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Difficulty of different languages

I think one can use Yod, Aleph, Waw and He to indicate vowels in Hebrew (and presumably Phoenician) when it isn't obvious. Hence why the Greeks turned them into Iota, Alpha, Ypsilon and Eta.
Seemingly the Greeks indicated vowels in this way before the Phoenicians got round to it. Wiki.
Phoenician was written with the Phoenician script, an abjad (consonantary) originating from the Proto-Canaanite script that also became the basis for the Greek and hence the Latin alphabets. The Western Mediterranean (Punic) area form of the script gradually developed somewhat different and more cursive letter shapes; in the 3rd century BC, it also began to exhibit a tendency to mark the presence of vowels, especially final vowels, with an aleph or sometimes an ayin.​

The Phoenician alphabet was in use from c 1,000 BCE, and had been borrowed by the Greeks long before the 3rd century BCE, so the chronology suggests that the use of these letters as vowels was invented by the Greeks and then borrowed back by the Phoenicians. That view would seem to be supported by the notice that this was a feature particularly of the Punic (Carthaginian) version of the script.
 
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I think one can use Yod, Aleph, Waw and He to indicate vowels in Hebrew (and presumably Phoenician) when it isn't obvious. Hence why the Greeks turned them into Iota, Alpha, Ypsilon and Eta.
Close. Phoenician & Aramaic (which is just a name for the form that Phoenician letters had evolved into in a later era) only did the dual-use thing with three letters: waw/wau, yod/yud, and ʔalif/ʔaleph. These equate to modern standard Greek upsilon, iota, and alpha. I don't think the Phoenicians were using them that way yet when the Greeks made full-time vowels out of them, but users of the Phoenician/Aramaic alphabet would make the same associations later. Either way, though, those three were it for the Semitic languages.

The Greeks still had three or four more vowel sounds that those don't account for, and based their symbols for them on letters which the Phoenician alphabet retained as consonants. One of those was ʕayn, on which the Greeks based their letters for two sounds that would be lumped together as "o" in most languages: a "big" one and a "little" one, O-mega and O-micron.

The history of the remaining two letters was made a bit messy by the fact that not all Greek dialects agreed on whether "h" counts as a distinct sound or how many e-like sounds needed to be distinguished. Phoenician had two h-like sounds, which both seem to have had an e-like effect on the vowels after them, to outsiders like the Greeks, whether that was a distinct phoneme in Phoenician or not. The lighter one, equivalent to our "h", was represented by Phoenician he, which the Greeks adopted as epsilon, which was always a vowel (and gave us our E).

The heavier or more "emphatic" one, pronounced with some constriction in the throat or back of the mouth, was represented by Phoenician ḥet. The Greeks did adopt this as the letter eta (which looks like our H), but not necessarily as a vowel at first. Some dialects used it for the sound "h", while others used it for a second e-like vowel. Eventually the latter became standard (after the Italians had gotten the alphabet from somebody who had been doing the former). With eta as a vowel, the sound "h" was treated not as an independent sound but as a way of breathing for vowels and "r"s, indicated by only a diacritical mark called a "dasia" above the affected real letter. In Phoenician it simply remained nothing but a consonant, never used as a vowel.

All of that about the Greek alphabet happened long before anybody speaking any Semitic language ever thought of using either he or ḥet as a vowel, and before the ancestor of any modern Semitic language even had a vowel sound like "e" to represent with it, with no input from or effect on any contemporary Semitic language.

All modern Semitic alphabets are descended from the Aramaic one, so they all inherited the dual uses for the three letters I named above, and no more. But Hebrew later evolved to have not three but five vowel sounds. One letter, the original waw/wau, thus ended up as a consonant (which has shifted from "w" to "v" so now the letter's name is "vav") and two distinct vowels: both "u" and "o". The other new vowel sound, "e", wasn't around when the Greeks were deciding what to do with their epsilon and eta. Now that it is here, it's perceived as sounding like it's somewhere between the sounds "a" and "i", and it may have evolved from both in different settings, so it's inconsistently represented by either alef, yod, or a new fourth part-time vowel letter, he... which is the evolutionary equivalent of epsilon, but was not used this way til epsilon had been around for ages.
 
German has an even wider choice of prepositions when you want to express where you go to. If a country name has an article, you use in, e.g.
"Wir fahren in die Schweiz" (Switzerland)
and otherwise you use nach, e.g.
"Wir fahren nach Österreich" (Austria)
with one single exception: Wir fahren gegen Engeland. :boxedin:

For non-geographical locations, it's zu, e.g., "Wir fahren zum Bahnhof" (train station), except when it's an, e.g., "Wir fahren an den Strand" (the beach). See this page for many more examples.

