[HN Gopher] Reasons some languages are harder to learn
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Reasons some languages are harder to learn
Author : prostoalex
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-05-15 00:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| DennisP wrote:
| 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," just "flashed."
|
| Seems like it was Mojave, not sure.
| Jenk wrote:
| One of my former employers participated in a goodwill project
| to help Maasai tribes in Kenya build infrastructure like
| schools and wells.
|
| The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of
| their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how
| difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at
| the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a
| metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in
| time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual
| perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest
| la vie" but explicitly time)
|
| When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the
| goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of
| space and time
|
| Is this actually true? From a quick look at Wikipedia, it
| doesn't seem to be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
| DennisP wrote:
| My professors were pretty big Whorf fans, in general.
| masklinn wrote:
| There are a fair amount of langages which interestingly break
| western assumptions about langage logic and reasoning.
|
| A pretty famous example is Aboriginal Australian langages where
| directions are always absolute (cardinal), not relative. So in
| e.g. Guugu Yimithirr you'd tell a guest that the food is in the
| living room on the southern table, rather than e.g. the table
| to the left of the entrance, or the table in front of the
| balcony.
|
| In at least some of these langages, time is also cardinal:
| where most western cultures order timelines left to right, Kuuk
| Thaayorre speakers do so east to west.
|
| IIRC there are also cultures where time goes back to front
| (because you can see the past so it's obviously in front of
| you).
| xenocratus wrote:
| Link for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayo
| rre_language#Lexica...
| umvi wrote:
| 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.
| katmannthree wrote:
| Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is
| fairly common in some languages and even happens in English
| under some circumstances (generally in either very informal
| or highly technical communications). In contexts where
| inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping
| nonessential fillers.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
| masklinn wrote:
| > Seems like that language would be incompatible with a
| modern society and would only really work for a primitive
| one.
|
| I don't know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I
| rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating
| would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode.
|
| That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. "the grocery
| store is 5mn away", possibly with the addendum that it's on
| foot / by car / by bike if's not obvious from context.
| rendall wrote:
| > _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
| umvi wrote:
| Ok well whatever the opposite of "modern" is then. A
| language spoken only by Amazon tribes is not going to
| contain vocabulary for things related to technological
| advancement like computers
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >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.
| bradrn wrote:
| > 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...]
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > distances were always expressed in terms of travel time
|
| That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the
| US.
| anthk wrote:
| In Spain too. How long is X from there? About 10 minutes by
| car.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Facts - I honestly dont know how far apart cities on the US
| East Coast are, but I know exactly how long it would take to
| drive between them.
|
| I'd have to work backwards to figure out distance.
| Razengan wrote:
| + "for English natives."
|
| Because you didn't grow up with them.
| q-big wrote:
| Archive.is: https://archive.is/shK4D
| Clewza313 wrote:
| https://archive.is/shK4D
| kashyapc wrote:
| 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?"
| tom_mellior wrote:
| 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".
| RandomWorker wrote:
| 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 with a lot of thinking while you
| talk..example; I would generally make up a sentence like this..
| "hey why don't we go for a run, somewhere next Monday maybe
| around noon, just the two of us. I think there's a nice track
| close to my place." I though of the activity first then the time
| then the person. Generally that's how I come up with how to plan
| activities. In Chinese its subjects, time location, verb. I'm
| just beginning, but that has been the hardest part for my brain
| in particular.
| skripp wrote:
| >"hey why don't we go for a run, somewhere next Monday maybe
| around noon, just the two of us. I think there's a nice track
| close to my place."
|
| Ai !Xia Ge Xing Qi Wo Men Yi Qi Qu Pao Bu Ba . Bi Ru Xing Qi Yi
| Zhong Wu ,Jiu Wo Men Lia . Wo Jia Fu Jin Hao Xiang You Ge Ting
| Hao De Pao Dao .
|
| That's almost a direct translation that would work just fine in
| Chinese.
|
| > I though of the activity first then the time then the person.
| Generally that's how I come up with how to plan activities.
|
| Then you will be really happy to learn about the topic-comment
| structure in Chinese. It's exactly what you want!
