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Cacti from non-native speakers of English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 33 of 42 26 February 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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After reading through this thread again, I'm going to make some highly unscientific conclusions based on four
answers, one of them my own answer, from native speakers of Germanic languages apart from English: 1) Native speakers of Germanic languages (other than English) regard all Germanic languages as quite easy and easier than all other languages (except Esperanto maybe). 2) Native speakers of Germanic languages (other than English) regard all Romance languages as relatively easy. They are more difficult than Germanic languages, but easier than everything else. 3) Native speakers of Germanic languages (other than English) find all Romance languages to be more or less equally easy (or difficult). Thus French, Italian and Spanish receive the same cactus rating. Now, how does this compare to the cactus ratings given in the language profiles? http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/index.html 1 cactus: Esperanto, 2 cacti: English, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese 3 cacti: French, German, Dutch, Hindu/Urdu, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Farsi, Bengali, Turkish, 4 cacti: Russian, Latin, Thai, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukranian, Slovak 5 cacti: Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Cantonese, Since this thread is called "Cacti from non-native speakers of English", I assume the cactus ratings of the main site are made with the assumption that your mother tongue is English. If this is true, those ratings must be completely wrong. First off: English itself can't be two cactuses. Second: How can Germanic languages like Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian be in the same league as Turkish, Hindu/Urdu, Farsi and Bengali? Third: How can Dutch, being relatively closely related to English, be more difficult than some of the Romance languages and even Indonesian? To me, all the cactus ratings given in this thread (not only those by Germanic language speakers) make a lot more sense than those in the language profiles. Edited by tractor on 27 February 2010 at 12:00am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4652 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 34 of 42 07 March 2013 at 7:09pm | IP Logged |
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Reviving the thread, since it looks immensely useful:
Native speaker of Polish: 1 cactus - Czech, Slovak 1.5 cactus - Russian and other Cyrilic-based Slavic languages 2 cacti - French, Spanish, Italian; Latin 2.5 cacti - German 3 cacti - Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian 4 cacti - Arabic, Hungarian, Thai, Greek, Urdu, Farsi 5 cacti - Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean * German gets +0.5 cacti for "den" and "dem", which I get hopelessly confused. * Russian and Cyrilic based languages get +0.5 cacti for being, you guessed it, Cyrilic-based. Comments (optional): 1-cactus languages don't require much effort; 2-cactus languages would require some serious study; no tough challenges anticipated; 3-cactus languages exhibit a certain level of nastiness without being too scary; 4-cactus languages are tough and bizarre; 5-cactus languages take a lot of masochism to master. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 35 of 42 07 March 2013 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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Hmm one thing nobody has mentioned (I think) is that languages can be TOO close. For example, any Scandinavian will list the two other languages as the easiest, but is it really easier to learn to actually speak them than, say, Dutch? Many Russians know that Belarusian and Ukrainian are easy but how many people ever get fluent in them?
For me, Belarusian got MUCH easier after I learned Polish to passive B2 or so. Everything suddenly made sense. On the other hand, Bulgarian is seemingly distinct enough that it should be actually easier. I'm not sure about the number of cacti because for me Esperanto would have three in the real world, due to the limited availability of media and non-beginner materials. And because the awesome affixes are hard to understand/combine on the fly. Seriously, a natural language with a lot of media and a vocabulary similar to Russian is probably easier. Like, again, Polish, which is phonetically similar to Esperanto. Also as for cases, it's important to realize that there's a difference between understanding what they are and understanding how to form them. Surely, those in Latin or Finnish are easier for us than for native speakers of English, but those in German or Icelandic aren't any easier. TBH I still find it crazy that the fuсking article can take the case endings! On the whole, native speakers of other Germanic languages certainly have a huge advantage, even if they have to learn what cases are. Zireael, I wonder why you consider German so easy? Is it because you can have so much exposure in Poland and there are loan words and travelling is easy? All these factors are important and (apart from the loan words) this is what makes Finnish easier for the people living in St Petersburg and Russian Karelia than for the rest of Russians. And of course Japanese.. hehe. In the real world it might indeed be easier than Thai, Urdu, Farsi or Vietnamese, assuming you are learning them in Europe and not in the respective countries. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4652 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 36 of 42 07 March 2013 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
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Vietnamese is tonal, just like Mandarin, and the other three just scare me.
