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What are the easiest languages to learn? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| AndrewS Diglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4429 days ago 27 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Spanish | Message 49 of 58 14 October 2012 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||
That is the point of the thread I believe. At the risk of being a drag, I would like to mention the scope of moaning about learning English on numerous forums. Boomerang3378, take a look at non-English forums you can understand. I do not think russian ones are somewhat peculiar on this subject. Most funny groans are like "I've been learning English for 10 years and I can understand almost nothing. Let's admit it's hopeless and wasting time". Not only lazy people think like that... I myself is struggling now with strange sounds and grammar. Thank God there are a lot of books in English that I love. It's the only chance ) And, naturally, I vote for Russian as easiest ))) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5259 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes  Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 50 of 58 14 October 2012 at 11:12am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6912 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 51 of 58 14 October 2012 at 11:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's silly to base the difficulty of a language on the amount of vocabulary and grammar - some esperantists brag about the 400-600 roots and the 16 (!) grammar rules.
I've heard a lot of stupid sayings about languages, including "Chinese has no grammar" and most recently "One can rarely make grammar mistakes in Chinese.". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 52 of 58 14 October 2012 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think it would be equally hard. There might be a few more details to be internalised that are particular to Russian, but the main jump is getting accustomed to the fact that Russian isn't English or Dutch and thus treating the language as such. And honestly, perfection isn't attainable, so if I speak with 99%> correct Russian, I can be pretty satisfied with that. The real barrier right now for me is to break through that barrier of vocabulary acquisition, and getting the grammatical distinctions exactly right. But you know why I'm not doing that? Because that's a huge cleanup operation and I quite simply don't feel Russian has the priority in that sense. Furthermore this adaptation I'm doing is taking time because I am doing that exact routine for French. The fact that Russian has more (or I would say a different) set of rules to internalise specifically doesn't really impinge on making it harder. It is true, though, that after French, I would classify Russian as the second hardest language I've attempted - because it was the first to deviate so strongly from my background in other languages, and thus it's taken some time to accept that the rules are different. But I work through my languages in steps. Step 1: communicating the basic needs (this means knowing the essential phrases and basics), this is usually done in a few months. Mastering a pronunciation that is by and large understandable is also part of this stage. This is where I want to communicate everything I am going to directly *NEED*, in terms of raw basic information. Note that this doesn't have to be theoretically validated. If I speak to, say, a Russian, and they understand what I want, even though my sh's aren't perfectly palatalised or anything, it's ok at this stage. I am doing my best to mimick Russians here and I will try my best but if I fail 100x before I get it right that's perfectly okay. To make an analogy with a house: this is where I lay the foundation. Step 2: create the ability to speak well in terms of the big picture. It doesn't have to be 100% correct at this stage, but I should be able to make myself understood in all fields, even if I have to resort to circumlocutions. If I make a case mistake or stumble a bit over word order or misuse a particle or verb tense here and there these are the types of issues that don't bother me. Perfection is a paralytic at this stage - I want to be able to write long sentences, take position, use conjunctions. Once this step is achieved I will call myself "fluent" because I will be automatically able to produce rapid speech and written texts, and understand most of what is said back to me. This is where I build the actual house until it stands on its own. It will not be decorated, finished, painted, etc, but it will be a house and you could potentially move in there. Step 3: This is where I perform the cleanup routine. This is where I start to weed out the little things that have gone unchecked - use of prepositions in phrases I don't know, necessary idiomatics I do not have, the subtleties of word order, grammar, verb conjugation. This is where I decorate the language and make it a real house. This is where I move into the house and make it my own. My Russian is still in step 2. My French is at the crossing between 2 and 3, and I have never really done this consciously before, because my German is also definitely at step 2 and I learned English a long time ago, and did most of that internalising unconsciously because the general skills necessary for step 3 (essay writing, presenting, etc.) still had to be learned. I used English to learn how to paint the house, not to do the actual thing later. It wasn't the same as building my own house. Look at it as the language engineering mentality. Theory is a tool, it's not a substitute. Edited by tarvos on 14 October 2012 at 12:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fireballtrouble Triglot Senior Member Turkey Joined 4527 days ago 129 posts - 203 votes Speaks: Turkish*, French, English Studies: German | Message 53 of 58 14 October 2012 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Without considering the difficulties of vocabulary or sonority, I would like to point
out an other perspective. I think it totally depends on the family branch to which our native language belongs. The immense portion of the world population is speaking Indo-European languages so the comparison is generally done among this family. My native language is Turkish, I still remember how challenging it was, the acquisition of English for me when I was in primary school. Switching your brain from a Ural-Altaic language, the one of suffixes and vocal harmony into a language of rigid syntax and irregularities was quite difficult even it was 'English', the language considered as 'the easiest' to learn. If I have learnt Kyrgyz, Turkmen, it would be much more easier for me than English. I must underline that it is just for the acquisition of the first foreign language. Edited by fireballtrouble on 14 October 2012 at 9:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 54 of 58 15 October 2012 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 55 of 58 18 October 2012 at 1:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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For Russian speakers, Belarusian is supposed to be the easiest language. But if we're talking about the real world, and that's what I prefer to talk about, then despite being the closest language to Russian it's NOT the easiest.
In fact, I'd say that a related language is only significantly easier if you learn it the way Scandinavians learn their neighbours' languages. A lot of passive exposure first. Even the few that learn it actively (say, if they move to another Scandinavian country) are usually already fluent passively by that point. But if you're learning from scratch and trying to speak from the very beginning, you'll still need a lot of input. Input is crucial for truly being sure you're using words (and structures) that exist in the related language and not just in your mother tongue. It's much more efficient to have more input than to consciously spend time on remembering the fact that a certain word is the same in the two languages. I'd say that for a Russian who studies the traditional way the easiest languages to learn to *speak* (not just understand) are English and Esperanto. There are various resources and various opportunities to study these langs for free or cheaply, there's tons of stuff online, there are certainly more opportunities to speak than in any other language (well, with some exceptions like Finnish in St Petersburg or "Chinese" in Vladivostok etc). How can the poor, abused Belarusian compete with that??? :( Even the easiest Slavic language for a Russian would not be Belarusian. It's either Ukrainian or Polish - perhaps Polish because it's a bigger language. If we're not talking about the first foreign language, I'd say it's even more likely to be Polish. Of course it's often said that it's quite far away from Russian and they're not mutually intelligible - but I *think* most Polish words that are different from Russian are international words that Russian chose not to adopt or just borrowings from German. There's a big difference in the easiness of Polish for a monoglot Russian and a Russian who speaks (some) English and German. Now when a Slavic language is hard to understand because it's *more* Slavic than Russian, that's more difficult. I wonder if modern Bulgarian would be the easiest language for a religious Russian who already knows many prayers in Old Church Slavonic... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5069 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 56 of 58 18 October 2012 at 2:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Based on pronunciation and on vocabulary? I would say yes. The pronunciation is different but if you apply a few predictable changes (mostly concerning the vowels), it becomes quite similar. On grammar, Russian and Old Church Slavonic are distant from Bulgarian in the nominal system so that might be an issue. The verbal systems in Old Church Slavonic and Bulgarian are remarkable similar from what I know, except Bulgarian has no dual and some more periphrastic constructions. I have a book on Old Church Slavonic/Old Bulgarian and they rarely even provide translations for most of the Old Church Slavonic words. Thus, they didn't even bother putting a glossary or vocabulary section in the book; it's pure grammar. Edited by Kartof on 18 October 2012 at 2:26am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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