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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#201

Post by StavrosK »

idlewords wrote: post #195
StavrosK wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's best to tackle this answer in stages: 1. There are separate categories of "to go" in Russian and other Slavic languages for walking on foot, strolling, climbing, running, crawling, flying, going by vehicle, swimming and probably a few more I'm forgetting. The method of locomotion is baked into the verb. You can read some examples here if the nerdery interests you: http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_moti…

Hm, yeah, that's a lot of context, thanks for the explanation! I imagine it would be hell to translate from Russian to something like English, because you lose all that effortless nuance and have to make it explicit in a way that sounds more forced.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#202

Post by idlewords »

StavrosK wrote: post #201
idlewords wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's best to tackle this answer in stages: 1. There are separate categories of "to go" in Russian and other Slavic languages for walking on foot, strolling, climbing, running, crawling, flying, going by vehicle, swimming and probably a few more I'm forgetting. The method of locomotion is baked into the verb. You can read some examples here if the nerdery interests you: http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_moti…

Hm, yeah, that's a lot of context, thanks for the explanation! I imagine it would be hell to translate from Russian to something like English, because you lose all that effortless nuance and have to make it explicit in a way that sounds more forced.

I've come to believe in conservation of nuance where translation goes, where it's just always hell in either direction. Mad respect for translators.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#203

Post by bradrn »

Tainnor wrote: post #199
bradrn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php ), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology. > Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment. Ooh, I wrote a whole series of…

I wrote my master's thesis about split intransitivity.[1] You can find some resources in the bibliography, although I'm sure there's tons more. I'll have to check your essays too! edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis. [1] https://github.com/Fryie/thesis

Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right.

(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#204

Post by bradrn »

Tainnor wrote: post #200
bradrn wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in English, while you can rearrange constituents up to a point … I would argue that it can often sound slightly archaic This I don’t agree with.† The rest of your post, however, I agree with entirely, and how I forgot the examples you mention I’m not entirely sure. [† see what I did there?]

archaic might have been a bad choice of words, although it probably depends on the exact sentence. I do think it sounds more formal, though, I think I'd be less likely to hear your first sentence in everyday conversation. Then again, I'm not a native speaker of English.

My native-speaker intuition tells me the opposite — I’m probably more likely to use such constructions in colloquial speech than in formal written text. My second sentence does seem more formal to me though.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#205

Post by Tainnor »

bradrn wrote: post #203
Tainnor wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote my master's thesis about split intransitivity.[1] You can find some resources in the bibliography, although I'm sure there's tons more. I'll have to check your essays too! edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis. [1] https://github.com/Fryie/thesis

Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right. (And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )

Well, if you check my thesis (and can make sense of the convoluted sentences), a big part of it was wading through the mess of terminology and also quite imprecise definitions. I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour, at least if we want to use them meaningfully for cross-linguistic comparison. That's why I attempted a definition more centred on Lazard and Haspelmath.

It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#206

Post by bradrn »

Tainnor wrote: post #205
bradrn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right. (And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )

Well, if you check my thesis (and can make sense of the convoluted sentences), a big part of it was wading through the mess of terminology and also quite imprecise definitions. I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour, at least if we want to use them meaningfully for cross-linguistic comparison. That's why I attempted a defi…

> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour

Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.

[0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi...

> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.

Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#207

Post by deeteecee »

glandium wrote: post #157
deeteecee wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd stick to the common ones, you don't need to learn them all.

Whether you want it or not, you'll end up encountering them, not necessarily with enough context to tell you what they are. Example from regular news: 1000軒停電.1000世帯停電.1000戸停電.(and they all point to something slightly different) Of course, it depends what you use Japanese for.

Yes, it does depend. My recommendation would still be to follow up with what I said and master the common ones used for basic conversation first. Then work on the rarer ones that pop up in the news or when you're renting apartments or whatever.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#208

Post by CRConrad »

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…

What a lot of different consonants! (T, d, k, s = 5.) Finnish does it with three: "Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. Koko kokkoko kokoon? Koko kokko kokoon."

https://www.puhutaan-suomea.net/kokoo-koko-kokko-kokoon/

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#209

Post by CRConrad »

dragonwriter wrote: post #132
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…

> 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 lik…

And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#210

Post by CRConrad »

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 will bump off my wife. Off my wife I will bump. Indeed, I will bump my wife off.[1]

The English, she has also the verbs splittable, non?[2]

___

[1] For the record: No I won't.

[2] Pardon, watching Poirot on TV.

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