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What language did you find easiest? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5077 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 25 of 66 05 February 2015 at 9:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I am glad you included the qualification of 'for a healthy person' in your question of whether I find walking easy or not. I also think it is an excellent comparison to learning a language. Walking is the simple process of placing one foot in front of the other enough times to reach your goal. This is the same as learning a language. Once you have a method of learning that suits you and works for you then the element of great effort no longer exists. I would compare learning a language to walking from Vienna to Paris (or wherever). The process is simple, no doubt, but to reach the goal is not easy. We could even run from Vienna to Paris, that is just as simple as walking. But would it be easy? Learning a language requires dedication to the task, just as a walk of many thousands of kilometres would. Is language learning a walk in the park? For me, if it were easy I could open my Assimil book, listen to the dialog once or twice, write it out once and I would know the entire contents of the lesson. Then I could proceed to next lesson and so forth. Now that would be easy and a walk in the park. Serpent, you yourself said, "language learning is not a walk in the park". By the way walking as such is not an easy thing to learn. It is a very complex activity. Can you remember the effort you required to learn how to walk? Probably not, I don't either, we all fall down many times before learning how to balance ourselves, then take one step, fall over, get up, try again, then take another tentative step etc. Plus I am sure you seen film of the struggle of adults, who after a severe accident, need to learn how to walk again. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 26 of 66 05 February 2015 at 11:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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You're looking at learning a language or walking from Wien to Paris as monumental blocks, but both can be broken into simple repetitive activities that take a lot of time but minimal effort. The biggest barrier is one's own doubt about whether today's steps are worth it if the destination remains far away. And in language learning it's also the knowledge which steps to take and how not to overload yourself (somehow it's much more obvious that you shouldn't use fancy but uncomfortable shoes or try to run the whole distance in a week). This is where HTLAL is priceless :)
(And you don't need to master the whole Assimil lesson from the beginning. Come back for the active wave, seek real world examples through a multitrack approach or use SRS) Edited by Serpent on 05 February 2015 at 11:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5077 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 27 of 66 05 February 2015 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Exactly! Learning a language isn't a monumental task, it is a matter of breaking the process down into small digestable chunks. This means it would be without toil but not without effort. I also agree that you don't need to master an Assimil lesson from the beginning, as already said it should be assimulated over time. (Yes, I use SRS.) By beef is with the use of the word 'easy'. It is bandied about on the forum so regularly that one might assume: language learning is easy. I am sure nobody finds learning their first foreign language as easier. I had a lot fun learning German, the challenge was enjoyable, but on the other hand I would never say to was easy. An example of, and not to pick on anyone, the carefree use of 'easy': the first reply on this thred is:
For Stelle Spanish was "much" easier than Tagalog. This implies that Tagalog was also easy, just less so than Spanish. Perhaps Stelle could tell us it Tagalog was in fact easy to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 28 of 66 05 February 2015 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Sort of like saying that a proton is much bigger than an electron means that an electron is big, just not as big as a proton? Or saying that John is older than Sarah implies that we're talking about a couple of senior citizens? Is this some sort of perscriptivist rule that I have yet to hear about? Some nonesense dug up by Strunk and White, perhaps? Because it's ridiculous. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 29 of 66 05 February 2015 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's not how comparative works in English. Check out: Wikipedia article on Comparisons If I say "my brother is much richer than me" it certainly doesn't imply that I myself am rich (which is what you are saying). Edited by patrickwilken on 05 February 2015 at 2:59pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 30 of 66 05 February 2015 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I agree that none of them are particularly easy, even related languages. Yes, you get a "discount" for a related language, but in my experience that mostly applies to the beginner stage which, relatively speaking, is already the shorter and easier part of the learning process. The discount on the "hard" parts (the intermediate to advanced stage and the development of active skills) doesn't seem quite as significant.
I'd say a similar thing applies to the "third language" discount, i.e., finding a third language easier because the second has taught you how to learn a language. But perhaps that's just because my second wasn't exactly highly advanced when I started my third. Thanks to my French, I picked up basic Italian quite quickly and it didn't take long to get to the stage of understanding it quite well, but going from there to being able to speak well is still taking a lot of time and hard work, quite comparable to what I put in to reach the same sort of level in French. During my early fast progress in Italian I assumed that I'd keep going at the same quick rate, so I was in for a bit of a shock when things suddenly went back to a "normal" pace after that initial sprint. Overall I'd say I've found Italian slightly easier than French. Not so much for these discounts at the beginner stage, which in the long term become less significant; more just because I have more opportunities to use it and for the extra motivation that these opportunities give me. I also made a similar mistake of underestimating Spanish. Again my experience was that I picked up the basics quickly but going beyond that was going to require far more work than I have time for. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5077 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 31 of 66 05 February 2015 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
True! Sorry about that, my example was a poor one and I got carried away. I accept your correction. Thank you.
Garyb I agree with your above post. There is a difference between easier and easy. Serpent may note that you used the word easier a few times but not easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4101 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 32 of 66 05 February 2015 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
While it is of course easy to overestimate your progress in the beginning when everything is easy and the slow intermediate stage isn't even on the horizon... "normal" might depend a lot on your other languages. You're doing Romance languages, so it makes sense that your "normal" progress in one language would be similar to another. My own self-study frame of reference is a Celtic language. Like you with Italian I was amazed at how quickly and easily I progressed in the beginning with Breton, since my reference back then was taking classes in school or at university. But my intermediate "normal" in Breton is nowhere near my intermediate "normal" in French, when I picked it back up, so if my Italian soon falls back to my French "normal" it's still going to seem to be progressing at super-speed compared to my other intermediate language. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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