Just started to refresh my German learnt a while ago at school. From memory Bahnhof is masculine so it is der Bahnhof, but using the preposition "zu" changes der to dem. But you don't say zu dem, you say zum instead - quite simple:confused:
 
Close. Phoenician & Aramaic (which is just a name for the form that Phoenician letters had evolved into in a later era) only did the dual-use thing with three letters: waw/wau, yod/yud, and ʔalif/ʔaleph. These equate to modern standard Greek upsilon, iota, and alpha. I don't think the Phoenicians were using them that way yet when the Greeks made full-time vowels out of them, but users of the Phoenician/Aramaic alphabet would make the same associations later. Either way, though, those three were it for the Semitic languages.

The Greeks still had three or four more vowel sounds that those don't account for, and based their symbols for them on letters which the Phoenician alphabet retained as consonants. One of those was ʕayn, on which the Greeks based their letters for two sounds that would be lumped together as "o" in most languages: a "big" one and a "little" one, O-mega and O-micron.

The history of the remaining two letters was made a bit messy by the fact that not all Greek dialects agreed on whether "h" counts as a distinct sound or how many e-like sounds needed to be distinguished. Phoenician had two h-like sounds, which both seem to have had an e-like effect on the vowels after them, to outsiders like the Greeks, whether that was a distinct phoneme in Phoenician or not. The lighter one, equivalent to our "h", was represented by Phoenician he, which the Greeks adopted as epsilon, which was always a vowel (and gave us our E).

The heavier or more "emphatic" one, pronounced with some constriction in the throat or back of the mouth, was represented by Phoenician ḥet. The Greeks did adopt this as the letter eta (which looks like our H), but not necessarily as a vowel at first. Some dialects used it for the sound "h", while others used it for a second e-like vowel. Eventually the latter became standard (after the Italians had gotten the alphabet from somebody who had been doing the former). With eta as a vowel, the sound "h" was treated not as an independent sound but as a way of breathing for vowels and "r"s, indicated by only a diacritical mark called a "dasia" above the affected real letter. In Phoenician it simply remained nothing but a consonant, never used as a vowel.

All of that about the Greek alphabet happened long before anybody speaking any Semitic language ever thought of using either he or ḥet as a vowel, and before the ancestor of any modern Semitic language even had a vowel sound like "e" to represent with it, with no input from or effect on any contemporary Semitic language.

All modern Semitic alphabets are descended from the Aramaic one, so they all inherited the dual uses for the three letters I named above, and no more. But Hebrew later evolved to have not three but five vowel sounds. One letter, the original waw/wau, thus ended up as a consonant (which has shifted from "w" to "v" so now the letter's name is "vav") and two distinct vowels: both "u" and "o". The other new vowel sound, "e", wasn't around when the Greeks were deciding what to do with their epsilon and eta. Now that it is here, it's perceived as sounding like it's somewhere between the sounds "a" and "i", and it may have evolved from both in different settings, so it's inconsistently represented by either alef, yod, or a new fourth part-time vowel letter, he... which is the evolutionary equivalent of epsilon, but was not used this way til epsilon had been around for ages.

Thanks!
 
I spent a year learning Esperanto on my own, and 4 years learning Spanish in school. My spoken and received Spanish is pretty hopeless, but I'm still quite capable with Esperanto :)

The major advantage I had when learning Esperanto wasn't the simplicity of the language, but that everyone who learns Esperanto acquires it as a second or third language during adulthood. The community taught me how to learn a foreign language (some of the advice I received is reflected here), making Esperanto a stepping stone to learning virtually any other language in the future.


Yes, learning how to learn. That's one of the great advantages of Esperanto. I'm amazed at how negative (often quite so) people are with respect to Esperanto. It is a great second language. Not having to memorize exceptions to grammar rules gets you up to speed much faster and allows you to start speaking much faster. Once you learn to become somewhat comfortable in a foreign language and start thinking in a foreign language rather than translating, learning other languages becomes easier.
 
Bringing the thing about vowels in Semitic alphabets back to the subject of difficulty of learning other languages...

