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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3871 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 89 of 134 25 May 2014 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Okay, I am cooling down now. (not sarcastic) But can y'all agree that linguistics/languages as a whole has huge
misconceptions among laymen, often more than most other fields? I saw and read what I did and they exist, whatever percentage, they exist. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6436 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 90 of 134 25 May 2014 at 7:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Reminds me on that quote about how when people read newspapers, they all laugh at the incompetent presentation of the few things they happen to be knowledgeable about. But they still trust the newspaper on everything else.
This applies to other things too. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3886 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 91 of 134 25 May 2014 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stolan, I'm probably one of the people you want to
slap in the face, because I am not a huge fan of English, nonetheless is currently my best foreign language. I learnt it without spending time on grammar books at all, but only from exposure, reading and watching movies. It has been easy to learn it, though I think it is absurdly difficult to master it. Said that in any case English is an easy language to learn (we should define learn by the way; Have a A2 level learner learnt the language? Or you need B1? Or you haven't learnt if you are not C2+?), mostly for Germanic languages first language learner, and fairly comfortable for romance languages first language learner because of the huge latin vocabulary in it; said that Mandarin is known to have a fairly simple grammar; I'm pretty confused by the way by your definition of Mandarin as "The simplest language in the world", and that who gives up learning it is "stupid" (same people that haven't have any problem learning English, that doesn't match your perspective of Mandarin as easier language to learn). Correct me if I put on your fingers words that you didn't digit, I wouldn't be suprised if I didn't understand. By following your logic, a normal IQ not bigot learner of Mandarin, how much time should take to learn Mandarin? 1 month? 6 month? 1 year? What makes this language so easy, besides of the easy grammar? The writing system? The tones? I since now read that Mandarin is incredibly difficult and time taking to learn because of the writing system and the outstandingly difficult pronunciation of the language (if you can't distinguish the tones you're dead because what is said doesn't make any sense; if you mess up when speaking you risk to offend the people without having the willing to or simply to say non-sense). I find more difficult an highly irregular language grammar-wise and/or with an insane spelling (like, let say, English in my opinion) than a language with genders, conjugations, cases, agglutination but phonetic and regular; but to me the grammar is not the worse beast to fight when learning a language (otherwise Dutch should be really easy for me to learn, Danish even easier). Edited by tristano on 25 May 2014 at 8:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3871 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 92 of 134 25 May 2014 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Edit: idea no more Edited by Stolan on 26 May 2014 at 4:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3886 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 93 of 134 25 May 2014 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had really hard time to study Persian and Mandarin by the way. And I momentaneously
postponed the time I'll start to study them seriously. With different motivations (other than a sense of urgence to be able to at least understand most of the european languages for career motivations): - I don't find Persian difficult at all, if not the problem to have to memorize every written word because the script is not phonetic and less logical the Arabic. - Mandarin is incredibly time taking, I think I can learn to understand the spoken language not in too much time but I'm scared with the pronunciation about reading it even the natives have serious problems. Reading it aloud is impossible if you don't know the meaning and the pronunciation of every character in your text. And honestly I think that it is exactly why Mandarin is considered to be an amazingly difficult language. Am I so wrong? If so, why? I personally can talk only for my self, while I cannot say anything about the posters you're mad about. I don't know their motivation, nor yours beside what you wrote. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4129 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 94 of 134 25 May 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well Mandarin actually is not very difficult, in the context that you compare it with
its neighbouring languages. In for example, Fújiàn Province, also spoken by the majority of the Chinese in Singapore, Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia, they speak Fukien (also called Hokkien, Minnan, Ban-lam-gu), which has literally double the tones of MAndarin; it has eight tones, and often cannot correspond with standard written MAndarin, same with CAntonese. Vietnamese has either six or five tones, depending on dialect, says my Vietnamese friend. But still the grammar in all of these languages is fairly straightforward, the verb is not even conjugated, i.e. infinitive = "conjugation" for all persons. I started French and Mandarin at age 13, and my perception is that Mandarin was easier than French. The writing system has been discussed, but it only takes practise, I rmemeber that I had blue/green character books, basically books with 10x10 squares on each page where you write characters in the boxes, typically practising one character for one or two, or however many rows. However, I learnt both traditional and simplified (if there it had one), and also the pinyin. It still was not as irregular as I thought that French was. The only difficulty is the syntax at higher levels that has unintuitive patterns for an Indo-European native speaker. But until intermediate/high- intermediate, it really did not seem as difficult as others purport it to be. When I studied it, I could pronounce Mandarin with more flow and ease than French, even the "liaison" in Mandarin, which changes the 3rd tone into a 2nd tone when preceded by a 4th tone word. Edited by 1e4e6 on 25 May 2014 at 9:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3871 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 95 of 134 25 May 2014 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
