Quote: (05-26-2016 08:20 AM)marty Wrote:
Quote: (05-23-2016 08:55 AM)redpillage Wrote:
On a different note, what's tougher to learn - Polish or Hungarian*? ;-) *I'd vote Hungarian
Your question doesn't make sense. I don't want to offend you, it's a common misconception. There are no "easy" and "hard" languages. Every language is easy and hard at the same time.
I don't want to offend you, but the question made sense to me. He didn't ask which was "easy", but which was "tougher to learn"; so you engage with a straw man from here on out, never answering what is a very simple question (Hungarian is "tougher").
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There are certain aspects that make a language look easy or hard.
"Certain aspects" (which you do not define or list); and "look", as in the differences of one language are only superficial, as opposed to really being more complex and different from English? The problem is, those differences are more than mere superficial ones: languages greatly differ in the amount of time needed to master, due to the specific language's complexity and distinction from one's native language. Here's a good general list of difficulty, compiled by people who actual specialize in secondary language acquisition, the Foreign Service Institute (US):
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com...difficulty
Note that the chart above, while useful, has one extra variable not mentioned, which supports my earlier answer two-fold, in that not all of the languages are taught to the same level of proficiency by FSI; that is, one needs a "3/3" in French to graduate, but only a "2/2" in Hungarian. If they taught Hungarian to the same proficiency as say, they teach to French, it would be at least one year extra of training: approximately two years of full time education for Hungarian, against only six months for French. Notice also that Hungarian has an "asterisk", showing it is of increased difficult to learn, yet Polish does not. (For definition of the number scale used in Diplomacy, see
here)
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The differences in difficulty between acquiring one language instea of another are real, and based on the differences between one's native tongue and the target language.
In any case, your argument is trying to split the baby, so to speak, by first pretending no language is 'easy' in the abstract, in which you make a metaphysical point that is true but irrelevant to human interest, but then must needs contradict yourself by saying there are "difficulties" present in learning languages. What "biggest difficulties" could there be since you said no language is "hard"?
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So Spanish could be considered "easier" for a native English speaker than Japanese. But the same doesn't apply to a native speaker of Korean. Japanese would be "easier" for him than Spanish because the writing system and grammar are much closer to his native language than Spanish.
Could be considered is a rather disingenuous use of passive voice, which you supplement with scare quotes over
"easier"; even though
easier is really what you mean, you cannot directly admit it because it contradicts your earlier "no language is easy or hard" dogma that you did not think of, but rather received from some "professor" who must have never had to learn more than one other language as an adult, but was trying to show how everyone is "equal".
Both Japanese and Korean are of
completely different, and rather isolated, language families. As for the written forms, Japanese uses three different writing systems, and Korean uses a fourth, a unique Alphabet of its own. How are they closely related again, compared to Spanish? And in the context of this thread, who cares of the ease of a Korean speaker learning Spanish?
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But other factors come into play, too. For certain English-speaking people Japanese would be "easier" to learn than Spanish, if he has no interest in said language but absolutely passionate about Japanese anime, manga, history or whatever.
Your "other factors" are just the motivations of the learner; but that was not an issue in play, and any question of willpower is present in any situation in which someone is attempting to achieve something.
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The other limiting belief I'd want people to get rid of is that a language is hard to learn. It isn't.
If only! John McWhorter, linguistics professor, said all languages will "beat you up" due to their relative complexity, number of words to learn, etc. He believed that Spanish will probably beat up an English speaker the least and is a good starter language. When I went from studying Latin to Ancient Greek, Latin immediately became easy, so much more complex was Greek. Russian phonology, on the other hand, makes the Attic dialect seem like Hawaiian.
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There are certainly millions of people (in most cases) who had acquired it as either their mother tongue or as a foreign language. You can do it, too. All languages are constructed using the same elements, there is nothing inherently difficult about it.
Secondary language acquisition is completely different, from a practical point of view, than native acquisition; and saying that "all languages are constructed of the same elements" is misleading, since
the devil is in the details: the difficulty of language acquisition is in the many months of (mostly memorizing) the "deets". It would be like claiming that since all languages have vocabulary and grammar, all must then require the same time and effort to learn, be they Algonquin, Italian, or Pirahã!
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If you spend years learning a language and you can't speak it fluently (I could write a long article about what that really means) or read a book written for adults, you are doing something wrong and it's not the language's fault.
Or you got bad advice on the internet, or tried to
learn it in a classroom setting, the way the idiotic credentialing "educational system" of the modern west attempts to teach it.
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Both are quite different from English but still European languages with Latin alphabets, so you should find a lot of things that are similar to English.
Hungary may be in Europe, but the Hungarian
Language is not Indo-European at all and is utterly different from them. The Magyars are of Asian origin as is their Language. It shows in the language itself:
description:
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WIKIPEDIA: Hungarian is an agglutinative language. It uses various affixes, mainly suffixes, to change a word's meaning and grammatical function. The suffixes are attached according to vowel harmony. The verbs are conjugated according to definiteness, tense, mood, person and number. The nouns can be declined with 18 case suffixes, most of which correspond to English prepositions. Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, which means that word order depends on the topic-comment structure of the sentence (e.g. what aspect is assumed to be known and what is emphasized).
This ain't High School Spanish.
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Surely it can't be much harder the other way around.
Usually it is; languages differ in their acquisition difficultly even considering only two languages in play. For instance, it has been observed that Russian speakers seem to pick up English faster than the inverse, probably because English is a
relatively simplified language. Ukrainians can understand Russian better than the inverse; etc.