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Language Difficulty | ||
Tags: Turkish | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rcottere Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 6607 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian Studies: Arabic (Written), Portuguese, French, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Kurdish, Swedish | Message 1 of 22 24 October 2006 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would first like to say that I love the website and I find it extremely useful. However, one thing that has been bothering me is the language difficulty section. It is simply inaccurate. For example, Turkish and French are both ranked with three symbols. Turkish is harder than any Indo-European language for an native English speaker, including Russian, which is marked with four symbols. I do study French, Russian and Turkish so I have personal experience and the DLI (Defense Language Institute) ranks them more accurately.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 22 24 October 2006 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Check this thread out.
In my opinion, the original rating isn't too far off. As a counter to your experiences, here are mine: I find that Russian is more difficult since it has unmarked variable stress (leading to vowel reduction on unstressed syllables) which means that Russian spelling isn't really phonetic, and inflections/declensions are grouped by gender and number which complicates the language. It is true that Russian is Indo-European, but the link is distant and only some very basic vocabulary and English loanwords in Russian can be easily discerned by native English speakers. Turkish is different, but it is not necessarily difficult. (Once an English speaker gets around the concepts, it almost seems as if a language planner had sat down and used a calculator to design the language. At least it seems that uniform and precise to me.) As you know, the language has very few irregularities and exceptions. Turkish conjugation and declension is a matter of adding suffixes of the proper vowel class. Turkish vocabulary is different, but I would say that learning Russian vocabulary is only marginally easier than learning Turkish vocabulary since the advantage of learning the shared vocabulary of English and Russian is countered by the fact that one must learn where the (unmarked) stress is placed and keep in mind the exceptions (ex. KOCTb = "bone" which at first looks masculine because of the consonant ending, but we learn that it is feminine anyway even though it doesn't end in "a") Edited by Chung on 24 October 2006 at 8:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 3 of 22 25 October 2006 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Chung. Compare to Russian, I consider Turkish to be really easy. After one year of (not always regular) study, I'm feeling that progress has speeded up significantly once I got used to the very different grammar. Vocabulary acquisition is not easy, but there are very regular rules how to make new words out of words you know by adding suffixes (much like in Esperanto), so the number of words you have to learn is actually much lower than in vocabulary-rich languages like French or English: by learning one root, there are up to a dozen derived words you'll understand as well. Pronunciation and spelling couldn't be easier. So, I guess the difficulty rankings are justified, even if I'd give French 2.5 if it was possible, placing it between Italian and Turkish. Edited by Marc Frisch on 25 October 2006 at 4:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rcottere Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 6607 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian Studies: Arabic (Written), Portuguese, French, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Kurdish, Swedish | Message 4 of 22 25 October 2006 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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In terms of that post. I have not yet read all seven pages but I will as soon as I have more than five minutes free. In response to the Russian spelling comment. Just about every russian word can be pronounced on sight and the reduction is not that difficult considering that most of it predictable. Charles Townsend's Russian Word Building is excellent if you want to read up on it. English is far more complicated than Russian in terms of spelling.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html That link gives a very vague outline of the DLI's opinions. French is a category one whereas Turkish and Russian are both category IIIs. The DLI does go into more specifics if you take the time to search their website. My main concern is that French is considered as hard as Turkish for a native english speaker. That is simply not true. A native speaker of English has knows thousands of French words simply because of the Normans. I have many friends who are quite good at French but struggle with the Latin cases. I can't even imagine how my Friends would react if they saw a Turkish grammar. Sorry for the spelling. I'm in a rush and I didn't have time to proofread. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 5 of 22 26 October 2006 at 3:26am | IP Logged | ||
I agree that French is easier than Turkish for an English speaker, but maybe less so than one would expect. In French you will become operational much faster, no doubt. However, to reach perfection, you will have to master the more difficult aspects of the language: less common tenses and the complex conjugation system with its many exceptions, an atrocious orthography, two genders (and even if you're very fluent you'll mess them up once in a while or forget to accord the past participle) etc. In Turkish, there are no such difficulties and the Turkish cases are by no means comparable to the Latin ones: It's not more difficult than English where you have to learn a preposition for every case: from the house, to the house, of the house, etc. I'd guess that after 1 year of study your French will be much much better than your Turkish, after 5 years they'll be at the same level and after 10 years your Turkish might be just a little bit 'more perfect' than your French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6696 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 6 of 22 10 November 2006 at 3:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I have the feeling that Romance languages, as a whole, are harder than people give them credit for. I think someone else said this, but when teaching them, you can start them out easy, but they only get harder, where as Russian or German or Greek (I guess that's probably similar enough in its weirdities) start out hard, but once you get the hard stuff down, it gets easier. I imagined agglutinating languages are similar, in this sense.
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| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7189 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 7 of 22 10 November 2006 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||
Going off topic a tad...
The only word that immediately comes to mind that ends in a soft sign and is masculine (there are more but I'm still learning) is словарь (dictionary). Edited by Darobat on 10 November 2006 at 9:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6619 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 8 of 22 10 November 2006 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||
The perception that Turkish and French are equally difficult is the result of a "grammar-focused" view of language learning. Turkish grammar is quite regular and logical, and if learning grammar and vocabulary was all that learning a language involved, then Turkish would be easy. Learning the grammar is actually only a part of language learning, but many people never get beyond this point and never realize that idiomatic usage is the real challenge in language learning. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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