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Why are Korean and Arabic considered hard | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6184 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes  | Message 33 of 57 28 January 2012 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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단장 권익환 .... I believe that's the name of the team lead. 권익환. 권 is a common surname in Korean, typically written as Kwon in English.
Again, 손모씨가 is possibly a name of the visiting relative. 씨 is usually paired up with a name of a person. It is a polite form of addressing a person It will take quite a long time to be able to read news article in Korean. You need to learn a lot of elements and understand a bit more some hanja to be able to deal with that stuff. I have dabbled for roughly 2 years in this language, plus I have background in Chinese so I know the extent of challenge to deal with formal written material in Korean. To learn to communicate informally with Koreans may not be hard to achieve. However, news is wicked! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6283 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 34 of 57 28 January 2012 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If you are Caucasian, just pretend you are German or something and you don't speak English. Speak some fake German at them (and hope they don't actually speak German!). Or pretend you are Icelandic or Finnish or some from some country where they almost assuredly won't speak the language. Learn a couple Icelandic or Finnish phrases and when a Korean tries to speak English to you, just repeat your Icelandic or Finnish phrases and shrug, and then try speaking to them in Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6184 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 35 of 57 28 January 2012 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When I travelled in Korean I soon found out that once you are outside of Seoul you are basically in a monolingual zone. Even teenagers don't speak English good enough to communicate. It is no wonder I could count with my two hands how many foreigners whom I have come across in a month (excluding Seoul).
I am not kidding you when I passed by in Anyang the clerks in the city's tourist booth did not know a word of English other than thank you and welcome. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5166 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 36 of 57 29 January 2012 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Arabic grammar is certainly not easy, but definitely manageable.
Your math seems to be correct, but in reality, Arabic verb conjugation is much easier than the conjugation of verbs in Romance languages, because it usually boils down to just one verb pattern for the past and one for present/future use. As for the derived verb forms, they're extremely regular and very few verbs have all 10 derived forms. Stressing that you'll need to master 1040 verb forms might impress your monolingual friends, but might give everybody else a wrong picture about the difficulty of Arabic.
It's true that many Arab writers love synonyms and that the terminology for scientific terms is inconsistent, which means that you have to learn more vocabulary at the beginning, but OTOH the root/pattern system makes it often possible to infer the meaning of new words from the root and/or the pattern.
I'd agree that the script is not very difficult once you get to the point of recognizing whole words, but the pronunciation of some letters is not exactly easy and will take significantly longer to learn than the sounds of most Indo-European languages. If you've read this far and are wondering what difficulties to expect, I can recommend the book "Arabic in chains: structural problems and artificial barriers" by Robert Marzari, which is an English translation of his German book "Fesselndes Arabisch - Strukturelle Schwierigkeiten und künstliche Barrieren in der arabischen Sprache". Since the book uses transliterated Arabic, it's also accessible to those who cannot read Arabic. It's a bit pricy, though, and might not be easy to get, because it was published by one of the smaller German publishing houses. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Voodie Tetraglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4650 days ago 17 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek | Message 37 of 57 29 January 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is true that few verbs have all the forms. But what about the weak roots? Their conjugational paradigms differ quite considerably. And taking into account all the types (2 assimilated, 2 hollow, 2 defective and doubled), we have much more than just one pattern. To be more precise, the book on "Arabic Irregular Verbs" that I'm looking at right now, has 697 pages. And there are only paradigms in it, no explanations :) Arabic grammar is definitely manageable. But it is rather alien as well as complicated. And that alone makes it difficult, especially in the beginning. Unfortunately, I haven't studied any Romance languages myself, but those who have, don't seem to agree with your statement. I even have an acquaintance who gave in after a year of Arabic (couldn't handle the grammar) and moved to the French group of the same level. She caught up with them after 3 months, having no prior experience with Romance languages. And this is not the only example. Edited by Voodie on 29 January 2012 at 8:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5166 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 38 of 57 29 January 2012 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, weak roots (and roots with hamzas) are a bit tricky, but they too boil down to a couple of more or less manageable patterns and those who don't need to be learned like irregular verbs in any other language. Look at any French or Spanish grammar book and you'll also find long lists of irregular verbs with often unpredictable conjugation patterns.
The grammar of Romance languages is certainly easier to grasp for a speaker of an Indo-European language than Arabic grammar, but one might as well argue that there are even some Arabic grammar features that are simpler than their Indo-European counterparts. For example, Arabic relative pronouns (الذي،التي etc.) are not declined (i.e. Arabic doesn't distinguish between "who" and "whom") and pretty much all Arabic prepositions govern just one case--the Genitive. OTOH, Russian prepositions govern 5 cases. (IIRC, some of them even govern 2 different cases, depending on the meaning.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Voodie Tetraglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4650 days ago 17 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek | Message 39 of 57 29 January 2012 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But even with the relative clauses it is not so straightforward. In certain cases the pronoun is omitted. Getting used to the so-called returning pronoun (DamIr al-'aid) also takes some time.
Since Russian is my native tongue, I am quite aware of this fact. :) But I think, lack of cases in Arabic is compensated with its verbal morphology, which seems to be much more complicated than the ones of German or Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5166 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 40 of 57 29 January 2012 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Arabic verbal morphology is definitely more complex, but figuring out the correct use of imperfective and perfective Russian verbs is also not exactly easy. You'll find in almost every foreign language features that seem to be very alien and complicated until you have a closer look at your own language (or other languages that you studied) and realize that some of their grammar aspects will undoubtedly appear quite complicated and unwieldy to foreigners. There's no doubt that it takes most people longer to study Arabic than other languages, but, IMHO, we shouldn't discourage potential students by making certain aspects of grammar and morphology appear more complicated than they actually are. For example, many potential students worry about missing vowels in Arabic, but few students of Japanese seem to consider Chinese or Japanese readings of Kanji characters an insurmountable problem. Edited by Doitsujin on 29 January 2012 at 11:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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