Serbo-Croatian or Greek (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Serbo-Croatian or Greek
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14 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

benzionisrael
Triglot
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Spain
Joined 4476 days ago
79 posts - 142 votes

Speaks: English*, Japanese, Spanish^B2

Message 9 of 14

25 April 2012 at 9:37pm | IP Logged

Merv wrote:

benzionisrael wrote:

Update: I have just recently began checking out a few lessons of my new language
textbooks and have explored a bit of both Serbo-Croatian and Greek. In these last two days I have studied the
basic verbal conjugations, acquired a bit of vocabulary and have taken a glance at the nominal and adjectival
case system of Serbo-Croatian, and then I learned how to write the Greek alphabet, learned some basic
expressions and took a brief look at the Greek verbal paradigms and the genders of nouns.

Both of them seem really interesting languages to me and I would like to learn both in the long run. Right now I
am just playing around with and exploring these two languages, but I feel that soon I will have to make the
decision of which one to focus on first should it be unfeasable to study both at the same time.

I feel much beauty in the Greek script even though its orthography is harder than that of Serbo-Croatian. Written
SC is more phonetic and therefore easier that written Greek which is unphonetic at times and contains
irregularities. I like the simplicity of SC orthography on the other hand. However, the case system seems difficult
to comprehend at this stage whereas Greek nominal and adjectival declension is much more simple. It can be a
handful memorizing and understanding the case system. I don´t know if to focus on the case-heavy difficult
language first and gain experience in that sort of ballgame or whether to study the less case-heavy language
first and secure an investment.

I want to get proficient in another language fast, both in speaking and writing. I fear that complex case systems
will be difficult to reproduce in real speech.

I agree that Greek script is very beautiful, maybe the nicest script out there other than Georgian. I'm not sure
about your impression that Greek is easier. I think FSI/DLI states that they are pretty comparable in difficulty, at
the category 3 (of 4) level.

I don't know what to say about your worries regarding case declension, other than that a lot of major languages
involve cases, and oftentimes harder systems than those of SC or Greek. Westerners tend to get spoiled by the
Romance languages and simpler Germanic languages (Dutch, Nordic) into thinking that cases are something
insurmountable. They're not. You just need to practice and think about 3x harder to make a sentence because
you're not just worried about getting the verb in order, but also the nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Eventually
it all becomes second nature.

Today as well I studied a lot of Serbo-Croatian. I am getting a bit more used to the case system and am even starting to like it.

What you say is correct, that it is a matter of getting accustomed with new declensions.

Besides, the SC verbal paradigm is much more simple than that of any Romance language for spoiled declension-fearing Westerners, and that allows learners to focus more on learning the nominal and adjectival inflections. For example, in most Slavic languages there aren´t the multiple past tenses, fusional future and conditional paradigms, multiple subjunctive forms and compound tenses which exist in Spanish or Italian. Although SC nouns and adjectives are more complex, verbs are much more simple and that should compensate things.

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Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5084 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes

Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 10 of 14

26 April 2012 at 12:13am | IP Logged

benzionisrael wrote:

Merv wrote:

benzionisrael wrote:

Update: I have just recently began checking out
a few lessons of my new language
textbooks and have explored a bit of both Serbo-Croatian and Greek. In these last two days I have studied the
basic verbal conjugations, acquired a bit of vocabulary and have taken a glance at the nominal and adjectival
case system of Serbo-Croatian, and then I learned how to write the Greek alphabet, learned some basic
expressions and took a brief look at the Greek verbal paradigms and the genders of nouns.

Both of them seem really interesting languages to me and I would like to learn both in the long run. Right now I
am just playing around with and exploring these two languages, but I feel that soon I will have to make the
decision of which one to focus on first should it be unfeasable to study both at the same time.

I feel much beauty in the Greek script even though its orthography is harder than that of Serbo-Croatian. Written
SC is more phonetic and therefore easier that written Greek which is unphonetic at times and contains
irregularities. I like the simplicity of SC orthography on the other hand. However, the case system seems difficult
to comprehend at this stage whereas Greek nominal and adjectival declension is much more simple. It can be a
handful memorizing and understanding the case system. I don´t know if to focus on the case-heavy difficult
language first and gain experience in that sort of ballgame or whether to study the less case-heavy language
first and secure an investment.

