When a Chinese PhD Student Meets a German Supervisor [pdf]
It&#x27;s hard to start from scratch in a language.<p>Chinese and German share virtually no roots.<p>For instance, if an English speaker started a PhD program in German, he can probably figure out some stuff since there are a lot of cognates and the writing system is similar. Sure, you&#x27;ll sound like a sedated five year old, but you can figure out where stuff is in stores and how to ask for things, and grammatically you&#x27;ll be in the same zip code.<p>Coming from Chinese, you really are starting from nothing. You&#x27;re doing a lot of memorizing, not only of vocabulary but   word order.