Esperanto was put one step above Romance languages (which it borrowed a lot of vocabulary from) since it is not a natural language and there are some things which stumped me completely when I looked through basic info on it. German got 2 cacti since it has easy pronunciation and Latin script. No funny pronunciation - unlike in English (which would be 3 cacti, btw). The cases and the damned article are the +0.5 thing. French has worse pronunciation, but at least its rules are easy to learn, according to my mum and some of my friends. And Hungarian simply does not "resemble any normal language at all", is the consensus among my friends. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 37 of 42 07 March 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
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I don't understand why Norwegian and Swedish should be harder than German and just as difficult as Japanese. Because of their pitch accents? I don't think so.
5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4359 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 38 of 42 08 March 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged |
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This is a very interesting idea, to write a list like that.
Renaissancemedi: native speaker of Greek 1 cactus: Nothing is that easy for me. Greek is not a language that has similar languages to learn. 2 cacti: Italian and French. I remember the vocabulary without trying, for some mysterious reason, which makes it easy for me to learn more and more.Plus I like those languages so much, it's no trouble dealing with them! 3 cacti: German,Russian, Turkish. More effort, but ok. Hard enough to be very interesting. 4 cacti: Hebrew and Arabic. These two languages are a category on its own for me, because they are both familiar and exotic. Familiar because we are neighbours in this part of the world, and exotic for obvious reasons. The alphabets are an extra source of stress. 5 cacti: Anything Asian, Japanese, Chinese, etc. I haven't felt the need to learn them yet, and they seem so difficult. I admire the people who learn them. I left out English, not because it's easy or anything, but because I use it so much I learn without making a conscious effort. So I can't really judge. I also left out the scandinavian languages, because I have only seen a little bit of Danish, but not enough to know how hard it would be to learn. As for Greek itself, one can study it forever and never say "I know it all now". Is it wrong to say it's my great love? I assume it's the same for all languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 39 of 42 08 March 2013 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
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If the cactus scale is based on your own personal mother tongue it should be different each time you substitute a new native language - but I do think that I know at least some languages well enough to put myself in the situation of a native speaker of those. And besides there are factors which depend more on where you live than on your native language. For instance it must be a problem to find materials in some languages which are poorly represented on the internet, more or less absent in their written forms outside one single spot on the globe and not spoken by any human conversation partners in your neighboorhood.
Other factors are decided by your school system and your society. For instance English may have a simple morphology, but its spelling is an acknowledged nightmare and it is shock full of idiomatic phrases and idiosyncratic syntactic features. If we weren't forced to learn it in school and had it flowing around us all day long English would definitely be considered a fairly difficult language, - more likely 3 than 2 cactaceae. The inherently linguistic features like amount of shared vocabulary, amount of morphology to learn, parallels in syntax and pronunciation are to a higher degree dependent on your native language, but it would be wrong only to consider that influence. For instance the fluid word categories of Bahasa Indonesia were not a problem to me because they just remind me of English (and to some extent Danish), combined with the liberal use of prefixes in Russian, German and even Danish. The big problem with Indonesian is learning all those strange words because the amount of shared words with the Indoeuropean languages isn't exactly overwhelming, and this observation once again raises the question: should the acquisition of words weigh more or less than the easiness of the morphology and the almost perfectly phonetical spelling? In my cases it has clearly been harder to add some Indonesian to my list than to put for instance Portuguese or Dutch there, both of which may be more grammar heavy than Indonesian, but which both have an inordinate amount of vocabulary in common with languages I already know like Spanish and German. Some other factors are easy to assess from an objective angle. The Chinese and Japanese writing system must put both languages at least on the level 4, but more reasonably at the level 5. And even Chinese and Japanese kids must have problems learning them, so they should really put their mother tongue at at least 2, maybe higher if writing is included in the assessment (and I can't see any logic in excluding it). So a cactus scale can't be seen as an objective measure of anything - and precisely therefore it has been interesting to look through the difffent replies in this old thread. Edited by Iversen on 10 March 2013 at 9:46am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4652 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 40 of 42 08 March 2013 at 1:10pm | IP Logged |
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I am aware that the cacti are inherently subjective and that's why I was so surprised when I saw the site's cacti rankings. However, this thread is precisely to see the differences in perception of language difficulty between speakers of various languages.
For instance, I'd love to see a native speaker of Arabic or Vietnamese on this thread... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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