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Why English is hard to learn | ||
Tags: Difficulty | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 57 of 84 18 June 2012 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree, and yes, there are Spanish words which become less precise when translated into English. (the distinction between "amigo" and "amiga", for example.) And I also agree that any concept can be translated into just about any language, with a greater or lesser degree of difficulty and circumlocution. My thesis, which I knew would not be a popular one, is that English demands more precision than some other languages. It's not only whether a concept CAN be expressed with precision in language X, but whether or not native speakers of language X are in the habit of expressing that concept precisely. Some languages ALLOW the speaker to be less precise, and people, being they way we are, will take advantage of that and form the habit of being less precise. It's just as Isabel Allende said in her interview with Jorge Ramos: learning to speak English taught her how to be more precise with her Spanish. Spanish ALLOWS less precision than English allows. I know nobody wants to hear this in a world where every culture should be respected equally, but some languages have some weaknesses where precision is concerned. That doesn't make them "bad" languages, just different. Watercolor can do things oil paints are not good at, and vice versa. English can do things Spanish is not good at, and vice versa. And please don't misunderstand me. I love Spanish. I love reading in Spanish and watching Spanish movies. I'm spending a great deal of time studying Spanish and I hope to achieve as near as possible to native fluency in Spanish. So my objective observations about the limitations of Spanish, as I find it written by natives, are by no means meant as condemnation or criticism. Just observations concerning the typical level of specificity and precision embodied in typical Spanish prose as compared to that of typical English prose. Spanish partitions semantic space into broader territories than English, as a general rule. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 58 of 84 18 June 2012 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have read countless times that French is more precise than English. And I have read the same thing about German.
I think all such claims should be taken with a large pinch of salt. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tiyafeh Pentaglot Newbie Israel Joined 4779 days ago 12 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew*, Portuguese, Spanish, Latin Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Arabic (Written), German, Greek, Aramaic, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 59 of 84 18 June 2012 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What about this example: 'Tengo tres empleadas' means 'I have three employees, all of whom are female'. On the other hand, a literal translation of the same sort you provide in your example gives us 'I have three employees', which provides no information at all about the gender of the aforementioned employees. So does this mean that English cannot convey all the nuances of Spanish? Wouldn't you say that just as 'Tengo tres empleadas' could be translated quite adequately as 'I have three female employees', 'Tengo tres hijos varones' would be a perfectly acceptable translation of 'I have three sons', which conveys exactly the same information about the children's gender? Perhaps there are concepts that English can describe which Spanish cannot, and perhaps not. Perhaps, since Spanish isn't your native language, there are concepts you can express in English but not in Spanish, but which native speakers of Spanish have no trouble expressing in their mother tongue. Your example is not enough to prove anything either way. All it proves is that you need to be careful with literal translations. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4866 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 60 of 84 19 June 2012 at 8:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Your points are valid. I'm sure overstated my case, and probably didn't state it with adequate precision, but my observation has been that reading the works of native Spanish writers I find that the writing tends to use less precise, more generic vocabulary than is typical of English writing. It's not so much a matter of what the language is CAPABLE of, as what typical usage is in that language. So I should not have said anything about concepts which a language can or cannot express, but rather about what a language does and does not express in typical written discourse. I just finished reading the third book of the Hunger Games trilogy in Spanish translation, and near the end I saw another example of the type of thing that, by my count, is very common in Spanish translations. The English "...I have trespassed into his home, the way he slithered into mine last year, hissing threats..." was translated "...he entrado en su casa igual que él entró en la mía el año pasado para amenazarme...". "trespassed into" becomes "entered", just as "slithered into" becomes "entered". "hissing threats" becomes "to threaten me", loosing the whole serpent reference introduced with "slithered". "He slithered into my house hissing threats..." is a whole lot more evocative than "He entered my house to threaten me...". I realize that was a decision made by the translator, but why was that decision made? My reading of both Spanish originals and translations suggests it is because typical Spanish usage is