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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4506 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 65 of 134 23 May 2014 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||
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-What ’easy’ language do you find hard?-
Danish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3826 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 66 of 134 23 May 2014 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
Keep in mind that English is the universal lingua franca. If it was Portuguese then Spanish kids would learn it relatively easily and quickly, but because this is not the case Spanish kids struggle with English. If Swedish or Danish were the linguae francae you would learn them. Culture matters more than you think. Although perhaps culture is not the best word to describe what I mean, perhaps I should say attitude and cultural affinity. Granted, Scandinavian children start learning English at an early age but so do many Hungarians yet the results are totally different. If we look at the map, we can see that 2 types of countries speak good English. 1. Former colonies (no explanation needed) and 2. Northwest-European fringe (Scandinavians, Dutch, to some extent Germans). This Northwest European fringe has geographical proximity to Britain and also long-standing cultural, commercial ties. Dutch and Swedish children are surrounded by English from an early age, are interested in British and American culture, and yes with some exceptions (e.g. Finns) all speak a Germanic language related to English. On the other hand Hungary never had any commercial or cultural ties with English-speaking nations, for centuries it has been influenced by the Germanosphere. If someone spoke a foreign tongue in Hungary it was almost always German, while the elite also spoke French along with German. Up until the late 20th century English was as alien in Hungary as Japanese or Swahili. Even today the majority of the people are not really open to English. They learn the language because they have to, they have to pass a language exam to obtain their degrees, or want to polish their CVs, but the overwhelming majority is not genuinely interested in the language and once they passed their language exams and collected their kudos, they never use it again, and within a couple of years will forget everything. After 8-12 years of classroom instruction the brightest and most hardworking children might be able to pass a B1 exam. If their parents hired a private tutor probably even B2. Nevertheless, the great majority never get beyond A2. And even those bright kids who get beyond B2 will forget the language after graduation because they will never use it again. I am afraid you overestimate the easiness of English. What you perceive as simplicity (i.e. the isolating tendencies in the language) pose a huge challenge for someone like me who is coming from an agglutinative language. I am right now going through an English grammar book, and believe me, it is pretty complex and above all arbitrary. When you meet people who tell you that English is so and so easy, you are probably dealing with a very small and specific minority who have a strong interest in English, they've actually moved to the UK to study or work in qualified positions etc. They do not represent the whole population. You probably don't bump into the Polish factory worker who hardly knows more than 100 English words or the Spanish kitchen porter who will probably not understand the question when you ask the time. Edited by Hungringo on 23 May 2014 at 11:28am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3937 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 67 of 134 23 May 2014 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
I'd probably put less emphasis on physical closeness to Britain and historical ties when it comes to Scandinavians and English. We are much closer to Germany and German culture has been much more important historically, yet the few people I know who are independent (not even fluent) speakers of German picked it up for work. Cultural allegiance is absolutely crucial, though. Scandinavia has allied with anglophone culture to the exclusion of almost everything else. Swedes are almost as likely as stereotype monolingual Americans and Brits to act incredulous when people abroad don't know English, look down their noses at countries who dub anything with an intended audience older than 10, etc. And they are often utterly convinced that their knowledge of English means they have access to everything this world has to offer. The French, on the other hand, don't have the same allegiance to all things anglophone. Early last year I remember checking the current cinema top #20 and there were three Scandinavian films on the list at the time. Sure, most people probably chose the "French Version" rather than the "Subtitled Original Version", but that's not the point. Those films had a market, an enormous market. I see this a lot when I watch news and documentaries too. Often when a French journalist is interviewing an Italian or a Spanish expert, whoever has been chosen to provide the journalist with an expert has found someone who speaks French. German and Russian experts all speak German and Russian. Dutch and Scandinavian experts speak English. Even the Chinese are more likely to find French TV a Francophone Chinese to speak to than the Scandinavians who, to a large extent, learn French in school. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4460 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 68 of 134 23 May 2014 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know a woman who grew up in the Soviet Union as a monoglot Russian speaker. When that political system collapsed, she moved to Germany without knowing a single word of German (or English). Her only option was to find menial work and start learning German bit by bit. She now speaks fluently and holds down a marketing job in the German language. Which incidentally proves that adults can and do learn effectively from a starting point of zero.
