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Romance Languages Are Difficult! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 6977 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 9 of 31 12 July 2006 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Although I haven't studied a romance language, I'm going to assume that its similar; i.e. once you get the hang of it, it isn't so bad.
Don't you remember trying to learn the endings for all 6 cases, in both singular and plural, and all three genders? What about trying to remember two seperate words for every verb (perf/impf)? What about trying to remember the case that each preposition (or verb in some cases) requires? I bet that if you keep at it, the Romance languages won't seem so bad. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6710 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 10 of 31 12 July 2006 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know, I'd say Romance isn't too hard, Russian is kinda difficult. But the easiest thing I can imagine is Chinese. No grammar, no endings, one word, one idea, one character. No problem! Talk about easy. When you want to say: I'm going to the store tomorrow in Chinese you say literally "I tomorrow go store" or I went to the store yesterday => "I yesterday go store" So, I'd say Romance, Germanic, and Slavic are all harder than Chinese.
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| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6679 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 11 of 31 12 July 2006 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. As someone who's spend years studying Mandarin, I personally find it a million times harder than any of the Romance and Germanic languages (I have no experience with the Slavic ones so I can't say). Sure, the grammar is easy but a language is far more than just grammar. The writing system is a headache in itself and there have been countless discussions here about it. Even if you knew the meaning of each individual character (which would takes years to accomplish), you won't always necessarily understand the meaning of a sentence. It is also much harder to sound off a character you don't know. With any alphabet-based language, you can at least pronounce the word even if you don't know its meaning. It is very hard to do the same with Chinese if you don't have pinyin or 'bopomofo' to rely on. I'm not saying Mandarin is impossible as many people have succeeded in learning it to a fairly high standard, but I'd be careful with labelling it as being easier than any of the Romance languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6698 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 31 13 July 2006 at 6:36am | IP Logged | ||
No grammar? The lack of inflections and conjugations does not make a sentence like "Earlier my wife worked at a company in Beijing" (example from Pimsleur 2) any easier. I'd say that the syntax shows quite a high level of complexity, but that's perhaps just me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mga Groupie United States beastie.redirectme.n Joined 6912 days ago 67 posts - 66 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Arabic (Written) | Message 13 of 31 13 July 2006 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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| kronos77 Groupie United States Joined 6528 days ago 78 posts - 81 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Dutch, Mandarin | Message 14 of 31 13 July 2006 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Speakers of analytic languages tend to forget that syntax is part of grammar
too. We focus on morphology since that is what is most challenging to us intially. It's a matter of familiarity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6657 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 15 of 31 13 July 2006 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I second the notion, at least with Spanish. I sort of have a bias towards French because I have an aunt who speaks it and so had more of an immediate interest in the language. For some reason, Spanish has always struck me as a challenging language. Not the most, certainly, but not the breeze that it seems to be known for. It might be a personal thing though to me...because other people seem to find it easier. I will not discourage anyone from wanting to learn it (quite the contrary!) but I would still warn them that it is a fairly complex language, probably a bit more than a potential student may have been expecting. That said, I'm still glad I learned it! Now I just need to brush the rust away because frankly I cannot speak very much anymore after a couple of years of hardly speaking it. At least I've maintained for myself a lot of the written language via MSN. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kronos77 Groupie United States Joined 6528 days ago 78 posts - 81 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Dutch, Mandarin | Message 16 of 31 13 July 2006 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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As I think about this more, I start to realise one reason romance
languages have a reputation of being easy. They are easy to dumb down. That is, the complex elements can be separated out and set aside for later. This is what happens at most American universities, where students are required to take two semesters of a language, with Spanish, French and Italian being very popular choices. They are never really presented with the more difficult aspects of the grammar. Languages like Russian, on the other hand, have their complexity woven throughout the grammar. It is tough to separate the difficult from the easy and students have to immediately fight their way through difficult terrain. You can't dumb down Russian for the unmotivated college kid looking for an easy two semester requirement. So, the popular wisdom on campus is to take Spanish because it is easy. And it is...for two semesters. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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