|
| EDIT:
|
| If you really want to say "go running together" before "next
| week" then that's also fine:
|
| Ai !Wo Men Yi Qi Qu Pao Bu Ba . Bi Ru Xing Qi Yi Zhong Wu ,Jiu
| Wo Men Lia . Wo Jia Fu Jin Hao Xiang You Ge Ting Hao De Pao Dao
| .
| eloisius wrote:
| 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 Guo guo (past
| experience), or Wan wan (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."
| RandomWorker wrote:
| ahh! Very cool, thank you. These features at this point seem
| like something that can be locked into the look up table.
| Though, the exceptions rule book is getting pretty big. :P I
| guess that's where it gets complicated. The features approach
| kind of compliments my programming part of my brain. Which is
| also juggling between various features of programming
| languages and packages within those languages. It definitely
| takes time to lock in the vocab (I spend on average, measured
| on a weekly basis, between 30 min-1h30min a day learning
| Chinese). I'm just 7 months in my Chinese learning
| experience. In general, I continuously discover more and more
| depth. What's the amount of time you go back and redo some
| the earlier stuff you learn?
| eloisius wrote:
| Sounds like you've got the commitment to learn it. Are you
| self-studying, in class, studying in your home country or
| in a Chinese-speaking country?
|
| I spend 3 hours per day in class, 5 days a week. We learn
| about 10 new words and about 2-3 new grammatical structures
| per day. Outside of class it takes me about 5 hours per day
| to complete homework assignments and memorize vocab
| (including writing traditional characters). It's very brisk
| and I am barely able to keep up. Every day I feel like I am
| in a pressure cooker.
|
| Since my homework includes a lot of writing, I tend to peek
| back at previous chapters and continue to fold old grammar
| and vocab into my writing. Since I live in Taiwan I have
| plenty of opportunities to practice. I make it a point to
| try to put new grammar and words to use immediately while
| texting or talking with friends. Anytime I'm riding the
| metro or standing in line or something, I am always
| practicing flash cards in Pleco. I feel like occasional
| review wouldn't be enough for me, I actually have to put it
| to use to absorb it.
|
| Since I feel like my head is constantly just beneath the
| water in a perpetual state of drowning, I don't know if I'm
| in a position to offer advice, but if I'm offering advice
| I'd say forget the lookup table. Exceptions abound, and
| when you start getting into complements and directional
| phrases and stuff it's just too much. It's like trying to
| memorize the rules for the order of adjectives in English.
| It's easier to just practice usage and know when it sounds
| "off." Try to find people to practice talking with.
| magpi3 wrote:
| I am in my third year of Chinese. Ultimately I think it's best
| to figure out how to say things the Chinese way, and then just
| say that sentence a thousand times until it starts to feel more
| natural. If you have to think about it, you're gonna mash it
| up. That's my experience so far.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I think this is one of those things that teachers tend to make
| a big deal out of that doesn't matter too much in real life
| communication.
|
| It's not unusual in Chinese for someone to structure a
| meandering sentence like "let's go for a run ba, next Monday
| hao bu hao, around noon we can meet ne, just us two a, there is
| a nice track, it's my house nearby de yige, what do you think?"
|
| The sentence order is more important when you already have all
| the information up-front and you are trying to describe it to
| someone. So if you have three different runs and someone asks
| "which run?" then you might say "the just us two next Monday at
| noon my house nearby de track de nage run". Or drop everything
| but the last de: "us two next Monday at noon my house nearby
| track de". In reality, that's a bit of a weird thing to ever
| need to say, you'd probably just say "next Monday at noon de".
| Or "my house nearby track de". But if you did say "nage track
| de nage, my house nearby de nage track, next Monday at noon de,
| just the two of us going ba, nage run, you know ma", you would
| be understood too.
|
| Personally i think getting the tones right is the most
| important part of being understood in Chinese. Some Chinese may
| pretend not to understand you if you get the formal grammar
| "wrong", but that often comes across to me as a condescending
| form of ingrained elitism, because it doesn't happen when you
| talk to working class or poorly-educated Chinese. Much like in
| English, as long as the general pronunciation (including tones)
| is recognizable, you should be able to communicate your intent.
