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Cacti from non-native speakers of English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes  Speaks: Russian* | Message 41 of 42 09 March 2013 at 7:54am | IP Logged |
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Learning vocabulary is a bigger problem than learning grammar, so vocabulary is more
important. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ling Diglot Groupie Taiwan Joined 4587 days ago 61 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Indonesian, Thai | Message 42 of 42 09 March 2013 at 12:48pm | IP Logged |
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The following is based on my personal learning experiences.
Native speaker: English 1 cactus: Indonesian, Esperanto 2 cacti: Spanish 3 cacti: German, French, Thai 3.5 cacti: Mandarin, Cantonese 4 cacti: Turkish, Taiwanese 5 cacti: Latin, Arabic Indonesian is perhaps the easiest language I've ever studied. With minimal effort I was able to learn enough to hold simple conversations with locals in Indonesia. I was amazed at how much I could understand. Simple grammar, easy pronunciation, highly phonetic (though the letter "e" has two different sounds). It's almost a matter of memorizing vocabulary and stringing words together. The hardest parts are some of the affixes (when to use men-, ber-, -nya etc.) but these can be gotten around and them mastered through practice. Esperanto: having studied Spanish, French and German, and being a native English speaker, Esperanto (in my limited dabbling) seems a highly manageable language to me. Spanish: one of the easiest of the European languages, with very simple and regular pronunciation rules. German and French took some serious effort. My recollections of learning the languages in high school is that of drudgery. But much of it is dormant in the nether regions of my brain. Thai: it comes relatively easy to me after having studied Chinese. There are many grammatical concepts that are similar to Chinese (measure words, aspect, sentence-final particles), but the grammar is a bit closer to English, especially with its ability to create relative clauses easily (unlike Chinese). It's tonal, like Chinese, but has an alphabet. The large number of pronouns can be intimidating. Men and women speak differently. Mandarin: many people rate it as 5 cacti, but I find it nowhere near as difficult. The grammar is very simple: no conjugations, tenses, moods, cases, etc. Very few irregularities. It's tonal, but you get used to it. The hardest aspect of Mandarin is the characters, but learning them is not as daunting as one may imagine. Chengyu (4- character idioms) can be hard because they're countless, but they're not necessary and can be looked up easily. Spicing up your discourse with a few chengyu can impress. Cantonese: for those who already know Mandarin, Cantonese is a quick study, being the most closely related major language to Mandarin. Taiwanese: harder than Mandarin or Cantonese because of the complex tone sandhi, some difficult sounds (which vary according to who is speaks it), and its lack of a standardized writing system. Turkish: the seemingly endless agglutinative forms make it tough. But I haven't studied enough of it to judge well. Latin: one of the toughest languages I ever studied. Noun cases (each with multiple uses), verb conjugations (a myriad endings carrying information including tense, aspect, mood, number, person, active/passive), etc. Lots of irregularities, lots of exceptions, etc. Much of my problem learning it, however, lay in the crappy way the class was taught. Arabic: God oh god! Aaaarrrrggghhhh! Edited by ling on 09 March 2013 at 12:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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