Reasons some languages are harder to learn

Link for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language#Lexica...

> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

I remember reading about experiment that proved the opposite in regards to blue color —- speakers of languages with two basic colors for blue were differentiating one from another measurably faster.

No link to it unfortunately.

One of my former employers participated in a goodwill project to help Maasai tribes in Kenya build infrastructure like schools and wells.

The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest la vie" but explicitly time)

When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.

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 completely unfamiliar word, but even in those cases it's just a guess. You can never be certain. And in fact, since you can't be certain, it means you need an entirely separate type of dictionary to look up these words, a reverse-kanji dictionary where characters are categorized variously by the number of lines, the presence of certain components, and other schemes of native and non-native invention. This is because you don't have a name for the word you're looking at, whereas in almost every other language, the "spelling" of the word is the name.

About four years into Japanese, the same point where in my Spanish studies I was picking up Don Quixote and enjoying it, I was struggling to cope with young adult fiction. No, I was completely defeated by it. Every page was a slog and it was impossible to progress without turning it into a study session where I looked up the pronunciation of every single unfamiliar word and repeatedly practiced writing unfamiliar characters.

At some point it becomes simply impossible to progress without active, intentional study. The so-called "osmosis" hits a hard asymptote and it's because of kanji. Reading fiction for 12 year olds means pencil, paper, and two dictionaries to decipher it. Or it used to; I guess mobile apps that can OCR the text and look up words have made this process vastly easier for younger learners.

The article is paywalled so mea culpa if this point is addressed in there.

> 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 the word that answers that question, "The red dress, you should wear". Without delving into an entire Hungarian grammar lesson [because 1) I'm not qualified and 2) It would take several months], you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses. Yoda might say "Patience you must have my young Padawan." but he would never say "Must have you young Padawan patience." Why? Because he's putting emphasis on patience, so he starts the sentence with that, and then the rest of the sentence falls into an order behind that, but isn't random.

Also, while Finnish and Hungarian both have flexible word order and are both agglutinative, a language being agglutinative has little to do with word order and is about the fact that rather than using multiple words, you add prefixes and suffixes to words to add meaning. For example, "I play with my dog" is only two "words" in Hungarian: "kutyámmal játszom" which is basically "dog+my+with play+i", but because of the agglutinative nature, the boundary between what is a "word" and what is a sentence is a bit fuzzy and the words can get very long, for example: "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which roughly translates to "because of y'all's continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated".

Because of agglutination Hungarian also has a very fun tongue twister: "Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek tettese, te!" which basically means, "Did you do this pretend deed? You doer of pretend deeds, you!"