Difficulty in Learning another Language?

[lpetrich]

 Proto-Indo-European verbs - it also had related-verb aspects, but formed very differently from Slavic ones. I can't find any good lists of reconstructed examples, however. The PIE system has lots of relics in the dialects, like irregular past-tense formations in Germanic, Latin, and Greek.

There's a notable bit of suppletion in PIE: "to be": imperfective *h1es-, perfective *bheuH- They show up as English "is", "be", and Latin "est", "fuit", for instance. "Was" is further suppletion in Germanic.

 Suppletion is full of examples.

English "go" also has suppletion: its past tense "went" from "wend".

The Romance conjugations of their words for "to go" are a crazy quilt of suppletion, from these five sources in their ancestor, Latin:

1. vādere ‘to go, proceed’,
2. īre ‘to go’
3. ambitāre ‘to go around’ -> Spanish, Portuguese andar "to walk"
4. ambulāre ‘to walk’
5. fuī suppletive perfective of esse ‘to be’

I consulted Verbix:

• French: aller (4), present je vais (1), (boot verb) nous allons (4), future j'irai (2), others also (4) including the subjunctive
• Spanish: ir (2), present yo voy (1), impf. yo iba (2), past yo fui (5), future yo iré (2), past part. ido (2)
• Portuguese: ir (much like Spanish)
• Italian: andare (3), present io vado (1), (boot verb) noi andiamo, impf. io andavo (3), others also (3)
• Catalan: anar (much like Italian)

Subjunctives are usually parallel to indicatives.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here is the main source that I've found for difficulty of (natural) language learning for English speakers.

Foreign Language Training - United States Department of State

FSI’s Experience with Language Learning

The following language learning timelines reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages to U.S. diplomats, and illustrate the time usually required for a student to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in the language, or a score of “Speaking-3/Reading-3” on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. These timelines are based on what FSI has observed as the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency, though the actual time can vary based on a number of factors, including the language learner’s natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.

Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - Wikibooks, open books for an open world has an earlier version of this list.

• I (24 weeks) Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Galician, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
• I' (30 weeks) French
• II (36 weeks) German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Javanese, Jumieka
• III (44 weeks) (most languages)
• IV (88 weeks) Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

Is that ranking even halfway plausible? Has anyone made any similar lists for native speakers of other languages? I can imagine the KGB and its successors doing so for speakers of Russian, but I haven't found anything on that.

Sounds weird that it's so hard for English speakers to learn German. English is basically a German dialect with French words added. I'd assume it'd be on par with Swedish, Danish and Dutch. Which also are German dialects.

 

[lpetrich]

Sounds weird that it's so hard for English speakers to learn German. English is basically a German dialect with French words added. I'd assume it'd be on par with Swedish, Danish and Dutch. Which also are German dialects.

The FSI lists most Germanic languages at 24 weeks, with two exceptions: German at 36 weeks and Icelandic at 44 weeks (the number for most langs).

I suspect that the main difference is more inflection in German and especially Icelandic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Kan shu ma translates literally you read books? Spoken Chines communicates more with less words.

Ni hau ma, are you felling OK?

I'd like to see the absolute literal translations of these. From the looks of it it's

Read book
You feel OK

Learning a language like Chinese and Spansih is to understnd thoughts abd feelings which are epressed diffently in language and culture.

Spanish has a fluid syntax as opposed to more rigid English. In Spanish unless you are being formal pronouns are optional.

Latino immigrants who are not proficient in English speak with Spanish syntax and grammar using English words. I understood that when I began to learn Spanish. Chinese do the same at times.

This happens in general, not only in those specific examples. From what I've seen learning a language is actually three separate things.

1) Learning words.
2) Learning grammar.
3) Learning word concepts. This is by far the hardest.

An example of #3 to clarify: In Chinese "open" and "turn on" are the same thing. (Likewise, "close" and "turn off".) For an English speaker learning Chinese it's no problem--both words are represented by the same sound. For a Chinese speaker learning English, though, until the separate word concepts are learned (which is much harder than learning the words) it's a matter of having to pick the correct way of saying it and errors are common. (It took a long time before she wouldn't ask me to open the light.) This is also why Chinese speakers are notorious for getting gender wrong--in spoken Chinese "he", "she", and "it" are all the same sound. With the light there was at least always the same pairing so in time she learned it by repetition, but gender doesn't have a pairing like that. "It" always pairs with objects and gets learned by repetition, but "he" and "she" don't--virtually anything that can be a "he" can be a "she" and vice versa. Learning by repetition isn't possible, you either have to stop and think of which is right in this context or errors will abound. Note that we get something of a taste of this when learning a language with gendered nouns--although there is a pairing so it's akin to my light example, not the he/she problem.

ni hau ma? is 'you good?' ma is the question word and ni is a pronoun. We translate as a number of contextual meanings. A Chinese not fluent in English might say 'You good?'.