| It won't get you passing grades if you have to write an essay,
| but if you just want to talk to people on the street, I think
| focusing on tones and the small sounds that give contextual
| hints about what you're saying (ma, ne, ba, a/ya, nage/nege,
| yige, de etc) is a better investment.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| The history behind the proliferation of Indonesian is wild. As
| the government developed and Indonesia started to nationalize,
| choosing a common, sanctioned language was an obvious priority.
|
| And instead of working from the most commonly spoken
| language/dialect, they chose an obscure language that would
| offend few.
|
| I suspect one reason Indonesian is often considered the easiest
| language to learn derived from the fact that it was promptly
| (and recently) adopted by a diverse group of varying language
| speakers, and allowed to evolve to suit them all.
| bradrn wrote:
| 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/89
| acbd042982...)
| adamjb wrote:
| >Malay / Indonesian is one of the world's major languages,
| with up to two hundred million native speakers. Actually,
| though, it is not one language, or even two, but a family of
| languages with about as much internal diversity as the Slavic
| or Romance language families.
|
| My dad had a gig teaching Indonesian to members of the ADF in
| the lead up to to their peacekeeping mission in East Timor
| (INTERFET). Quite logically he taught them Timorese
| Indonesian, which got him in trouble because they wanted him
| to teach standard Indonesian.
| thedogeye wrote:
| Dutch is the hardest language to learn because all of its
| speakers will just switch to English immediately when you try to
| speak to them.
| laurieg wrote:
| 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.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| * Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages.
|
| * Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
|
| Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those
| that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language
| Structures (WALS):
|
| https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...
| lhorie wrote:
| > To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-
| ed"
|
| The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say
| "oishikatta".
|
| With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features,
| like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what
| you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori,
| futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or
| "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc), a plethora of
| onomatopoeias even for things that don't actually make any
| sounds - notoriously, "pika" (as in pikachu) is word for the
| "sound" of sparkling, politeness conjugations (e.g. "da" vs
| "desu" vs " de gozaimasu"), and many other things.
| greggman3 wrote:
| ippon, nihon, and ippiki, nihiki are numbers with counter
| units added (different from hitori, futari). Counter units
| exist in English. It's common to say "I have 600 head of
| cattle" vs "I have 600 cattle". "600 head of cattle" is
| exactly the same in Japanese, "Niu 600Tou ". The counters in
| Japanese are also often similar to the way we use the words
| in English. You don't say "I have 12 wines". You say "I have
| 12 bottles of wine". "12 bottles of wine" is very similar to
| "wain12Ben ". I think "5 loaves of bread" also fits. You'd
| never say "I have 5 breads". You have to say "I have 5 loaves
| of bread"
|
| I get there's a subtle difference but it's not that far off.
| We also say "I have 6 meters of rope". "meters" is the
| counting unit, which is the same concept as all the Japanese
| counting units.
|
| As for the onomatopoeias, at some point you get used to them
| and they feel like they fit and you can start to pick them up
| without having them explained. Even the ones that don't seem
| like the make a sound, start to make a sound, at least in my
| mind once I've internalized it.
|
| Not the same but in some sense similar, dogs don't say "bark"
| but with enough repetition many people perceive "bark"
| instead of the actual sound the small dog is making.
| lhorie wrote:
| I think the difference (and what makes Japanese harder in
| this case) is that you can't stumble into the correct
| number suffix for a large number of mundane nouns. For
| example, "12 bottles of wine" uses words that are used in
| other contexts ("bottles", "wine"), so if you mash these
| English words together, you get a proper sentence that
| doesn't sound weird. This is because you _have_ to use
| "bottles" to provide context. In Japanese, you have to know
| about the rule even to say "botoru wa ippon" ("one
| bottle"); "botoru wa ichi" stands out as broken Japanese as
| much as saying "me likes".
|
| There's nothing context-wise that suggests one is supposed
| to suffix "hon/pon" (lit. "Book") when you're counting
| carrots, while tomatoes are counted with "hitotsu,
| futatsu". The rule for flat things is to suffix "mai", but
| while postcards are "ichimai, nimai", magazines are
| "hitotsu, futatsu" and pamphlets are "isatsu, nisatsu".
