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Ranking the "Medium Hard" Languages | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4035 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 17 of 62 11 January 2014 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ah, relieved I am not the first to bring this up!
We shouldn't equate the needed studytime (which is what FSI estimates) with the difficulty of the language; Chinese is a pretty straight forward language, but learning the characters usually takes ages. This is why it's ranked as time-consuming, but it has no inflectional patterns whatsoever. Finnish was ranked as I think 4+ in FSI, which means it's a bit above the others in the fourth tier because Finnish has a lot lot lot of inflection and weird ways of saying things such as the emotion-causative and the genitive-subject, but the spelling which 99% regular shaves a lot of time out of that. Difficulty of the language itself; not its orthography, boils down to a simple question; "are these grammatical patterns familiar to you?" For example a lot of anglophones who I've seen learning Finnish have a terribly hard time wrapping their heads around the object marking. Three cases to choose from in a positive clause and one in negative clauses (that you must always use in negative clauses) is an enormous source of confusion because English does not have object marking. Then again I have trouble with the syntax of Swedish; switching the syntax on its head in subordinate clauses always messes with my head, even though I know the principle. I just am not used to that because Finnish doesn't really have any "rules" what comes to syntax, more like "preferences". Edited by Henkkles on 11 January 2014 at 12:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3770 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 18 of 62 11 January 2014 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Indonesian is much easier than French if you speak a language that is totally unrelated to any of them. However, if you already speak English natively or as L2, you'll already know huge chunks of French vocabulary. Although I find Indonesian grammar and spelling much easier then their French equivalents, I find it really hard to retain Indonesian vocabulary.
Due to phonetic reasons for me English is probably one of the hardest languages I have ever come across. English has a totally irregular spelling and a very challenging pronunciation and sound system. It's basically a French-Germanic mongrel, and as a consequence it has an enormous vocabulary, but lacks the inner systemic logics of Romance and Germanic languages. Of course there is a variety of resources and due to political, economic and military reasons and secondary cultural factors English prevails, but in my opinion it has nothing to do with its easieness in a purely lingusitic sense. Should a global power switch happen in the future English will be relegated to lower positions as it has happenned to many other dominant languages in the past. Edited by Hungringo on 11 January 2014 at 1:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| doubleUelle Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 3817 days ago 67 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Japanese Studies: Spanish, Thai | Message 19 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No worries, I understand. I was indeed referring to the former, i.e. that Thai is a analytic (opposite of agglunative) language that has no conjugations, declensions, gender (for nouns), etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4828 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 20 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A lot of people are confusing
1) difficulty of learning a language as L2 given that you only know English-L1 2) difficulty of a language going by how (dis)similar it is to/from English 3) difficulty of a language compared to how common/unusual it's features are among all languages (one could argue that languages should be weighted by number of speakers) It makes sense to measure 1) in number of hours it takes an average English speaker to learn L2 to a certain level. The degree of similarity of vocabulary and a hard writing system present a high degree of 1)difficulty, more so than phonetics/grammar. Whereas for 3) there's little vocabulary common to all human languages, so linguistic features are most applicable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| doubleUelle Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 3817 days ago 67 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Japanese Studies: Spanish, Thai | Message 21 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I would also add: "Are these words similar to the ones in your native language?" and "Are these sounds similar to ones in your native language (or at least easy to learn?" Languages like Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese (all varieties) are all very straightforward grammatically, because there are no conjugations, declensions, gender (for nouns) etc. But they don't share a lot of core vocabulary with English (the way that French and German do) and the sounds/pronunciation definitely take some work. So they still come out as languages that can be difficult, despite the absence of challenging grammar. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4035 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 22 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, those would be the next questions, but the hardest thing (in my opinion) is to wrap one's head around the way the language expresses things; in English we say "I have to go" but in Finnish I would say the same thing as roughly "mine holds to go", even though it doesn't make any sense in translation. I would modify your questions thus: Is the vocabulary transparent with any language you already know? Is the phonemic inventory of the target language outside of what you are accustomed to pronouncing? but I think these are a bit more minor things. Feel free to disagree though! Edited by Henkkles on 11 January 2014 at 3:15pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4395 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 23 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I've studied them both (though didn't take Turkish anywhere near my Russian, just because I had to stop studying it due to time constraints). Interesting is that while Russian would be more transparent to me, due to my native language, I'd still rank it harder than Turkish. Russian grammar is just mind blowing. If I were to master it to perfection it would definitely be more time consuming than mastering Turkish, given its non - transparent vocabulary. Speaking of transparent vocabulary, I'm sometimes puzzled how people from my own country often tell me they cannot comprehend a word of spoken Russian, which is always baffling to me, just because if you really listen carefully it shouldn't be all that "non-transparent". It probably has something to do with training your ear to listen more carefully. Anyway, the point of saying this is that if we take that in account, then Russian would indeed pose greater difficulty. Another factor is how practical the language is. And by practical here I mean nothing else but the ease of forming an expression without driving yourself crazy. While most people I know are usually puzzled with agglutinative languages I do believe they're very practical indeed. Well at least in my mind. For example, take the word * Gözlerimde - if we were to take it apart, it consists of the following: (1)Göz - eye; (2)ler - the marker for plural (can be also "lar" if the vocal harmony was different); (3)im - the indicator for yours; (4)de - the indicator for "in". So, basically what we have here is the expression "In your eyes" in a one short word. By that I mean practical. And while Russian can also be practical from a Bulgarian's point of view, for example, the sentence: "Хорошие апельсины - надо брать!" (Lit: These oranges are nice - I've got to buy them), in Bulgarian it translates into: Тези портокали са хубави. Трябва да си ги купя!. Now enough of my "practicality" and back to the previous example. :D So while "gözlerimde" is one word in Turkish due to it being an agglutinative language, in Russian it goes like so: * В твоих глазах - |So now, we have the indicator for (1) В - in, at first position, then (2)твоих - lit. your, in prepositional case, then (3)глазах - lit. eyes, in prepositional case, while the singular for eyes is "глаз". Basically these are my reasons to consider Russian more difficult than Turkish, especially if one were to master it. And I haven't even spoken about the pronunciation, which in Russian can literally drive you nuts sometimes, especially if you're a grammar nazi and hate misspelling words. Meanwhile Turkish pronunciation is quite straightforward and basically what you hear is what you write. Edited by Einarr on 11 January 2014 at 6:43pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| betelgeuzah Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 4183 days ago 51 posts - 82 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Japanese, Italian | Message 24 of 62 11 January 2014 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But we aren't really saying "hold" when we state that now are we? It's just a case of single verb having multiple meanings. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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