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Most difficult language combination

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
25 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4  Next >>
hribecek
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 5137 days ago
1243 posts - 1458 votes 
Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish
Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian

 
 Message 17 of 25
25 November 2010 at 5:20pm | IP Logged 
@jeeb
I wrote the post title and definitely didn't mean difficult as bad.
I'm a language lover and if anything 'difficult' when related to languages means very interesting and fun for me.
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jeeb
Groupie
Joined 4948 days ago
49 posts - 80 votes 

 
 Message 18 of 25
26 November 2010 at 1:17am | IP Logged 

hribecek wrote:
@jeeb
I wrote the post title and definitely didn't mean difficult as bad.
I'm a language lover and if anything 'difficult' when related to languages means very interesting
and fun for me.


Hi hribecek,
I don't mean to against you. And I'm glad that you love taking language challenges.
However, generally, people just connects" difficult" with "bad" and tones equals to
difficult.
As I have posted in the last page, some people, like the author of "Get Talking Chinese"
intentionally exaggerates the number of tones in Cantonese to demonise Cantonese.
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Raчraч Ŋuɲa
Triglot
Senior Member
New Zealand
Joined 5606 days ago
154 posts - 233 votes 
Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 19 of 25
26 November 2010 at 6:49am | IP Logged 
Chung wrote:
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:
Chung wrote:

6b) otherwise let the language's alignment be ergative-accusative (e.g. Nez Percé). The
rarity of this alignment should make the language very difficult for many foreigners to
master as they are "hard-wired" in nominative-accusative alignment.


Ergative alignment is not rare, according to
WALS,
"Although ergative case marking is also quite widespread, it is almost completely
lacking
from Africa and is rare in Europe; hotbeds of ergativity include Australia and the
Caucasus, to a somewhat lesser extent parts of the Americas, New Guinea, South Asia,
and
the Austronesian family."


If you look closely at my post, I proposed using the rarely-attested alignment of
ergative-accusative (sometimes called "tripartite alignment") seeing that ergative
alignment (often referring to ergative-absolutive alignment) occurs more frequently.


Oh, my bad!

But alignment in itself doesn't make any language hard to learn, does it?

Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 26 November 2010 at 6:49am
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Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6944 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 21 of 25
26 November 2010 at 4:04pm | IP Logged 
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:
Chung wrote:
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:
Chung wrote:

6b) otherwise let the language's alignment be ergative-accusative (e.g. Nez Percé). The
rarity of this alignment should make the language very difficult for many foreigners to
master as they are "hard-wired" in nominative-accusative alignment.


Ergative alignment is not rare, according to
WALS,
"Although ergative case marking is also quite widespread, it is almost completely
lacking
from Africa and is rare in Europe; hotbeds of ergativity include Australia and the
Caucasus, to a somewhat lesser extent parts of the Americas, New Guinea, South Asia,
and
the Austronesian family."


If you look closely at my post, I proposed using the rarely-attested alignment of
ergative-accusative (sometimes called "tripartite alignment") seeing that ergative
alignment (often referring to ergative-absolutive alignment) occurs more frequently.


Oh, my bad!

But alignment in itself doesn't make any language hard to learn, does it?


Remember that a language's being "hard" is relative and there's a demonstrable trend where an unfamiliar language is easier to learn when it's closer to a language that is already known very well or native to the learner. Because the ergative-accusative alignment is rare and many people aren't exposed to or fluent in heavily ergative languages (much less ergative-accusative ones) I strongly suspect that a hypothetical language that would have ergative-accusative alignment in conjunction with the other characteristics that I proposed would be very challenging.
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tornus
Diglot
GroupieRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4931 days ago
82 posts - 113 votes 
Speaks: French*, English
Studies: Spanish, Swedish, Danish

 
 Message 22 of 25
27 November 2010 at 2:14pm | IP Logged 
hribecek wrote:

Most tenses - Spanish (12/13???)

My question is how you count the number of tenses in a language. i'm not sure Spanish has so many tenses (i'm learning it for 4 years at school i know only 6 tenses) . subjunctive present for example is not really a tense in my opinion. if you consider it is, then french have 22 tenses

in fact there are in fench and in Spanish some "mods" (i don't know if it's called that way in English), it interpret the way the subject consider the action expressed by the verb.

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hribecek
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 5137 days ago
1243 posts - 1458 votes 
Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish
Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian

 
 Message 23 of 25
27 November 2010 at 4:48pm | IP Logged 
@tornus
I'm sure you're right. When I wrote 12/13, I did so without realy knowing the definition for tense. The 'tenses' I meant were - present simple, present continuous, past simple, imperfective, present perfect (preterito perfecto), past perfect (pluscuamperfecto), future simple, future perfect, subjunctive present, subjunctive imperfective and subjunctive perfect. Then I was thinking about also the past continuous and the future continuous.

So maybe better categories would be -

The most moods
The most voices
The most tenses

Or something like that.
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eumiro
Bilingual Octoglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 5062 days ago
74 posts - 102 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, French, English, German, Polish, Spanish, Russian
Studies: Italian, Hungarian

 
 Message 24 of 25
27 November 2010 at 6:17pm | IP Logged 
ellasevia wrote:
Most cases - Hungarian (18)


Well, these are not real cases as known in Slavic languages.

The Czech has seven cases (Slovak has six of them), each of them is used in different
situations with different prepositions and each of them modifies the original word.

The Hungarian 'cases' are just prepositions (for, to, at, under, with, from,...), that
are put at the end of a noun. They have usually two possible forms to harmonize with the
last syllabe of the noun.


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