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Why is Spanish singled out as easy lang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5336 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 49 of 55 13 May 2012 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think only someone who has never learnt a language well can maintain that learning any natural language is "easy", even by comparison.
Regarding grammar, it has been a long time since I've learnt Russian grammar to the point where I can intuitively comprehend a sentence where other elements are known too, yet my understanding of the language continues to be minimal in comparison with what I have yet to learn. Unless we're considering a behemoth such as Sanskrit, grammar is the least of the concerns when learning a new language, and in any case the difference between modern European tongues is minimal in this regard. Vocabulary and syntax - these represent the real challenge of learning a language. Being a native speaker of Spanish it is more of a challenge for me to write good Spanish than good English. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 50 of 55 14 May 2012 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eilis91 Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie France Joined 4567 days ago 28 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English*, Irish*, French, Italian Studies: German, Yoruba | Message 51 of 55 15 May 2012 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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In school I found Spanish so much harder than French and Italian. I always had difficulty with the verb tenses (I can't
remember which ones in particular as it has been so long since I studied Spanish). Having said that, I think at the low level of competence to which lower-achieving schoolchildren aspire in a second language that Spanish is possibly easier, i.e. it is easier to grasp the basics, but still, when it gets to leaving cert level (end of school exams in Ireland), Spanish is way harder than French! Just my opinion, though. When my mother was in secondary school in Ireland in the 1960s, classes were in three streams and the top two streams studied French, the bottom stream studying Spanish, the theory being that Spanish was easier. I just really can't understand where that thinking came from! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4835 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 52 of 55 15 May 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||
I have learnt English to a degree that I can communicate in this forum, watch English movies and sitcoms, read English books, and talk to English natives. I would not say it was hard. Of course, it took time, but I never had the feeling it was overly difficult. Yes, I still make mistakes, but who doesn't? I am of the opinion that one can compare languages regarding complexity. Moreover, learning languages that are close to your native language is inherently easier than learning an unrelated language. Period. I stopped studying Dutch, because it was too easy and I lost interest. Now, that I am studying Russian, I feel much more challenged. The grammar is more complex, the vocabulary is largely unknown, and I know it's a task that will take much time. Why? Because it is more difficult. And regarding agglutination: The main concept may be based on logic, but there are extreme cases (I think it was in Turkish) where you can generate words that have to be translated by complex sentences. In German, we would call them Bandwurmwörter ('tapeworm words'). They may be constructed absolutely logically, but analyzing and thus understanding them would be a difficult task. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elizabeth_rb Diglot Groupie United Kingdom polyglotintraining.b Joined 4627 days ago 54 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: GermanB1 | Message 53 of 55 18 May 2012 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose I'm going to repeat some of what's already been said, but it's getting to be
a longish thread... Anyway, I wonder if one of the reasons many people think Spanish is an easy language is coming from their own experiences with French in school. I mean, suppose an adult learner did French at school, but now takes up Spanish for his travels. He's going to think it's easier for two resaons: 1) It *is* easier to pronounce and read out, as some have already said; and 2) He will be unconsciously calling on his experience of French to help him and will be finding it easier. I suppose Spanish is easier than some other languages, esp. in the early stages, and it seems to be me to be the most accessible of the Romance languages for the above reasons as well as slightly less tricky bits than seem to me in Italian and Portuguese and the huge amount of support materials available!
I wonder where these figures came from?? I have both of these on my shelf - both the same 'cover' - and the Italian is only 63 pages longer than the Spanish (and I mean actual work pages, not answers, verb charts etc), 11 more of which could be disregarded when you see that the Italian one spends that long on an intro chapter to pronunciation, whereas the Spanish one doesn't. My Italian one is less than 300 pages. Whilst Italian *does* seem a bit harder to me than Spanish, I'm not sure I'd rely on length of Schaum grammar books as a guide (even though I know that wasn't entirely the point that was being made), as the Chinese one has 18 more pages of actual workbook pages, but the type is larger, it's more spaced out and each example sentence and exercise item is printed 3 times - once each in romanisation and also in both simplified and traditional characters. So, if it were to be printed like the Spanish one, it would have less than 100 work pages!! By that token, Chinese is a doddle!!!=) Anyway, I don't mind if Spanish is relatively easy, I could use a 'buy one get one half price' language to boost my linguistic abilities.=) But seriously, there is just NO such thing as an 'easy language'. All languages take a great deal of persistence and work to master and, although some have more challenging aspects than Spanish - fiendish grammar, totally unfamiliar vocab and time-consuming scripts, Spanish won't be an easy task for any learner. Public exam entries for foreign languages in the UK are declining year on year because they are seen as 'hard' subjects. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zashi Newbie United States Joined 4559 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 54 of 55 24 May 2012 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Easy is definitely subjective. I wonder if easy means 'it's accessible' which is true - there are tons of material out there - "worthwhile material" not always but the quantity is large.
For reference, Berlitz Study Plan lists - in order of time needed to be successful... eg. Spanish is successful at 600 hours for 20 weeks. Russian is successful at 1100 hours for 37 weeks. Arabic is successful at 1300 hours for 43 weeks. Of course you must have a DEFINITIVE learning plan... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5421 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 55 of 55 26 May 2012 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||
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There are a couple of issues here that merit some distinctions. I think we should distinguish between the various skills that we refer to when talking about learning a language.
It seems pretty clear to me that the writing systems of certain languages are more difficult than others (French over Spanish or Italian, for example.) The verb systems of languages do vary in complexity. The Spanish subjunctive, for example, is something that never ceases to amaze me because it is used so often for no distinctive reason. And English verb morphology is very simple compared to the Romance languages. But when it comes to learning to actually speak the language, all of these technical questions, in my mind, are not as important as actual meaningful exposure to the language. For this reason I believe that most languages are really not that more difficult or easy to learn when the conditions are ideal. English is a case in point. Is it so widespread because it is the easiest language in the world? Not necessarily. It does have some simple features when compared to many other languages, but it's not necessarily an easy language. It's just that it is so omnipresent in the media, the school system, public signs, business and popular culture that the whole world is massively exposed to it. So, inevitably many people speak some English. English is therefore probably the easiest language to learn to speak or get by in, not because of its easy internal features but because it is so widespread. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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