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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

#61

Post by ilammy »

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".

That's more about contextuality. You can articulate "watashi wa korona wo kakatteimasu" or might even be fine with "watashi korona" when speaking with suitable intonation.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#62

Post by HDMI_Cable »

Muromec wrote: post #41
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 Sa…

It really depends. If you spend time in a country, only speaking in its language and reading newspapers in it, you could learn a language in like 3 months. This is especially true if you know another language and already have the mental model for learning them.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#63

Post by hassancf »

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…

“Watashi wa” is actually not the subject of the sentence in Japanese. It’s what is called a theme, as in: this is what we are going to talk about, the topic.

Example: “Watashi ha hamburger desu”: With regard to “Watashi” = me/I (i.e. concerning “me”), “it is” a hamburger,

Which ends up translated to:

I am a hamburger. Or: For me, it will be a hamburger.

So the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) introduces the theme or topic in the sentence, rather than the subject. Very different from English.

Reference: theme and rheme in Japanese.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#64

Post by anthk »

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…

In English too. Mesa in English is a plateau, while in Spanish it's just a table (furniture), while sierra is not just a mountain range, but a carpenter's saw too.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#65

Post by jghn »

throw0101a wrote: post #56
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. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school. The US State department has the Foreign Service Institute, which is its primary training centre. With-in there they have the School of Language Studies, which teaches more than seventy languages, and over the years/decades i…

Different amounts of time for a native English speaker. For instance, languages like Dutch are going to be easier than Korean simply because English is a close cousin of Dutch.

Many of the lower ranked languages on this list are interrelated via proto-indoeuropean and many of the higher ranked languages are not.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#67

Post by anthk »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #15
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 in terms of travel time That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.

In Spain too. How long is X from there? About 10 minutes by car.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#68

Post by slibhb »

Muromec wrote: post #41
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 Sa…

Believe me, native English speakers do not think about the definite-ness of a word. We just knows that "the" comes before some things and not others and it sounds odd when someone gets it wrong.

My argument is that these differences are cosmetic, not that they don't exist. Also, Sapir-Worf is not at all referring to minor grammatical issues of this kind.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#69

Post by laurieg »

I broadly like the idea of "slicing up reality differently". Usually when this it comes up the focus is on grammar, but I think this explains the relative ease/difficulty of learning close/distant languages quite well. You can argue about whether grammar or vocabulary acquisition is more difficult but it's certainly true that there's just more of the latter.

One way I look at this to pick a word with many quite different meanings. "Set" can mean a group of things or something to turn hard (like a jelly) along with plenty of other things. Since European languages tend to share ancestors you aren't surprised that these multiple distinct meanings are shared. But with distance languages you have to learn a completely different word for each particular meaning. In fact, I'm sometimes surprised when two different meanings line up between English and Japanese, as I'm so used to them being completely separate.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#70

Post by eloisius »

RandomWorker wrote: post #7

When I started learning Chinese the grammar really made think hard about what I needed to say first. Then put it in the right grammar order, then translate the words, which is like a inverted 3D lookup table, sounds/tone/meaning. Memorizing the lookup table which people say is the hard part is actually the easy bit. It’s the restructuring of my thoughts to fit in the grammar. I find English I get you can get away wit…

I’m about a year in studying Mandarin and feel the same way. All the “exotic” features people say make it hard to learn, like tones and writing characters, aren’t that hard to remember and use. English let’s us have a lot of flexibility when it comes to putting prepositions like “last week” before or after the main clause in a sentence. Maybe Mandarin too has this flexibility and I just haven’t gotten that far in my studies, but it sure feels like I can’t make up what I’m saying as I say it.

Aside from that, I’d say some features of the language are quite nice, and feel like they were created with human experience in mind more than rules of logic. For example, it relies on specialized complements, like 過 guò (past experience), or 完 wán (finished something), to modify the action of a clause. Unlike English which uses the same past-tense grammar to describe that I ate something in the past and a tree fell in the woods. There are even complements to express the result perceiving with ones senses “I looked and saw”, and the result of cognition “I looked and understood.”

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