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Difficulty of learning a foreign language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5767 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 9 of 13 16 February 2010 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||
One point on why Japanese is easy: Chinese co-verbs / prepositions work just like Japanese case markers, but inversed. A sentence spoken with lotta co-verbs in Chinese is very very SOV. So the word order is not damn different considering the same relative construction. You ate (lit. have eaten) the chips that I bought yesterday. 你 把 我 昨天 买 的 薯片 吃 了。 You ACC I yesterday buy REL chips eat PERF. きみは (を) ぼくが きのう かった (連体形) ポテトチップ を (moved after the noun phrase) たべ た。 You-TOPIC I-ACTOR yesterday buy-PERF REL chips ACC eat PERF. Edited by minus273 on 16 February 2010 at 1:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nescafe Senior Member Japan Joined 5411 days ago 137 posts - 227 votes | Message 10 of 13 16 February 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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My native language is Japanese, and I feel Mandarin is much easier than English. Just hearing a new word, the Chinese character for the word comes to me naturaly. I can understand detailed nuance of new Mandrin words at first glance, and keep it in mind easily.
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| Rafaelodias Tetraglot Newbie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5395 days ago 11 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Italian, Spanish, English Studies: Japanese | Message 11 of 13 19 February 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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My mother tongue is Portuguese and therefore other Romance languages come so much easier for me. I come from a country (Brazil) which is really big and unfortunately monolingual, although the indigenous people speak 170 different languages, but they represent less than 0,5% of the population; because of both reasons we don't have much contact with any other language, actually we don't need to use any other language to live here, but my problem is that I love learning languages. I've studied Japanese, Italian and Latin at University although my main subject was Portuguese language and Literatures. After my studies I decided to move to the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, to have my first experience abroad and learn more languages once in Amsterdam you can learn whatever language you want. I tried to learn Dutch at once, but it was too difficult to make contacts with the natives in Amsterdam and I ended up in an internacional friend group in which the main languages were Italian, English, Portuguese and Spanish, now I speak fluently Italian and well enough English (my English is still "young", 1 year), Spanish I understand almost 100% but I didn't have time to learn it yet and with Spanish speakers I still use my own language and they answer me in Spanish. Even Having learnt the languages I wanted to in Amsterdam, I felt so sad because I was unable to learn the language I was supposed to speak there. My question is: has someone had the same feeling in a similar situation? Of course I understand that using just basic Dutch phrases like "alstublieft" or "dank u wel" in my daily life in Amsterdam without a real immersion in the society I could never have learnt Dutch, besides everybody speaks very well English in Amsterdam. Any way I think that I made a good choice because now English, Italian, Spanish and also Japanese are useful for me in Brazil as I'm teaching Portuguese as foreign language and Dutch wouldn't be so important in my country.
Sorry for eventual mistakes in English. Thanks. Rafael 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5926 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 12 of 13 19 February 2010 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Edited by mick33 on 19 February 2010 at 8:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rafaelodias Tetraglot Newbie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5395 days ago 11 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Italian, Spanish, English Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 13 20 February 2010 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||
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As a Portuguese speaker I would say that the closest language to Portuguese is Spanish. I have never studied Spanish but without any effort I can understand it as well as I understand my own language, but of course we have to get used with the false friends. Although the funny thing is that it is easier Portuguese speakers understand Spanish than the opposite. In Portuguese there are some complicated sounds which are closer to Catalan than to Spanish, so in my abroad experience I've had better communication in Portuguese/Spanish with the people from Barcelona than the people from other regions. Maybe an other fact is that Spanish is more disseminated than Portuguese.
Portuguese and Italian? I also speak Italian and I think my mother tongue has helped to learn it to get more vocabulary but if you compare both grammars, they are quite different whereas Spanish has almost the same grammar. Edited by Rafaelodias on 01 March 2010 at 1:36am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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