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Ranking list of languages by difficulty | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Autarkis Triglot Groupie Switzerland twitter.com/Autarkis Joined 5951 days ago 95 posts - 106 votes  4 sounds Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 89 of 115 23 September 2008 at 4:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Let me just say that by definition of the way the human brain learns languages there can never an easiest language. It depends which languages you're coming from, as many but not all posters here realize.
I think both French and German sentence structure can be more convoluted than English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6041 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 90 of 115 23 September 2008 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
Just because the human brain is capable of learning any language perfectly does not mean that every language is equally complex. Saying that all languages are equally difficult is just being politically correct. Let me give you an example, in Spanish to make a word plural you just add (e)s. That's all!!! In German on the other hand you have to learn the plural of every single word separately. Now you could try and argue that Spanish is more complex in some other area but by saying that you admit that some areas might be easy. What if Spanish just has these easy areas? For example, you might argue that Spanish has two genders. Just two?? Compare that with three for Greek, German and the Slavic languages. Furthermore, the gender of Spanish nouns is very predictable. If it ends in an o it's masculine if it ends in an a it's feminine. What about the few exceptions like el mapa? Please. How many of them are there? 20? Try learning the gender of every single word separately like in German where the ending doesn't help. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lemanensis Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland hebrew.ecott.ch Joined 5923 days ago 73 posts - 77 votes Speaks: French*, English*, German, Spanish, Swedish Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 91 of 115 23 September 2008 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||
There are various rules actually: just as an example, most words in -er, -ich, -ig, ing, -ling are masculine; the majority of words in -e and -in are feminine; nouns starting with ge- or ending in -chen, -el, -erl, -le, -lein, -tum, -nis are neuter, etc. And there are loads more. That helps enormously. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Deecab Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 106 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English, Korean* Studies: Mandarin | Message 92 of 115 23 September 2008 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, their sentences CAN be but they would particularly seem that way because of gender and inflection. At English's best, German or French would either be equally or less convoluted since there is absolutely no limit to the longest sentence in English. You can create a billion word sentence to your desire.
And I don't believe every language is equally complex but it's pretty similar. German may have more plurals/gender but its reading, spelling and pronunciation are easier than English/French. French has gender but English has more complex prepositional phrase and wider vocabulary size to be fluent. There are more slangs/idioms to know too. Global exposure certainly facilitates it but the sake of this case, let's be objective. Spanish has fairly predictable gender and easier spelling but their listening is pretty hard, harder than lot of other European languages. I don't think it's any harder to learn a gender + noun than learning another idiom/slang in English, which is plentiful. It's just that gender/inflection are learned from beginning as a learner and cultural/social vocabularies are not as deemed important, thus learned afterward so learners tend to think "Language with gender/declension is way harder". Edited by Deecab on 23 September 2008 at 12:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jody Senior Member United States Joined 6237 days ago 242 posts - 252 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Bulgarian | Message 93 of 115 23 September 2008 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Never mind. I just read the previous posts again, and realized that I misunderstood what was being said. Please disregard. Edited by jody on 23 September 2008 at 12:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Autarkis Triglot Groupie Switzerland twitter.com/Autarkis Joined 5951 days ago 95 posts - 106 votes 4 sounds Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 94 of 115 23 September 2008 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
That's not what I said. I said that the difficulty of a language depends on which language(s) you already know. I tentatively assume that you are correct with the rest of your statement - if there was an objective way to measure a postulated language-brain compatibility to the naive brain there might be an easiest language. However, to the person being raised with any given language, this result is purely academic, if interesting. Example: I'm raised with Swiss German. Science proves that Spanish is the easiest language. Does that mean I can pick it up easiest? Not at all. I'd have a much easier time with Dutch and English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6041 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 95 of 115 24 September 2008 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||
This argument gets used a lot. Why is it so hard to imagine a language that only has easier features??? For example, like you said French has gender but English has more complex prepositional phrases. Is it so hard to imagine a language that has neither of these two features? Hypothetically, lets pretend language A has gender but no declension while language B be has declension but no gender. Sure you could argue these are similar when it comes to complexity. However, what if you encountered language C that has no gender and no declension. You already agree that a language can have no declension (language A) and that it doesn't need to have gender (language B) then why can't language C have neither??? Edited by John Smith on 24 September 2008 at 1:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6893 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 96 of 115 24 September 2008 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
Exactly. Or even to imagine a language where the easier features dominate over the difficult ones. It is often claimed that all languages are objectively of equal complexity or equal difficulty, or as above that there cannot be an easiest language, but I have yet to see any convincing argument anywhere to support that claim. The observation that less complexity in one area is outweighed by more in another shows nothing at all, since noone can objectively measure the effect of each and actually show that they balance out. This type of argumentation is like claiming that Holland is objectively equally mountainous as Switzerland, based on a glib observation that lower areas of land are outweighed by higher ground in other areas. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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