| Having to remember these seemingly arbitrary rules as a
| Japanese learner is often considered a bewildering
| experience.
| corey_moncure wrote:
| 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 completely unfamiliar word, but even in
| those cases it's just a guess. You can never be certain. And in
| fact, since you can't be certain, it means you need an entirely
| separate type of dictionary to look up these words, a reverse-
| kanji dictionary where characters are categorized variously by
| the number of lines, the presence of certain components, and
| other schemes of native and non-native invention. This is
| because you don't have a name for the word you're looking at,
| whereas in almost every other language, the "spelling" of the
| word is the name.
|
| About four years into Japanese, the same point where in my
| Spanish studies I was picking up Don Quixote and enjoying it, I
| was struggling to cope with young adult fiction. No, I was
| completely defeated by it. Every page was a slog and it was
| impossible to progress without turning it into a study session
| where I looked up the pronunciation of every single unfamiliar
| word and repeatedly practiced writing unfamiliar characters.
|
| At some point it becomes simply impossible to progress without
| active, intentional study. The so-called "osmosis" hits a hard
| asymptote and it's because of kanji. Reading fiction for 12
| year olds means pencil, paper, and two dictionaries to decipher
| it. Or it used to; I guess mobile apps that can OCR the text
| and look up words have made this process vastly easier for
| younger learners.
|
| The article is paywalled so mea culpa if this point is
| addressed in there.
| klipklop wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| usrusr wrote:
| To be fair, in the English language mentally attaching an
| unknown sequence of characters to some work-in-progress
| pronunciation guess can also lead to some serious hilarity.
|
| I suspect that people who grew up with a non-alphabetic
| script have better "geometry abstraction capabilities"
| trained into their brains that would make them noticeably
| more performant in a test involving fantasy glyph
| memorization/reidentification.
| laurieg wrote:
| 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 falls away apart from for unusual
| readings or less common words, and pretty much entirely for
| texts aimed at adults. Still, if you're content with quite
| simple content you can pick up a wonderful amount of language
| by osmosis with the helping hand of furigana.
| lhorie wrote:
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I always wondered, does Kanji not have a way of breaking
| things down? I noticed some complex Kanji characters seem to
| made up of smaller simpler characters. I always wondered if
| it was a coincidence or not.
| schoen wrote:
| These are historically separate characters, and they're
| meaningful, but it's relatively unlikely that you can use
| them as a way of learning Japanese or Chinese characters
| that you don't already know (as opposed to maybe as a way
| of helping to remember ones that you do know).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificat
| i...
|
| Also, in the Japanese case, they were borrowed from Chinese
| centuries ago and commonly given one pronunciation based on
| what the Chinese word _sounded like to Japanese people at
| that time_ , and another based on _the Japanese translation
| of the Chinese word_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings
|
| So yes, all of this is super-meaningful at an etymological
| level, but not transparent or reliable, and even trickier
| with Japanese rather than Chinese, because extra layers
| like kunyomi were added on top.
| karatinversion wrote:
| Many kanji are composed of symbols that are also kanji in
| themselves; there are also radicals which are not kanji in
| isolation but appear in the same form in many characters.
|
| That being said, the meaning (or meanings...) of a kanji
| cannot be derived from its parts, just like the meaning of
| an English word cannot be derived from the letters that
| appear in it.
|
| Also, as a rule, the same character will be read
| differently in different contexts. E.g. Sheng kiru _i_kiru
| "to live", Sheng mareru _uma_reru "to be born", Xue Sheng
| gaku_sei_ "student".
| usrusr wrote:
| My mental model is that all human languages try to distribute
| some extra redundancy over the duration of the uttering to make
| transmission errors recoverable. Unfortunately, none of those
| checksum patterns are easy when you have to learn them as a
| secondary language.
| hassancf wrote:
| "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.
