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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4044 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 41 of 134 21 May 2014 at 12:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
"de tunder". and "the author" for me is "di oufor". to be fair, while I can produce the -th like in "author" but it's too impractical for me to use it when the word is not in the end of a sentence, I don't have any idea about the difference between the -th of "mother" and the d as in "random". what bothers you about Italian? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4686 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 42 of 134 21 May 2014 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Getting back to the OP, I have found Spanish to be much more difficult than I thought it would/should be. Cajun French and English are both native languages for me and so I assumed Spanish would fall right into place. German was a breeze in comparison and even my Mandarin has progressed more quickly than my Spanish.
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| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4633 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 43 of 134 21 May 2014 at 1:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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German has been the hardest for me. Not because of the cases or articles, but the vocab. Anytime I hear someone say German is easy only because it's in the same family as English, I automatically assume that they haven't actually studied it past the basics. Or that they're more passionate for it than I was. :P
French used to be a problem as far as listening comprehension goes, but really all you have to do is keep listening and everything starts to make sense. I think every language is hard in terms of LC, but French seems to be a bit more exaggerated in difficulty. Edited by sillygoose1 on 21 May 2014 at 1:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4662 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 44 of 134 21 May 2014 at 1:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well that's a start. You've noticed that "the" is pronounced in at least two distinct ways :-)
That's weird. Why isn't it easier when it's at the start of the sentence? Surely that way you can get over and done with and enjoy what's left of the utterance? Or you can go for the "London" pronunciation and use "f" as you do, but you need to modify the final vowel into something between "a" and "schwa" I think. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gustavo Russi Tetraglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3840 days ago 9 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French, Italian | Message 45 of 134 21 May 2014 at 5:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I'm pretty sure we all have only one point with different points of view. As English is not my mother language, the "mechanical aspects" of languages for me have different names. I believe we do understand that the "de" im monde is not just ignored though, as another forum member said. We just had different ways of explaining it :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Dragon27 Diglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 4238 days ago 41 posts - 71 votes Speaks: Russian*, English | Message 46 of 134 21 May 2014 at 7:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Gustavo Russi
"t" at the end of the "internet" (and other words) may not be "released". That is, it is pronounced, but not finished, the tongue is held at the alveoli, so this "t" is barely heard. Is that what you meant? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Penelope Diglot Senior Member Greece Joined 3866 days ago 110 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English, French Studies: Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 47 of 134 21 May 2014 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nothing bothers me at all! In fact every year I start to learn any other language , and I end up studying Italian one way or another :D But it is not easy, and I say that because in Greece it has a reputation that it is the most beautiful and the most easy language to learn. Although I agree with the most beautiful, it is not the easiest, because if one wants to go past the usual tourist coversations and even a bit more than that, it is actually not that easy. As for the -th, you have some good advice here. Because you are aware there is a difference, you'll find a way to pronounce it. Maybe it's just a matter of practice. English is terribly hard to pronounce properly for most foreigners I believe, maybe the hardest of all! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4665 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 48 of 134 21 May 2014 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Italian was difficult for me:
1. spelling was ridiculously hard, especially double consonants (doppie), I had to look up every other word before trying to write something [in theory, Italians should pronounce all double consonants clearly, and learners should hear them, but that's not the case in real life, since in the North many double consonants are pronounced as single, while from Rome southwards single consonants are pronounced as double, even the initial ones] 2. pronunciation [standard Italian has 7 stressed vowels and not 5 as in Spanish, yet this is not indicated in spelling, except for a handful of words like perché and ventitré which Northerners pronounce differently and write incorrectly perchè, ventitrè etc...90% of Italians use open and close O and E (ò vs ó, è vs é) but except from Rome and Tuscany, their distribution is more often than never different than the ditionary and RAI standards; this is different than in Portuguese, where all people pronounce open and close E,O as it should be in the dictionary] 3. Italian grammar (too many irregular verbs, prepositions that vary with the object used; compared to Italian, Portuguese has very few irregular verbs, and the use of prepositions is consistent, in Brazilian Portuguese you use A, PARA, EM with all destinations (depending on degree of formality) but in Italian, you say VADO A FRANCIA, but VADO IN ROMA, that's extremely difficult, since you have to memorize prepositions along with the noun). 4. Too many regional preferences (affecting not only pronunciation perché/perchè, ragno [rañño/ra:ño], zio [tsio, dzio], but syntax too [Hai capito? vs Capisti?] and vocabulary (cocomero vs anguria). 5. Aside from RAI news and dubbed films, spoken standard Italian is extremely rare to find, most Italians have heavy local accents (which are not only difficult to understand but have no pure beauty of what foreigners mean of Italian: standard RAI Italian.) 6. Italians don't give a damn about their language and spell words incorrectly, not only on the internet but in magazines and newspapers too: many times they write perchè, ventitrè or perche', ventitre' instead of perché, ventitré...It may be better if they studied punctuation more at school instead of venturing into old literature (like Dante or Petrarca). 7. So, I quit studying Italian, and focused more on my Portuguese and my Spanish. You can always use Spanish in Italy since most people understand it. I still love the sound of standard RAI Italian, with all open and close vowels pronounced clearly: trèno, stupèndo, perché, stélla, with [ts] in zio, zaino, with geminated gn/gl (ragno [rañño]), with raddoppiamento sintattico (a Milano [ammilano]), too bad most Italians don't speak like that, but use regional accents I don't find as acoustically appealing . As for Italians accepting foreign-accented Italian, they're like Chinese, even if you speak borderline-acceptable Italian with a foreign accent, they will say: you speak great Italian. The most famous example is my fellow patriot Nina Moric. Edited by Medulin on 21 May 2014 at 11:52am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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