You could say that it works better for the languages that do it that way because of some trait(s) about the spoken languages that make distinguishing vowels less important, so it's only a problem when such an alphabet is adopted by an unrelated language which doesn't share those traits, like Urdu and Persian using the Arabic alphabet. But it looks like it would complicate learning even for someone going from one such alphabet to another, because they'll have random disagreements on how to spell even exactly the same word! Consider the name of a plant called "colocasia" in English (same plant as is also called "taro"). That name has been passed around from language to language all over Eurasia relatively recently, so it hasn't had much time for the sounds to change:

English: colocasia
Russian: колоказия "kolokaziʸa"
Gujarati: કોલોકેસીયાનો "kolokesīyāno"

But look at what happens to it when it hits the two most common modern Semitic alphabets:

Hebrew: קולקס "qwlqs"
Arabic: قلقاس "qlqas"

One shows the first vowel and drops the third, while the other shows the third and drops the first! The letter-to-letter equivalencies between these alphabets are pretty simple & straightforward, but they still don't help you convert one spelling to the other even for words with the same pronunciation.
 
Bringing the thing about vowels in Semitic alphabets back to the subject of difficulty of learning other languages...

You could say that it works better for the languages that do it that way because of some trait(s) about the spoken languages that make distinguishing vowels less important, so it's only a problem when such an alphabet is adopted by an unrelated language which doesn't share those traits, like Urdu and Persian using the Arabic alphabet. But it looks like it would complicate learning even for someone going from one such alphabet to another, because they'll have random disagreements on how to spell even exactly the same word! Consider the name of a plant called "colocasia" in English (same plant as is also called "taro"). That name has been passed around from language to language all over Eurasia relatively recently, so it hasn't had much time for the sounds to change:

English: colocasia
Russian: колоказия "kolokaziʸa"
Gujarati: કોલોકેસીયાનો "kolokesīyāno"

But look at what happens to it when it hits the two most common modern Semitic alphabets:

Hebrew: קולקס "qwlqs"
Arabic: قلقاس "qlqas"

One shows the first vowel and drops the third, while the other shows the third and drops the first! The letter-to-letter equivalencies between these alphabets are pretty simple & straightforward, but they still don't help you convert one spelling to the other even for words with the same pronunciation.

Very interesting! (Incidentally, I had never heard of Gujarati until now...) I have a very limited knowledge of any of the individual languages (I can painstakingly read Hebrew, Cyrillic and Greek letters out loud, and have extremely rudimentary knowledge of vocabulary and grammar) but no real understanding or reading ability, just an aptitude to pick things up by osmosis and general interest in linguistics, history and language, and I always enjoy explanations and examples from people with real knowledge. (An acquantaince who frequents a bar I sometimes hang out at is a professor emeritus in German; I often talk her into holding private lectures on various minutiae of German linguistics... And I don't even know much German beyond being maybe able to read Der Spiegel with a dictionary; I'm not sure how I even picked that much up.)
 
I spent a year learning Esperanto on my own, and 4 years learning Spanish in school. My spoken and received Spanish is pretty hopeless, but I'm still quite capable with Esperanto :)

Do you have regular conversations with other Esperanto-speakers?

I'd be interested in learning it but there are other languages I'd like to pursue too - I have to speak some Spanish for my job but luckily it is usually in the present tense.

ETA: It blows me away that young schoolchildren in China learn written Mandarin (which is also written Cantonese?). Even simplified characters are fairly complex. I've always wondered what this does to their neural circuitry.
 
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Looks interesting, but I'm not able to access anything more than the title without paying for it.

Have you got a subscription there?

No, bought the 'real' magazine old school fashion and read it:D. I coo that a few times per year whenever I get to a magazine retailer that sells Sci-Am.

Basically it examines the learning of language specific sounds by infants. They learn these sounds well before being able to speak. They ales do much better when these sounds are learned by watching adults produce them (iirc they all but ignore playback of recorded speech). Exposing infants to persons speaking more than one language also aids them in learning those languages but, again iirc, it must be kept up and babies will concentrate on the most spoken language if multiples are spoken around them.

Not sure if I still have the issue, might have gone to recycle( I get taken to task for hoarding magazines :D )
 
Do you have regular conversations with other Esperanto-speakers?

I'd be interested in learning it but there are other languages I'd like to pursue too - I have to speak some Spanish for my job but luckily it is usually in the present tense.

ETA: It blows me away that young schoolchildren in China learn written Mandarin (which is also written Cantonese?). Even simplified characters are fairly complex. I've always wondered what this does to their neural circuitry.

Yes early Chinese Emperor (which one escapes me) codified the written language across his domain. Not a bad idea at all at the time as it allowed ease of communication with his provinces.
 