| yosito wrote:
| > 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
| the word that answers that question, "The red dress, you should
| wear". Without delving into an entire Hungarian grammar lesson
| [because 1) I'm not qualified and 2) It would take several
| months], you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word
| order that Yoda uses. Yoda might say "Patience you must have my
| young Padawan." but he would never say "Must have you young
| Padawan patience." Why? Because he's putting emphasis on
| patience, so he starts the sentence with that, and then the
| rest of the sentence falls into an order behind that, but isn't
| random.
|
| Also, while Finnish and Hungarian both have flexible word order
| and are both agglutinative, a language being agglutinative has
| little to do with word order and is about the fact that rather
| than using multiple words, you add prefixes and suffixes to
| words to add meaning. For example, "I play with my dog" is only
| two "words" in Hungarian: "kutyammal jatszom" which is
| basically "dog+my+with play+i", but because of the
| agglutinative nature, the boundary between what is a "word" and
| what is a sentence is a bit fuzzy and the words can get very
| long, for example:
| "megszentsegtelenithetetlensegeskedeseitekert" which roughly
| translates to "because of y'all's continued behavior as if you
| could not be desecrated".
|
| Because of agglutination Hungarian also has a very fun tongue
| twister: "Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek
| tettese, te!" which basically means, "Did you do this pretend
| deed? You doer of pretend deeds, you!"
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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 interesting!
| tom_mellior wrote:
| 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.
| kiscica wrote:
| >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 "hazainkban" (haz[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.
| bradrn wrote:
| > 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.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > 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...
| 1cvmask wrote:
| 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.
| bradrn wrote:
| > 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!
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _"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 extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard
| to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them._
|
| https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-
| worlds...
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > 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.wikipe
| dia.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.)
| MauranKilom wrote:
| young lady = (das) Madchen
|
| turnip = (die) Rube
|
| (for those wondering)
| ben_w wrote:
| 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", ,,Hundchen" = "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".
| liversage wrote:
| 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.
| q-big wrote:
| 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 charge" of quarks).
| hprotagonist wrote:
| 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.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >* 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".
| ilammy wrote:
| 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.
| lhorie wrote:
| "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")
| schoen wrote:
| Similarly, in Portuguese you can "have" or "be with"
| various nouns reflecting physical, mental, or emotional
| states which would be expressed with adjectives in English,
| like "I have hunger", "I have fear", "I'm with fear", "I'm
| with jealousy", "I'm with yearning for him".
|
| I know German also uses "have" this way quite a lot (at
| least for hunger, thirst, fear, and desire, probably for
| many other things).
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I always wondered why my Japanese friends taught me the form
| "X-san oshiri wa suteki desu" rather than "X-san wa oshiriga
| idesu" which is what Google Translate suggests for the English
| version of the sentence in its most natural form.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| "X has a good butt" doesn't sound terribly natural in English
| either. Also, _X ga ii_ has a connotation of preferring X
| over other alternatives: _X ka Y ka docchi ga ii? X ga ii_.
| dheera wrote:
| The reverse is true as well, i.e. English has plenty of things
| that are alien to other languages.
|
| Conjugating verbs, inflection, capitalization, and plural forms
| of nouns are alien to at least Chinese and probably many other
| Sino-Tibetan languages.
|
| The lack of phoenetic/spelling consistency is alien to many
| European languages, especially Spanish, which is remarkably
| consistent.
| tomcooks wrote:
| > 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| 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 another way of saying that
| languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly
| different ways.
|
| It does not follow that languages having different features
| results in "slicing up reality differently". That's only true if
| you believe some form of Sapir-Worf.
|
| > Danish, for instance, does not have a word for "wood"; it just
| uses "tree" (trae).
|
| Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word
| for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he
| likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes
| are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's
| not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in
| understanding (no kidding).
|
| > Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii)
|
| Great, and in English dark blue might be "navy".
|
| 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. If you're thrown into a situation where you need to
| acquire a language, odds are you'll figure it out.
|
| This topic (differences between natural languages) always ends up
| as amateur sociology like "foreigners see things differently". It
| might be true but there's no evidence for it. Or all the evidence
| is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. To
| me, it all sounds like "inuits have 87 words for snow".
| sethammons wrote:
| > 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| ...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.
