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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#131

Post by 4bpp »

cletus wrote: post #52

I'm no expert but I find the hypothesis that all languages are basically a wash in terms of complexity... unconvincing. Some examples: 1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in lingui…

> Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted.

English also does not indicate pronunciation in the written form, and even more phonetic languages like German and Russian do not indicate stress (like замок (stress on a) = castle/замок (stress on o) = (e.g. door) lock).

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#132

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.

People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.

The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#133

Post by pseudalopex »

fpig wrote: post #127
pseudalopex wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same. Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.

How? They used gender to mean social gender. So did I.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#134

Post by meepmorp »

avidiax wrote: post #123
karatinversion wrote: post #119

The article states that the hardest thing to learn in a language are structural distinctions which one's native language does not make. Does anyone here have experience of such features that English has, coming from a different language?

Gendered pronouns Some of the verb tenses (e.g. past perfect continuous) don't exist in other languages. Verb inflection

What's your native language?

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#135

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

StavrosK wrote: post #130
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…

> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? I…

Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#136

Post by avidiax »

meepmorp wrote: post #134
avidiax wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gendered pronouns Some of the verb tenses (e.g. past perfect continuous) don't exist in other languages. Verb inflection

What's your native language?

I don't speak it, but this is relative to Cantonese.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#137

Post by hprotagonist »

pseudalopex wrote: post #126
hprotagonist wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage

Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.

except when context is not enough; i.e., when a grammatical gender form applies to nouns that describe persons with social genders.

And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#138

Post by krisoft »

yosito wrote: post #30
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…

> Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part by putting whatever is important in front. For example, if you ask a question, the question word that you expect an answer to always goes in front, "What should I wear?" and the answer should start with…

> you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses

Absolutely. So much so that in the Hungarian dub of Star Wars Yoda speaks normaly, like any other character. His vocal weirdness thing completely gets lost in the translation.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#139

Post by bradrn »

tom_mellior wrote: post #91
hprotagonist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the e…

> To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them. Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are…

I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list:

• Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (• Noun classifiers: commonly small (• Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting

• Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns

• Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on

• Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to

And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers.

(All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#140

Post by glandium »

lhorie wrote: post #87
greggman3 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ippon, nihon, and ippiki, nihiki are numbers with counter units added (different from hitori, futari). Counter units exist in English. It's common to say "I have 600 head of cattle" vs "I have 600 cattle". "600 head of cattle" is exactly the same in Japanese, "牛６００頭". The counters in Japanese are also often similar to the way we use the words in English. You don't say "I have 12 wines". You say "I have 12 bottles of…

I think the difference (and what makes Japanese harder in this case) is that you can't stumble into the correct number suffix for a large number of mundane nouns. For example, "12 bottles of wine" uses words that are used in other contexts ("bottles", "wine"), so if you mash these English words together, you get a proper sentence that doesn't sound weird. This is because you have to use "bottles" to provide context.…

Nitpicks follow. Tomatoes are counted in 個 (ko). The counter 本 for carrots and other things does not mean book in that context. The character just also means book, but has other meanings. Both magazines and pamphlets are counted in 冊(satsu) or 部(bu).
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