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Words & concepts: problems ? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| JanKG Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5769 days ago 245 posts - 280 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Finnish | Message 1 of 9 26 January 2010 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A. Which very specific concepts expressed in one language can hardly or with difficulty be expressed in another language ?
B. By extension: what specific grammatical phenomena in your language seem hard to understand or to explain to a learner? (Even for speakers of related languages, like West Germanic languages for me as a native speaker of Dutch) Edited by JanKG on 26 January 2010 at 7:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| elvisrules Tetraglot Senior Member BelgiumRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5471 days ago 286 posts - 390 votes Speaks: French, English*, Dutch, Flemish Studies: Lowland Scots, Japanese, German | Message 2 of 9 26 January 2010 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A.
I can't think of anything at the moment. B. English: much/many Dutch: kennen/weten 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JanKG Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5769 days ago 245 posts - 280 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Finnish | Message 3 of 9 26 January 2010 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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B, Dutch: you're right, even native speakers don't have a clue.
B, English: I think that is a purely grammatical problem, not based on a different worldview, whereas the present perfect is quite differently used... But think of Yoruba and Japanese: you must find something !!! ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 4 of 9 27 January 2010 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A: French 'en' or Italian 'ne'. (Always wondered if this concept crops up in other languages)
B: English: Anything to do with prepositions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JanKG Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5769 days ago 245 posts - 280 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Finnish | Message 5 of 9 27 January 2010 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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OK, but strictly speaking that is simply double negative, not leading to negation though. Is that a concept problem ?
English prep. ??? Why ? I do think of this AKk./ Dat. variation in German in verbs of thinking. I think that adds a dimension we do not know in Dutch. Even the English 'into' is fairly strange to us, although we have 'naar binnen' (to in'), but only as an adverb, not as a preposition. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 9 27 January 2010 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think the most difficult to explain in words are small insignificant 'fillers'. For instance 'halt' in German (z.B. "Das Leben Ist Halt Kein Rosa Ponyhof", a genuine quote from Google). The nearest equivalent is "simply" or "really" .
In Danish maybe something like the adverb "vel": "Det er vel det bedste" (genuine quote invented by me), which must be rendered by an expression "I suppose" in English. Or "jamen" (literally "yes, but...") which is used very often (in fact way too often!) by interviewees in the defensive mode: "Hvornår holdt du op med at slå din kone?" "Jamen det har jeg da aldrig gjort" ("When did you stop beating your wife?" "'yes but' I never did that"). Notice also the word "da" in Danish, which in cases like this one expresses that the interlocutor is totally off the mark by making such unfounded accusations. Formally it is the same word as "da" = "when", but this particular use of it couldn't be predicted from the normal core meaning. And how do you translate French "bon ben" ? On the other hand many English expressions are used 'as is' (or slightly altered) in other languages, not least in science and technology. This means that there won't be a native expression for the thing in question. For instance "multitasking" is also "multitasking" in Danish, unless you want to use a long expression like "lave en masse/flere ting på én gang" ('do a lot/several things at the same time'). The use of a loanword or phrase usually indicates that something is difficult to express in another language). And this must be even more obvious when you comnpare very distant languages. Edited by Iversen on 27 January 2010 at 10:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5437 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 7 of 9 27 January 2010 at 11:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This usage of "halt" is regional. It is understood everywhere, but not necessarily used. Where I'm from you would use "eben" instead. The meaning is exactly the same, and it's equally hard to translate to English. "Das ist eben so." / "Das ist halt so." - "That's just the way it is." There are three words in German that seem to be translatable to any other language only as one single word. The English expression is "reason", the French one "la raison", but they are all equivalents to these: Grund (m): is the reason why a statement is true. Don't mix this up with "cause", because this is "Ursache (f)" in German. Causes are special reasons and apply only to causality, i.e. if there is a time dependency. Verstand (m): is the mental capability of perceiving the world as objects, processes etc. and to draw conclusions from it for one's own actions. One can call this representational reason. Both humans and higher animals have this kind of reason. Vernunft (f): is the capability of abstract thinking, i.e. to think, write and talk in non-representational concepts. On this planet this applies only to humans. These three words are in daily use and no academic terminology, even though the distinction of the latter two gets blurred very often. One thing that seems to be hard to express in French is the English "at all". This corresponds exactly to the German "überhaupt". In English you can say "This doesn't work at all." (G: "Das funktioniert überhaupt nicht.") The same in French: "Ca ne marche pas du tout." But the French "du tout" can be used in negative phrases only, because it's tied to the "pas". The English and German expressions can be used in positive sentences as well: "I want to know whether this works at all." ("Ich will wissen, ob das überhaupt funktioniert.") I had some discussions with native French speakers, and they seem to have a hard time to even understand what this "at all" adds to the sentence. I was told that you can express this in French only as "Je veux savoir si ça marche ou pas", "...whether it works or not". May someone correct me if I'm wrong with that. Edited by OlafP on 27 January 2010 at 11:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 9 27 January 2010 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's trickier than you think -- in many languages much/many/a lot (of) is considered one concept and the problem many people face is that they tie the first one of the English forms they encounter to the (single) native-language-learnt concept.
No-one mentioned any double negatives -- I'm assuming you mean "en"(FR)/"ne"(IT). These are partitive pronouns and are more than a little confusing (as quite a lot of languages don't have them. They can be equivalent to "some" (I want some), "a bit" (I want a bit) but these in English aren't considered true pronouns (because you can qualify them with an "of" phrase eg "a bit of something"). "en" and "ne" function as pronouns and only ever as pronouns. Many learners will try to translate "I want a bit" literally and avoid the partitive pronoun (but this is wrong). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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