Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons some languages are harder to learn

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 215 posts

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#31

Post by lhorie »

tjpnz wrote: post #17
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…

>* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc. It also works for "I have" as in "Watashi wa korona da" or "I have Covid 19".

"be" and "have" can be quite quirky from language to language. For example, in portuguese, "I am healthy" can be translated to "eu sou saudavel" (meaning, the person lives a healthy lifestyle) or "eu estou saudavel" (meaning, the person is currently temporarily healthy). "I am 20 years old" translates to "eu tenho vinte anos" (or "I have 20 years of age")

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#32

Post by Robotbeat »

Have any of you learned any Malay/Indonesian? Fantastically easy. Purely phonetic, simple grammar, not tonal or anything else weird.

I seriously think, as an English speaker, it’s easier to learn than German or French or whatever, even though it has no relationship with European languages (unlike Hindi, which is part of the same Indo-European languages... in spite of the “Indo” prefix, there’s no relation). It helps that there are many loan words from English, but it seriously is an extremely easy to learn trade language.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#33

Post by 1cvmask »

hprotagonist wrote: post #16
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…

> 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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language

Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#34

Post by VoodooJuJu »

DennisP wrote: post #2

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed…

>distances were always expressed as travel time

I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars.

For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square feet or square cubits or square whatever it is. I have a domain-specific (farming) definition that actually communicates something more useful to me than arbitrary distance units.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#35

Post by slibhb »

sethammons wrote: post #21
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…

> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. Look up Navajo Code Talkers. Navajo was picked because it is so difficult to learn. I believe, at the time, only two people ever had managed to speak it who were not raised speaking it, or so an old history teacher said.

...or maybe because zero people outside the US (and not too many inside the US) speak Navajo.

If you're thrown in with a bunch of people who only speak Navajo, you're going to figure it out.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#36

Post by ben_w »

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)

This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter.

When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#37

Post by lebuffon »

Clewza313 wrote: post #14
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…

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: 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. The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obviou…

My own pet hypothesis is that it is not just language but our entire culture that creates an O/S for our brain in our early years.

"Restraining world view" seems harsh IMHO. Sounds a little elitist to me. But affecting world-view is possibly correct.

I suspect the plasticity of the brain can overcome some of the things that the original O/S load affects but it seems to require either a big emotional event or real effort by people to undo the initial programming, like being dropped into a new country where you don't know the language but must learn it to survive. We figure it out.

It does beg the question however what are we missing, as a result of our initial programming, that we might want to download an update for. :)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#38

Post by bradrn »

Robotbeat wrote: post #32

Have any of you learned any Malay/Indonesian? Fantastically easy. Purely phonetic, simple grammar, not tonal or anything else weird. I seriously think, as an English speaker, it’s easier to learn than German or French or whatever, even though it has no relationship with European languages (unlike Hindi, which is part of the same Indo-European languages... in spite of the “Indo” prefix, there’s no relation). It helps…

That’s basically because Standard Indonesian has been artificially Europeanicised, or so I hear:

> In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfil the functions of a "national language", it must have a "well-developed" system of grammar. Unfortunately, the only type of grammar that the language planners are usually familiar with is the Eurocentric grammar of European languages.Thus, Standard Malay / Indonesian has had a variety of linguistic features artificially grafted onto it that are reminiscent of European languages, including nominal number marking, verbal active and passive prefixes, and others.

— Gil 2001, Escaping Eurocentrism: Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning (https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#39

Post by kiscica »

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…

>Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.

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. Also, there are plenty of languages not usually characterized as "agglutinative"(e.g. Russian) in which affixes rather than word order are the primary determinant of the role that a word plays.

"Agglutinative" is really just a way of saying that meaning-bearing morphemes in the language tend to be more closely bound together: where in English, for example, we'd express "in our houses" with 3 words, whereas in Hungarian, these would form a single word "házainkban" (ház[a] "house", -i- plural, -nk "our," -ban "in"). We know they're separate words in English because other stuff can come between them ("in each of our big houses"); not so in Hungarian. (So arguably agglutinativity is more about constrained morpheme order than it is about free word order!)

>Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.

Of course context can radically alter meaning in English too; think of the waiter who says "which one of you is the hamburger?" ("Me, I'm the hamburger, and he's the Caesar salad.")

Almost all language classifications exist along a spectrum, or perhaps it'd be better to talk about a high-dimensional space. Different languages rely more or less on different strategies, but there are almost no linguistic features for which analogues can't be found in most languages.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#40

Post by tomcooks »

> In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over.

TL;DR: Anglo-saxon approach to foreign cultures.

Post reply on HN