This reminds me of a letter my FIL wrote me something like 30 years ago. 100% correctly spelled English but I utterly couldn't understand it. My wife was able to read it much easier than she could read proper English, though--it was Chinese transliterated into English. She could convert the words back into proper Chinese and it was clear. (There was also the problem that he had used multiple idioms, which of course utterly fall apart when transliterated.) After that disaster he didn't try any more, anything he wanted to communicate he wrote to her and let her translate.

Some say English is the hardest to lean as a second language.

Probably.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The context of any language is learned as you grow up in it. In Chinese as I remember 'you go store' could mean go right now,
go in the future, or you went in the past.

In Chinese, one indicates tense with adverbs, so if one omits them, one expects tense info to be filled in with context.

More generally, Chinese does not modify words. The concept doesn't exist. Anything we do with modifiers they do by adding another word. Thus they only have "waitperson". "Waiter" and "Waitress" translate as "male waitperson" and "female waitperson". (This goes along with my previous post about gender issues--since we rarely say "waitperson" in English it's once again one concept in Chinese, two in English and thus ripe for errors.) (Note that they have gendered words for family relationships--and thus it's a one-to-one translation so they don't get messed up.)

 

[Swammerdami]

As a general principle it is somewhat easier to learn a language closely related to a language one already knows very well.

However there is diminishing returns on that. When languages have been out of touch for, say, 15 centuries the learning advantage of that kinship will be MUCH smaller than even with a 10-century separation. (Naturally this is not an absolute threshold.)


The languages of Western Europe still spoken today, comprise descendants of just five languages spoken 1 AD. These are Vasconic-Basque and 4 Indo-European languages: Gaelic (Irish), Brittonic (Welsh). Germanic, Roman.

In 500 AD the Romance languages were still unified. Dialectic variations were developing, but there would be great mutual intelligibility and bilingualism for many further centuries. Germanic, OTOH, had split into West, North and East branches much earlier and more abruptly. By this time there were a dizzying number of distinct German tribes and dialects. (Of course there were several Celtic languages but all but two went extinct.)

Surely {German, Norwegian, English, Gothic} are more different than any Romance trio (or quartet, throwing in Latin as counterpart to Gothic) you can name. There is a diminishing return on genetic closeness; G & E diverged about 1600 years ago. (Can you name two Romance languages more different from each other than English is from German?)

Anglo-Saxon began life as a group of West Germanic dialects that became established in (and gave its name to) England. A dozen different dialects of this Old English were spoken in England -- and some of the dialectal differences are said to persist to the present-day, at least a millennium later!

Old English written language was more-or-less standardized in its Wessex dialect, but beginning about 1100(?) an Early Middle English emerged in London and eventually became the Standard. Many of these Londoners were immigrants from the Danelaw, immediately to London's North. It is somewhat controversial what language the Danelaw people spoke! A consensus view is that Scandinavian immigrants had learned the local English dialect(s), and this Norsified East Central English went on to become Early London (or Standard) Middle English.

HOWEVER there is notable evidence (but a minority view) that the Danelaw people had retained their North Germanic language. There were TWO different polities operating in England: The Danes and the English. These Dane rulers would continue to speak Danish, if only to demonstrate their power. Often two languages will be kept separate for political purpose, and this was the case in England prior to 1066 AD. After Billy the Bastard arrived, the dynamic reversed. On the principle that "My enemy's enemy is my friend", the English and Danelaw resistance to Norman rule naturally wanted to unify. In the hypothesis a sort of "koiné" of Central Old English and Danelaw Norse developed, with an almost deliberate(!) 50-50 mixture. Perhaps it was this clever combination that led the C.O.Engl and D'w.Norse koiné's result in London to become Early Standard Middle English. Early Middle English developed throughout the 12th century. It was mostly after 1215 that the language accelerated borrowing from French (mostly Parisian French rather than Norman French). NB: The professors espousing this hypothesis do NOT consider the resultant language to be a koiné.

ETA: Note that the West-North split in Germanic would have been only 950 years old when the koiné allegedly developed. This is closer(?) than the same-named Greek koiné and closer than Romance connections, e.g. French-Italian today. AFAIK only I am speaking of koiné but I think this perspective may be correct.


TLDR: I'm not surprised that English speakers learn Romance and Danish more easily than German.


