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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#101

Post by umvi »

rendall wrote: post #50
umvi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one As a heads-up, contemporary thought is that no culture is "primitive". Primitive implies lesser

Ok well whatever the opposite of "modern" is then. A language spoken only by Amazon tribes is not going to contain vocabulary for things related to technological advancement like computers

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#103

Post by schoen »

lhorie wrote: post #31
tjpnz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* 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".

"be" and "have" can be quite quirky from language to language. For example, in portuguese, "I am healthy" can be translated to "eu sou saudavel" (meaning, the person lives a healthy lifestyle) or "eu estou saudavel" (meaning, the person is currently temporarily healthy). "I am 20 years old" translates to "eu tenho vinte anos" (or "I have 20 years of age")

Similarly, in Portuguese you can "have" or "be with" various nouns reflecting physical, mental, or emotional states which would be expressed with adjectives in English, like "I have hunger", "I have fear", "I'm with fear", "I'm with jealousy", "I'm with yearning for him".

I know German also uses "have" this way quite a lot (at least for hunger, thirst, fear, and desire, probably for many other things).

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#104

Post by tayo42 »

corey_moncure wrote: post #28
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…

The real roadblock with Japanese, in my opinion, is how kanji makes it impossible to absorb new vocabulary through casual reading. We naturally infer the meaning of words from their syntactical and semantic context, but with kanji there's no "name" to hang the inferred meaning to as you read. You can't pronounce it in your head, or out loud. Kanji make it possible to sometimes guess the meaning and pronunciation of a…

I always wondered, does Kanji not have a way of breaking things down? I noticed some complex Kanji characters seem to made up of smaller simpler characters. I always wondered if it was a coincidence or not.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#105

Post by dheera »

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…

The reverse is true as well, i.e. English has plenty of things that are alien to other languages.

Conjugating verbs, inflection, capitalization, and plural forms of nouns are alien to at least Chinese and probably many other Sino-Tibetan languages.

The lack of phoenetic/spelling consistency is alien to many European languages, especially Spanish, which is remarkably consistent.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#106

Post by zasz »

yorwba wrote: post #83
asiachick wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can actually test in various ways if one language is harder to learn than another. For example you ask children to ask for a cheeseburger. If they say "I can has cheeseburger" they are not as far along as "May I have a cheeseburger". you then sample lots of kids and you find that in some language kids speak the language in the "proper" way much soon than other languages. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2…

However, the things that make a language hard to learn for kids aren't necessarily the same that make it hard for adults. The article you link is about acquisition of past tense formation in Danish, where some verbs have a past tense ending in -ede, like bade/badede (bathe/bathed) and some others end in -te, like kalde/kaldte (call/called) and yet others are completely different. Those verb endings are frequently red…

Aren't children supposed to be better at learning new languages than adults, though? There's supposed to be a critical period where language acquisition is much easier.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#107

Post by Muromec »

skripp wrote: post #75
Muromec wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does beg the question however what are we missing Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example. Or ability to mention a French coworker in your speech without explicitly mentioning their gender and the whole singular the all together

> Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example. Non-native here. I don't quite follow. How about: "The object is far away from both of us.". The concept is there, but maybe not as a single word. Sure, it might be convenient to be able to say "The object it broscht!", but it would just be syntactic sugar. Not a new concept. Same for french coworker. Not a new concept. "French p…

> Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.

In English — yes. In Ukrainian or Russian I just can’t omit this information without descending into soul-crashing legalize of “french person“.

The point being —- yes, its possible to say exactly that, but it would either be in a wrong register or too much of words where you could have just one.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#108

Post by [deleted] »

klipklop wrote: post #99
corey_moncure wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real roadblock with Japanese, in my opinion, is how kanji makes it impossible to absorb new vocabulary through casual reading. We naturally infer the meaning of words from their syntactical and semantic context, but with kanji there's no "name" to hang the inferred meaning to as you read. You can't pronounce it in your head, or out loud. Kanji make it possible to sometimes guess the meaning and pronunciation of a…

I agree and the only solution is to memorize a lot of kanji sadly. There are anki flashcard (spaced repetition) decks that can help drill the kanji into your head. Finding accessible reading material is challenging especially at the absolute beginner stage. In my japanese study I make sure I flashcard kanji every day. Without 300+ memorized reading even kids stuff will be hard. EDIT: Just saw that you are 4 years int…

[deleted]

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#109

Post by Clewza313 »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #51
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…

I always wondered why my Japanese friends taught me the form "X-san oshiri wa suteki desu" rather than "X-san wa oshiriga īdesu" which is what Google Translate suggests for the English version of the sentence in its most natural form.

"X has a good butt" doesn't sound terribly natural in English either. Also, X ga ii has a connotation of preferring X over other alternatives: X ka Y ka docchi ga ii? X ga ii.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#110

Post by Kranar »

sethammons wrote: post #21
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…

> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. Look up Navajo Code Talkers. Navajo was picked because it is so difficult to learn. I believe, at the time, only two people ever had managed to speak it who were not raised speaking it, or so an old history teacher said.

Sure there is a sense in which Navajo is really hard to learn, but that's the same sense in which it's very hard to learn Babylonian/Akkadian. It's hard because no one speaks it, there is no culture to immerse yourself in, no theater or movies you can watch, no music you can listen to, no novels you can read, no friends to speak with, etc etc...

The only way to learn Akkadian, or Navajo, is in a very artificial and academic manner, and learning things in that fashion tends to be very inefficient.

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