Reasons some languages are harder to learn • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#91

Post by tom_mellior » Sun, May 16, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #81

bradrn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

“Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the e…

> To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#92

Post by kashyapc » Sun, May 16, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my brain in interesting ways.

• Verb comes at the end ... except when not. A dead-simple example: the phrase "because it is difficult" is translated as omdat het moelijk is. The verb is is here. And omdat means "because" and it has a synonym called want (yes, it's a Dutch word). However, the-verb-comes-at-the-end rule doesn't apply to want, so the same Dutch phrase with want becomes: want het is moelijk (here, the verb sits in the 'normal' position). This subject/verb order can get really complex.

• Split verbs. The verb "invite" (uitnodig[en]) in the sentence "I invite you all" gets split in two: "in" and "vite"; and the first part goes to the end of the sentence: "I vite you all in" The sentence in Dutch reads: Ik nodig jullie allemaal uit (notice the verb split: nodig ... uit).

My frustration here is hilariously expressed by Mark Twain in his essay[1] on German. NOTE! — Before you take offence at the title[1], Mark Twain was an accomplished German speaker, he wrote this in a fun spirit!

"The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance [...]"

              • • •

And there are many other subtleties like "inversion", and usage of grammatical articles ("de" vs. "het") is arbitrary enough that there's an entire website[2] that helps you learn which article to use when.

[1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html — "The Awful German Language"

[2] https://www.welklidwoord.be/ — the website name means "which article is it?"

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#93

Post by tom_mellior » Sun, May 16, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #55

yosito wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Something that has stuck with me from a writing class in college (English) was that you should try to start and end sentences with important words. The professor emphasized that you shouldn't try too hard—readability is paramount, and you don't want to mangle the sentence—but where you can manage it, it makes writing more powerful. It sounds like Hungarian effectively built this into the language, which is super inte…

Yes, Hungarian has this kind of emphasis built in. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis for examples of how varying the word order can change the emphasis and thus effectively the meaning of a sentence.

Because it really affects the meaning, I also think that your parent's statement that "you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part" is not strong enough. You don't just "typically" do this. You do it because you must, because most permutations of a given set of words -- although perfectly grammatical, and referring to the same event -- are simply pragmatically incorrect in the context of the conversation or text.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#94

Post by lhorie » Sun, May 16, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

laurieg wrote: post #72

corey_moncure wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I empathise with your struggles with kanji, the language itself provides a solution: furigana. Japanese is wonderful for having a very close mapping between letters and sounds. These easy to read and pronounce letters are often written above kanji for young children. Admittedly, once children become teenagers they are expected to be able to read a good amount of everyday kanji words and the use of furigana fall…

My impression is that adult learners tend to struggle with Kanji even though furigana exists because age is a strong identity factor in Japanese culture and furigana is usually used in age-specific contexts.

So a Kanji that might be accompanied by furigana in a shounen manga (geared to kids) typically won't be accompanied by it in a seinen novel (geared towards young adults). Needless to say, adults don't necessarily want to read doraemon (a kids series) as beginner Japanese learners.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#95

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 16, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #74

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…

> 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 linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that? Well, but you can often translate incomplete German sentences to another SO…

[deleted]

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#96

Post by tom_mellior » Sun, May 16, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

kashyapc wrote: post #92

A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my…

Not sure if you know this, but both of the examples you mention are the same in German: "..., weil es schwierig ist" and "..., denn es ist schwierig" both mean "... because it's difficult", but "weil" and "denn" have different requirements for where the verb goes. And "ich lade euch ein" is also a mandatory splitting of "einladen", "to invite".

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#97

Post by hprotagonist » Sun, May 16, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

q-big wrote: post #54

MauranKilom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)

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…

friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms.

this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#98

Post by tragomaskhalos » Sun, May 16, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

A shout out to Sanskrit (for European learners at least) - its trick is to be complex on a number of orthogonal axes, with few obvious shortcuts for the learner:

- Writing system (devanagari) - conjunct consonants will keep tripping you up long after you've mastered the basics;

- Vocabulary - the hope of familiarity due to a common Indo-European vocabulary quickly dissipates;

- Noun morphology - approx twice as many forms per paradigm to learn compared to classical Greek, and many more paradigms;

- Sandhi - a difficulty so disruptive that it is often ignored initially, and the GCSE exam has a non-sandhi section, but must be mastered in order to read original texts

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#99

Post by klipklop » Sun, May 16, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

corey_moncure wrote: post #28

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…

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…

I agree and the only solution is to memorize a lot of kanji sadly.

There are anki flashcard (spaced repetition) decks that can help drill the kanji into your head.

Finding accessible reading material is challenging especially at the absolute beginner stage.

In my japanese study I make sure I flashcard kanji every day. Without 300+ memorized reading even kids stuff will be hard.

EDIT: Just saw that you are 4 years into studying. That is a bit demoralizing for me that you still can't read adult level stuff. I can only read stuff along the level of "Ayako rides the train", etc.

Re: Reasons some languages are harder to learn

#100

Post by lebuffon » Sun, May 16, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

Muromec wrote: post #48

lebuffon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In parts of the USA you can say "yonder object" and be understood that it is far away from both of us. It is archaic to most native speakers now.