The point of my story is that she has recently been trying to learn English, a language which is almost universally badged as "easy". She has been to a couple of residential courses in London and is taking the project seriously, but she is having a hard time. I think the "easy" languages are the ones people are already motivated to learn. Russian is often described as a tough language but tens of millions of people across the old USSR learned it as a non-native tongue because it was obviously incredibly useful for life in that part of the world at that particular time 7 persons have 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 69 of 134 23 May 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone can learn a language like Russian, it is not intelligence at all but sheer memorization of forms, painful
irregularity doesn't make a language "deeper" or "complex", it just makes things less logical and in need of rote! Like I said, if I hear someone gave up learning a language because it was too difficult, they have moved a notch down in my mind considering millions of people often learn "hard" languages without complaining. Likewise, I think people who give up learning Mandarin must be absolutely stupid, it's the simplest language in the eastern hemisphere that is a lingua franca. Millions speak it and learn it, it is not up there with Russian, it is down with English and Spanish.
I want to strangle everyone who says that about English. English has been smoothed over but it is not ultra simplified nor anywhere near Esperanto levels. Around the world, languages ebb and flow, things are grammaticalized, things build up, things break down, just is! Armenian lost gender around 500 AD but nobody says a thing. English has numerous phrasal verbs, decent tense aspect, 150 irregular verbs, about 10 irregular plurals, 5 irregular adjective comparatives, and 44 phonemes (24 consonants, 20 vowel sounds) But something like Turkish has 28 phonemes, only 1 irregular verb, no irregular plurals, and the same declension and conjugation for every word yet nobody says a single thing! Same thing with Hungarian, it is not that complex either yet "inflection" makes them "better"! Indonesian too, Persian too, etc! How does this idea that English is "the absolute bottom level of all" get to be? I blame the attitude of European speakers growing up, they are raised with nationalism and want an easy target like English since they won't bother to learn languages outside their family. These same idiots would never lay a finger on Mandarin despite it being 100% isolating, they can't even be consistent in their bigotry against English! Edited by Stolan on 23 May 2014 at 5:19pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gustavo Russi Tetraglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3681 days ago 9 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French, Italian | Message 70 of 134 23 May 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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English is oftenly considered easy because it is popular. It isn't "English" that is
easy. It's the English-language-bombing people all around the world receive everyday naturally without noticing. It's a lingua franca, so people "get used" to it. And when someone gets used to something without too much effort, they consider that thing to be easy. I got used to reading Mandarin when I was a child (before anyone told me it was "hard") and I must say it has been the easiest language I've ever learned. I could understand Mandarin just as well as I could understand English, simply because they were present in my day-to-day life. Today, six years after I stopped learning it, I can still see some logic to it, even though people think I'm crazy. Someone earlier on this thread was talking about the similarities between Portuguese and Spanish. It is true - both languages are very close to eachother. The problem is that people in lusophone countries tend to start learning Spanish simply because it is close to Portuguese, but they have a very hard time with it - Spanish is not present in their daily life, so they end up saying that "Spanish may seem to be easy, but it is hard as hell". This is the difference between finding something easy or hard: if you find the logic in it or not. If you feel Russian is logical (because maybe you've had it always around you for family reasons or such), you'll find it to be easy. I actually find Italian more comprehensible than Spanish today, because I have never deeply studied Spanish while my Italian is in a pretty decent level. And now that I may start learning German, many people are telling me "the cases complicate it all", but I've managed to understand the mechanics of the language before actually trying to say that "I learn German and is easy/hard". Until now, I haven't had any problem with phonetics or verbal tenses. And again, people call me crazy, because I'm supposed to find it hard. 5 persons have 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 71 of 134 23 May 2014 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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People operate on instinct, people can never come to conclusions based on direct observation and deduction. I
hate people, one "person" is better than "people". They let perceived ideas control how successful they are in language learning! But I will never get to correct all of those fools who make bad linguistic claims. I have gone out and made my observations on different grammars in the world, I actually feel I may have gone slightly mad when the sheer differences in complexity and different forms of grammaticalization seemed so inconsistent. I thought humans would move towards equal features and complexities in said features as the human mind is limitless in how a language could get in all areas and we are all the same species, but it is not so! It is quite random, Turkish could morph into a beast while Russian may turn into an Indonesian. Just because! Edited by Stolan on 23 May 2014 at 11:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4146 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 72 of 134 23 May 2014 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that objectivity is more attainable with smaller questions. Which languages have
relatively easy tense systems? As Stolan intimated- which languages have relatively easy phonetics or declensions? These are interesting to ask. It's a bit boring to say "it all depends on how much you want it." And I don't think it's strictly true. Some language x will take more time to learn as a function of the genetic distance between the languages. Learning outside of your immediate language family will necessarily take cumulatively longer than learning within it. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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