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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5366 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 1 of 31 09 September 2010 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A thought went through my mind today when I saw some Chinese characters on a Chinese restaurants window.
As a native English speaker I can think in English fast, read English fast and I don't have to think about tenses when speaking as they somehow come out my mouth automatically. My question is - do speakers of difficult languages have to think more whilst speaking to ensure that they get pronounciation correct, the correct tense, the correct case etc. Examples include - do Russian speakers have to think hard to ensure they get the correct case, do German speakers have difficulty making up some of those long words and do speakers of Chinese and Japanese have to read slower as the writing system is so complex. I know this is a weird question, but I'm curious. What are your thoughts? 3 persons have 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 2 of 31 09 September 2010 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Difficult languages? They are difficult to an English speaker, but not to their native speakers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 3 of 31 09 September 2010 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly, I’m a native Italian speaker and I don’t have to think at all about using the right conjugation, while I have to pay attention to my 3rd person singular when speaking in English (which is not my native language). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 4 of 31 10 September 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know much about Chinese, but I have read that eye-tracking showed that people read it by looking back and forth on the line to see which characters should be combined as compound words and which are not. However, that doesn't seem to make any difference in reading speed. It wouldn't apply to Japanese, since the phonetic parts make it more obvious where one word ends and the next begins. With Japanese, I've been studying less than a year, and my reading speed is the same as in English (pretty fast) as long as the text doesn't have any unknown words. I think that while these writing systems look complicated, they don't require any extra effort to decode compared to a completely phonetic system. The writing part is complicated and takes a lot of practice to do well and effortlessly, but the reading part is not as difficult or arcane as it seems to people unfamiliar with the system. It's really just the same as in English; you glance at a word and automatically know what it means and how it sounds. You don't have to pause and think about each character any more than you would sound out each letter of an English word individually. If anything, reading Chinese probably takes less time than English, just because any given sentence takes up less space. If you're interested in languages, it's worth it to study at least a bit of Chinese or Japanese, just to get over the IT'S SO COMPLEX mindset when it comes to the characters that all look like a bunch of random little lines until you learn what they mean and how they're put together. As for the spoken language, difficult languages aren't difficult to their native speakers, so I can't see anyone having to think at all about pronunciation, tenses, or cases. I know I don't think about those things with Spanish, even though the grammar is more complicated than English. The only thing I can think of that might require a bit more effort is choosing the correct honorifics in a language with several levels of politeness, like in Japanese. A Japanese person who isn't used to using keigo does have to think about it to make it come out right, because it requires not only different grammar but some different vocabulary as well. However, for a Japanese person who uses it every day at work it would be as effortless as normal speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 31 10 September 2010 at 1:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Since all children learn their first language in the same amount of time, it obviously is
no harder for anyone in particular to speak their first language. All languages present an equal level of difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 6 of 31 10 September 2010 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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My first thought on seeing the topic was similar to some of the previously-posted comments (all equally easy/hard for native speakers), but on reflection, I wonder whether the topic is a bit more nuanced.
Pace in achieving literacy as opposed to oral coummunication may well be different between different languages (I don't have any idea whether that is the case, expect for random anecdotal comments I have heard about various of the Chinese languages and the increased difficulty in learning a non-phonetic system of writing as compared to a phonetic alphabet or syllabary (and joining the pile-on concerning the Japanese political leader who reportedly keeps mixing up kanji). I have read a number of articles supporting a theory that Chinese are better at math (or learn how to count higher much more quickly than non-Chinese children as a result of how the language handles numbers (shorter words, more logical counting system). No idea if that bears any merit, just throwing it out there. I am not of a Chinese background and I managed to learn in English how to count really fast up to lots, or at least to the fingers + toes upper limit. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 5193 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 7 of 31 11 September 2010 at 11:12am | IP Logged | |||||
This is actually an area of study among linguistics -- it does seem that some languages are 'more difficult' than others. Extremely complex languages seem to be languages that have developed in isolation for a long periods of time and there is anecdotal evidence that it can take native children longer to assimilate such languages then children of other language speakers. An example given is Cree where Cree children might not obtain full mastery until the age of 10, long after children of European language speakers master their respective languages. But, what an individual perceives as difficult is also highly conditioned by one's native language. And, as an example, linguists do not consider Mandarin Chinese a particularly complex language, indeed, it is of about the same order of complexity as English. Edited by Nudimmud on 11 September 2010 at 11:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| CommanderK Bilingual Triglot Newbie Israel melearninglanguages. Joined 5190 days ago 24 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew*, Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 8 of 31 11 September 2010 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know about other languages, but I read Russian and Hebrew as fast as you read
English. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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