Do you have regular conversations with other Esperanto-speakers?

I'd be interested in learning it but there are other languages I'd like to pursue too - I have to speak some Spanish for my job but luckily it is usually in the present tense.

ETA: It blows me away that young schoolchildren in China learn written Mandarin (which is also written Cantonese?). Even simplified characters are fairly complex. I've always wondered what this does to their neural circuitry.

Written Chinese is indeed unified across all the different Chinese languages. I worked with Chinese people (scientists), and a lot of them tend to 'write' characters in the palm of their hand while speaking. For another Chinese speaker and reader, this helps to understand what's meant when the speaker is not proficient enough in the language. For us westerners, it was just an amusing perk.
 
The closer the foreign language is to your native language, the easier it is to learn.

A native English speaker would presumably have the least difficulty with Frisian, German, etc... .moderate difficulty with Latinate languages since so much of our vocabulary is derived from that (although not the grammer or conjugations) which is at least part of why American schools teach Latin, Spanish, and French predominately.

Many Asiatic languages are not based on phonems and, as was mentioned, are tonal, which is very difficult for an English speaker to even hear let alone learn.

That all said, it depends on the person. I am a native English speaker. I am reasonably proficient with Latin and close to fluent in Mexican Spanish. I can read French and Italian okay but I can hardly understand a word of it spoken. I know people who can teach themselves a foreign language in a few weeks and others who can't correctly pronounce "jalapeño".
 
But look at what happens to it when it hits the two most common modern Semitic alphabets:

Hebrew: קולקס "qwlqs"
Arabic: قلقاس "qlqas"

One shows the first vowel and drops the third, while the other shows the third and drops the first! The letter-to-letter equivalencies between these alphabets are pretty simple & straightforward, but they still don't help you convert one spelling to the other even for words with the same pronunciation.

One of the difficulties, as I'm sure you know, is that both Hebrew and Arabic use "templates" of consonants that are overset onto a vowel pattern to determine case etc... so for them to take a foreign word that doesn't fit that pattern requires juggling and shifting of sounds. The more modern the word, the more jiggling it required, since so many modern developments came from English speaking cultures.
 
Language fascinates me.

As some of you know, I speak Scottish Gaelic. I could probably put my mind to Irish (it sounds to me like a drunken Geordie does to a southern Englishman) if I put a few weeks work into it but have no great reason to do so. There are some words of Welsh that make sense but again no particular need to look into it. They would be closest in structure to my mother tongue.

I am functionally bilingual in English (language of education and business, ya'see) and have to say I didn't find it particularly hard, although I did learn at an early age and was immersed to a much greater degree than many others here will have been with foreign languages.

Although I have French to something about CSYS level (Scots of a certain age will know what I mean), I found German (which I took to O-Grade level) a little beat easier because of the glutteral sounds were easier to pronounce and there were more crossover words (to my mind, at least) from English. I used to work with a Fresian stonemason and he could string together some sentences which almost made sense for the English monoglot, but other times it was a mad Dutch-style Low Saxon mix that defied easy analysis.

But really, not of you use nearly enough consonants. I mean, it's nearly illegible.
 
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Category III: 88 weeks (2200 class hours)
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Japanese is more difficult than the others.

Not in the opinion of St Francis Xavier who reported in 1552 following a visit to Japan, that
Japan is a very large empire entirely composed of islands. One language is spoken throughout, not very difficult to learn.​

Did he try to learn Japanese writing? That's reportedly very difficult.

This caught my attention. I did one year of Japanese (32 hours in total) before I discovered I couldn't learn any language because I am kinda brain-damaged and I suck at it.

I studied nothing hence I learnt almost nothing, but I found Japanese to be as easy as English -and English is really easy, that's why I've gotten a grasp to it in the long run-. Indeed, Japanese taught me word order is important to certain languages, and later I found it to be important in English.

Japanese was easy to me because it has no conjugations, no articles, no plurals, no articulation at all, almost no tenses, moods are not really moods, and all the grammar rules were pretty much brand new to me, so they are easier to learn than those of languages that are deceptively similar -they aren't- like French, or deceivingly simple like English.

