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What ’easy’ language do you find hard? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gustavo Russi Tetraglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3639 days ago 9 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French, Italian | Message 49 of 134 21 May 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
exactally. i just didnt know how to properly express myself :( 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5003 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 50 of 134 21 May 2014 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Regarding Italian, while Medulin's points are very valid I'd say they're pretty minor issues overall. Many people don't pronounce it in the "standard" way... so what, and things like open versus closed Es hardly impede understanding. I suppose that as a native English speaker, and one with a regional accent that's quite different from RP, the idea of so many local variations is hardly unusual to me, and if anything they make the language more charming and interesting. It's fun to guess where in Italy people are from based on their accent. Especially considering many Italians have only been speaking Italian as a first language for a few generations and Italy's only been a unified country for a century and a half, a lack of standardisation is not surprising.
If you think Italians are bad at writing their own language, then all I can say is don't try French... I found the fact that many Italians can at least write their language mostly correctly to be quite a big relief after French and even English. Italian is more difficult than it first appears though. Already having a decent knowledge of French, I picked up the basics pretty quickly, but I was wrong to think that my progress would keep going at that rate. There is a lot of subtlety and flexibility with usage and word order that can be quite hard to master when you're used to a more rigid and standardised language like French; I've mentioned some of these points in my log, and a recent thread on Italian questions highlights a few. It does mean that you can get a lot of leeway in terms of being understood, but also that speaking "correctly" is trickier. I've seen that French keeps coming up on this thread. I've met tons of French learners but extremely few who speak it very well, even after years in France, while people who speak excellent Spanish or Italian as a second language don't seem too rare. People always seem to really struggle with at least one aspect; for me it's pronunciation, for others it might be grammar or listening comprehension. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4086 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 51 of 134 21 May 2014 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I must say that I am extremely surprised to see English so often listed. I continue to
hear, and have heard, especially from international classmates, and people from Northern Europe, that English so easy that all they had to do to get to a high level was play video games, watch British or American television, watch British or American films, or navigate the Internet, or any combination thereof, which guaranteed instant C1/C2. I know that English is extremely simplified and has no cases, noun gender, low amount of conjugation, low distiction for detail (i.e. not many use (t)here/(t)hither/(t)hence so that one can use a wrong word and still not be wrong, etc., so I wonder what the real opinion is. I had friends who said that English was just ridiculously easy that playing World of Warcraft or watching David Attenborough and Coronation Street whilst reading Wikipedia articles sufficed to achieve at least C1, since English surrounds society but that we Anglophones particularly cannot do this because of their attitude and aptitude towards languages. So it seems like two extremes: those who have severe problems and those who find that it is the easiest language in the world. Regarding French, the grammar I find fairly straightforward and simplified, almost as if it in some manner tried to simplify itself like Modern English, although definitely not to such an extreme, with its lower usage of the imparfait du subjonctif, 2ème conditionnel, passé simple, amongst other factors. It seems strange to say, "He has been born in 1872", «Il a été né en 1872» instead of just «Il naquit en 1872». However,the pronunciation is a serious pickle. I remember at first how each time I tried to repeat a nasal sound in French, like the passé simple form «vînt», my mouth produced something different each time, because my nose had problems coordinating with my mouth for nasal sounds. That and how nasal sounds seem to "disappear" like an echo losing sound in a cave. Edited by 1e4e6 on 21 May 2014 at 11:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 3886 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 52 of 134 22 May 2014 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
same here..I almost have no problems understanding the weirdest U.S. slang but when it comes to British accents I'm kinda lost to the point it seems to me as they were different languages.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 3886 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 53 of 134 22 May 2014 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
1&4 in handwriting is enough to put the accent, we don't really care which one you write..It is not considered a mistake..I don't even know if they teach this stuff in school..so it really makes no difference if you write perché instead of perche'..Nobody will ever notice it or care about it. 2 It is exactly the opposite. ..vado in Francia, vado a Roma...you simply use IN regarding nations and regions, and A when talking about going to a city, town, village 3 capisti is not Italian..is a southern dialect you'll hear just in one region...but yes it's true, standard Italian almost doesn't exist accent wise. .Every single region has its own accent (I m not talking about dialects) to the point you can say 95% where people comes from 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3843 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 54 of 134 22 May 2014 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
