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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4900 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 1 of 134 19 May 2014 at 5:46am | IP Logged | ||
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So I've been on and off studying French for some time, and it's just way harder for me
that it should be. I am fluent in Spanish and have travelled in Italy without knowing Italian, and spoken portunyol w/ Brazilians, but for whatever reason, French just isn't as easy for me to use or understand. I think the double whammy of it's orthography being less clear and the phonetics being vastly different from the other romance family members is the main reason. What 'easy' language have you found to be hard after trying to study it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4288 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 2 of 134 19 May 2014 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Same with me--French is surprisingly difficult in terms of orthography, speaking,
comphrension (aural), etc. to me than any other Romance language, and even Germanic (although Danish comes close). The amount of silent, dropped, and nasal parts of words are very annoying to me--French to me has a low correlation of pronunciation to orthography, i.e. many silent, unexpected, and unpredictable sounds. Spanish and Italian are based essentially on pronouncing words as they look, which very few irregularities therein. A simple example could be «mundo» in Spanish, «mondo» in Portuguese, and «mondo» in Italian--they sound exactly like how they are spelt. However the French «monde» sounds more like the English "moan" with a nasal tinge at the end. If you asked any Hispanophone, Lusophone, or Italophone to pronounce «monde» and almost surely they would respond with two syllables. These things and even basic things wherefore the third person plural conjugations have silent endings "parlent" having the "-ent" completely silent, I cannot explain, and I am unsure how it developed that way. Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian do not seem to have this particularity. For a comparison, I have had less problems pronouncing Mandarin than French when learning both for the first time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bbcatcher 08 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4416 days ago 130 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian | Message 3 of 134 19 May 2014 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||
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For me, Dutch was very hard. So much so that I ended up losing motivation due to the amount of mistakes I
made while trying to converse with natives. Maybe one day I'll go back to it 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6548 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 4 of 134 19 May 2014 at 7:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Russian
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4365 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 5 of 134 19 May 2014 at 8:44am | IP Logged | ||
Most people find French more difficult than Spanish or Italian. It took years of intense listening training until I was able to figure out what people were saying. Now I understand almost 100%, but sometimes still struggle when it comes to slang. That's normal. I find Dutch quite hard to learn. It's actually very easy for Germans because the languages are extremely similar. It's almost like a dialect (but still not quite a dialect). But that's exactly what it makes so hard, because it is all too easy to use patterns of the mother tongue which are actually non-existant in the target language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 134 19 May 2014 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
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What's an easy and what's supposed to be a hard language?
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 134 19 May 2014 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
Pumpkin, Russian was never supposed to be easy :-) Otherwise, I agree that French is a lot tougher than it might appear, based on its similarities with English. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 8 of 134 19 May 2014 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
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When I started learning Spanish it was easy but it got harder as I progressed. Trying to learn how to use the pretérito tense correctly made me furious 5 years ago, and I still don't think I understand it. I also struggled to recognize the subjunctive mood in written Spanish.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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