I want to get proficient in another language fast, both in speaking and writing. I fear that complex case systems
will be difficult to reproduce in real speech.

Today as well I studied a lot of Serbo-Croatian. I am getting a bit more used to the case system and am even
starting to like it.

What you say is correct, that it is a matter of getting accustomed with new declensions.

Besides, the SC verbal paradigm is much more simple than that of any Romance language for spoiled declension-
fearing Westerners, and that allows learners to focus more on learning the nominal and adjectival inflections. For
example, in most Slavic languages there aren´t the multiple past tenses, fusional future and conditional
paradigms, multiple subjunctive forms and compound tenses which exist in Spanish or Italian. Although SC
nouns and adjectives are more complex, verbs are much more simple and that should compensate things.

I admire your optimism. There is a reason, however, why languages with nasty declension are considered to be
substantially harder than those with nasty conjugation. With conjugation, your focus can be thrown almost
entirely onto one word: the verb. Most of the rest of the sentence doesn't vary much, except a simple adjustment
for gender and number. With declension, you have multiple nouns, adjectives (and often more than one adjective
modifying a noun), and pronouns, which must be declined according to their function in the sentence. And in
Slavic, the determiners for what case form to use depend on gender, number, and animacy. Because of this
precision, these languages often have very free word order.
1 person has voted this message useful

benzionisrael
Triglot
Groupie
Spain
Joined 4476 days ago
79 posts - 142 votes

Speaks: English*, Japanese, Spanish^B2

Message 11 of 14

27 April 2012 at 12:58pm | IP Logged

Merv wrote:

benzionisrael wrote:

Merv wrote:

benzionisrael wrote:

Update: I have just recently began checking out
a few lessons of my new language
textbooks and have explored a bit of both Serbo-Croatian and Greek. In these last two days I have studied the
basic verbal conjugations, acquired a bit of vocabulary and have taken a glance at the nominal and adjectival
case system of Serbo-Croatian, and then I learned how to write the Greek alphabet, learned some basic
expressions and took a brief look at the Greek verbal paradigms and the genders of nouns.

Both of them seem really interesting languages to me and I would like to learn both in the long run. Right now I
am just playing around with and exploring these two languages, but I feel that soon I will have to make the
decision of which one to focus on first should it be unfeasable to study both at the same time.

I feel much beauty in the Greek script even though its orthography is harder than that of Serbo-Croatian. Written
SC is more phonetic and therefore easier that written Greek which is unphonetic at times and contains
irregularities. I like the simplicity of SC orthography on the other hand. However, the case system seems difficult
to comprehend at this stage whereas Greek nominal and adjectival declension is much more simple. It can be a
handful memorizing and understanding the case system. I don´t know if to focus on the case-heavy difficult
language first and gain experience in that sort of ballgame or whether to study the less case-heavy language
first and secure an investment.

I want to get proficient in another language fast, both in speaking and writing. I fear that complex case systems
will be difficult to reproduce in real speech.

Today as well I studied a lot of Serbo-Croatian. I am getting a bit more used to the case system and am even
starting to like it.

What you say is correct, that it is a matter of getting accustomed with new declensions.

Besides, the SC verbal paradigm is much more simple than that of any Romance language for spoiled declension-
fearing Westerners, and that allows learners to focus more on learning the nominal and adjectival inflections. For
example, in most Slavic languages there aren´t the multiple past tenses, fusional future and conditional
paradigms, multiple subjunctive forms and compound tenses which exist in Spanish or Italian. Although SC
nouns and adjectives are more complex, verbs are much more simple and that should compensate things.

My point is that although the Slavic language family barring Bulgarian has comlex nominal declension systems, its languages generally don´t have nasty verbal paradigms, therefore one can dedicate much more study time and focus to the case system. One part comes difficult, and the other a little easier. If there were a language with both nasty nominal declension and nasty verbal conjugations at the same time it would be a different story however.