The other languages have greater devices for analytical constructions, more obligatory use of measure words, and much more. But what they have in common is a heavy lack of "boundaries" between word types. Proto Indo European didn't have post/prepositions, and nouns were nearly identical to adjectives in syntax, (Which is why they are inflected to agree which is absent from Turkic or Uralic languages that weren't influenced) gender was only an animate-inaminate distinctions and verbs were not so elaborate (until the cowgil-rix system came along!) New tenses were created from derivational vowel changes and were separate lexical words and not inflection, it would take millennia to systemize into a normal verb tense system. And the new gender needed adjective inflections, and it needed its own declension! Hooray, but some adjectives don't inflect for female yet in Latin and Greek, oh boy! One of the reasons people think English is so primitive and backwards is that most IE languages have redundant complexities that are not found at all elsewhere in the world and English stands out for being not as overly elaborated. English is pretty normal in the scheme of things with simplifications in some areas due to its history. It is by no means an unusually simplistic language nor Esperanto-like or even close to Indonesian. It is accessible, yes. In many languages, prepositions and adverbs are identical in syntax, many have no separate adjectives, stative verbs are used almost entirely in many languages. Prepositions or Postpositions don't exist in Vietnamese or Thai (but they are getting grammaticalized as separate words in many Chinese dialects). Adverbs have been grammaticalized in Chinese dialects via particle suffixes but Vietnamese and Thai make no distinction at all, they also don't have a separate class of adjectives while Chinese is slowly making a distinction allowing different positioning. Low grammaticalization such as a lack of verbal complements such as prefixes or preverb like devices (phrasal/prefixed words) is there too, but Chinese now has result complements and some verb-noun compounds. Vietnamese and Thai have barely any heavy forms of grammatical boundaries such as transitivity categories and etc. Some don't even make a distinction at all, context is used entirely. Articles though are making an appearance in some Chinese dialects in some forms. But all of them almost completely lack any productive derivational morphology, it is just "not-able-see-sick" and not "blindness" And they lack word order rules such as strict clitic placement, question inversion, V2, or wh-fronting etc. probably due to a lack of boundaries, Ex: in Chinese : Shenme= What/Something, no syntactical boundary between indefinites and wh words in the word order! I would enjoy going on about Proto-IE but it is a likelyhood that in its earlier forms it could have started off rather simple, possibly the earliest stage had a much smaller phonological inventory and only one declension and conjugation for every word, no prepositons, no random gender, adjective=nouns in syntax, no articles, etc. like Hittite but it suddenly innovated numerous complexities very fast, a language like Ancient Greek is not the necessarily the norm, it is a mutant and so are its cousins. Nobody seems to know this and thus they think they were always complex and every normal language is equally complex, and anything that is a bit simpler must have been pidginized somehow or is abnormal. This is what I am getting at, I am trying to prove that more people are misguided about linguistics and English is the main area where these misconceptions show and possibly only English learners from Europe do this. Edited by Stolan on 26 May 2014 at 5:04am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3871 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 96 of 134 26 May 2014 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||
I never said Mandarin is the easiest language, but the only complicated area is the script overall. There are 4 tones but the languages syllable structure means only about 400-500 possible one syllable words can be formed aside from the tones. You treat the tones so special, tones are difficult....so are the numerous other dozen phonological distinctions in the world, you do know Mandarin does not distinguish vowel length or permit consonant clusters? Tones are just a dimension like voicing, palatization, or nasalization. Something like Hmong with 54 consonants and 8 tones is very difficult. There are numerous conservative dialects of Chinese that are very complicated grammatically often with irregular tonal changes and much more, Mandarin is not one of them. Also, English is an accessible IE language and the easiest Germanic language, but it is by no means the absolute bottom possible as claimed by so many nor is it devoid of any innovation as claimed so often. I by no means am trying to claim it is a complicated language, it isn't, but it's no pidgin, and claiming all other languages in the world are all more complicated is untrue, English is not unusually simple enough for it to be abnormal, it is a normal language that exists. IE relatives (owing to IE languages having very high complexity, the origin of which is a topic worth discussing) tend to dwarf it though, as if all of them are 7 '10', English is 5'8', rather shortish for a western guy, and people will bully that guy and call him a runt and say he is the shortest man ever born, even though the average height in the world may be 5 '6', but they don't know that. Edited by Stolan on 26 May 2014 at 5:08am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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