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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| laxxy Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6908 days ago 172 posts - 177 votes  Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 13 27 June 2005 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I do not.
You may check other American indian languages, and also greenlandic (it has a different name), eskimo and such. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7045 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 10 of 13 28 June 2005 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I remember reading similarly daunting descriptions of Quiche (Mayan), Inuit (Eskimo), and a number of other Native American languages. If I recall correctly, an anthropologist (?) named Greenberg has done a massive comparative survey of these tongues.
Diacritical marks themselves are not necessarily indicative of difficult pronunciation, but rather only of the fact that the alphabet being used to write them is ill-suited to that purpose. If these languages are indeed more difficult to learn than East Asian languages, I suspect that it will be due to socio-linguistic factors rather than grammatical ones. Materials for learning them are bound to be much more limited, and so in order to do so, you would of necessity have to go and get members of relatively small and very difficernt cultural circles to accept you and let you live with them for a number of years. In other words, you can probably learn a much more considerable amount of Chinese from books and tapes than you can Navajo. However, even if, for the sake of the arguement, we assume that it is more difficult to gain a command of spoken Navajo than of spoken Chinese, I still believe East Asian languages are going to be more difficult to master because they are literary vehicles that require mastery of very difficult script systems. Learn to speak Navajo and you are done; learn to speak Chinese and you are only just beginning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6701 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 11 of 13 19 January 2006 at 7:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I do not know nothing about Quiche, but the grammar of Yucatec maya(related to Quiche) is considered relatively simple. I have heard that for African slaves brought to Yucatan it was easier to learn Maya than Spanish. Inuit, on the other hand, is very complicated, and hardly is simpler than Navajo. There some other very difficult languages as Ojibwa/Chippewa(Algonkian family). Languages of South America as Quichua or Guarani, although are also agglutinative, are nevertheless IMHO simpler that North American languages.
Script of course adds difficulty to Chinese, but so does the fact that in order to perfectly master Chinese you must adopt an entirely different culture and philosophy. However there is also a philosophy behind Native American languages as well. I suspect that they regard the reality around us not as fixed things with frozen essences, but rather as a process which is continually changing and developping, so it could much better be described by a complex verbal phrase constructed "on the go" as one speaks, rather than by fixed vocabulary items, nouns, which represent the names of things. Edited by Linas on 19 January 2006 at 7:45am 2 persons have 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 12 of 13 26 February 2006 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Learning to read Chinese isn't that difficult. It just takes time and practice. The more characters you know the easier they become. (Speaking from experience...I spent nearly 2 years in China ) Not to mention the fact that Chinese doesn't really have anything like grammar at all. Not really anyway. At least compared to Romance/Slavic languages.
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| n0thingness Triglot Newbie Paraguay Joined 6634 days ago 29 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Portuguese, Spanish*, English Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese, Finnish | Message 13 of 13 28 February 2006 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not to mention the fact that Chinese doesn't really have anything like grammar at all. Not really anyway. At least compared to Romance/Slavic languages. [/QUOTE]
don't say that way.. the fact is that Chinese grammar doesn't rely on morphology, that is on how word inflect, conjugate or simply change; but mostly, if not all, on word order. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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