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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

economist.com

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#11

Post by masklinn »

umvi wrote: post #8
DennisP wrote: post #2

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed…

Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. As soon as you can have multiple things that flash or multiple modes of transportation your language would become too ambiguous. That's not to say the native Americans that speak it couldn't evolve the language to accommodate modern society, I'm sure they could.

> Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one.

I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode.

That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#12

Post by slibhb »

It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me.

> Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.

It does not follow that languages having different features results in "slicing up reality differently". That's only true if you believe some form of Sapir-Worf.

> Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae).

Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding).

> Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii)

Great, and in English dark blue might be "navy".

All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school. If you're thrown into a situation where you need to acquire a language, odds are you'll figure it out.

This topic (differences between natural languages) always ends up as amateur sociology like "foreigners see things differently". It might be true but there's no evidence for it. Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. To me, it all sounds like "inuits have 87 words for snow".

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#13

Post by magpi3 »

RandomWorker wrote: post #7

When I started learning Chinese the grammar really made think hard about what I needed to say first. Then put it in the right grammar order, then translate the words, which is like a inverted 3D lookup table, sounds/tone/meaning. Memorizing the lookup table which people say is the hard part is actually the easy bit. It’s the restructuring of my thoughts to fit in the grammar. I find English I get you can get away wit…

I am in my third year of Chinese. Ultimately I think it's best to figure out how to say things the Chinese way, and then just say that sentence a thousand times until it starts to feel more natural. If you have to think about it, you're gonna mash it up. That's my experience so far.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#14

Post by Clewza313 »

slibhb wrote: post #12

It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me. > Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is ano…

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#15

Post by BeFlatXIII »

DennisP wrote: post #2

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed…

> distances were always expressed in terms of travel time

That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#16

Post by hprotagonist »

Clewza313 wrote: post #9

Some examples of language features alien to English speakers: * Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" ( oishikatta desu ). * Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. * Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radical…

> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages

“In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.”

Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#17

Post by tjpnz »

Clewza313 wrote: post #9

Some examples of language features alien to English speakers: * Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" ( oishikatta desu ). * Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. * Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radical…

>* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.

It also works for "I have" as in "Watashi wa korona da" or "I have Covid 19".

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#18

Post by DennisP »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #5
DennisP wrote: post #2

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed…

> a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time Is this actually true? From a quick look at Wikipedia, it doesn't seem to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy

My professors were pretty big Whorf fans, in general.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#19

Post by curiousllama »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #15
DennisP wrote: post #2

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed…

> distances were always expressed in terms of travel time That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.

Facts - I honestly dont know how far apart cities on the US East Coast are, but I know exactly how long it would take to drive between them.

I’d have to work backwards to figure out distance.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#20

Post by MauranKilom »

hprotagonist wrote: post #16
Clewza313 wrote: post #9

Some examples of language features alien to English speakers: * Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" ( oishikatta desu ). * Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. * Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radical…

> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

young lady = (das) Mädchen

turnip = (die) Rübe

(for those wondering)

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