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Greek and Turkish : Which is Harder? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5450 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 17 of 21 29 January 2011 at 6:47pm | IP Logged |
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I can't say about the complexity of Greek grammar, but from what I hear it's quite irregular. Irregularity for me is more difficult than complexity, so I guess Greek for me?
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| ozzgee Newbie Turkey Joined 5002 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Studies: Turkish* | Message 18 of 21 18 March 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged |
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As a Turk , Turkish is harder than Greek. Really !
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| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 19 of 21 19 March 2011 at 1:33am | IP Logged |
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[QUOTE=Demiurg] Firstly, in our schools we're being taught that Turkish is a "Ural-Altaic" language and not even Altaic.[QUOTE]
This is very interesting considering the similarities between Turkish and Mongolian. They both sound indistinquisable to me as far as the way it sounds. I'm curious as to if both are Ural-Altaic? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5849 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 21 19 March 2011 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
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This question is not so easy to answer. I learned Ancient Greek at school an the grammar of it was very irregular and therefore not easy. What I read about modern Greek is that it is more simplified than Ancient Greek. Turkish is strictly logical and therefore very different from Ancient Greek but it is agglutinative and does not use subordinate clauses so the language structure is very different from Germanic and Romance languages. Turkish does not have genders but it has the vowel harmony like Finnish and Hungarian, which have similar grammar structures as Turkish. For me as a person which is rooted in Germanic and Romance languages neither Greek nor Turkish is an easy language. For me the vowel harmony of Turkish is really easy but not the "ulaç" constructions which Turkish uses instead of subordinate clauses.
If you decide for learning one of these languages, you should consider not only easiness/difficulty but which language has more personal use for you. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 19 March 2011 at 11:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| GinBoxer Tetraglot Newbie United States subdiversity.com Joined 4859 days ago 3 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Yiddish, Greek Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Russian | Message 21 of 21 08 August 2011 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
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In my opinion, posters in this forum and on the language review page are a little hard on Greek grammar, which to me seems simpler in many regards than many of its Indo-European cousins:
Greek phonology is remarkably close to that of Spanish. It has 5 vowels, and the only sounds not native to English are /x/ ("χ") and /γ/. Greek's verb system seems to me *much* more logical than, say, those of Romance languages, many of which retain numerous redundant tenses and moods. Greek has, effectively, 3 tenses– past, present and future– with perfective and imperfective aspect for the past and future tenses. Personal endings are 100% consistent and intuitive between different tenses and even in relation to Romance verb endings. "Additional" tenses, like present perfect, pluperfect and future perfect are rarely used and resemble English (and Romance) forms quite closely. Verbal aspect is *not*, however, nearly as critical as in Slavic languages and can generally be intuited or ignored by a native English speaker. Greek *does* have 3 noun cases (plus a vocative), but the ubiquity of definite articles makes it much easier to comprehend the function of a noun in a sentence than in, say, Russian or Latin, which lack articles. People here seem to kvetch about Greek spelling, but aside from multiple ways of writing a few different vowels, Greek orthography is basically a one-to-one sound correspondence, and a word's correct pronunciation is immediately apparent from its spelling. Above all, Greek has to its advantage, IMO, one of the best self-study programs that I've ever tried for any language– "Learn Greek Online" at www.ellinika.org. I studied Greek as my first foreign language, before I had developed more refined methods, but the course of study in LGO's free 105 lessons as well as the supportive online community set a high standard and left me with a strong foundation for Greek conversation and reading. Edited by GinBoxer on 08 August 2011 at 5:46pm 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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