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Advice on Spanish and French/German/Por.. | ||
Tags: Professionals | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 81 of 91 14 September 2012 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sure but it's not 350% harder. It's either 250% harder or takes 3.5x as long. Don't make it harder than it is lolol...
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| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4249 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 82 of 91 14 September 2012 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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?? I'm pretty sure my math is right. I'm not talking about the difficulty really, I'm more focused on the math for this.
If German is 20% harder (1.2x) than Spanish, And Arabic is 350% harder (3.5x) than Spanish, Then Arabic should be (3.5x)/(1.2x)=2.92x harder than German. This is a math question. I'm pretty sure I'm right. I don't understand how you are getting "250%" from. If a language takes 3x as long to get the same level of proficiency, for all intents and purposes it is three times as hard. I don't understand how something that takes 3-4x as long to learn could be only 2.5x harder. More time=harder. It doesn't matter if it is more "enjoyable" or whatever. We're just talking about difficulty.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 83 of 91 14 September 2012 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by Serpent on 14 September 2012 at 9:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4249 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 84 of 91 14 September 2012 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No. If Arabic is 350% harder than Spanish, (represented by 3.5x) and German is 20% harder than Spanish (represented by 1.2x), then Arabic is 350%/120%=292% harder than German. You take the difficulty of Arabic and divide it by that of German, with respect to Spanish as the baseline.
I don't understand how you are saying that Arabic is 250% harder than German. Even if subtracted 350%-20%, you would still get 330%. You DON'T subtract 100% from 350%. However, we are talking about a PERCENTAGE difference, not an absolute difference. Thus, we have to divide the two numbers to find the relative difficulty. If German is 20% harder than Spanish, then it is a factor of 1.2 greater than Spanish and not 120% harder.
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| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4249 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 85 of 91 14 September 2012 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I see the issue. German is NOT 120% harder, rather, it is 20% more difficult than Spanish, according to the FSI. That is represented by (1.2x).
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 86 of 91 14 September 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wasn't counting the difficulty compared to one another. I was just saying that you have to subtract it in both cases:)
3.5x stands for 250% harder the way 1.2x stands for 20% harder. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 87 of 91 14 September 2012 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4249 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 88 of 91 14 September 2012 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You can't just subtract the two numbers. The original post was comparing the difficulty of German to Arabic with Spanish as the baseline.
If you don't want to look at the numbers (which may be better), look at the question this way. 1. Arabic is 3.5 times harder to learn than Spanish. 2. German is *barely* more difficult to learn than Spanish. We can consider it almost as difficult as Spanish. 3. How is Arabic going to be 2.5 times harder than German? I'm willing to be corrected by somebody better than me at math, considering I haven't taken it in years and only did calculus 1 (and a bit of 2) but I'm 99.9% sure that it is 3.5/1.2 to find the relative difficulty of Arabic to German. I pretty know that I'm right but am having some difficulty explaining it to you. Can somebody better than me (and not as rusty as I am) explain it? It's kind of a basic premise that helps explain the difference between absolute and rate differences.
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