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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 5024 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 105 of 134 26 May 2014 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
?? My guess is this is for the sake of the many non-native speakers in China, whose native language is a different "dialect." It could be for the sake of the deaf, but somehow I don't see China as particularly deaf aware. Maybe it is. *shrugs* What I do doubt is that it's because they have trouble with their own language. But I'm assuming the majority of Chinese television is in a "standard" accent of some sort. If it routinely has all sorts of accents, some of which are far removed from the standard it would make sense. I'm thinking of certain dialects in English and Japanese that are often subtitled because they're hard for the average speaker to understand(can't name them off the top of my head but they exist). Since Chinese is a maybe some years in the future language for me I don't really know. To actually answer the original question, I find French listening comprehension difficult, and am having a much easier time so far with Spanish even though I know a lot more French. It's probably not helped by the fact that I didn't listen to a whole lot of native content until relatively recently. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3870 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 106 of 134 26 May 2014 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
That isn't to say Chinese dialects aren't digging out of a hole. Long ago many lost derivational techniques and grammatical categories were less existent. A language like Thai has no distinction between adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs, while a speaker of a western language may have to learn multiple words with different properties that are filled by one in Thai. I could explain but you probably know what I mean. The grammar is Southeast Asian languages is laughably lax, Chinese dialects have far more mandatory rules where a person can't just speak words without thinking. Some mandatory word order rules are emerging too while something like Thai is only SVO with no clitic placements, question inversion, wh-fronting, or V2 or anything difficult like that. I am actually surprised at languages like Thai which have no tonal sandhi or phonological changes in speech really and even simpler grammar overall than Mandarin in actual speech and far less grammaticalization. I admit now, Mandarin is pretty well built but it is by no means a conservative language. It is with English and Spanish. Thai and Lao are really barebones though, wonder why. I would find someone who thinks Mandarin is more complex than English overall outside of the script to be a dunce and filled with a double standard so huge that its all I can see. They have their respective qualities in grammar and phonology. Mandarin is not one of the hardest languages in the world, it is a relatively smoothed over language like English or Spanish, it is not up there with Russian at all! A very conservative dialect like Teochow is a conservative language! Edited by Stolan on 26 May 2014 at 10:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4545 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 107 of 134 27 May 2014 at 12:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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French is harder for me than Russian.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4894 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 108 of 134 27 May 2014 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
That's because your ambitions for French are bigger than for Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4545 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 109 of 134 27 May 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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But Korean is also harder for me than Russian, and my ambitions in that are much lower. I
don't see the link. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3870 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 110 of 134 27 May 2014 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Ooh, Mark, so nice of you to join us (not sarcastic) What are your opinions on the origin of complexity in a language and the way English is viewed both positively and negatively by your countrymen and how they view languages like Tatar and Turkish in terms of complexity when compared to Russian considering the straightforwardness of Tatar and kin. The low population density and lack of competing techniques from concentrated diversity may be the reason for the regularity and genderlessness, agree? In English and Mandarin it was the heavy influx of different speakers picking up the language throughout history without a strong consistent native population, or they just didn't care to be as schwer as German and Cantonese respectively, let alone Icelandic or Hokkienese. Edited by Stolan on 27 May 2014 at 1:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4128 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 111 of 134 27 May 2014 at 2:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are dictation lessons that I had during MAndarin. The teacher basically says
reading or speech or long story or whatever, and the students must recognise the words, and write them down. This is a rather oldschool technique, and sometimes in specialised Chinese schools, I believe that there is a one-on-one dictation test, so it is not as if just because MAndarin use characters, that it is somehow more difficult to recognise what exactly the words are. Just like tones make each word different, so do things like cases, which make the word completely different despite sounding very similar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3870 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 112 of 134 27 May 2014 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
That reminds me how perceived beliefs influence how a person experiences things. Imagine this situation, we have a man who smokes 20 cigarettes a day yet he is adamantly against marijuana/liquor/whatever. He is handed a cigarette with a tiny tiny bit of amaretto/hash/whatevever and smoke its then smokes his other cigarettes later that day. He then is told a week later what happened, he drops over dead since his brain is so convinced that marijuana/alcohol/whatever is bad for him that he stupidly dies that very second. Yet he never admitted to all the health problems his pack a day habit cost him. Idiots think English is "the easiest, nothing can possible be easier" for being uninflecting (It is the easiest Germanic language and "easy-ish", but not the absolute bottom scraping flagship of all languages in the whole entire world) yet a genderless language with no irregularities, only 5 vowels and 15 consonants with no clusters, no wh-fronting or word order movement rules, no adjective irregular comparison forms, and a lack of constructions as everything is done through regular inflection with barely any phonological changes would be harder for them than English just because there are fewer spaces between words. Edited by Stolan on 27 May 2014 at 7:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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