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Learning a very different word order? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5618 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 1 of 13 18 November 2011 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone
I've been having some problems recently dealing with Korean word order. Like Japanese (and Turkish and Finnish I believe?), it's very different from the English word order. In Spanish, I can change the word order when it's necessary but it's normally only necessary for a small part of a sentence and not for the entire sentence itself so it's not really a problem for me. In Korean, it wasn't a problem for me at lower levels but as I get (fractionally) stronger at the language I want to express myself more and better which requires some dexterity in the word re-arrangement department which I'm having difficulties getting around/have no prior experience with at this level. To the people who have learnt a language with a very different word order to a comfortable level, how did you learn the word order? What techniques did you use? What helped you learn it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5026 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 2 of 13 18 November 2011 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Not a real technique here, but I just keep focusing on complete/incomplete meaning.
Let's a assume (for starters) a simple sentence with only subject, verb and object. There's not that many possible orders (actually, it's 3! = 3·2·1 = 6), and the thing is, unless you hear the three of them you can only keep guessing at the meaning. Granted, languages that add endings to words give you more clues, but still. Just do it. Just keep thinking every time you hear a word (or when you're more advanced, a "group of words") that it is only a part, and you need all of them to understand. So, you hear 'the dog', and think 'ok, a dog. So what's with the dog?', then 'ate', and you start guessing 'ok, the dog ate something but, what was it?', and then... you finally get to know what happened. It's just kind of becoming aware of something you do automatically most of the time. For a different word order, it works the same: 'baby' (object) -> Something happened to the baby. What was it? +'dog' (subject) -> ok, so the dog did something to the baby. What did you do, bad dog? +'bark' -> Ah, the dog just barked at the baby. Relief, or whatever. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5181 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 13 18 November 2011 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Could you elaborate on the kinds of problems you are having?
I'm learning Japanese. I'm assuming the word order is very similar than in Korean. It's quite consistent, actually, so I didn't really have any particular issues... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5782 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 13 18 November 2011 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm interested to know any techniques as well. I'm fine with basic Japanese sentences, e.g. time + place + subject + object + verb + modal verb/adjective and any variation within that, however once I start building up to using subordinate clauses I can get lost very quickly. That and the passive voice, which causes no end of confusion about what was done to who by who...
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5181 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 13 18 November 2011 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||
Passive constructions are hard to parse regardless of the language, so I don't think this is really an issue of word order. As for subordinate clauses, this may cause word order issues in some languages like German or Norwegian, but not in Japanese or (probably) Korean where the order remains the same. If you happen to know, theoretically, where every item should fall, then use that knowledge to build memorable sentences, and modify them one phrase at a time. It should take very little time for you to get used to the order. Edited by Arekkusu on 18 November 2011 at 8:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| On_the_road Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4556 days ago 23 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish | Message 6 of 13 19 November 2011 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am studying German right now, and in German the word order is oftentimes a bit different to what I´m used to. However, for some reason I find that part quite easy compared to other parts of the language and I often just feel what the order of the words should be. I didn´t do anything in particular to learn this more than learning the basic rules and then just listening and reading as much as possible.
One bad thing, though, is that the reversed word-order of German sometimes affects my other languages so that I have used for instance an English or a Swedish sentence structured a bit like a German one (Most often this happens with the placing of adverbials - in German, adverbials of time often come before adverbials of space, whereas the opposite is more common in Swedish for instance) Edited by On_the_road on 19 November 2011 at 6:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5333 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 7 of 13 12 December 2011 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Input. Input, input and more input. The bigger your internal sample size grows in
target language, the better you are at expressing yourself, especially when word order differs greatly. I doubt that there are ready-made recipes for what you're asking. I feel that only way is to gather as much and as variable sample phrases as you can so that you can pull one out of your metaphorical bag whenever needed. Soon you'll internalise the logic and start creating correct phrases. When I used to work translating from English to Estonian (I no longer actively do) it was no rare occasion when I had to start translating from the end of the English sentence and rewrite the whole damn thing in reverse order for it to make any sense in Estonian. Btw, that's why software localisation is such a tricky thing: English strings which rely on certain order of words just fail when translated. This will result in convoluted translations which are no fault of a translator but of an artificial restrictions placed for localisation. Ah, but this is different subject on it's own. Edited by aabram on 12 December 2011 at 11:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6397 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 13 12 December 2011 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've only had the reverse experience, heh. Fixed word order? But how can I stress an object if I can't start the sentence with it? :-)))
I don't quite remember how I dealt with this. I think many Russians use the Russian syntax in English because they translate the structures and then juggle them around like they would in Russian, so try to learn to process the words and structures without translating them, maybe. Listening at a normal speed should help with this, you'll just have too little time to translate. BTW with Romance languages, I find it easier to listen-read using Russian or Finnish as the L1 rather than English, even if the original is in English. Italian and even Romanian translators don't tend to change the word order as much as the Russian ones but they do change it a little so it's easier for me to follow (yes I'm biased :P) the sentences in a language that arranges them logically, rather than grammatically. Yay I got an idea. Been LR'ing the hobbit in Finnish/German and it didn't go too well, hopefully English/German will go better :) Edited by Serpent on 12 December 2011 at 11:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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