I had no problem learning:

ichi (one)
hitotsu tsukue (one table)
ippiki tobako (one cigarette)
(I forgot the one I should use for a piece of paper, but it was more than 30 years ago)

no tremendous problems learning how to use particles; no hard problems learning how to nest verbs in a phrase (the main verb is the last word in the sentence, that's why Japanese people listen with inexpressive visages to react with a burst when the last word is said -and are such good listeners too-; you don't know what's it all about until the last word is pronounced)

This for instance:

tsukue no ue ni nani ga arimasu (table reverse-of on position something -there- be ----> there's something on the table)
tsukue no ue ni nani ga arimasu ka (table reverse-of on position something -there- be, question ----> is there anything on the table?)

About writing, we had to learn hiragana and katakana -the syllabic alphabets- pretty quickly as we used books for 6-year-old natives. I had sworn it would be impossible to me in the end to learn to read and write in Japanese but I gave it a try anyway. I was reading and writing with certain fluency three weeks later (like pedalling the bicycle fast enough to avoid falling with it), and my case wasn't the exception but the rule!

Not that kanji -the "ideographic" alphabet- is easy, but it's not as difficult as Chinese, as Japanese has a limited number of syllables -81 if I'm not mistaken- a word with 4 syllables is written as two kanjis representing two words with two syllables each, no matter the meanings are not related. Chinese also works a bit that way, but it's much trickier. That's why the meme of "in Chinese the symbol for crisis is the same symbol for opportunity ... wise millenarian chaps" and they forget it is also the symbol for 5 or 6 more banal words. Regarding Japanese, there is an exam for foreigners: the exam of "the thousand kanji". If you pass it you get a scholarship in Japan. At least, it was during those ancient times of the mullet, around 1983 or 84.

That's why

Category III: 88 weeks (2200 class hours)
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Japanese is more difficult than the others.

makes me think, what on the antipodes were the author talking about?
 
I used to work with a Fresian stonemason and he could string together some sentences which almost made sense for the English monoglot, but other times it was a mad Dutch-style Low Saxon mix that defied easy analysis.

But really, not of you use nearly enough consonants. I mean, it's nearly illegible.

I'd love to learn Frisian...it's just not available to me in rural Northern NY. I don't know why but it fascinates me.

I agree totally with the not enough consonants thing. Have you ever heard Hawaiian?? Look it up! So many vowels!
 
As an English speaker, there are some sounds in Czech that I just. can't. make. However, when I apologized in Prague for not being able to pronounce a word correctly, the lady I was speaking to seemed to indicate that there was some disagreement about exactly how to pronounce it anyway! (For Czech speakers, the sound I have trouble with is that rzhch sound). I think you have to grow up hearing certain sounds, or you won't be able to parse them successfully enough to recreate them.

I've been around a fair number of Navajo speakers, and never could get a handle on pronunciation there.
 
what on the antipodes were the author talking about?

Well, either I've misunderstood your post, or you've got some error in your understanding of Japanese. For example:

Japanese was easy to me because it has no conjugations

Are you speaking of verb conjugations? Because Japanese has tons of them!


I had no problem learning:

ichi (one)
hitotsu tsukue (one table)
ippiki tobako (one cigarette)
(I forgot the one I should use for a piece of paper, but it was more than 30 years ago)

This is actually one of the difficult aspects of Chinese, and especially Japanese. You need to remember a different counter for each noun, and also often different numbers to count shoe objects. For example: 20 years old.

no tremendous problems learning how to use particles

I think your experience here is different than that of most English speakers.

Not that kanji -the "ideographic" alphabet- is easy,

I know it's a technicality, but very small portion of the kanji are ideographic, and the kanji do not constitute an alphabet.

but it's not as difficult as Chinese, as Japanese has a limited number of syllables

I found it to be more difficult to learn the kanji in Japanese than in Chinese, since the Japanese have so many more way to read a single kanji.

if I'm not mistaken- a word with 4 syllables is written as two kanjis representing two words with two syllables each

I think you are mistaken here, as there is no simple relation between the number of kanji and the number of syllables in Japanese words!

Finally, you've mentioned thing about the differences in masculine and feminine speech in Japanese, and nothing about the various levels of formality which I think add quite a bit of additional difficulty.

Overall, I though you did a pretty good writeup, but thought I'd mention these possible misunderstandings. I'd also disagree that English is an easy language, having taught many people English as their second language. There is a lot of source material to draw upon, which is great for a learner, but there are also lots of exceptions and quirks. Then again, being from Argentina, you may well have had to learn English as a second language, whereas I never have. ;)
 
The Phoenician alphabet was in use from c 1,000 BCE, and had been borrowed by the Greeks long before the 3rd century BCE, so the chronology suggests that the use of these letters as vowels was invented by the Greeks and then borrowed back by the Phoenicians. That view would seem to be supported by the notice that this was a feature particularly of the Punic (Carthaginian) version of the script.

