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Easy exotic languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6107 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 9 of 19 22 November 2008 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, but I must insist. I can't stress enough the importance and beauty of Bahasa Melayu instead. ;-) Really, I am under an impression that Malay is, hmm, valued more. But I don't know much and my views are biased for sure, so I'll leave it at this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Topsiderunner Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6916 days ago 215 posts - 218 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Arabic (Written) | Message 10 of 19 23 November 2008 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've only studied Swahili for a few hours here and there, but it does seem quite easy and logical. There's more grammar than Indonesian, but everything's in the Latin alphabet. You also get a healthy dose of Arabic loan words (if that's a direction you'd ever want to go) whereas I'm not sure how useful Indonesian vocabulary would be for other major languages.
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| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6138 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 11 of 19 24 November 2008 at 5:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Both Bahasa Indonesian and Swahili are used as a lingua franca in their respective regions and this means a lot of
speakers learn the language later in life, which has resulted in them becoming easier than related languages. Compare Bahasa to Javanese and Swahili to Shona or Zulu and you'll see a clear tendency to simplify grammar, sound systems etc. Mandarin occupies the same niche among the Chinese languages but you still have the tones and Hanzi. Some people classify Farsi and Hindustani as "exotic" languages and both of them are pretty straightforward, although don't expect too much transparency in terms of vocab with the "European" Indo-European languages. Again, Urdu in particular functions as a lingua franca and a great deal of grammatical variation is tolerated especially with regards to the genders of nouns, spelling and sentence structure. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Olympia Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5979 days ago 195 posts - 244 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Old English, French | Message 12 of 19 09 December 2008 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, the languages themselves might not be exotic, but Spanish and Portuguese would get you to some pretty
exotic places in Latin America and French would do the same in Africa. And the languages are quite easy to learn. As far as African tribal languages go, I've heard that Swahili is the easiest of the Bantu languages because it's the only one that doesn't have tones. That still doesn't mean it's easy, though. Just easier by comparison. 1 person has 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 13 of 19 09 December 2008 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If conlangs are OK then have a look at toki pona :) It has just 118 words and most concepts are expressed by combining them :)) it also lacks any sort of inflections.
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| jez Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 6304 days ago 37 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 19 09 December 2008 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, but that doesn't make it easy necessarily. Because it only has 118 words, other words such as "friend" is made up out of "good" and "person". It's a context driven language that really requires you to simplify your thought process. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6314 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 15 of 19 10 December 2008 at 2:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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How correct an analogy would it be to say that Indonesian is kind of (obviously not exactly) like Mandarin minus the tones and characters? To the extent that yout left with a very simple grammar like that of Chinese.
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| sotong Newbie Australia Joined 5826 days ago 9 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Indonesian, Mandarin, Polish | Message 16 of 19 10 December 2008 at 4:37am | IP Logged | |||||
At the outset, I do agree that Indonesian is qualitatively "easier" than Chinese, for example, at least for a native speaker of English. Having studied both, I would wholeheartedly agree that Indonesian takes less time to master, if only because of its use of the Roman alphabet. However, I think for everyone to roundly say that Indonesian is just so-goddamned-easy neglects a few key areas of difficulty for the average student.
As a lot of people in this thread have already identified, there are some aspects of Indonesian grammar that allow a learner to rapidly acquire a "basic", low-level proficiency. Many of the stumbling blocks in European languages are absent: no tense and aspect markers, no noun genders, no verb conjugation, no cases. Provided that a traveller, for example, can string the words together in the right order, they're set. Outside of this context though, the grammar can get difficult. The complex affixation system - distinguishing between, for example, stative verbs, causative verbs, and benefactive verbs; or the many types of nouns - accounts for a lot of this difficulty. Although Indonesian has borrowed massively from a wide variety of languages - Dutch, Arabic, Sanskrit, and more recently, English - the basic core vocabulary will be largely foreign to the English speaking student, which provides another hurdle. The biggest stumbling-block I see though - and for some reason, this is so often neglected in teach-yourself-type books - is that Indonesian is so very diglossic. Spoken informal Indonesian differs from the standard written type in terms of syntax, vocab and grammar, so much so that the recent film "Ada Apa Dengan Cinta", filmed entirely in informal Indonesian (of a Jakartan variety that is becoming v. popular throughout Indonesia), was largely incomprehensible to me.
I get where you're coming from here - it is true that many Indonesian citizens aren't yet completely fluent in the national language, which can mean they use standard grammatical forms incorrectly. However, I disagree that Indonesia's lingua franca status has resulted in a simplification of the language, except in the most minor degree. This kind of process is evident in pidgin languages; Indonesian isn't a pidgin. The spoken language dispenses with many of the niceties of written language, of course, but the syntax of the formal register is just as rich and complex as that of the classical Malay which serves as its model. With regards to the Javanese/Indonesian comparison - again, it is true that Indonesian is "simpler" in one sense. Javanese speech varies intricately depending on social context, producing "ngoko" and "krama" registers of the language, while Indonesian does not. Language planning has gotten rid of similar forms in older Malay (such as the polite, "inferior" pronoun hamba, servant), that would be inappropriate in a modern, national language. However, the "simple" grammatical features of Indo are actually common to Javanese - no verb inflection for number, tense etc; use of auxiliary words instead etc. I hope I haven't rambled on too long here! (If so: I'm new to the forums, you're just gonna have to forgive me... :D) Interesting discussion, and I hope I haven't discouraged anyone from learning Indonesian: as I said at the start, I find it much easier than Chinese, and the language is rich, varied, and dare I say it, beautiful. A good choice of an "exotic" language! Edited by sotong on 10 December 2008 at 4:41am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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