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Native speakers precision

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cmj
Octoglot
Groupie
Switzerland
Joined 5343 days ago
58 posts - 191 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian

 
 Message 17 of 31
27 October 2010 at 9:41pm | IP Logged 
I think instead of framing the question in terms of "difficult languages" in general, it is better to focus, as most people have, on the question of particular features of particular languages which are unusually complex: e.g. English spelling, Chinese orthography (or whatever writing the characters correctly is called), some languages' case systems, etc...

To take the example of English, whose spelling system is notoriously complicated, we see native speakers regularly misspell words and mispronounce new words they've never encountered before. Naturally, the more competent the user, the fewer spelling mistakes he will make, but all native English speakers hesitate at certain points when it comes to spelling certain rare or irregular words. I gather the same thing applies to the writing of Chinese characters. On the other hand, even a modestly educated Spanish speaker should have near perfect spelling (except occasionally confusing b and v).

Similarly, from what I've seen native German speakers have trouble with cases in more difficult or unusual situations. And in French, I've had native speakers hesitate over and eventually look up the gender of uncommon words. Just the other day, a friend of mine who is a native speaker and has a M.A. in French literature got confused over whether she should use le or lui with a particular verb (I forget which one) and had to think it over for a few seconds before correcting herself.

It seems that native speakers do have problems with difficult aspects of their own languages, but generally only in cases that are not encountered in day to day usage. The more general, and controversial, question is whether certain languages have more of these features than others, or whether the extreme difficulty of mastering certain features of a language, even for native speakers, makes it overall "more difficult". Unfortunately I'm not sure what sort of metric one could use to evaluate this.     

Edited by cmj on 27 October 2010 at 9:44pm
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irrationale
Tetraglot
Senior Member
China
Joined 6055 days ago
669 posts - 1023 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog
Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese

 
 Message 18 of 31
28 October 2010 at 7:16am | IP Logged 
cmj wrote:
I think instead of framing the question in terms of "difficult languages" in general, it is better to focus, as most people have, on the question of particular features of particular languages which are unusually complex: e.g. English spelling, Chinese orthography (or whatever writing the characters correctly is called), some languages' case systems, etc...

To take the example of English, whose spelling system is notoriously complicated, we see native speakers regularly misspell words and mispronounce new words they've never encountered before. Naturally, the more competent the user, the fewer spelling mistakes he will make, but all native English speakers hesitate at certain points when it comes to spelling certain rare or irregular words. I gather the same thing applies to the writing of Chinese characters. On the other hand, even a modestly educated Spanish speaker should have near perfect spelling (except occasionally confusing b and v).

Similarly, from what I've seen native German speakers have trouble with cases in more difficult or unusual situations. And in French, I've had native speakers hesitate over and eventually look up the gender of uncommon words. Just the other day, a friend of mine who is a native speaker and has a M.A. in French literature got confused over whether she should use le or lui with a particular verb (I forget which one) and had to think it over for a few seconds before correcting herself.

It seems that native speakers do have problems with difficult aspects of their own languages, but generally only in cases that are not encountered in day to day usage. The more general, and controversial, question is whether certain languages have more of these features than others, or whether the extreme difficulty of mastering certain features of a language, even for native speakers, makes it overall "more difficult". Unfortunately I'm not sure what sort of metric one could use to evaluate this.     



Musing on this point, I have read of an Australian aboriginal language that has no words for, left, right, behind, front, they only have north, south, east, west. It takes kids many years to master this system and when they do, they have a near perfect faculty to tell the direction or orientation of an object instantly.
1 person has voted this message useful



Splog
Diglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
anthonylauder.c
Joined 5674 days ago
1062 posts - 3263 votes 
Speaks: English*, Czech
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 19 of 31
28 October 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged 
Arekkusu wrote:
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.