I'd always thought the Greeks had Phonetic writing long before 1000 BCE - but I didn't know how far back. Do you have any links for this, I'd love to read some more.

Thanks for posting.
 
I'd always thought the Greeks had Phonetic writing long before 1000 BCE - but I didn't know how far back. Do you have any links for this, I'd love to read some more.

Thanks for posting.
There was a phonetic script in the Bronze Age. But it was a syllabary, not an alphabet. With the catastrophic collapse of Greek and Cretan Bronze Age civilisation, writing seems to have disappeared entirely from the Greek world until the adoption of the "Punic" alphabet centuries later. The story of the decipherment of the early script, achieved in the mid 1950s, is fascinating.

A version of this syllabary remained in use in Cyprus until the fourth century BCE. It was deciphered in the 1870s.
 
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Overall, I though you did a pretty good writeup, but thought I'd mention these possible misunderstandings. I'd also disagree that English is an easy language, having taught many people English as their second language. There is a lot of source material to draw upon, which is great for a learner, but there are also lots of exceptions and quirks. Then again, being from Argentina, you may well have had to learn English as a second language, whereas I never have. ;)

Thanks for the corrections. They were just 32 hours 32 years ago so my knowledge is as deep and precise as anyone can expect. About conjugations I found

Watashi/Boku .... desu
Anata .............. desu
Watashi tachi .... desu
Anata tachi ...... desu

not very challenging when compared with a fully articulated language like Spanish.

Of course, as you say, the level of complexity can be a bit overwhelming once you leave the beginners level. We were warned that a basic level of Japanese was understood and appreciated by the natives but once one starts to get near their level the number of mistakes and ambiguities increases and communication becomes difficult -and their patience and adaptability diminishes-.

I only wanted to say I felt the same way as Francis Xavier regarding Japanese. And that learning a different writing system sounds an impossible undertake to those who only know one, but that perception is easily dispelled once you start to do it.

The same way English is easy but tricky. To me English has no conjugations at all (and I am prevented of writing "English have no conjugations at all" just because the verb sound like an imperative to me). English uses "marks": ending "d" is a mark of past, ending "s" is a mark of third person in present -what I hardly get- and a mark of plural -the only clear to me as it is the same in Spanish-.

The basic difference to me was Japanese being easy to understand and pronounce -to me- while English with its 12 vowels, more than 20 consonants and pronunciation marked by the rhythm of the stress -while insisting in using the wrong Latin alphabet instead of their own version of the Cyrillic one- make me impossible to learn it by ear -my brain impairment to learn languages-. Japanese with its similar sound and limited syllables is a bless. The rest -particles and all- is just information (I quitted smoking almost 9 years ago and abandoned Japanese more than 30 years ago, and I still think "ippiki kudasai" is they way to ask for a -one- cigarette)
 
Just started to refresh my German learnt a while ago at school. From memory Bahnhof is masculine so it is der Bahnhof, but using the preposition "zu" changes der to dem. But you don't say zu dem, you say zum instead - quite simple:confused:

The thing about German grammar is that it is pretty much detatched from semantics. This means that you can mutilate the grammar horribly, but still make yourself understood. Unlike for example Spanish, where the wrong form of a verb will screw up the entire meaning.

I once started learing Chinese, but for a European, the tonal part is very hard. Otherwise, the spoken language is rather simple, with very little grammar, compared to most European languages. The written language is a bitch, of course, with the interesting twist that it is mostly detatched from the spoken language. This means that you might in theory master written Chinese on a high level, without being able to speak or understand it at all!

ETA: The thing about English is that it is rather easy to learn to use, but very hard to master. You can pidgin along fine with a very narrow vocabulary, no grammar to speak of and a horrible pronunciation, but to actually master the language is very hard work (even for many native speakers).

ETA, ETA: Uhm, guess I've been here before. Oh, well .....

Hans
 
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Over the years I've had stabs at various languages and pretty much failed at them all. I'd probably say of the ones I have learned I found German the easiest, then French, then Korean, then Japanese, then Chinese. They all have their difficulties.

People assure me Mandarin is easy to speak but I struggled. I think part of it was that I couldn't read anything so there wasn't as much reinforcement. Also I discovered that people in Shanghai don't speak Mandarin to each other so I wasn't hearing Mandarin in daily life. Tones and the characters killed me.

Korean is simplified by having a wonderful phonetic alphabet but it does have quite a bit of complexity at times.