Meanwhile, I continue the claim that if conversational near-fluency is good enough without requiring to read/write the written language, then Thai is (significantly!) easier for the English speaker to learn than German.

 

[Lugubert]

Regard the 'ma' as a question mark.
Look book ?
You good ?

Russian uses "li" and I once saw it explained as "whether". Japanese also uses a "question particle", as it's sometimes called: "ka".

I've tried Arabic. Some classical, some Modern Standard Arabic. The absence of vowels in just about everything written but the Qur'an, children's and learners' books means that you more or less have to know the (grammar of the) language before you're able to read a text. I can't rank the difficulty of these three languages even for myself. Much depends on what resources are available, your motivation, your environment and which language skills you are aiming for. If the need were to arise, I would probably find MSA the easiest to revive and improve, then CH and hardest JP.

What the US FSI gives are averages from its experience, so one's experience may differ.

Lugubert, I'm curious about how easy or difficult it is to learn English. Here are some possible difficulties:

• Spelling: it's semi-logographic though letters have no marks on them.
• Phonology: lots of vowels and voiceless and voiced th.
• Grammar: numerous compound verb tenses, numerous irregular past-tense forms.

The past-tense irregularities are shared with other Germanic languages, I must note.

Has anyone in Sweden done anything analogous to the FSI's classification for Swedish speakers? Did the KGB ever work out anything analogous for Russian speakers?

Regarding the difficulty to learn English, I personally can't tell. My father was in the merchant navy, which contributed to my being exposed to some English from an early age. As a kid, I just absorbed foreign (and unusual Swedish) words. I'm told that I taught myself to read at the age of 4.

Generally speaking, I think that the main problems for Swedish speakers apart from the spelling are the 'do' constructions and the progressive forms, with tag questions slightly lower on that list. Lots of vowels in English? We, too, have around 20 vowel phonemes.

My 'daughter' now lives on the other coast; I might ask her some day how she found her five languages following her two early childhood languages. Her collection spans three language families, including two sub-families for Indo-European.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no FSI-like list in Sweden.

 

[lpetrich]

Swammerdami tries to speculate on what makes some languages especially easy for English speakers, but there are problems. He uses a lot of history, but there are language difficulties that don't fit.

Germanic:

• West: (English), Afrikaans, Dutch I, German II
• North: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish I, Icelandic III

Romance:

• Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish I
• Occitano-Romance: Catalan I
• Gallo-Romance: French I'
• Italo-Dalmatian: Italian I
• Eastern Romance: Romanian I

One has to ask: what makes Spanish and Italian easier than French, and what makes Dutch as easy as Danish.

Also, what makes Icelandic much more difficult than other North Germanic languages.

 

[Bronzeage]

I graduated high school fairly good in conversational Latin, but now I have little more than Salve and Vale.

 

[Swammerdami]

Swammerdami tries to speculate on what makes some languages especially easy for English speakers, but there are problems. He uses a lot of history, but there are language difficulties that don't fit....

One has to ask: what makes Spanish and Italian easier than French, and what makes Dutch as easy as Danish.

Also, what makes Icelandic much more difficult than other North Germanic languages.

You greatly exaggerate my post -- no general recipe was offered. I only suggested that the Romance languages are much closer to each other than English is to German. English has also had much contact with both Norse/Danish and with French/Latin: Obviously English will have some eased connections with Romance and Scandinavian languages.

Icelandic is particularly isolated. (E.g., the half-life of its Swadesh List is much longer than that of most languages.) Does it best preserve North Germanic morphology?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I graduated high school fairly good in conversational Latin, but now I have little more than Salve and Vale.

Yeah, if you don't use it you lose it.

A few years back my wife located someone she had known from long ago. At the time he could read English newspapers so she was surprised that he wasn't speaking to me in English. Too long without using it--he had gone from being able to read the paper to not being able to do simple conversation.

 

[lpetrich]

Icelandic is particularly isolated. (E.g., the half-life of its Swadesh List is much longer than that of most languages.) Does it best preserve North Germanic morphology?

Its word morphology is much more conservative than that of most other present-day Germanic languages. That of German is somewhat more conservative.