I remember reading somewhere a few months ago that English children are effectively
"fluent" (whatever that means) by the age of nine, whereas in another country (alas, I
forget which one) children reach fluency in their own language only by the age of
fifteen. Unfortunately, I can neither remember where I read it, nor which language was
that of the second group of children.
1 person has voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 6147 days ago
2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 20 of 31
28 October 2010 at 8:14am | IP Logged 
Splog wrote:
Arekkusu wrote:
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.


I remember reading somewhere a few months ago that English children are effectively
"fluent" (whatever that means) by the age of nine, whereas in another country (alas, I
forget which one) children reach fluency in their own language only by the age of
fifteen. Unfortunately, I can neither remember where I read it, nor which language was
that of the second group of children.


I remember reading something similar, I think. I believe the language of comparison was Polish.
1 person has voted this message useful



Gosia
Diglot
Newbie
Poland
Joined 5325 days ago
6 posts - 9 votes
Speaks: Polish*, English

 
 Message 21 of 31
28 October 2010 at 1:39pm | IP Logged 
Splog wrote:
Arekkusu wrote:
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.


I remember reading somewhere a few months ago that English children are effectively
"fluent" (whatever that means) by the age of nine, whereas in another country (alas, I
forget which one) children reach fluency in their own language only by the age of
fifteen. Unfortunately, I can neither remember where I read it, nor which language was
that of the second group of children.


I heard such an opinion, too, somewhere... I am not sure but I suppose it was Japanese.
I am Polish native speaker and it seems to me that children become fluent much earlier than 15 years old. 9 years old sounds much more realistic to me. But, to be honest, I don't know any results of language researches so I can't say for sure.
We (also adults) are used to making some mistakes anyway (especially with declination what I mentioned before) but it doesn't mean we don't speak Polish fluently;)

Edited by Gosia on 28 October 2010 at 1:40pm
2 persons have voted this message useful



Kounotori
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 5349 days ago
136 posts - 264 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 22 of 31
28 October 2010 at 4:15pm | IP Logged 
Gosia wrote:
I am Polish native speaker but while speaking Polish sometimes I do have a problem with declination of nouns (we have 7 cases in Polish) or conjugation of verbs.
So it takes some time to figure out how the word should look/sound like.
I speak fast and then I stop for a second (or a few seconds ;p) to think the declination over and often correct myself. And I can see that many people around do the same. We are used to asking one another "how it should be said"?


Finnish has 14 noun cases (15 if you feel like bragging) and I've never had any trouble with them or verb conjugation, and other people (at least the ones I interact with) have never had that much trouble with them, either.

Correcting yourself often while speaking your native language is not normal.
1 person has voted this message useful



t123
Diglot
Senior Member
South Africa
https://github.com/t
Joined 5616 days ago
139 posts - 226 votes 
Speaks: English*, Afrikaans

 
 Message 23 of 31
28 October 2010 at 4:39pm | IP Logged 
Was it this article: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&lin k=22321

Turkish children reach grammatical fluency by the age of 2-3, while Arabic children only
at around 12, German at 4-5.
1 person has voted this message useful



stelingo
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5837 days ago
722 posts - 1076 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian
Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin

 
 Message 24 of 31
28 October 2010 at 7:22pm | IP Logged 
Kounotori wrote:
Gosia wrote:
I am Polish native speaker but while speaking Polish sometimes I do have a problem with declination of nouns (we have 7 cases in Polish) or conjugation of verbs.
So it takes some time to figure out how the word should look/sound like.
I speak fast and then I stop for a second (or a few seconds ;p) to think the declination over and often correct myself. And I can see that many people around do the same. We are used to asking one another "how it should be said"?


Finnish has 14 noun cases (15 if you feel like bragging) and I've never had any trouble with them or verb conjugation, and other people (at least the ones I interact with) have never had that much trouble with them, either.

Correcting yourself often while speaking your native language is not normal.


You may have more cases in Finnish, but the Slavic languages have a greater variety of endings for each case depending on the ending of the noun stem.



Edited by stelingo on 28 October 2010 at 7:23pm


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