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Most difficult IE Language? | ||
Tags: Indo-European Languages | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5053 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 57 of 69 30 June 2010 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I will say that despite my Slavic language background, I found ancient Greek to be a viciously difficult language, especially if you try to treat the accent as a proper pitch accent rather than a stress accent. I would assume that for an analytic language background (e.g English only), it would be even harder. The lack of stress predictability (similar problem seen in Russian), and the insane amount of inflection (of articles, for example, along the lines of number, case, and gender), are what I found to be the hardest. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5228 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 58 of 69 30 June 2010 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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How do Russian and Slovene compare to Czech and Polish in terms of complexity? Czech and Polish have fixed stress while Russian and Slovene don't, but I don't know much more about the differences. Edited by chucknorrisman on 30 June 2010 at 3:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| trance0 Pentaglot Groupie Slovenia Joined 5530 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: Slovenian*, English, German, Croatian, Serbian | Message 59 of 69 01 July 2010 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Slovene is probably somewhat easier than Polish and maybe also Russian. While it has mobile stress, which makes it similar to Russian in this respect, it also has generally easier orthography (and pronunciation) than Russian, Polish and Czech. As for morphology, Slovene is generally simpler than Russian, Polish and Czech. In comparrison with Russian there are fewer verb conjugations and in comparrison with Czech and Polish there are fewer declension paradigms and one less case. However, Slovene still uses dual number with all flexible word classes, but this usually poses problems only for beginner learners.
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| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5228 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 60 of 69 01 July 2010 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for the answer. Just got one more quick question about Slovene: in this language, are the perfective verbs used as future tenses as well like in Russian, or are they different? I've heard that they were used quite differently, but I want to check. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| trance0 Pentaglot Groupie Slovenia Joined 5530 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: Slovenian*, English, German, Croatian, Serbian | Message 61 of 69 02 July 2010 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Old Slavic bǫdǫ originally was the perfective pair to "byti" in present tense, and as at this stage present tense of perfective verbs was future tense (as is still the case in West and East Slavic while the South Slavic situation is different).
In Slovene future is formed with forms of "bǫdǫ" (in Slovene it is 'bom' in 1st sg.) plus participle, thus "bom delal" etc., and future is formed like that with both perfective and imperfective verbs (as opposed to Russian where only imperfective verbs form future like that while perfective verbs present tense are future). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5618 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 62 of 69 03 July 2010 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, this depends on where you are from, doesn't it?
For example Czech is not so hard for Polish person as per another thread, but it's probably very challenging for a native English speaker. Whereas speakers of Slavic languages have the devils time with something that is completely natural to most of us here: definite article and when to use it.. People in some areas have serious difficulties prounouncing sounds of other languages, and getting used to different letters than what they are used to. This is a very relative question. You would have to have a starting point, like: What is the most difficult Indo European language for a monolingual native English speaker? Then I'd say it's got to be a Slavic one, or Finnish, Hungarian any Baltic, Greek, Welsh or Basque. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5233 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 63 of 69 03 July 2010 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Except that Finnish, Hungarian and Basque aren't Indo European. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5061 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 64 of 69 05 July 2010 at 1:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you throw Finnish, Hungarian, or Basque into the equation, you're dealing with something entirely different. But for a native English speaker, I think the "European" side would be easier than the "Indo" side. They might have been connected thousands of years ago but now the resemblance isn't visible on the surface. I don't know about the distinct grammatical differences, but it seems to me that a European language would be easier to deal with for an English speaker.
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