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.
| Kranar wrote:
| Sure there is a sense in which Navajo is really hard to
| learn, but that's the same sense in which it's very hard to
| learn Babylonian/Akkadian. It's hard because no one speaks
| it, there is no culture to immerse yourself in, no theater or
| movies you can watch, no music you can listen to, no novels
| you can read, no friends to speak with, etc etc...
|
| The only way to learn Akkadian, or Navajo, is in a very
| artificial and academic manner, and learning things in that
| fashion tends to be very inefficient.
| asiachick wrote:
| you can actually test in various ways if one language is harder
| to learn than another. For example you ask children to ask for
| a cheeseburger. If they say "I can has cheeseburger" they are
| not as far along as "May I have a cheeseburger".
|
| you then sample lots of kids and you find that in some language
| kids speak the language in the "proper" way much soon than
| other languages.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish...
| yorwba wrote:
| However, the things that make a language hard to learn for
| kids aren't necessarily the same that make it hard for
| adults.
|
| The article you link is about acquisition of past tense
| formation in Danish, where some verbs have a past tense
| ending in -ede, like bade/badede (bathe/bathed) and some
| others end in -te, like kalde/kaldte (call/called) and yet
| others are completely different. Those verb endings are
| frequently reduced in speech, which makes them sound similar
| or identical. In the study, children who used more different
| reduced forms were more likely to use a -ede form for a verb
| that usually goes with -te.
|
| An adult learning a language is more likely to learn the
| "proper" form in a controlled environment first and then
| learn to slur their verb endings later when they reach a
| level where they can have casual conversations with native
| speakers. Compare also English "would of" vs. "would've,"
| which native speakers seem to confuse a lot, although they're
| obviously different to someone who first encountered those
| words in writing.
| zasz wrote:
| Aren't children supposed to be better at learning new
| languages than adults, though? There's supposed to be a
| critical period where language acquisition is much easier.
| Muromec wrote:
| > 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.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Which language are you coming from? Vaguely wondering if I
| can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a
| way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less
| puzzling.
|
| Edit: oh, Russian? Just wondering. Seen this come up a ton of
| times with Russian-speakers. For whatever reason it's an
| especially alien thing coming from that particular language.
|
| Anyway, definite / indefinite is helpful for clarifying
| whether we're referring to a specific item or a generic item
| (i.e. any instance of that type of item, doesn't matter which
| one.)
|
| Hmm, now that I think about it, it seems implicitly clear to
| me and that limits my ability to creatively explain its
| utility.
|
| Maybe I should turn this around instead-- could you help me
| understand why that isn't a way of categorizing things that's
| employed by Russian-speakers? Why don't you need to make that
| distinction?
| Muromec wrote:
| > oh, Russian? Just wondering
|
| Close enough -- Ukrainian. In fact most languages on this
| planet don't have articles.
|
| > Why don't you need to make that distinction?
|
| Because you just ydon't, it's perfectly clear from context
| most of time or even completely irrelevant. When you
| actually mean to make this distinction, you just add
| this/that/my/your or some/any/whatever, refer to specific
| object by name or any other way.
|
| > ... in a way that makes its utility to English speakers
| seem less puzzling
|
| I mean I _understand_ the thing, it encodes another
| redundant bit of information, which I just don't have when
| I'm thinking about something.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame
| definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to
| English speakers seem less puzzling.
|
| First, it must be understood that English really many nouns
| tagged with a determiner; which can be articles (the X,
| a/an X), possessive or demonstrative "pronouns" (his/her X,
| this/that X, etc.), or others. (The nouns English doesn't
| want tagged are proper nouns, or nouns that talk about a
| type of X rather than an instance of X).
|
| _The X_ means that the question "which X?" is
| possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer expects the
| listener/reader to know/care the answer to "which X?".
|
| _A /an X_ means that the question "which X?" is
| possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer does not
| expect the listener/reader to know/care about the answer to
| "which X?".
|
| It's important to understand that whether to use _the_
| versus _a /an_ is controlled completely by the point of
| view and understanding of the speaker/writer. If the
| speaker/writer is setting an expectation the
| listener/reader can't meet, that's a sign to ask questions,
| pretend you know, or remember and wait until later for
| clarification.
|
| I know Russian doesn't have articles but I'm not sure why
| they're "needed" in English versus Russian.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| 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.
| slibhb wrote:
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| >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.