German grammar is supposed to be difficult but I found it clicked with me as it's pretty rule based and has fewer quirks.

French was probably the easiest but I didn't really enjoy learning it or have any great interest in it while at school.
 
ETA: The thing about English is that it is rather easy to learn to use, but very hard to master. You can pidgin along fine with a very narrow vocabulary, no grammar to speak of and a horrible pronunciation, but to actually master the language is very hard work (even for many native speakers).

Regarding that, aren't all languages alike?

What I can say about English is that its grammar is so succinct that you need to manage a lot of specific vocabulary and collocations in order to manage a palette with more than primary colours.
 
Written Chinese is indeed unified across all the different Chinese languages. I worked with Chinese people (scientists), and a lot of them tend to 'write' characters in the palm of their hand while speaking. For another Chinese speaker and reader, this helps to understand what's meant when the speaker is not proficient enough in the language. For us westerners, it was just an amusing perk.

I think Japanese and Chinese speakers can communicate to a limited extent this way, too. (It's complicated by the way Japanese has retained the original meanings of many of the Chinese characters it uses, as well as assigning new meanings to them.)


I only wanted to say I felt the same way as Francis Xavier regarding Japanese. And that learning a different writing system sounds an impossible undertake to those who only know one, but that perception is easily dispelled once you start to do it.
It's not as hard as it looks to start with, but it's still not easy. You learn the two 50 character kana systems, and that gets you able to know how things sound (at least if there is furigana), read verb endings, and foreign words. You then learn kanji, and learn to recognise the strokes, and smaller characters that make up the more complicated ones, so may have some idea of meaning, but no idea how to pronounce them. (But the meaning may be wrong since, as I understand it, the Japanese took the characters for their sound to start with, and later for the meaning; at least, they used them for both.)

The basic difference to me was Japanese being easy to understand and pronounce -to me- while English with its 12 vowels, more than 20 consonants and pronunciation marked by the rhythm of the stress -while insisting in using the wrong Latin alphabet instead of their own version of the Cyrillic one- make me impossible to learn it by ear -my brain impairment to learn languages-. Japanese with its similar sound and limited syllables is a bless. The rest -particles and all- is just information (I quitted smoking almost 9 years ago and abandoned Japanese more than 30 years ago, and I still think "ippiki kudasai" is they way to ask for a -one- cigarette)

I certainly found the sounds in Japanese easier to master (to the extent that I did, anyway) than French or even Spanish.

I once started learing Chinese, but for a European, the tonal part is very hard.

That's Mandarin, I'm guessing, I think Cantonese is easier. (I was unable to learn to say just one word in Mandarin properly, despite the incentive of impressing a pretty Chinese girl by doing so!)
 
About conjugations I found

Watashi/Boku .... desu
Anata .............. desu
Watashi tachi .... desu
Anata tachi ...... desu

not very challenging when compared with a fully articulated language like Spanish.
I don't know what you mean.

To me English has no conjugations at all... English uses "marks": ending "d" is a mark of past, ending "s" is a mark of third person in present
What's the difference between marking a verb like that and conjugating it?

ending "s" is a mark of third person in present -what I hardly get- and a mark of plural -the only clear to me as it is the same in Spanish
What is the difficulty?

English... -while insisting in using the wrong Latin alphabet instead of their own version of the Cyrillic one-...
How would the Cyrillic alphabet be an improvement for English?

The thing about German grammar is that it is pretty much detatched from semantics. This means that you can mutilate the grammar horribly, but still make yourself understood. Unlike for example Spanish, where the wrong form of a verb will screw up the entire meaning.
How is that difference possible?

Chinese... The written language is a bitch, of course, with the interesting twist that it is mostly detatched from the spoken language.
Unifying the various writing systems that existed before was a good idea to unify the empire originally, but I suspect now it's actually holding back from more thorough unification, by allowing just enough between-language communication to stop people from learning each other's spoken languages or unifying on a single one.

German grammar is supposed to be difficult but I found it clicked with me as it's pretty rule based and has fewer quirks.
I always hated German's genders & cases, but I realize practically all European languages that aren't English have those problems. The problem I had with German that might not be so common is that, although one of the first things they do is teach you how to conjugate regular verbs, as soon as you start dealing with the past & participles, there aren't any regular verbs.
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That's Mandarin, I'm guessing, I think Cantonese is easier. (I was unable to learn to say just one word in Mandarin properly, despite the incentive of impressing a pretty Chinese girl by doing so!)

