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Why is Spanish singled out as easy lang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4692 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 33 of 55 10 May 2012 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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How is learning nouns along with their gender front-loaded, _especially_ compared with Spanish, where you have to do the same thing? The fact that one language has 2, the other 3 genders doesn't make much of a difference.
You don't need to master the cases to be conversational fluent. By that standard, 25% of us native German speakers aren't fluent. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4856 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 34 of 55 10 May 2012 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My impression is that it is VERY easy to learn A LITTLE BIT of Spanish. It's much harder to learn a little bit of French because French pronunciation, if not approached with great caution, can do permanent damage to your tongue! (Or so I'm told) And we won't even talk about what Russian or German can do to your throat!
Everyone I know can say "Más cerveza por favor" in the Mexican restaurant. But in a French restaurant I've never actually seen people twisting their faces and puckering their lips in the contortions necessary to name items on the menu. (Well, that's not quite true. I've seen it happen on T.V., but certainly not in real life.) But getting beyond the stage of knowing "a little bit" of Spanish and really knowing Spanish is a huge leap. The first semester of high school Spanish, (which back in the 60's was what we all took) was easy. It was the linguistic wading pool. But splashing around in the wading pool is a lot different from competing in an Olympic swimming event, or diving from a Coast Guard helicopter into shark-infested waters to rescue a boater in distress. In my high school few held on into the second semester, and the rest graduated with the impression that swimming the English Channel was just like splashing in the wading pool, only for a little longer. But get a little deeper into it and you soon discover that every Spanish word has at a bare minimum three different, and often contradictory meanings, and that some conjugated forms of some verbs look just like certain nouns, which when you're at the stage of reading one word at a time can drive your straight up the wall. (Ella es lista. Ella está lista. Ella tiene una lista. And what's this mean? He hit the cue ball with a taco? Really? Didn't that get taco sauce on the felt? And what about that lady who's walking on tacos? or the gentleman complaining that he already has forty tacos?) So I'd say that every language has, somewhere along the line, a giant wall that has to be scaled to attain mastery. With French, German, Russian, Latin, that wall is two steps in from the trail head. With Spanish, you still have to scale the wall when you come to it, but it's a few miles down the path before you even realize that it's there. And if you cut your hike short, before catching sight of the wall, Spanish seems like a very easy stroll in the park. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6428 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 35 of 55 11 May 2012 at 7:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like the wall analogy.
With Japanese it's kanji. With Korean it's pronunciation and understanding the spoken language. Spanish looks like this: ________________|________ (that's a path and and wall) German looks like this: _|_______________________ Japanese looks like this: __. . __. . ___| . . . That's a path with a few stepping stones you have to jump onto along the way (learning kana) then you're like ok this is cool, and then you learn that there's no spaces between words (the next set of stepping stones). Then you get to the point where you actually have to learn kanji if you want to be serious about it. That's your wall. You have to jump off the wall and land on more stepping stones when you learn that kanji has multiple pronunciations. Korean looks like this: ___ . |_|_|_| | | | | | It's a level path at the beginning as you learn how to read and write in a few hours. And you get spaces between words. Then the path ends and you have to jump onto a stepping stone when you realize you can't tell the difference between some consonants. Then you have to jump from the stepping stone onto the wall and pull yourself up when you realize you can't understand anyone (or be understood yourself) even after studying for years. Then it's a series of walls, but you're reassured because at least you can read and write everything. But then the ground between the walls disappears and you have to leap from wall to wall over a vast chasm below because you realize that the entire language is homonyms and a ridiculous amount of spoken sandhi that you will never understand. And then you jump off the last wall into the chasm. :) Edited by IronFist on 11 May 2012 at 7:19am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5047 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 36 of 55 11 May 2012 at 9:44am | IP Logged | |||||
learning twelve forms of the article is not difficult, as well as learning which preposition governs which case. I don't know how regular German verbs are and how many tenses you have to use in speech, in Spanish it is rather much. for example, diphtonguisations of verbs, which are hard to predict, then learning the difference between the Simple Past and the Complex one. Well, for me Spanish was very easy due to my previous experiance with languages and the way it was taught. I agree that nouns and adjectives are easy in Spanish and even prepositions seem rather logical to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6900 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 55 11 May 2012 at 11:03am | IP Logged | |||||
Even if one could learn twelve forms of an article (even fewer, since there are some duplicates), as well as the prepositions (governing direction, location etc.), I assume a lot of learners think it's easier to not having to worry about a case system. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5047 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 38 of 55 11 May 2012 at 11:54am | IP Logged | |||||
What's the problem with throat in Russian? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5047 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 39 of 55 11 May 2012 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
The same can be said about anything, but different features cause different problems for learners. Anyway, one has to remember when to use what preposition in Spanish too. German cases do make learning German more difficult, but not more than, say, conjugations. At least the article declension and usage of cases with prepositions. That's like English I am, you are, he is. I have never learnt German, but what I can see from Wikipedia, it has tough pronunciation. Edited by Марк on 11 May 2012 at 12:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6634 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 40 of 55 11 May 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am definitely of the belief that Spanish is probably the hardest language to learn (if not THE hardest) in the world. Reasons:
1. Accent marks 2. Highly regular orthography with a lack of exciting curveballs make it boring 3. Over 75 words for "pig," not a single native word for sexting 4. Learning the kanji can be a pain 5. Extremely attractive TV personalities, makes it hard to concentrate on what they're saying 6. No present tense, six past tenses??? 7. Spanish-speaking world dominated by a Spanish-English-Italian-Estonian hybrid called Spanglitalstonian, almost nowhere to practice pure Spanish 8. "Molestar" DOES NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES 9. Highly complex grammar 10. Letter R sounds weird 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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