Reasons some languages are harder to learn • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#171

Post by Tainnor » Mon, May 17, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

bradrn wrote: post #139

tom_mellior wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 posse…

linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately.

Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#172

Post by Tainnor » Mon, May 17, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

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…

I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times.

If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.

What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#173

Post by Tainnor » Mon, May 17, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

hassancf wrote: post #63

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…

“Watashi wa” is actually not the subject of the sentence in Japanese. It’s what is called a theme, as in: this is what we are going to talk about, the topic. Example: “Watashi ha hamburger desu”: With regard to “Watashi” = me/I (i.e. concerning “me”), “it is” a hamburger, Which ends up translated to: I am a hamburger. Or: For me, it will be a hamburger. So the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) introduces the theme or to…

> the “wa” particule (actually “ha”)

phonetically, it's "wa". The fact that it's written with the kana for "ha" is just a weird quirk of the writing system.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#174

Post by Tainnor » Mon, May 17, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

That's not "the Chomskyan hypothesis", it's a statement that can't be proved or falsified, since what "fundamentally the same" and "cosmetic differences" mean is really anyone's guess. Viewed from far enough, of course languages are essentially all the same, same as all living beings are essentially the same.

Nevertheless, I think that looking at any textbook in linguistic typology or just browsing WALS gives you quite an impression of how diverse languages can be, much more than you'd assume if you only speak a number of European languages.

> Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf.

Maybe you should look at the data about colour perception or, even more strikingly, spatial reasoning, which uses actual experiments conducted on speakers of different languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Guugu Yimithirr). The results can be interpreted differently, but to say that this is just "baseless speculation" is fundamentally wrong and doesn't agree with empirical data. There's a very strong version of Sapir-Whorf ("language constrains how you think") that probably no linguist takes seriously anymore, but there's still substantial debate about the weak form ("language influences how you think").

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#175

Post by kashyapc » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

tom_mellior wrote: post #96

kashyapc wrote: post #92

A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my…

Not sure if you know this, but both of the examples you mention are the same in German: "..., weil es schwierig ist " and "..., denn es ist schwierig" both mean "... because it's difficult", but "weil" and "denn" have different requirements for where the verb goes. And "ich lade euch ein " is also a mandatory splitting of "einladen", "to invite".

I did not know, but guessed as much, given that Dutch shares a lot of German grammatical structure. Thanks for the confirmation and the examples. :-)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#176

Post by yosito » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

tom_mellior wrote: post #170

krisoft wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is misleading. The translation could trivially make him use incorrect word orders. "Lost in translation" suggests that it would be difficult to make him speak in a quirky way, but that's not the case at all. The translator just couldn't be arsed. They couldn't even be arsed to give him a non-human voice. It's just a shoddy translation/dub, not a statement about the Hungarian language.

The thing is, Yoda doesn't simply use an "incorrect" word order. He uses a word order which emphasizes the focus of his sentence by putting it first. Since Hungarian already does this, there is nothing different in Hungarian about the way Yoda talks.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#177

Post by bradrn » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #169

bradrn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. I agree; GP didn’t choose the best examples for this. But there are languages like Yimas, Tiwi and Dyirbal for which word order truly is insignificant, so the point still stands.

Latin would be an example that more people might be familiar with. There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man…

You’re completely right — indeed, Latin would have been a much better example than the ones I chose. (But I had been reading about Yimas a few hours before posting and it was on my mind.)

> There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.

But how common is it to have the former without the latter? Most languages I read about have either both or neither.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#178

Post by kashyapc » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

thedogeye wrote: post #66

Dutch is the hardest language to learn because all of its speakers will just switch to English immediately when you try to speak to them.

It depends where you are, I guess. What you say is perhaps more true in the Netherlands, my experience in Belgium (particularly Flanders, where I live) has been different. People seem to appreciate my efforts and forgive my mistakes. Granted, this is only possible after you've gained a certain competency level where you don't make your interlocutor impatient, or they notice you making too much effort. And you only have three seconds to make that first impression. ;-)

I've taken two years of night classes, and gained a so-called 'C1' competency[1], but in practice I'm a moderate 'B2'. I strongly recommend taking long-term formal classes; makes life so much more pleasant. FWIW, I try to keep my Dutch relatively sharp by listening to the radio, reading the local newspaper, and importantly talking only in Dutch with some of my local friends, and in everyday interactions with the society.

An interesting (but more effortful) method to improve Dutch is: if you've read and enjoyed a book in English, read its equivalent Dutch translation, while having the English copy nearby.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#179

Post by bradrn » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:24 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #171

bradrn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 posse…

linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately. Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement . In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.

> linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately.

Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?

(My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.)

> Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement.

Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#180

Post by thealig » Mon, May 17, 2021, 11:41 AM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #154

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…

Doesn't Japanese have different words for numbers depending on the shape of the object (e.g., "one" for flat things, "one" for cylindrical things, etc...)? Some languages (Hindi, Japanese, Chinese) I can't even figure out where words begin/end (or sentences), even with a dictionary. (I'm looking at you, Japanese particle).

Hindi has got the "pipe" to end a sentence, and spaces between words.

eg. मैं पहले उससे नहीं मिला था |

(I have not met him before).