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Most inefficient languages? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6687 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes  3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 41 of 69 19 September 2007 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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... Edited by justinwilliams on 19 September 2007 at 8:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7186 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 42 of 69 19 September 2007 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
I know a number of native Russian speakers who speak broken English, but have more or less mastered Polish, Croatian or another Slavic language. But how is this so?! These languages have huge complicated case systems, while English has verbs that stay the same nearly constantly and nouns that barely decline! The answer lies in the fact that the these “complicated” aspects of these languages are familiar to the native Russian speaker, and therefore are easier for him to master. If you were a monolingual native speaker of Russian, I’d be willing to bet you’d be arguing languages need to change in a very different way. And this is precisely why no language needs to change. You won’t please everyone, and by artificially making a language easier for some people, you’ll be making it more difficult for others. Russian is an example of a language that has arguably become more difficult over time. Russian today is notorious for having a rather unpredictable set of verb conjugations. Verbs look like they should conjugate one way, and then don’t or have random stem changes. However, if you go back in time, you’d notice that a lot of the seemingly irregular verb changes that occur in present day Russian were perfectly regular in the past. For example, the verb vesti seems to get a d out of nowhere when you conjugate in (vesti -> vedu), but historically the verb was vetdi which conjugated predictably. But due to sound changes, it’s now one of the hundreds of illogical verbs in Russian. This is just one example of how Russian specifically has become more complex, and there are many more (and equally many examples of the language getting simpler) in all languages. I must ask you: why are you learning languages if you don't enjoy learning new ways to think and express things. If you don't enjoy learning the complexities of a new language, why are you on this forum? That is precisely what learning a language is all about. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6357 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 43 of 69 19 September 2007 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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It seems one of the crucial things here again is just an inability (or refusal) to differentiate one's subjective perspective from a truly objective one. There is no such thing as a "neutral" mother language. One's entire perspective of ease and difficulty is directly generated from the first language one learns as a child. When people continue to argue that certain languages are objectively more or less challenging than others, they inevitably place the languages most distant (etymologically-speaking) from theirs in the "objectively difficult" category, and languages that share the most with their mother tongues as "objectively straightforward".
An inability - or perhaps better stated, an unwillingness - to recognize what this means leads to these kinds of threads. I can't imagine how many young Chinese males have started threads on equivalent Chinese-language forums declaring English to be an impossible, irrational, archaic language, which the civilized world would do well to improve. Naturally, they compare it to Japanese (an easy, rational language), and demand to fellow learners: Why Can't English Be More Like Japanese? Incidentally, most two year olds are unable to differentiate between their own perspectives and those of others. It takes kids until about three years of age before most pick up that, say, their view of a mountain might not be the same as that of someone on a different side of the mountain, and that their perspectives are not the be-all, end-all, in terms of how other people picture the world. This always comes to mind when I read these kinds of threads. Edited by FSI on 19 September 2007 at 6:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6687 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 44 of 69 19 September 2007 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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... Edited by justinwilliams on 19 September 2007 at 8:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6357 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 45 of 69 19 September 2007 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Nah. There's no such thing as a hard language or a hard language to learn in objective terms. What's easy and what's hard simply depends on which language you start from, and which language you wish to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6687 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 46 of 69 19 September 2007 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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... Edited by justinwilliams on 19 September 2007 at 8:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 47 of 69 19 September 2007 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here's a bit of my experience which shows that while I agree with the idea that foreign languages have their own idiosyncracies and that this is the overriding thrust, it doesn't mean that I don't get frustrated now and then and wonder why in hell some languages don't ditch certain features since I know of other languages which get along fine without these features.
When I was learning Lithuanian in preparation for a trip to Eastern Europe, I was a bit surprised at how elaborate the declensions were. It was a tough slog for me since no matter how hard I tried, I had a tough time getting the endings right and expressing myself in an understandable way (the declension is important!). The declension of Lithuanian is still elaborate, with masculine and feminine nouns still divided into sub-classes (similar to Latin), while kindred Balto-Slavonic languages (e.g. Polish, Slovenian) no longer make such fine distinctions. In frustration I often thought that Lithuanian making such distinctions was pointless, since I could express a Lithuanian sentence into a kindred language such as Polish and convey the same information without getting tangled up in the intricate declension. However, I knew that my complaints were just venting, since I doubt that Lithuanians would suddenly agree with me and reset their grammar into a less elaborate pattern. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6357 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 48 of 69 19 September 2007 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
The issue with this is that children the world over learn to speak and understand their languages at the same times - everywhere. They start speaking around 12 months. They hit the two word stage soon after. From there, they generally go on to full sentences of varying degrees of accuracy, continually improving with age. There isn't a language in existence where the majority of children take longer to learn the spoken/aural language as a whole than the majority of children who learn to speak/understand any other language. So there isn't an objective hierarchy of languages for children, just as there isn't one for adults. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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