But generally with most languages an easy/easier aspect compensates for the hard/harder aspect thus making learning more manageable. For example, Japanese has one of the most difficult writing systems in the world plus very alien and difficult vocabulary, but the relatively simple grammar (no gender, no nominal-adjectival agreement, no complex noun cases except for a simple and completely regular particle system, no overly elaborate verb forms) make the task of learning the language a bit easier. Since the basics of grammar are simple enough to learn, one is able to dedicate much more time to the difficult parts, ie. the idiograms and the difficult vocabulary.

1 person has voted this message useful

Itikar
Groupie
Italy
Joined 4480 days ago
94 posts - 158 votes

Speaks: Italian*

Message 12 of 14

27 April 2012 at 11:17pm | IP Logged

Personally I somewhat find some truth in Ben's thought.
In general I think the importance of a declension system for determining a language's difficulty is greatly overrated, as well as the importance of morphology in general, also for verbs.

In fact in my native language what I find hard of the verbs is rarely their morphology, that depends merely from memory, but when and where tenses and moods should be employed.

In the Slavic languages I find, in a certain sense, a lot more difficult the verbal aspect than the declension. In fact I am waiting for a book I order specifically on this topic. I wouldn't have ordered a book specifically on declensions, provided there were one (and for instance there isn't, at least in Italian).

That said I am not saying declensions are "easy" in the strict sense. I do errors and I will do still a lot of errors for a long time to come, surely more than with verb conjugations, but most of these errors are not so critical for comprehension. And even if I may do a critical error, most of times context helps immensely to clear any incomprehension. For verbal aspect on the other hand it isn't so simple, and while with a lot of practice a declension will rarely cause more problems than in pronunciation, verbal aspect will always remain more insidious.

I think anyway that most of this fearsome reputation of the declension systems comes from a sort of inferiority complex most western European languages have toward their more ancient, more inflective ancestors, like Latin, Greek, Norse and so on, which were indeed rich in this field.

Yet in my experience with languages with declension:
Latin: at school I never had big problems with the declensions, save for some irregulars or ambiguous forms, and I never knew any of my schoolmates having, even the less clever ones. On the other hand we had big problems with subordinate clauses, like infinitives, or strange verb forms like deponent verbs.
German: the real pain was the fixed word order, especially where the verb goes, and especially if the verb went in strange places or if it split, both from the past participle in compound tenses or from the prefix separable verbs. And the complete change of a verb's meaning due to prefixes! "hören"/to hear ---> aufhören/to give up. Cases? Really, save for male accusative, they are pratically comparable to articled prepositions. After a while I virtually did no logical errors with declensions, the only errors in this fields were mostly due to choosing the wrong gender for a word.
Russian: my black hole is the use of different kind motion verbs, unidirectionals or multidirectionals, especially идти/ходить, but also the others. Then several errors due to choosing the right verb with the right aspects, especially if due to prefixes different from по-. I find to some extent difficult to catch up with the process of word formation i.e. with prefixes like на-, у- or пере-, but it is less discomforting than in German, since there is a logic behind them. Regarding the declensions, more the times passes, more my errors are linked to pronunciation and stress than to grammar and morphology. At the beginning I had a bit of trouble with different form of accusative for animate or inanimate nouns, but now I almost got past it.
1 person has voted this message useful

Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5084 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes

Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 13 of 14

28 April 2012 at 12:32am | IP Logged

Itikar wrote:

Personally I somewhat find some truth in Ben's thought.
In general I think the importance of a declension system for determining a language's difficulty is greatly
overrated, as well as the importance of morphology in general, also for verbs.

In fact in my native language what I find hard of the verbs is rarely their morphology, that depends merely from
memory, but when and where tenses and moods should be employed.

In the Slavic languages I find, in a certain sense, a lot more difficult the verbal aspect than the declension. In fact
I am waiting for a book I order specifically on this topic. I wouldn't have ordered a book specifically on
declensions, provided there were one (and for instance there isn't, at least in Italian).