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| >> Danish, for instance, does not have a word for "wood"; it
| just uses "tree" (trae).
|
| > Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the
| word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we
| say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and
| "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how
| weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context
| is important in understanding (no kidding).
|
| Usually the same word is used for wood and tree, but we do have
| the word "ved", which refers specifically to the woody part of
| a plant, not the entirety of it. So you would call it
| "kerneved" for heartwood and "splintved" for sapwood.
|
| It's not really in common everyday use, but very commonly used
| in the forestry and woodworking trades.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| 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 obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one
| meaning of many. For example, in Japanese _handoru_ (handle)
| refers exclusively to a car 's steering wheel, _kanningu_
| (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a _beisu-appu_ (base up)
| is a salary increase.
| Muromec wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I remember reading about experiment that proved the opposite
| in regards to blue color --- speakers of languages with two
| basic colors for blue were differentiating one from another
| measurably faster.
|
| No link to it unfortunately.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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 idea is that English speakers identify light and dark as
| a variation of the _same thing_.
|
| Are red and pink the same colour or different colours? What
| if you call "pink" something like "light red" instead? Are
| they now classified in your brain as two different things or
| the same one.
|
| Is dark blue and light blue two colours or one? Does "light
| blue" become a different colour in a person's brain if it's
| label as _azure_ as in Italian ( _etc_ )?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color)
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| lebuffon wrote:
| 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. :)
| Muromec wrote:
| > 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
| lebuffon wrote:
| 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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Look at that tree over there.
|
| I worked with a French person once. They were very good
| at their job.
| skripp wrote:
| > Ability to say that certain objects is far from both
| speaker and listener for example.
|
| Non-native here. I don't quite follow. How about: "The
| object is far away from both of us.".
|
| The concept is there, but maybe not as a single word.
| Sure, it might be convenient to be able to say "The
| object it broscht!", but it would just be syntactic
| sugar. Not a new concept.
|
| Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.
|
| "French person", "Frenchie", "Cheese eating surrender
| monkey"
|
| Latter two might be SLIGHTLY inappropriate in a working
| environment.
| Muromec wrote:
| > Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.
|
| In English -- yes. In Ukrainian or Russian I just can't
| omit this information without descending into soul-
| crashing legalize of "french person".
|
| The point being --- yes, its possible to say exactly
| that, but it would either be in a wrong register or too
| much of words where you could have just one.
| slibhb wrote:
| 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.
| drstewart wrote:
| I think saying all differences are "cosmetic" undersells them a
| bit.
|
| Sure, having different words for numbers related to different
| objects doesn't fundamentally break the world, but to someone
| raised with a concept of a number being a number universally,
| it's a pretty big conceptual change.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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 it has been found that
| different language take different amounts of time to become
| proficient in (on average).
|
| * Danish, Dutch, French, Norwegian, etc, take 24 weeks for an
| English speaker to learn
|
| * German takes 30 weeks
|
| * Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili take 36w
|
| * Albanian, Bengali, Bosnian, Polish, Urdu, etc, take 44w
|
| * Arabic, Japanenese, Korean, Cant/Mand Chinese take 88w
|
| See:
|
| * https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Service_Institute
| jghn wrote:
| 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.
| idlewords wrote:
| There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is
| so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot
| mess of a writing system:
|
| http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
|
| My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that
| language had such a high attrition rate among college learners.
| It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language
| without learning much of the grammatical apparatus of noun
| declensions, verbs of motion, and the perfective/imperfective
| distinction, all of which are profoundly alien to an English
| speaker.
|
| So Russian departments end up teaching the material three times
| through--first years are overwhelmed and try to retain what they
| can, in second year you are expected to absorb the material, and
| in third year you're supposed to internalize it. That means you
| study for three years to reach a level of proficiency other
| students gain in one.
|
| Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are
| almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run,
| crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you
| stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb
| inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an
| obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known
| only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its
| own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a
| vehicle?
|
| Meanwhile, fellow students learning German or French can speak
| proficiently after one year and start reading literature after
| two. It's a bitter pill.
