@sothischickshe left [these tags] on that joke post I made about teaching French to English speakers vs. Chinese speakers:
😂😂😂#Language#English#French#I think that's less grammar than prepositions#Though blah blah definitional criteria
@katistrophe left [these tags] on the same post:
#language#i feel like German and Danish have some similar preposition mappings#which makes the differences more of a bastard of course
They brought up an interesting point.
From an English/French speaker's perspective, my post is about the difficulty of translating prepositions, specifically. However, I'd argue that from a Chinese speaker's perspective, my post is about the difficulty of translating grammar, in general.
When you're translating between closely related languages, the parts of speech remain the same in the vast majority of situations. Nouns translate into nouns, adjectives translate into adjectives, conjunctions translate into conjunctions, verbs translate into verbs, prepositions translate into prepositions, etc.
But it's a whole different story when you're translating between distantly related languages.
When you're translating from English into Mandarin Chinese, prepositions often (but not always) turn into verbs.
In English, you would say, "I watched the video [on] my cell phone." In Mandarin, you would instead say, "我[用]手机看了视频 / I [used] my cell phone to watch the video."
Similarly, "You can't eat pizza [with] a fork" becomes "你不能[用]叉子吃披萨 / You can't [use] a fork to eat pizza."
"Write it [in] English" becomes "[用]英语写 / [Use] English to write (it)."
"You can get there [by] train" becomes "你能[乘]火车去那里 / You can [ride] a train to get there."
Moreover, a lot of Chinese verbs also function as prepositions.
给 can be a preposition meaning "for" or a verb meaning "to give." 上 can be a preposition meaning "on" or a verb meaning "to board (a ship/plane)" or "to attend/be in attendance (in a class or at work)." 跟 can be a preposition meaning "with" or a verb meaning "to follow/accompany." Etc., etc.
When you're translating a prepositional phrase between French and Spanish, or English and French, your first question is, "Which preposition do I need to use?"
But when you're translating from French/English into a language like Mandarin Chinese, or some other wholly unrelated language, your first question is, "Can I use a preposition?"
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