That said I am not saying declensions are "easy" in the strict sense. I do errors and I will do still a lot of errors for
a long time to come, surely more than with verb conjugations, but most of these errors are not so critical for
comprehension. And even if I may do a critical error, most of times context helps immensely to clear any
incomprehension. For verbal aspect on the other hand it isn't so simple, and while with a lot of practice a
declension will rarely cause more problems than in pronunciation, verbal aspect will always remain more
insidious.

I think anyway that most of this fearsome reputation of the declension systems comes from a sort of inferiority
complex most western European languages have toward their more ancient, more inflective ancestors, like Latin,
Greek, Norse and so on, which were indeed rich in this field.

Yet in my experience with languages with declension:
Latin: at school I never had big problems with the declensions, save for some irregulars or ambiguous
forms, and I never knew any of my schoolmates having, even the less clever ones. On the other hand we had big
problems with subordinate clauses, like infinitives, or strange verb forms like deponent verbs.
German: the real pain was the fixed word order, especially where the verb goes, and especially if the verb
went in strange places or if it split, both from the past participle in compound tenses or from the prefix
separable verbs. And the complete change of a verb's meaning due to prefixes! "hören"/to hear --->
aufhören/to give up. Cases? Really, save for male accusative, they are pratically comparable to articled
prepositions. After a while I virtually did no logical errors with declensions, the only errors in this fields were
mostly due to choosing the wrong gender for a word.
Russian: my black hole is the use of different kind motion verbs, unidirectionals or multidirectionals,
especially идти/ходить, but also the others. Then several errors due to choosing the right verb with the right
aspects, especially if due to prefixes different from по-. I find to some extent difficult to catch up with the
process of word formation i.e. with prefixes like на-, у- or пере-, but it is less discomforting than in German,
since there is a logic behind them. Regarding the declensions, more the times passes, more my errors are linked
to pronunciation and stress than to grammar and morphology. At the beginning I had a bit of trouble with
different form of accusative for animate or inanimate nouns, but now I almost got past it.

I'm not entirely disagreeing with what benisraelzion says. For instance, between the Northwest Caucasian (Pontic)
and Northeast Caucasian (Caspian) languages, one family has incredibly complicated verbs and simple nouns and
the other has incredibly complicated nouns and simple verbs (I forget which, though). So there may be a principle
of "compensation" at work here, but it could also be a matter of random chance.

Certainly in Slavic the loss of numerous tenses is the result of information being coded by aspectual pairs of
verbs. So compensation is going on. But I see no reason why verbal complexity should at all be tied up with
nominal complexity. Clearly in Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit both the nouns AND the verbs were very
complex, with numerous cases, tenses, moods, and even pitch accent (in the case of the latter two).

I would also agree with you that usage - when to activate the subjunctive, when to pick which verb from an
aspectual pair, when to throw in a preposition alongside a declined noun and when to omit it - is MUCH, MUCH
harder than actually assimilating the morphology and even generating the word on the fly. I have little problem
conjugating in the present or past subjunctive in Spanish, but I still struggle with knowing when to activate the
mood and when not to activate it.

In short, your point is well taken, but I don't think anyone here was really disagreeing with the points being
made. I do still believe that declension is generally more difficult than conjugation, which may be affirmed by the
fact that native English speakers would likely find German harder to learn than Italian, even if we were to control
for the differences in cognates between the two languages
1 person has voted this message useful

Itikar
Groupie
Italy
Joined 4480 days ago
94 posts - 158 votes

Speaks: Italian*

Message 14 of 14

28 April 2012 at 6:47pm | IP Logged

In general most of foreigners I met, who were able to speak Italian, used a simplified conjugation. Indicative present and imperfect plus some compoud tenses derived from them like compound past. Also native speakers are not completely immune to this, since the most common errors we commit are probably due to the wrong or missing employments of tenses like simple past or subjunctives.

That said, I agree with you, that in general (although there are exceptions like for instance Arabic) once understood where to use a certain tense it takes less time to assimilate the correct morphology of one or more conjugations, than to master the morphology of one or more declensions once understood where and when a certain case should be used.
They are both a matter of "repetita iuvant", but agreed, the latter requires more time and more practice.

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