English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#321

Post by bradrn » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

wwwwewwww wrote: post #308

soldehierro wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit my ignorance of the grammatical complexities of Hungarian beyond the fact that it's highly declined and has a really interesting case system, though I will remark that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity. (This isn't necessarily an established, of course, as complexity is something that will likely never be fully quantified). Ultimatel…

"that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity." I would love to see a citation for this. It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn. With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them…

This is something I happen to know a bit about, since a while ago I had a long conversation about this on a conlanging forum [0]. Unfortunately, I can give you no citation for this — quite the reverse! In fact, the general consensus seems to be that languages are not at all equally complex. My understanding is that statements to that effect are usually considered to be effectively a ‘lie-to-children’: not wrong as such, but certainly over-simplified. As Mark Rosenfelder says so eloquently in the linked thread:

> [Saying that this statement is wrong] … seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand why Linguistics 101 books say things like this. … It's because non-linguists are obsessed with which languages are better than others, and complexity is part of that. They want to hear that French is more logical, Italian is more beautiful, Arabic is God's language, Phrygian is the first language, etc, etc. They want to hear that the standard languages are better than dialects. They want to hear that primitive cultures speak primitive languages … linguistics professors all run into it and get tired of it and throw in some stuff to combat the myths.

Also, some linguists have put forward examples of genuinely simpler languages. Most famously, David Gil has suggested that Riau Indonesian is fundamentally simpler than other languages [1], but I’m sure there’s other examples.

That being said, I have a dissenting opinion: I think the vast majority of languages are indeed at about the same level of complexity (with exceptional cases like Riau Indonesian and creoles). Again, you can find some intensive discussion of my claim in the linked thread, but basically, my claim is that a lack of sophistication in one part of the grammar tends to be balanced by increased complexity in another part. e.g. Turkish has lots of suffixes making its verbs very complicated; English doesn’t have this, but compensates by using lots of auxiliary verbs with intricate rules for ordering and combining. Kalam only has about 200 verbs in total, but compensates with detailed rules for combining those verbs to give different shades of meaning. And so on and so forth.

[0] https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=631

[1] https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#322

Post by gerdesj » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

blackshaw wrote: post #318

gerdesj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"also known as Lingua franca." ... which is Latin for: language of the Franks - French!

Ironically, while they gave their name to the French language, the Franks themselves spoke a Germanic language, not French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankish_language

The Holy Roman Empire was a right old mish mash, just like the Pretannic Isles or Brythonic Isles or whatever.

Nowadays people are so wrapped up in modern boundaries and notions of nationalism and fail to notice that history is rather messy.

My family history has been rather well researched by my uncle who has a no nonsense approach to his findings. We have at least one mass murderer in the bloodline. An innkeeper of a pub and hostelry on Salisbury Plain at a crossroads was not a nice person. There was a chair that dumped people into the cellar where they were butchered. The whole thing has been hyped somewhat but it was 200 odd years ago. During WW1 an ancestor may have run away during a Zeppelin raid on Kent. We know he was signed up to join the army and had done basic training and was sent to a camp in Kent before despatch to France. He would have had a pass to visit relatives within reason. Anyway it gets complicated.

My point is that a simple comment like "the Franks themselves spoke a Germanic language" is a bit trite (no offense meant). We classify the Frankish language as Germanic, but then we also classify modern English as such. My name is also quite literally testament to how daft it gets.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#323

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

soldehierro wrote: post #265

raverbashing wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian. Sounds like an outrageous claim done by a monolingual ;) These are the languages with the biggest barriers (tonal + alphabet in the case of Mandarin and weird case system in the case of Hungarian). So no, those are the worse examples you could have picked. French could work, or maybe Japanese with a romanicized alphabet could work. Heck…

Grammatical complexity, in my opinion is overhyped as a barrier to language learning. In my own experience, after enough time and pratice you eventually internalize grammar structures without a problem. The real issue is learning enough vocabularly to express yourself not simply fluently, but eloquently, and to be able to make it through any text you find. Also, a few problems in your argument against Mandarin: tone…

It's a nice thesis but I disagree. Yes, the complexity of English is distributed in other places rather than in an exaggerated number of cases or multiple verbal conjugations.

But it is still easier than Mandarin or Hungarian (especially for speakers of PIE originated languages ;) ).