Mmmh let's see what can I do for you... probably not much because you have really strong ideas, but I'll try the same to provide my opinion. 1. How can be the spelling hard? It is almost completely phonetic. An before to come in this forum, like all the Italians, I thought was completely phonetic. By the way, the sound quality of doubles and singles consonants are completely different. When speaking informally people don't really care about the sound quality or the grammar. 2. Also here. Every time I say to an Italian person that we have 7 vowels he looks me perplex and thinks I'm stupid. For Italians the vowels are simply 5. The corrent pronunciation is important only if you want to sing or act at great levels, otherwise who cares! We understand each others in any case (and I'm not speaking about farmers, it is the same with people of the highest social classes). When I'm with people of the North I tend to use their accent and when I'm with people with the south I tend to use southern accent. Now that I leave in the Netherlands I speak much less Italian and my Italians mates in Italy told me that I have a foreigner accent. I find this thing lovely. 3. For sure much less than English. 4. That is the beauty of our language. It is lovely to hear so many different way to speak. I have a lot of fun with my Sicilian flatmate when we start to compare Como's slang with Catania's slang. By the way, the remote past is an archaic form to refer to facts happened very far away in the past. It is useful just for the books and some article. In the south it is used instead of the past... proximus? (I don't know how to translate it lol) but it's grammatically wrong. By the way it's funny and adds colour to the language. 5. Standard Italian is boring. 6. Don't see a reason about why should I care. I don't know how to pronounce it, I don't need to know how to write it. Autocorrector does magics, but if I don't use it nobody will notice it. 7. If you like more Portuguese and Spanish why not. By the way, people understands some words of Spanish but they will answer with Italian and you will probably understand only because of the gestures and in that way you cannot have proper conversations and they will ignore you. With two words in Italian they will probably invite you for dinner (in the south, at least). 8. Matter of tastes. RAI productions not only are usually terrible but nobody speaks like them. It just seems artificial. If you speak like them you will probably mocked in most environments. Keep in mind that Italian people usually live in small villages of 3000-4000 inhabitants and they are tremendously proud of that. Hearing people who talk like RAI trash stuff is just funny, or annoying. Either they seem to be a TV charachter or give the impression that are trying to show off. But I understand that you have a completely different opinion about that, that is absolutely fair. 9. Exactly. Therefore Italian is tremendously easy, because unless you want to do the writer or university professor in certain universities an acceptable level is just enough. We have old people speaking only dialect, people from other regions with their completely different Italian, a lot of immigrants with their own accents learning our provincial variation (the variations are not only regional) if not even our dialect (that can be slightly different between people of two confinant villages of 2000 inhabitants). Once a Senegalese boy started to talk me in milanese dialect, was awesome! In Italy we love the diversities (a part of some ignorant people who love to make fun of people from other countries/regions/provinces/cities/villages) and most of all we hate the standardization. I add another personal point of view. All that I wrote is valid only for spoken Italian. When I read a book I demand a perfect artistic literary Italian and the educated people also generally follow this pattern. Literary Italian is a joy. And we are lucky that our language didn't change so much that we can understand texts of the 1300. But still, nobody speaks like that. If you want to learn to write a book in Italian, then the language is not difficult, but, let's say, almost impossible. EDIT: actually this is also not true. There are the ghost writers to fix your manuscript. Edited by tristano on 22 May 2014 at 2:30am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3843 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 55 of 134 22 May 2014 at 2:59am | IP Logged | ||
Hi garyb! I just had an amazing 7 days vacation in Scotland. I really loved the accent, specially in Glasgow and in Inverness. But indeed the informations that Medulin wrote are very accurate. I noticed that people from east europe are often able to learn Italian in a ridicolous amount of time, like 2-3 months. That should be do to an easier pronunciation and grammar, don't really know. The subtleties like in every language (and the own mother tongue as well) we never end to learn them. We say "Fino alla bara si impara". We are proud of our broken ambiguous imperfect language. So expressive and colourful! I don't know how is the reality with French people. They probably have different registers like us and they use them more or less succesfully exactly like us I think. No? One thing that I don't appreciate of English is the lack of a variety of different registers. When I talk to the highest management I have the same feeling that I have when I talk with a close friend. Or to my dog. When I read novels I feel the same literary expressivity that I advert when I read a chapter talking about the non horizontal scability of join operations of relational databases. Middle English seems to be a completely different story, it seems to me to be much more colourful! But here probably I am the problem. I like French much more and probably I'm only biased because of it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3828 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 56 of 134 22 May 2014 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
The existence has stunted the state of linguistic knowledge in common European people. We have way too many people who only speak Indo European languages and come to think of inflection as the only form of complexity even though something like Turkish is miles simpler in regularity, phonology, and many more than English despite being highly inflecting. English has some irregular plurals, comparative forms and at least 150 irregular verbs unlike Turkish which has only about a 1/10 of that and 28 phonemes compared to 43 in English. But it gets a free pass for being agglutinating. To add, gender had to come into existence at some point yet nobody finds that strange, so why is gender going away any stranger? If only they knew what PIE was like! I constantly encounter the said people who make such stupid enraging claims on languages (English is backwards, primitive, etc.) that I want to reach over and slap them. Next time they claim English is easy, ask them about Turkish, Persian, or Mandarin, 1e4e6! Edited by Stolan on 22 May 2014 at 3:40am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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