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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#111

Post by hrktb »

idlewords wrote: post #73

There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the…

Proficient French after one year is miraculous (German would be realistic for limited domains), it’s an unforgiving language in a lot of unfathomable ways, just matching gender and number in a phrase can be a nightmare

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#112

Post by Muromec »

aerovistae wrote: post #58
Muromec wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them Learning a language is definitely not easy and claiming that learning different languages is same level of effort is outright ridiculous. It’s not to say that one language itself is harder or easier compared to another, it’s a matter of it being different from the one you speak already. > Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sa…

Which language are you coming from? Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling. Edit: oh, Russian? Just wondering. Seen this come up a ton of times with Russian-speakers. For whatever reason it's an especially alien thing coming from that particular language. Anyway, definite / indefinite is helpful for clarifying…

> oh, Russian? Just wondering

Close enough — Ukrainian. In fact most languages on this planet don’t have articles.

> Why don't you need to make that distinction?

Because you just ydon’t, it’s perfectly clear from context most of time or even completely irrelevant. When you actually mean to make this distinction, you just add this/that/my/your or some/any/whatever, refer to specific object by name or any other way.

> … in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling

I mean I understand the thing, it encodes another redundant bit of information, which I just don’t have when I’m thinking about something.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#113

Post by schoen »

tayo42 wrote: post #104
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 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.

These are historically separate characters, and they're meaningful, but it's relatively unlikely that you can use them as a way of learning Japanese or Chinese characters that you don't already know (as opposed to maybe as a way of helping to remember ones that you do know).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

Also, in the Japanese case, they were borrowed from Chinese centuries ago and commonly given one pronunciation based on what the Chinese word sounded like to Japanese people at that time, and another based on the Japanese translation of the Chinese word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings

So yes, all of this is super-meaningful at an etymological level, but not transparent or reliable, and even trickier with Japanese rather than Chinese, because extra layers like kunyomi were added on top.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#114

Post by karatinversion »

tayo42 wrote: post #104
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 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.

Many kanji are composed of symbols that are also kanji in themselves; there are also radicals which are not kanji in isolation but appear in the same form in many characters.

That being said, the meaning (or meanings...) of a kanji cannot be derived from its parts, just like the meaning of an English word cannot be derived from the letters that appear in it.

Also, as a rule, the same character will be read differently in different contexts. E.g. 生きる _i_kiru "to live", 生まれる _uma_reru "to be born", 学生 gaku_sei_ "student".

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#115

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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…

>> 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).

Usually the same word is used for wood and tree, but we do have the word "ved", which refers specifically to the woody part of a plant, not the entirety of it. So you would call it "kerneved" for heartwood and "splintved" for sapwood.

It's not really in common everyday use, but very commonly used in the forestry and woodworking trades.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#116

Post by Muromec »

zasz wrote: post #106
yorwba wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not like they are better it’s just repeating everything a million times and talking the whole day without shame of making a mistake is more fun when you are 6.

The fact that vocabulary of a 6 year old child is much smaller and takes less time to remember of course helps

On the other hand, when you are adult , you can actually understand abstract concepts of grammar. It’s just too boring to repeat everything enough times to train your neural network to get it right without thinking.

What children are actually really good at are sounds of language.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#117

Post by pseudalopex »

q-big wrote: post #54
MauranKilom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)

Native German speaker: Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color…

It isn't coincidental most words for men and male animals are masculine and most words for women and female animals are feminine.

It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#118

Post by kaiwen1 »

Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#120

Post by fpig »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #34
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 as travel time I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars. For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square f…

How is such a definition more useful? It's certainly not more useful to me. If someone tried to sell me such a quantity of land, the first thing I'd ask would be what the actual size is in standard units. A universal, precisely defined system of units is superior because it works in any context, you just need to know the system.

Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.

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