| hrktb wrote:
| Proficient French after one year is miraculous (German would be
| realistic for limited domains), it's an unforgiving language in
| a lot of unfathomable ways, just matching gender and number in
| a phrase can be a nightmare
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/shK4D
| morekozhambu wrote:
| naasto vidyte bhaavo naabhaavo vidyte stH | ubhyorpi
| dRsstto'ntstvnyostttvdrshibhiH ||
| lazyant wrote:
| Non-paywalled https://outline.com/PsFJw2
| cletus wrote:
| 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 linguistics. Front loading of
| information? Something like that?
|
| 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht"
| (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For
| reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht".
|
| 3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where
| words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg
| in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite
| article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive
| load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's
| common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from
| the verb conjugation.
|
| 3. Writing system. Asian languages are the poster children for
| complex writing systems that often don't delineate word
| boundaries and may have thousands of characters. I think I read
| once that in Taiwan in high school they have competitions for how
| quickly you can find a word in a dictionary. Oh and don't tonal
| Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form
| (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of
| this where vowels are typically omitted.
|
| 4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep
| that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just
| seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be
| native English bias.
|
| I find it fascinating that through a variety of means a lot of
| this linguistic cruft disappeared between Old English and Middle
| English.
|
| English really is the red-headed stepchild of languages. In my
| experience, no one is the least bit concerned loan words in
| English whereas in French there's a Ministry dedicated to coming
| up with French words for foreign concepts to keep French
| "French".
|
| This is why I find the hypothesis that languages constrain
| cultures so interesting. If your mindset has shifted to
| preserving your language (in essence, to resist change), how can
| that not impact your culture?
| q-big wrote:
| > 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau
| gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until
| the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane
| "umgebraucht".
|
| "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" -> "I have needed my wife".
|
| brauchen -> to need
|
| bringen -> to bring; Partizip II: gebracht
|
| umbringen -> to kill; Partzip II: umgebracht
|
| There is no word "umbrauchen", of which the fictional Partizip
| II would be "umgebraucht".
| cletus wrote:
| My bad. I meant (um)gebracht.
| wingerlang wrote:
| > Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone
| in the written form (genuine question)?
|
| At least in Thai, you can easily know the tone from the written
| words.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| > 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 SOV language easily.
|
| > 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau
| gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until
| the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane
| "umgebraucht".
|
| Well, it's just a different mental model of incomplete
| sentences / information. With SOV word order you just infer
| that the S and O have a relationship and make the nature of the
| relationship more precise after.
|
| > 3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements
| where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even
| article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the
| indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have
| a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it
| seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when
| it's obvious from the verb conjugation.
|
| As you mention, what complex morphology gives can allow someone
| to waive finding a precise word in a language without that
| morphology. It's not like these distinctions don't add
| information on their own, however arbitrary they are.
|
| > 3. Writing system.
|
| I agree that Chinese character-based scripts cognitively heavy,
| but this is a characteristic of the script, not the language.
|
| > 4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep
| that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just
| seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be
| native English bias.
|
| write vs. writing, writer, rightly, etc.
|
| turn up, turnaround, turner, etc.
|
| There's more nuance to what where these counterpoints are
| coming from, but I think I've given some food for thought. The
| points you mention look to me very typical of someone learning
| a more inflected language.
|
| But consider also the flipside of learning Classical Chinese,
| which fails to make many distinctions that many languages make.
| You might, say, struggle with the ambiguity: is the action
| meant to be in the present, past or future? But perhaps that is
| not important with respect to the passage (and the language has
| tools to signify it where important). And consider also that in
| languages like English where tense needs to be signified, in
| narrative contexts where tense is not important, we
| conventionally use the past, but may use the present (historic
| present) for stylistic effect.
|
| Note on Classical Chinese: of course, it survives only in
| writing, and beyond Old Chinese it is a separate language from
| the vernacular, and it is not very friendly to being spoken in
| the pronunciation of in the modern Chinese languages. But books
| like the Mencius were dialogues that presumably recorded Old
| Chinese.
| [deleted]
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| 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
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