Here's a summary:

		St			Wk			Art
		m	f	n	m	f	n	m	f	n
Sg	Nom	-ur	-	-	-i	-a	-a	-inn	-in	-idh
	Acc	-	-	-	-a	-u	-a	-inn	-ina	-idh
	Dat	-i	-	-i	-a	-u	-a	-inum	-inni	-inu
	Gen	-s	-ar	-s	-a	-u	-a	-ins	-innar	-ins
Pl	Nom	-ar	-ar	-	-ar	-ur	-u	-inir	-inar	-in
	Acc	-a	-ar	-	-a	-ur	-u	-ina	-inar	-in
	Dat	-um	-um	-um	-um	-um	-um	-inum	-inum	-inum
	Gen	-a	-a	-a	-a	-na	-na	-inna	-inna	-inna

Sg = singular, pl = plural, m = masculine, f = feminine, n = neuter
St = strong declension, wk = weak declension, art = suffixed definite article (its initial i often drops out)

Adjective and pronoun declensions are similar. Adjectives are in the strong declension when in an indefinite noun phrase, and the weak declension when in in a definite one, with a definite article, demonstrative pronoun, or possessive pronoun. This is a feature of the older Germanic languages, and it survives in varying degree in the present-day ones, with one exception: English. However, Middle English had a much-reduced version of that feature, much like what Dutch now has.

 

[lpetrich]

Let's look at Old English.

		St			Wk
		m	f	n	m	f	n
Sg	Nom	-	-u, -	-	-a	-e	-e
	Acc	-	-e	-	-an	-an	-e
	Dat	-e	-e	-e	-an	-an	-an
	Gen	-es	-e	-es	-an	-an	-an
Pl	Nom	-as	-a, -e	-u, -	-an	-an	-an
	Acc	-as	-a, -e	-u, -	-an	-an	-an
	Dat	-um	-um	-um	-um	-um	-um
	Gen	-a	-a	-a	-ena	-ena	-ena

Old English adjectives had similar declensions, and they were in the strong declension in indefinite noun phrases and in the weak declension in definite noun phrases.

By Middle English, the strong and weak forms are both unchanging, with the weak one formed from the strong one with a suffixed -e. Dutch is similar. An adjective gets -e unless it is for an indefinite neuter singular noun.

 

[lpetrich]

In the Continental Scandinavian languages, noun declensions are much more simplified, but like in Icelandic, they have suffixed definite articles. A rather oversimplified summary:

• Common: -n
• Neuter: -t
• Plural: -na, -ne

A further complication is that when a noun has an adjective, a definite artlcle is also placed before the adjective. I used Google Translate:

• English: A dog. The dog. Dogs. The dogs. A big dog. The big dog. Big dogs. The big dogs.
• Swedish: En hund. Hunden. Hundar. Hundarna. En stor hund. Den stora hunden. Stora hundar. De stora hundarna.
• Norwegian: En hund. Hunden. Hunder. Hundene. En stor hund. Den store hunden. Store hunder. De store hundene.
• Danish: En hund. Hunden. Hunde. Hundene. En stor hund. Den store hund. Store hunde. De store hunde.
• Icelandic: Hundur. Hundurinn. Hundar. Hundarnir. Stór hundur. Stóri hundurinn. Stórir hundar. Stóru hundarnir.
• German: Ein Hund. Der Hund. Hunde. Die Hunde. Ein großer Hund. Der große Hund. Große Hunde. Die großen Hunde.
• Dutch: Een hond. De hond. Honden. De honden. Een grote hond. De grote hond. Grote honden. De grote honden.

For "dog", the English cognate is "hound", a dog for hunting. Google Translate's translations of "big" differ: a West-Germanic form *grot and a North-Germanic form *stor. The West-Germanic one has English cognate "great".

 

[lpetrich]

German adjectives with indefinite / definite determiners:

-

Ind

Def

m

f

n

pl

m

f

n

pl

m

f

n

pl

Sg

Nom

-er

-e

-es

-e

I- -er

I-e -e

I- -es

I-e -en

D-er -e

D-e -e

D-es -e

D-e -en

Acc

-en

-e

-es

-e

I-en -en

I-e -e

I- -es

I-e -en

D-en -en

D-e -e

D-es -e

D-e -en

Dat

-em

-er

-em

-en

I-em -en

I-er -en

I-em -en

I-en -en

D-em -en

D-er -en

D-em -en

D-en -en

Gen

-en

-er

-en

-er

I-es -en

I-er -en

I-es -en

I-er -en

D-es -en

D-er -en

D-es -en

D-er -en

Noun declension ( German nouns) is simpler.

Here are the most common patterns. In the plural, the dative adds -n if the plural does not already end in -n. In the singular, feminine nouns are usually indeclinable, and proper names and masculine and neuter nouns usually have -(e)s in their genitive.

 

[lpetrich]

Someone claimed in Quora that Chinese is the world's easiest language, except for its writing. I responded to that claim, but Quora does not have a good search system, so I was unable to find my response.

