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Why English is hard to learn | ||
Tags: Difficulty | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 49 of 84 18 June 2012 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
@fiziwig Not gonna argue with your theory, just gonna do what I do best - nitpick!
Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 June 2012 at 10:55am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 50 of 84 18 June 2012 at 11:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What languages does not loan words for things they have no words of their own? Diskutera, karma, guru, precis,
taga, precision, konstant, and safari are words that exist in Swedish. Take, is by the way not a loan word. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 51 of 84 18 June 2012 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 June 2012 at 11:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 84 18 June 2012 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sort of. Colloquial spoken French is a really interesting language. Besides the obvious differences from written French (questions almost never use inversion, ne is dropped more often than not, on is the second-personal plural subject pronoun), there's a lot of deeply fascinating stuff going on in spoken French, including topic/comment and comment/anti-topic constructions, fun clefts (Y a que lui qui me comprend!) and all sorts of other things that get linguists excited. As one put it, "We've really said goodbye to Standard Average European here, haven't we?" But this is all just enthusiastic linguistics geekery. Most students of French never even notice this stuff; they just pick it up by osmosis, and spend several weeks enthusiastically repeating things like "C'est ______, ça !" I agree that English orthography is kind of an evil mess, and we sure do love our phrasal verbs and prepositions. And does anyone even agree on how many past tenses and aspects we have? Still, every language has some headaches like this. Just try looking up Old Norse verbs in the dictionary. ("OK, so we have an initial consonant, a vowel mutated by a sound law, and a consonant assimilated by the suffix. Basically, we know it starts with 's'.") Or Latin ablatives. ("This term, class, we're going to learn 25 new uses of the ablative case.") Or German syntax. Or Irish phonology. Or Russian verbs. Or Arabic dialects. Or Chinese tones. Or Kanji readings. Or Korean phonology. Isn't it pretty much a cliché? If you ask native speakers, pretty much every language is the hardest language on earth. It's more like every language has some twisty little challenges and some areas of surprising simplicity. The only real question is how much vocabulary, grammar, phonology and orthography you can recycle from a related language. Edited by emk on 18 June 2012 at 2:12pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 53 of 84 18 June 2012 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have heard many things, but this is the biggest load of rubbish I have ever heard... Edited by Josquin on 18 June 2012 at 1:29pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 54 of 84 18 June 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
English: "I have three sons." translated to Spanish: "Tengo tres hijos." translated back to English: "I have three children, at least one of which is a son, but the sex of the others is unspecified." The Spanish translation does not capture all the information in the English original. Spanish cannot make the simple, bare statement "I have three sons." without introducing ambiguity not present in the English original. I rest my case. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 55 of 84 18 June 2012 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Unfortunately, I don't speak any Spanish (though I can understand it to a certain degree), so I can't give a counter-example. To state that a given language A cannot render all information of another language B is trivial, but to say that on the other hand language B can capture every single information of language A - which would make it a superior language by the way - is pure nonsense! There is no way that every nuance of a Spanish text can be reproduced in English, simply because of all the associations a native Spanish speaker has with certain words and expressions that don't exist in English. Your example proves nothing. So, the word "hijo" is ambiguous compared to the word "son". I am convinced there are Spanish words that become ambiguous when they are translated into English. For a Spanish speaker the use of subjunctive has a certain content of information that cannot be reproduced in English. For you, the use of subjunctive may be only a set of rules, for a native Spanish speaker there is a certain notion added to the concept. As I said, unfortunately I cannot give you a specific Spanish example, but let's have a look at Russian instead. Russian verbs of motion distinguish between going by foot and going by car, whether the motion is directioned towards a goal or not, and whether it takes place once or several times. All this cannot be rendered adequately in English, so English is not more precise than other languages. Every language is complex in its own way, and it's not possible to reproduce every aspect of information in another language. So, my saying "This is rubbish" was based on fundamental considerations about language as a human concept and not a single case study of "Tengo tres hijos". I rest my case. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4735 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 56 of 84 18 June 2012 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Just a nitpick about the details of English grammar: In English, the "to" is considered part of the infinitive form of a verb. For example, the French movie title "Etre et avoir" is rendered in English as "To Be and to Have". That fact also creates the possibility of the "split infinitive" (placing a modifier between the "to" and the verb); which all English grammar books say is incorrect, but which many native English speakers do fairly often in informal speech. (One well known example of a split infinitive from American pop culture is the phrase "to boldly go" from the Star Trek intro.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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