Quite the contrary! Mandarin has only four tones, Canonese has more (at least six, I think).

Mmm, I think she was putting you on. Sort of Pidgin Mandarin is not that hard. Problem is when you say something in Chinese, they giggle and continue in English. Basically, I think they prefer you not to speak Chinese; they seem to feel it invades their privacy.

Normally, in Europe, it is not polite to speak a language not all present understand (in meetings), but in China, they constantly switch to Chinese among themselves, so after a bit of this, we started to speak Danish among ourselves. Works fine, really: Both parts have a private language, and there is a common one (English).;)

I never made it to actually speak Chinese (other than hello, how are you, thank you etc...) but I got to the point where I would usually know what they were talking about.

Now that I've retired, it fades from disuse, of course.

Hans
 
What's the difference between marking a verb like that and conjugating it?

You forgot the "to me" part

What is the difficulty?

Again, to me English has no conjugations

How would the Cyrillic alphabet be an improvement for English?

None, as that's not what I said. You may read again what I said and consult some encyclopaedia -there are free bad ones on the Internet- about what the Cyrillic alphabet is in order to get what I said.
 
How is that difference possible?

German grammar, while complex, has little impact on meaning. In other words, it is manly formal.

In Spanish the grammar carries meaning. For instance, the form of the verb indicates the subject to such a degree that the subject is generally omitted frm a sentence.

Unifying the various writing systems that existed before was a good idea to unify the empire originally, but I suspect now it's actually holding back from more thorough unification, by allowing just enough between-language communication to stop people from learning each other's spoken languages or unifying on a single one.

It must be said that one excellent outcome of the communist revolution is a very high level of literacy. But yes, in the long run, the writing system may become a burden.

Hans
 
You forgot the "to me" part... None, as that's not what I said. You may read again what I said and consult some encyclopaedia -there are free bad ones on the Internet- about what the Cyrillic alphabet is in order to get what I said.
Holy wow, what on Earth is wrong with you?
 
I had a hard time asking where the bathroom was in Russian once I got outside the Moscow area.:o
Do you mean there are no bathrooms outside the Moscow area? That's the kind of thing disgruntled tourists used to report back in the Soviet era. Or if there was a bathroom there was no hot water - and absolutely never any bath plugs.
 
"Wir fahren nach Österreich" (Austria)
with one single exception: Wir fahren gegen Engeland. :boxedin:
.
But "wir fahren gegen Eng[e]land" doesn't mean the same as the other examples. It implies going against England with hostile intent. "Wir fahren nach England" just means "we're going to England." Native German speakers please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
But "wir fahren gegen Eng[e]land" doesn't mean the same as the other examples. It implies going against England with hostile intent. "Wir fahren nach England" just means "we're going to England." Native German speakers please correct me if I'm wrong.
Its a joke in the original post.

It's from a WW2 German song. So your allusion to hostile intent is absolutely correct.
 
(I quitted smoking almost 9 years ago and abandoned Japanese more than 30 years ago, and I still think "ippiki kudasai" is they way to ask for a -one- cigarette)

Not unless your cigarette was alive and ran on four legs. Ippon is used for long, thin objects such as cigarettes.
 
Not unless your cigarette was alive and ran on four legs. Ippon is used for long, thin objects such as cigarettes.

Useful when you smoke mantises.

So I was mistaken on the very spot I learnt it (I'm sure we wouldn't talk of animals). A good case for looking up my old notes and learn if my memories can change that way along time (they do, but I have some checkpoints to detect them and say "I don't remember exactly but I think it was something like..."; this one had been not the case so far)
 
Useful when you smoke mantises.

So I was mistaken on the very spot I learnt it (I'm sure we wouldn't talk of animals). A good case for looking up my old notes and learn if my memories can change that way along time (they do, but I have some checkpoints to detect them and say "I don't remember exactly but I think it was something like..."; this one had been not the case so far)

Memory will let you down. I recall misremebering lots of things.
 
Or the radio discourse by Emperor Hirohito when Japan surrendered that almost nobody could understand
This makes me think of how English has different words for different levels of dignity of some acts, like
wolf down < eat < dine
shut up < be quiet
German has fressen (nonhuman doing eating, human doing undignified eating) and essen (human doing eating)
Does Japanese take it further? Like having a specialized "Emperor Vocabulary" or "Emperor Grammar"?

(or how katakana changed use from something used by inferior members of society to something used to write foreign words).
At least all of the more recent ones.
 
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