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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

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Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#41

Post by Muromec »

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

Learning a language is definitely not easy and claiming that learning different languages is same level of effort is outright ridiculous.

It’s not to say that one language itself is harder or easier compared to another, it’s a matter of it being different from the one you speak already.

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

I would totally blame Sapir-Worf for all the articles I consistently omit or mixup when writing in English. Something being definite or indefinite is just not a category that I use when thinking about things and it’s existence still makes almost zero sense after more than a decade of practicing languages that have it.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#42

Post by JackFr »

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.

I believe Navajo was picked because it was obscure and in particular US intelligence knew the whereabouts every academic who had studied or published it.

Other Native American languages which might have been studied by European professors and students of linguistics had to be rejected.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#43

Post by bradrn »

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…

> we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time.

This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expression of time. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy

[EDIT: Whoops, didn’t realise MaxBarraclough already mentioned this, sorry…]

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#44

Post by imtringued »

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.

I'm pretty sure if you were to hold a gun against my head until I get fluent in french you'll leave me alone far earlier than if I had to learn an Asian language with Chinese characters.

Learning Chinese characters is just busywork, that's all there is to it. It might be easy but it will still take forever.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#45

Post by slibhb »

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…

If you say that languages are how people slice up the world, and this makes different languages harder or easier to learn, you're committing to some form of Sapir-Worf, however mild. "I have the English way of slicing up the world and it's hard to adjust to the Japanese way of slicing up the world".

An alternate explanation is, as I argued, that the differences between human languages are superficial and the underlying (and more interesting) concept of language is the same for everyone. If that's true, the differences between languages are minutia.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#46

Post by bradrn »

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…

> several-hundred-gender languages

I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#47

Post by liversage »

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)

Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#48

Post by Muromec »

lebuffon wrote: post #37
Clewza313 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

> It does beg the question however what are we missing

Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.

Or ability to mention a French coworker in your speech without explicitly mentioning their gender and the whole singular the all together

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#49

Post by bradrn »

kiscica wrote: post #39
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 "a…

> 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.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#50

Post by rendall »

umvi wrote: post #8
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…

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.

> like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one

As a heads-up, contemporary thought is that no culture is "primitive". Primitive implies lesser

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