Quote: (11-29-2013 12:09 AM)Fathom Wrote:
I have learned both German and Mandarin, in addition to the two languages I acquired as a child. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a "difficult" or "easy" language. It's a very simple matter that comes down to a few things.
It is true that much of the so-called difficulty of a language is subjective, and often words like "difficult", "exotic" or "strange" are just substitutes for "whatever my dumb ass is not familiar with". However, there are elements of a language and/or script that can be counted as objectively more difficult or at least more complex than others.
These can include grammar complexity: for example, an inflected language with 12 cases and 3 grammatical numbers (let's say instead of just singular and plural, they also add a dual number) will objectively require more time to learn and more potential mistakes to be made than a language with an isolating grammar, no inflections, and no strict distinction between singular/plural. Irregularity can also make a language "objectively" more difficult. If each verb conjunction you learn, for example, has hundreds of irregular verbs where the rules you've just spent hours cramming into your head suddenly don't apply, then you're going to need a lot more time to get things right than you will with a language with a much more regular structure, or, again, a language with no inflections at all.
Similar can be said with regard to a script, where generally, the more characters there are to learn the more time it'll take you. Generally, I think the following types of scripts can be listed in the following order in terms of most difficult/complex to the easiest/simplest types of script.
Semantic/logographic: these are scripts where each character usually represents a whole word or part of a word rather than a sound. Compound words not withstanding, this typically means you'll often have to learn a new character with each new word (again, not counting compound words e.g. 交 jiao1 "to intersect", 通 tong1 "to pass", 交通 jiao1tong1 "traffic/communication"); often semantic scripts started as abstractions of crude image representations. Often they're also semanto-phonetic, meaning some characters will let you off easy by giving little hints as to their pronunciation e.g. Chinese 馬 "ma3" (horse), 罵 "ma4" (to scold, to curse at smn.), 媽 "ma1" ("mommy", "mama"), each with the "馬" ma/horse component, or 土 "tu3" (earth) and 吐 tu4 ("to vomit", again with the earth/tu character to the right), providing the pronunciation. Most of the time, however, you just have to learn the damn things (Japanese is even more of a dick, as it randomly changes the pronunciation of each Chinese character like a dozen times). These scripts usually take many years to gain any sort of proficiency or literacy in. As far as I know, the only semantic script used today is Chinese script (or "Kanji" and "Hanja" as the Japanese and Koreans call it, respectively). Cuneiform and Egyptian hierglyphs are probably older examples.
Syllabaries: scripts where every character represents a single syllable (no shit, you'd never guess that from the name, would you). These types of scripts usually emerge later from the semantic types mentioned above. Obviously they're much easier, as learning 50 to a couple hundred syllables you need to write a language is a hell of a lot easier than spending years upon years memorising thousands upon thousands of symbols. Well known examples of these are the two Japanese scripts hiragana/ひらがな and katakana/カタカナ (still used alongside a Japanese variant of Chinese characters -- so much for simplification, then). As far as I know, the Inuit language uses one of these as well, as did Ancient Persian, to name a few. Problem with these is that you've often got to find a way of getting around words with a lot of consonants mashed up together. How do you write a word like "Herbst" or "twelfths" using a script where syllables only end with "a/ka/ta/...", "i/ki/chi/...", "u/ku/tsu/...", "e/ke/te/..." and "o/ko/to/..."?
Alphabets By far the easiest and simplest. Any script where each character (in theory) represents one single sound. Instead of 50 to 200 syllables, you generally only need a couple dozen letters. Some scripts are more phonetic than others, with some spelling their words completely different from the way they pronounce them, while others write each word more or less exactly how it is pronounced (most scripts don't write every word exactly the way they pronounce them, though). Some of the simpler scripts, like Korean Hangeul/한글 (about 24 letters) and Chinese Zhuyin Fuhao ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ (37 letters, not to be confused with actual Chinese characters, used mainly on Taiwanese keyboards to type Chinese characters) are so simple you can learn them by yourself in less than a week or so; with others, like English-Roman letters (whose spelling makes no goddamn sense, whatsoever), you may have to spend years learning the individual spelling combination for each word (knight, night, now, know, no, though, cough, through, debt, comb, tomb, bomb...sorry, but what the fuck?).
Some types of scripts overlap here or use all three of these types in one. Point is, it's generally safe to say the more characters/rules you have to learn in a script/language the more time consuming and more "objectively" difficult it will be. The only real way around it is to be exposed to it and use it as much as possible. Sitting at a table and looking at flashcards is fine, but eventually you'll have to use it to get any good at it.