It would have been easier on Reddit, for instance, where I found Chinese is the easiest language in the world. And the more I learn English the more I dislike it. : ChineseLanguage and (Mandarin) Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn. : unpopularopinion

Strictly speaking, Chinese is not one language but a close family of them: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, ... Mandarin is the most commonly-learned one, and what is most commonly meant by "Chinese".

That claimer made the argument that if one ignores its writing system, Chinese is super easy because it does not have grammatical inflections -- nouns are the same whether singular or plural, verbs have the same form no matter what tense, etc. That is not quite correct, because Chinese has some plural suffixes that are used in limited circumstances, like -men in wo "I, me" and women "we, us". BTW, the possessive adjective "my" is wo de, literally "of me", in Chinese.

There are some other such "isolating" languages, languages with little or no inflection, like Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai, and I pointed out that that argument would make them super easy. But that claimer refused to accept my argument.

I pointed out that in the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute's estimates, they are intermediate in difficulty, like most languages, and not super easy. That claimer refused to accept that argument.

 

[Politesse]

I pointed out that in the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute's estimates, they are intermediate in difficulty, like most languages, and not super easy.

The State Department would be the first to point out that their scale is only meant to describe how easy or difficult it willl be for the average English-only speaker to pick up a language in a controlled classroom setting. There is no objective measure for language difficulty; rather, it is easy to pick up languages relatively similar in syntax and phonology to your first language(s), and more difficult to master languages that have features you are wholly unfamiliar with.

Hence why, if you're looking at the chart, you will notice that Category 1 languages are subtitled "Languages Closely Related to English", and why all of them are PIE languages. That isn't because English is super easy to learn, just that it is the primary language of most students trained by the US state department.

 

[lpetrich]

What might make spoken Chinese difficult for an English speaker? It has tones, levels of sound pitch that distinguish words. Denoting pitch by 1 to 5, the tones of Mandarin are 55, 35, 214, 51, of Cantonese are 55, 25, 33, 21, 23, 22, of Thai 33, 32, 451, 343, 325, of Vietnamese are 33, 22, 213, 224, 25, 221.

Most dialects of Khmer do not have tones, and Japanese and Korean have a pitch accent, distinguishing high and low pitch. By comparison, English has a stress accent, distinguishing greater and lesser loudness.

That claimer claimed that that makes Mandarin easier than Thai, when by his argument, Khmer would be even easier.

Yet Thai, Khmer, and Vietnamese are at difficulty III, the typical difficulty of other languages for English speakers.

 

[lpetrich]

The State Department would be the first to point out that their scale is only meant to describe how easy or difficult it willl be for the average English-only speaker to pick up a language in a controlled classroom setting. ...

Yes, I concede that difficulty is relative, and that's why I'm so disappointed that I have been unable to find similar assessments for speakers of other languages.

Hence why, if you're looking at the chart, you will notice that Category 1 languages are subtitled "Languages Closely Related to English", and why all of them are PIE languages. That isn't because English is super easy to learn, just that it is the primary language of most students trained by the US state department.

As to being easy because of being Indo-European, there are oodles of IE langs that are at difficulty III, the average difficulty: Icelandic, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, Greek, Farsi, Hindi, Sinhala, ...

Furthermore, Romance langs are descendants of Latin, an Italic lang, and the speakers of ancestral Italic and Germanic went their separate ways early in Indo-European language history. That was roughly when speakers of ancestral Balto-Slavic, Greek-Armenian, and Indo-Iranian went their separate ways.

So it's likely that living near each other that led to some convergence, the  Sprachbund effect, making  Standard Average European

 

[Politesse]

I am of that camp which considers English a creole language of sorts; it is rightly classified as Germanic, but so much of its vocabulary, idioms, and even some grammatical rules were shaped by French and ecclesiastical Latin; this gives English speakers a distinct edge when it comes to picking up Romance languages. English speakers learn Esperanto very easily, because that conlang was constructed from many of the same "base ingredients" as English.

In any case, difficulty tends to swirl, as I said, around certain factors: very different phonologies make learning complicated, as do unfamiliar structural elements. Having to learn or unlearn tones, or social rules such as hierarchies of rank or animacy that must be internalized to produce correctly conjugated speech. This can result in some interesting patterns; it is easier for Portuguese speakers to learn Spanish than the other way around for instance, because although these languages are so similar many linguists consider them dialects of the same tongue, one manner in which Portuguese differs noticeably is a slightly larger set of basic phonemes, 23 to 15-18 of Spanish. They consequently differ noticeably in phonotactics as well, catching Spanish learners off guard even with cognate words and phrases.