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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 81 of 134 24 May 2014 at 9:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, I agree that learning inside your own language family should be easier because of the cognates and similar grammar ideas. But I sometimes get the feeling that people label a more "exotic" language as being difficult without stopping to think they may only be doing so from a certain perspective. For example there will be Asian languages which have a fearsome reputation in Europe but will be regarded as more accessible in other parts of the world. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3986 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 82 of 134 24 May 2014 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Anglophones find other languages too difficult because they have no real incentives to learn them. If Hungarian was the global lingua franca probably even I would be less keen on learning languages. This is a completely understandable human attitude, I can't blame Anglophones for this, although perhaps envy them a bit .
Having a native like English accent is a daunting task. I have achieved this in Spanish, but never will in English. When I recently moved to my current home and had the first over-the-fence chat with my neighbour I tried to put on my best British accent to see if I can fool her. Well, I hardly opened my mouth when she kindly asked me: "You are not English, are you?" Note that I have been studying English for 15 years and have lived in the UK for about 7. By contrast, after 6 months in Latin-America nobody noticed in similar small talk situations that I wasn't a native speaker of Spanish. Edited by Hungringo on 24 May 2014 at 10:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4030 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 83 of 134 24 May 2014 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 Or this article and the 120 or so comments agreeing with it. English loathing and mocking is much more common than one thinks. There is tons wrong with this article actually, this person claims there are languages harder than Ancient Greek for example, no, there isn't, and mentions Turkish without realizing that it is ironically simpler than English. I hate these kinds of smug "linguists", but there are thousands of them right now. Go onto youtube comments and you will see stuff like "English is useful for being simple but it cannot express and show what (other european languages like German and French), etc." Greek, Dutch, and Portuguese are the most arrogant on how "simple" they think English is. Thousands of internet posts and forum comments etc. The word "PRIMITIVE" always pops up, but what bugs me the most is they aren't consistent in their bigotry. PRIMITIVE, etc "Englisch ist eine primitive sprache" "Keine grammatik" thousands of comments like this in the world. and finally "WE USE IT BECAUSE IT IS THE EASIEST DUMBEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD" http://www.usingenglish.com/weblog/archives/000037.html Look at all those comments! Exactly what I said, disparaging and ignoring Chinese, I want to slap them but the sad thing is that good things always happen to bad people in our world. Yahoo answers in other languages has hundreds of thousands of posts like I mentioned. Edited by Stolan on 24 May 2014 at 5:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4306 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 84 of 134 24 May 2014 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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What part of the Economist article can be said to expressing "loathing and mocking" of English? I didn't
detect that. Also your position is confusing. Are you arguing that detractors are wrong to call English primitive, or that they're only inconsistent, by not being equally critical towards the primitiveness of Chinese? Or both? Like I said, I don't think it's very intelligible to call a whole language "simple" overall, pace the comments on these pages you object to, however we know what they have in mind: the wimpy declension tables and near-complete lack of case and gender. In these 3 particular respects, English is quick to pick up. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 85 of 134 24 May 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Really? You are going to use the troll section of the internet to prove an already flimsy point? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4030 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 86 of 134 24 May 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The economist article wasn't a troll. The tone treated English as not "special" like every single other language in the
world. I know the type who writes those posts, sort of a self loathing native English speaker who believes everything except English is exotic.
Turkic languages are simpler overall as they have far smaller inventories of sounds and no gender, not even in pronouns and only a 1/10 of the number of irregular forms as in English and most seldom have any grammaticalization of preverbs that is as elaborate as phrasal verbs in English, Hungarian, or German. Many Uralic languages too such as Udmurt and Komi are simple. They have the only one regular declension and conjugations each (no vowel harmony or difficult phonemic processes like mobile stress or unusual mutations) hardly or no adjective agreement, no articles etc. but they are let off free, nobody singles them out to the same degree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komi-Permyak_language#Grammar I am actually surprised at how simple they are, English, Indonesian, and Mandarin have historical excuses. Their bare bone simplicity weirds me out the same way so many Indo European languages do because of their extreme complexity. To Serpent I have never seen a single Russian comment on a Turkic or non-finnic Uralic language for their legitimate Indonesian-like straightforwardness while I have heard many say things about English, often derisive such as how it is "primitive" and "the easiest", and I'm sure you've heard your countrymen possibly comment on English's ease in many ways, but anything on Turkic or non-finnic Uralic? Any insulting comments? They're closer in proximity but they haven't laid a finger on any of them so far. So ironic. Edited by Stolan on 24 May 2014 at 11:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 87 of 134 24 May 2014 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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English is forced down the throats of millions of people, so it is no wonder it is
discussed quite a bit more than languages that are of interest only in specific regions. And that there are a lot of negative sentiments towards this language might also have to do with this little detail (ie. 'forcing'). Additionally, comments about languages written in English are usually either about English or from native English speakers. Edited by daegga on 24 May 2014 at 11:38pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 88 of 134 25 May 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Stolan, I've heard much more about English being difficult. Any subjective negativity is usually about the way it sounds and not about it being "primitive" or whatever.
Have you ever studied Indonesian btw? While it's one of the easiest Asian languages, it's not as much of a walk in the park as you claim. Also Turkish is known to be regular and relatively easy among those who care about learning languages. I know a couple of people who learn/speak it, interestingly both also have Spanish on their lists. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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