satisfied with the more generic "entered" in place of the more precise "trespassed" and "slithered", even though it is possible to say both of those things in Spanish. Now it may just be a matter of style that English authors like to use more "flowery" language than Spanish authors. I don't really know. All I know, as a matter of objective, factual observation, is that native Spanish writing tends to use more generic, broader, and less precise vocabulary than native English writing. It may well be that other languages like French or German are written in styles even MORE precise than English. I don't know. But what I am NOT saying is that English is "better". English is not better. It's different. What I'm saying is that English is harder for native speakers of languages that are accustomed, as a matter of typical usage, to using less precision in their semantic categories. As an extreme (and artificial) example, for someone who spoke only Toki Pona learning ANY natural language would be a nightmare because the vocabulary of Toki Pona is so vague and ambiguous the hypothetical native speaker would have to learn how to think in a way very alien to their native language. And never doubt that the language a person speaks influences they way he thinks. Even grammatical gender alters how a person thinks about inanimate objects. For example: How grammatical gender changes our thinking Edited by fiziwig on 19 June 2012 at 8:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4778 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 61 of 84 19 June 2012 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, to be sure there are certainly some differences between colloquial and written French, however you can still pretty much look up anything in a reference book. You can read in a book that "Il a" and "Il y a" become often "Y'a" in the spoken language, it's there. English grammar says you can invert a negated, contracted conjugation of the verb to be to pose a tag question such as "Isn't he", which means that it's technically possible to say "Amn't I" (which is only actually done in Hiberno=English). However, outside of that one isolated variety of English, virtually no one says "amn't I" and they prefer to say the long form "am I not" (many people actually say "aren't I" instead, which defies all logic). This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. The formal rules of English are trumped by idiomatic usage to the point where the latter can totally negate the former. For all intensive purposes, though "amn't I" is grammatically sound, it's wrong. It's wrong because almost all usage has decided so. It has been marked by my spell checker as incorrect. The attitude in the French language is the opposite. It's certainly possible for usage to defy the grammatical standard, but even native speakers themselves will consider their own usage wrong if it is in conflict with the prescribed grammar of the language. In French, standard grammar trumps usage. French people have an expression that is used in no other language I have studied: "Je sais pas si c'est français, mais..." which is followed by a word or expression of dubious grammar. Quebeckers will sometimes preface or conclude a flagrant Anglicism with the oft-quipped phrase "(comme on dit) en bon Québécois", which is sometimes used as an ironic way of saying that what the speaker is about to say (or has just said) is technically wrong. Ex. "En bon Québécois, on appelle ça la 'clutch'." This is an attitude of the speaker towards his language which conveys a sentiment of transgression; he suspects he's committing an error so he excuses himself for it. A native English speaker almost never questions his English in this way. Have you ever heard a native English speaker say something like "I don't know if this is good English, but..." I never have. In English, something either sounds right or sounds wrong. Whether it actually is correct is of little importance to the speaker unless he is writing a paper or something and feels he will be judged by a different standard. I don't know, maybe I'm looking too far into this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4773 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 62 of 84 19 June 2012 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4778 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 63 of 84 19 June 2012 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure what native speakers the Swedish-native OP was referring to, but none that I've ever met and I'm a native speaker who has lived in two English-speaking countries. In my experience, unless one is writing a paper, one doesn't really question his own usage. He just says whatever comes most naturally. He might know somewhere that it's technically wrong. For example, I say ain't all the time, and I know it's not considered "good English" but I don't care as long as I'm in an environment where the word is common. Now, if I go somewhere else and change milieus, I'll use something more acceptable because I'm aware of the differences, but one thing I'll never do is to check with my interlocuter to see if "ain't" is correct usage. I know it isn't. Everyone does, whether they use it or not. Edited by lecavaleur on 19 June 2012 at 8:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 64 of 84 19 June 2012 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How come it's mostly English natives that argues that English is hard, and most of the rest of us, people who've
learnt it as a second languages, hold other opinions? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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