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What language did you find easiest? | ||
Tags: Easiness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 66 08 February 2015 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
At last, a refreshing voice. The remark about un espèce instead of une espèce is astute because it corresponds to a rather quirky feature of French grammar. There is a long tradition of making the grammatical gender of espèce agree with the gender of the complement, as in un espèce de fou and une espèce de folle. This is actually quite logical but the prescriptivists have imposed the general form une espèce in the standard. But this doesn't change the fact that native speakers never make certain kinds of mistakes even though they make certain very specific ones. Concerning that drive for perfection that seems to always kick in for tastyonions, I think the explanation is pretty simple and applies to many people - but not to all. To have learned a language partially is very frustrating. The joy of discovery and wonder is becoming palpable. Just being able to understand is exciting. Then there is even greater pleasure of starting to say things and have other people respond spontaneously without a quizzical look on their face. There's an incredible sense of achievement. It's only natural to want to go further and become better, which by the way implies, for me at least, making fewer mistakes. Edited by s_allard on 08 February 2015 at 12:47pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 50 of 66 08 February 2015 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, this is a common false dichotomy. Polyglots generally have a pretty high level in some 2-4 languages at the very least. And the synergy helps too. And s_allard, please try to accept how unique your situation is. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4443 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 51 of 66 08 February 2015 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Mandarin is much easier than French. Being brought up in a Cantonese-speaking environment with some
knowledge of waiting the characters the main issue is pronouncing the same words & phrases differently. Although French is similar to English with many of the same words, I find there are enough differences that I can read a block of text but have trouble listening to the same thing being said. I heard some Cantonese-speakers complain about reading Simplified Chinese characters like learning a new language because they lived in Hong Kong and learned to read Traditional Characters. Personally I don't find Simplified characters a big deal. Edited by shk00design on 08 February 2015 at 9:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 52 of 66 09 February 2015 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm glad somebody else is saying that Mandarin is easier than French. I really don't buy into this notion that any language is easy or easier than another. Let's not mix up language with learning environment. I don't think babies or young children find learning a language easy or hard. It's just a fact of life. You learn the language you grow up in. Black people or Caucasians who grow up in China speak Chinese just like everybody else. It just seems strange to us because we are not used to seeing it. When I read the posts in this thread, I observe that the most of the time, the so-called easiest language is the one that the learner was most exposed to at the earliest age. For me, this was English, so this qualifies as my easiest language. But, at the same time, I'll never say that learning to write and speak English well has been easy. There is so much still to learn. I've been using English most of my life and every time I read a newspaper I find something new to learn. I come back to this idea of wanting to speak the language well. I won't rehash that toxic debate about how mistakes don't matter but I believe that every learner of another language here at HTLAL - and that includes our dyed-in-the-wool defender of mistakes - wants to speak that language well or to the best of their ability. We may recognize our limitations but we don't have to like them. I don't care how close the target language is to our native language, learning to speak or write it well at an adult age is very difficult. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4031 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 53 of 66 10 February 2015 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Easiest language: German....since it's the only European language I put my time into, the cognates meaning I already
have half of the basic words, okay so let's pretend I didn't know German, what would be the easiest? Mandarin: Obviously since it is a streamlined (actually "held back" is a better term) language due to its historical spread like English or Spanish, but the non-prescriptivist variety may be a different story. Grammatically would be Thai, a language where: "The children strolled slowly over the big red bridge at night in peace carrying a friend's bag and their own."= "Child child walk slow bridge red big night peace take before bag friend and thing belong group he" (word for word translation) which is perfectly grammatical, (imagine if the poet Karamzin knew of this language), but it has the hardest phonology of all that I've learned and the pragmatics can be tough. Edited by Stolan on 10 February 2015 at 3:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gomorritis Tetraglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 4277 days ago 91 posts - 157 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French Studies: Greek, German, Dutch | Message 54 of 66 12 February 2015 at 12:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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Not counting Romance languages, I find Greek the easiest so far.
- It sounds very clear to me. Normally, from the moment I learn a word, I will detect it in speech every single time. - Phonology is relatively easy for a Spanish speaker. Many new consonants must be learned, but vowels are identical. - Prosody is extremely similar to that of Castillian Spanish. - I find sentence structure very similar to Spanish even in complex sentences. Often a word by word translation of a Spanish sentence will be correct. - Almost all noun genres are easily deduced by the spelling of the word. - Use of prepositions is quite logical. All those features make it much easier for me than German, Dutch or English. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 55 of 66 12 February 2015 at 1:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Spanish (of any country). Specialising in Peninsular and Argentinian Spanish
(castellano), perhaps it might be too controversial, but I would say that I find Spanish to be the easiest language of all languages, and undoubtedly the easiest Indo- European language. Its regularity, to mine eyes, overcomes any irregularities such as dipthongued verbs (o->ue, i->ie), a number of verb tenses, grammatical gender, big diglossia, etc. The sounds are clear and simple that I think that anyone can at least make after some study without extreme errors. The only real difficulty that is infamous is the speed of its speech. But I, as a native Anglophone, trained myself to speak at least 2 or 3 times as fast in Spanish as in English with little difficulty. It just takes time and practise, and it also helps that, to me at least, the vowels and syllables are all fairly clear and regular without any drastic mouth or throat/guttural movements (c.f. Vietnamese, Danish, Thai, French). Spanish grammar also makes more sense than all of the other languages that I study/studied, and my native English as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 56 of 66 12 February 2015 at 10:33am | IP Logged | |||||
There is some synergy at play but it's more that you know what works for you. Chinese is very interesting to learn because of the characters, because that's a hurdle I've never taken before and I find the character classes the most interesting ones - producing speech orally isn't the challenge for me apart from the tones. All in all Chinese is shaping up to be an interesting language. I don't have equal levels in many of my languages but I tend to rather have a spread of languages in certain strata where my best ones are native-like, then there's a stratum where my knowledge is very broad and I can apply it effectively, then there's a stratum at which I'm simply good but noticeably off, a stratum of language through which I can muddle myself with some effort, a stratum of similar languages which I can read but which I can't necessarily speak very well and a stratum of languages at which I'm a beginner. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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