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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

#121

Post by Muromec »

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…

>I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load

It doesn’t for a native speaker, that’s the biggest magic. Same way English has a specific order in which adjectives have to be added, but you don’t stop and think which one of them is first.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#122

Post by hprotagonist »

pseudalopex wrote: post #117
q-big wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#123

Post by avidiax »

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

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#124

Post by fpig »

masklinn wrote: post #11
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.

> 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…

> I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me

That's a ridiculous statement.

When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance.

Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide".

That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context.

Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#125

Post by euske »

lhorie wrote: post #23
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…

> To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say "oishikatta". With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features, like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc),…

Counters are often depicted as a unique feature in Japanese but I think it originated in Chinese, as their use of counters are more systematic (e.g. instead of saying "this book", you can say "this [book-counter]" in Chinese, which is not allowed in Japanese "*この冊"). Also many onomatopoeic words exist in English, but they just exhibit in a different way (e.g. "glitter" or "slippery" sounds very onomatopoeic to me). Politeness is indeed an interesting feature, and I see a lot of Japanese natives (especially in their teens) struggle with it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese native learning Chinese.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#126

Post by pseudalopex »

hprotagonist wrote: post #122
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.

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.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#127

Post by fpig »

pseudalopex wrote: post #117
q-big wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#128

Post by randomraccoon »

kaiwen1 wrote: post #118

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."

Less descriptive, but I would think "Let's forage for food at low tide" would convey much the same meaning more succinctly. Still cool, thanks for sharing!

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#129

Post by StavrosK »

MauranKilom wrote: post #20
hprotagonist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

But it does have a gender, the neuter gender.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#130

Post by StavrosK »

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? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?

Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.

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