https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/05/08/the-real-reasons-some-languages-are-harder-to-learn

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[20210508_BKD001_1]

Johnson
The real reasons some languages are harder to learn

They slice up the messy reality of life differently from your own

Books & artsMay 8th 2021 edition
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May 8th 2021

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WHEN CONSIDERING which foreign languages to study, some people shy
away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking
squiggles seem to symbolise the impenetrability of the language, the
difficulty of the task ahead.

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So it can be surprising to hear devotees of Russian say the alphabet
is the easiest part of the job. The Cyrillic script, like the Roman
one, has its origins in the Greek alphabet. As a result, some letters
look the same and are used near identically. Others look the same but
have different pronunciations, like the P in Cyrillic, which stands
for an r-sound. For Russian, that cuts the task down to only about 20
entirely new characters. These can comfortably be learned in a week,
and soon mastered to the point that they present little trouble. An
alphabet, in other words, is just an alphabet. A few tricks aside
(such as the occasional omission of vowels), other versions do what
the Roman one does: represent sounds.

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 another way of saying that languages slice up the
messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.

This is easily illustrated with concrete vocabulary. Sometimes the
meanings of foreign words and their English equivalents overlap but
don't match exactly. Danish, for instance, does not have a word for
"wood"; it just uses "tree" (trae). Or consider colours, which lie on
a spectrum that different languages segment differently. In Japanese,
ao traditionally refers to both green and blue. Some green items are
covered by a different word, midori, but ao applies to some
vegetables and green traffic lights (which, to make matters more
confusing, are slightly blueish in Japan). As a result, ao is rather
tricky to wield.

Life becomes tougher still when other languages make distinctions
that yours ignores. Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark
(sinii); foreigners can be baffled by what to call, say, a mid-blue
pair of jeans. Plenty of other "basic" English words are similarly
broken down in their foreign corollaries. "Wall" and "corner" seem
like simple concepts, until you learn languages that sensibly
distinguish between a city's walls and a bedroom's (German Mauer
versus Wand), interior corners and street corners (Spanish rincon and
esquina), and so on.

These problems are tractable on their own; you don't often have to
refer to a corner in casual conversation. But when other languages
make structural distinctions missing from your native tongue--often in
the operation of verbs--the mental effort seems never-ending. English
has verbs-of-all-work that seem straightforward enough until you try
to translate them. In languages like German, "put" is divided into
verbs that signify hanging, laying something flat and placing
something tall and thin. "Go" in Russian is a nightmare, with a suite
of verbs distinguishing walking and travelling by vehicle, one-way
and round trips, single and repeated journeys, and other niceties.
You can specify all these things in English if you want to; the
difference is that in Russian, you must.

Sometimes verb systems force choices on speakers not only for
individual verbs, but for all of them. Many English-speakers are
familiar with languages, such as French and Italian, which have two
different past tenses, for completed actions and for habitual or
continued ones. But verb systems get much more exotic than that.

"Evidential" languages require a verb ending that shows how the
speaker knows that the statement made is true. Turkish is one of
them; others, such as a cluster in the Amazon, have particularly
complex--and obligatory--evidentiality rules. Many languages mark
subjects and direct objects of sentences in distinct ways. But in
Basque, subjects of intransitive verbs (those that take no direct
object) look like direct objects themselves, while subjects of
transitive verbs get a special form. If Martin catches sight of
Diego, Basques say the equivalent of "Martinek sees Diego."

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. It is a bit like a personal trainer putting you
through entirely new exercises. You might have thought yourself fit
before, but the next day you will wake up sore in muscles you never
knew you had.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print
edition under the headline "Tongue-twisters"

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