If you have languages that have "standardized teaching" you'll see that it takes a much longer time to go from A to B level in German than in French for example. See this (scroll down) https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/language-difficulty/

Note that this difficulty is "kinda" reciprocal (not 100% because English is easy to a German speaker but not vice versa), you could have a different index for native Chinese speakers for example, but I'd bet English would be one of the easiest even then.

Sure, English has historical advantages, before that it was French and then Latin and people dealt with those in some way, so you have a point (access to a language plays much more on the ability to learn than grammar for sure).

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#324

Post by selimthegrim » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

blackshaw wrote: post #320

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 5. Word munging is uncommon in English. Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have),…

> "I would have had eaten" Where are you from? "I would have had eaten" makes no sense to me (British). I don't think it's a valid construction.

Would have had to have eaten probably?

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#325

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 8:39 AM UTC

blackshaw wrote: post #319

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes. With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully? Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

"Criterion/criteria"

Thank you! Yeah, that's the one I keep forgetting, though it doesn't end in "omenon".

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#326

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

the_gipsy wrote: post #292

ternaryoperator wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound. The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.

So I dug this up a bit, because I'm accustomed to the form "Méjico" in Spain. You are right that México is written with an X but pronounced with a jota. However it has a special status of topónimo (place name), which sometimes don't have a translation (thank god). E.g. "Washington" is not pronounced with a sharp S, it's just pronounced as in the original language. Or Wyoming is pronounced as "uaióming", not "bioming"…

[deleted]

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#327

Post by blackshaw » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 12:32 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #325

blackshaw wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Criterion/criteria"

Thank you! Yeah, that's the one I keep forgetting, though it doesn't end in "omenon".

Another one I just remembered: "automaton/automata".

This site lets you search for English words by suffix, and the only words it can find ending in "-omenon" are "phenomenon" and... "superphenomon". What a phenomenal result.

https://www.litscape.com/word_tools/ends_with.php

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#328

Post by d1sxeyes » Fri, Apr 02, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

inkyoto wrote: post #301

d1sxeyes wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. Two short sentences here don't accurately convey the horror of Russian's case system, where not just verbs but also NOUNS must change (decline) into one of 6 main cases (potentially more depending on whether you consider the locative, partitive genitive, vocative, etc. as distinct cases) :D, but yes absolutely - basically, you only ever have the possessive form in English 'add 's, or for pronouns just learn 'his/h…

Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10). Hardly a 10/10 for the BDSM part. Whilst the Russian language has retained many grammatical features of the Proto-Indo-European language, it has also dropped many (i.e. perfect tenses, the aorist, a number of noun cases, merged long, short and ultra-short vowels into same quality vowels and lost all nasal vowels and the lis…

Those all sound super exciting. I'm in Hungary at the moment and the language here is also pretty agglutinative, so that's not so scary, but the idea of seven modes and twelve aspects is... well, next level.

I revise my 10/10 downwards, based on what you've mentioned here to somewhere around a 6.

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#329

Post by kwhitefoot » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #203

kwhitefoot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother Yes. Usually size comes first: big red metal ball . red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball . But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels w…

Pinker's written about this I know. The order looks something like this https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adj... (although there are exceptions, of course!)

Thank you!

Re: English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)

#330

Post by cehrlich » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

EE84M3i wrote: post #304

cehrlich wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native sp…

>Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. For reference, the Kanji Kentei test[1] has 12 levels. > Level 2 is as high as many Japanese, even those with higher education degrees, tend to go. Passing level 2 can be used as leverage when applying for jobs, etc. Passing levels pre-1 and 1 is especially rare even amo…

The Kanji Kentei tests production. I probably couldn't even produce 500 kanji without a computer/phone), and I don't think I will ever make it much further than that, because why bother? When would I ever need to handwrite kanji without access to a digital dictionary?

Recognition, however, is an entirely different story. To be able to recognize 98% of words, which is approximately the amount you need to be able to deduct the meaning of the remaining words from context, in the average novel you need something like 3000-3500 kanji.

The good news is recognition is much easier to achieve than production. With Heisig you can learn the first 2000 kanji (recognition only) in about 3 months, the next 1000 are more difficult because they're less common, but still it's nothing compared to passing even the lower levels of the Kentei.