François CholletVerified account

One of the most difficult things to master in a foreign language: cases where the target language uses multiple words (subcategories) for a concept for which your previous languages only have one word. You're simply not used to parse reality into these new subcategories.

A simple example would be counters in Japanese. In European languages, a counter is just a number, so you would say, "three birds, three peanuts, three sheets of paper, three pens, three cars". In Japanese, a counter conveys not just quantity but also various object properties

So you would say, sanba (birds and bunnies), sanko (generic small thing), sanmai (flat thing), sanbon (cylindrical thing), sandai (large vehicle), etc. In fact there are more distinct counters than I can count. It takes a long time to get used to these distinctions

There's even a counter specifically for chopsticks. Even though they're cylindrical objects, chopsticks are their own semantic category within cylinder-like things