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Ranking the "Medium Hard" Languages | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes  Speaks: Russian* | Message 33 of 62 11 January 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
hərɐ'sho probably. The first vowel is by no means an [a]. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4613 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 34 of 62 11 January 2014 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, my bad, I'll fix it right away. And it indeed is "твоих" , rather than "твойх", it's a typo I do due to my native language and sometimes it can get very annoying indeed. Just like now. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 35 of 62 11 January 2014 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
You are right, but I think it can be explained easier. Acc. sing. 1st declension - у (ю) 2nd declension anim. masc. = gen. other words = nom. 3d declendion = nom. Acc. pl. anim. = gen. inanim. = nom. Indeclinable nouns have one form for all cases and numbers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 36 of 62 11 January 2014 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Grammar specification and such can exist outside of inflection. Something agglutinating but very straightforward like Persian can be said to be simple. Compare Mandarin, which is really watered down, to Cantonese ( Mand. has fewer measure words, fewer particles, less tone agreement, only 6 vowels). Thai has more aspect particles, many vowels, classifiers, polite pronoun usage (around 27 more common ones based on feminity and politeness), end final words, etc than something like Chinese. I rank easieness based on how battered the language has become. An extreme example is Indonesian being one of the older lingua francas. English still didn't simplify in pronunciation though compared to her sisters, it still has its difficulties in that area. So there exist degrees. Edited by Stolan on 11 January 2014 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4254 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 37 of 62 11 January 2014 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I feel like a lot of these discussions end up being more of a matter of "how hard is the language to produce for a speaker", but often times I think the grammar rules that are difficult to learn and reproduce in speech, tend to be pretty helpful when it comes to listening comprehension, and can eliminate a lot of ambiguity that would otherwise have to be inferred through context.
To me a complex case system is easier to understand than a strict word order that I'm unfamiliar with. To me it always seemed like the most important factors when it comes to the "difficulty" of learning a language would be 1) how close is the language to one you already know and 2) how logical/uniform are the grammar rules. I also still don't understand why everyone thinks the fact Chinese languages have thousand of characters to learn makes them "hard". To me learning characters has always seemed more similar to learning words than it is to learning letters which I think is the comparison a lot of people make in their heads. So for example on CantoDict they list ~5000 characters as being at "level 3" (not sure how arbitrary or official this classification is), but then they also list ~50,000 compound words that can be made from the 5000 characters just in their database (there are probably more than this, but probably not all of these would be considered totally unique words). So of course it's hard to learn them all, but show me a language where learning 50,000 words is easy. Edited by YnEoS on 11 January 2014 at 10:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 38 of 62 11 January 2014 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been looking around for other sources for data to mash into the list, but haven't
found any good, objective studies. The FSI/DLI/FCO lists all include speaking, reading, and writing ... my guess is that it's the writing that keeps the East Asian languages in the top tier, even though there seems to be a consensus that Vietnamese is the hardest language to actually speak well. And there's some good arguments for placing Russian higher than Turkish, so tweaking the list, still using the FSI groups as a base & adding some HTLAL subjectivity into this, we get: Group 1 1. Dutch, Frisian 2. Romance and Scandinavian languages Group 2 3. German 4. Indonesian, Swahili 5. Hindi, Persian, Greek Group 3 6. Turkish, Thai 7. Vietnamese, Russian Group 4 8. Arabic 9. Korean, Chinese 10. Japanese (Also, I lumped Dutch in with "Scandinavian languages" earlier, which was a mistake) And here's one more excellent link that groups languages & length of time needed to reach various proficiency levels, broken up by the aptitude of the student: The following ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) Ratings represent levels of expected performance for language learners who complete full-time intensive and/or immersion, proficiency-based language training under the supervision of an instructor and with 1-4 students per class. Language Testing Int. (If HTLAL ever upgrades I would love to have the ability to post charts!) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| doubleUelle Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4035 days ago 67 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Japanese Studies: Spanish, Thai | Message 39 of 62 12 January 2014 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Holy f*ck, am I ever glad I never had to study Russian grammar! 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4444 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 40 of 62 12 January 2014 at 1:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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Languages being easy or difficult depends on how much interest you put into it and how much time you spend
outside of your studies to learn on your own. They are relative to one another so it is difficult to give artificial rankings. Although Chinese & Japanese are normally considered a difficult language, I can name 4 people who posted videos online who had no previous experience in Asian languages but mastered them: Moses McCormick (American goes by the nickname Laoshu), Steve Kaufmann (Canadian who lived in Quebec), Luca Lampariello (Italian) and Carlos Douh (Canadian now living in Hong Kong) who started off with Cantonese and getting to be fluent in Mandarin as well. The other day I was listening to 2 polyglots Steve Kaufmann discussing languages with Felix Wang who resides in Bruxelles (Belgium). Steve finds Russian more difficult in terms of spoken languages because they have a lot of awkward grammar rules. Chinese is quite straightforward if you ignore the characters. Most people tend to get put off by Chinese & Japanese because of the need to learn / recognize many characters. Japanese you can still get away from using characters entirely but they prefer to write with some characters in their text. Japanese & Korean tend to be similar in the sense you use different ways of addressing people who are more senior / junior such as a Japanese emperor for instance. On the other hand, Felix finds Turkish similar to Japanese in many respects. We may think of Chinese / Japanese as being difficult, many of them have problems learning English when they arrived in America. They tend to focus on passing exams (TOEFL scores). Japanese who learn English because they enjoy learning languages and want to socialize with friends become very fluent. Polyglot discussions: Felix in Brussels, English Edited by shk00design on 12 January 2014 at 1:57am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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