Different languages discussion

[RobbyBevard]

Topic started coming up in another thread about how difficult languages are to learn. Completely derailing the thread, but still interesting. So, moved the pertinent posts here. To what end, I'm not sure.

So.

General different languages thread.

If people are that picky about translations, then just learn Japanese and buy the originals. At least support someone rather than no-one.

I like how this keeps getting suggested as if it were a simple and easy alternative.

[Greg]

Brutal honesty.

If you are motivated, you can get good enough at Japanese to understand a good 75% of any given weekly OP (sans cultural gags etc) in about 9 months.

If you're in high school or college this is entirely doable.

If you're living in the working world it might take as much as a year.

Consider what I define as 'motivated'. I learned Hiragana in two days and Katakana in three. If you can work at that pace, it's easy.

Again, the problem for adults is simply time.

Of course, manga wasn't the only motivation I had going for me... *eyes slide inconspicuously to the left*

For other series the bar might be a little higher. Bleach with its metaphysical BULLSHITVOMITSPEWDOUCHEOVERFLOW still throws me for a loop.

And of course if you're reading a young adult comic without furigana well, you've gotta long road....

[RobbyBevard]

True story.

I never even fully learned my times tables.

I am godawful at memorization. Why I gave up acting after a year of elective theatre in high school and history was always my worst subject. (even though I discovered after school that I love history... just not multiple choice names and dates history.)

I've tried to learn Japanese several times. I can recognize a few hundred spoken words, if pressed. But it is just not within my mental skill set. I can't find the motivation to sit down and study.

Ever. For anything.

(Blatant poor excuses are just excuses, but. it is how it is.)
Would sure add some value to all those artbooks I have if I could actually read them.

[Mugiwara_no_Ice]

and English is one of the hardest, if not the, langauges to learn on the planet.

Hahaha And how would you know that? You're a native speaker aren't you?
I, who learned english as my 4th language, assure you that it's one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.

[maxterdexter]

Hahaha And how would you know that? You're a native speaker aren't you?
I, who learned english as my 4th language, assure you that it's one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.

After the 3rd language, the rest is easy.

But seriously, I learned english as a sidefect of watching tv, I didn't manage to duplicate the task with any other language that I had the chance to try the method (japanese, italian, portugese and french)

[RobbyBevard]

English is hard because its borrowed from a lot of other languages and has stupid bizarre rules like "i before e except after c, or in words like weird." or words like "to, too, two". Stupid grammar, slang, and context in general. Or at least thats my understanding.

But its the only language I got, so I can't really compare it. I suspect this might be a case where the teachers are just reciting what they were taught lying in order to make the students feel smarter.

Kind of like how they say that people still thought the world was flat in 1492, even though people had figured out horizon line curve centuries earlier. Makes us feel better to think "we're so much smarter than they were!"

Most people that learn multiple languages say that after you've learned a second language, its easier to learn a third, because you've already trained and learned how to break apart and differentiate and associate in your mind, and you start seeing the universal similarities.

Its also much easier if you start young.

[Demon Rin]

Honestly, Once you get the core rules down, Japanese is really easy because those rules do NOT Change.

Japanese is a Phonic language, everything is pronounced exactly as written, with the sole exception of topic markers (Topic Marker "Wa" is written "Ha", "O" is written as "Wo", "E" is written as "He")
And a good example of each of those is, from the lyrics to "Kokoro no Chizu", "Bokura wa hitotsu One Piece" That "wa" is written as "ha". From "Hikari E" the "E" in the title is written as "He", and from the new opening "Kaze Wo Sagashite", the "Wo" is actually pronounced "Oh".

But other than those clearly defined exceptions, everything is pronounced exactly as written and doesn't change.

The hardest part of Japanese is in the written form with Kanji, but when learning to read and understand Shonen Manga, it's a breeze because Shonen manga prints Furigana for every single Kanji used, so... yeah.

[Greg]

I realize this isn't the language thread but responding to pages 5 and 6, English is hard as fuck. I dunno if it's the hardest in the world but from both teaching it and learning other languages, English is really really difficult.

Many Japanese people would like to think theirs is the hardest to learn and openly state it proudly but that's really just because they think nobody can master keigo unless born on the Sun Emperor's doorstep.

As a European-derived laguage if you're coming from Europe, English is relatively easy to conquer because chances are the syntax is damn close. But the difficulty lies in the variety of slang and expressions that must be mastered just to be able to watch a thirty minute comedy.

Ask a Japanese individual that's seen SP to do an impression and they'll respond with gibberish that sounds like Xhosa.

1. They can't follow the speed which we take for granted.
2. There aren't words that begin to describe the slang in Japanese.

Now I'm talking about pure language comprehension, not 'getting' the jokes. Because 'sarcasm' and comedy is a topic in and of itself.

You'll find in Japanese that outside of regional dialects or accents, most things are pretty set in stone and people generally use a set terminology. That's not to say there isn't slang, but from what I've experienced, there's just no way it could match the overwhelming amount of it we have and use regularly in English.

Now, that's not to say it's hard to learn once you have a strong base in the language, but in five years I have YET to speak to a qualified English teacher as I would a native speaker and some of them are HIGHLY intelligent people who have even studied abroad.

[Mugiwara_no_Ice]

Isn't there a language thread inhere, cause this is highly interesting , but it's far too off-topic, maybe we can transfer the discussion to the topic roulette?

I'd like to explain why I think English is a relatively easy language.
For me hard languages are the classic ones like Latin or classic Arabic.

[RobbyBevard]

I'll gladly move the language talk elsewhere... but to where? I freely admit its not a topic I hang around usually. I looked and while there's a bunch of language threads, they all seem to be for specific different languages... full of the actual dialect.

There a particular spot in mind? Or do we need an actual new thread?

[Badass SnoCone]

The difficulty of learning English is different for people depending on what their primary language is. Learning English will probably be easier for people who speak German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. because they're all (including English) Germanic Languages, and all have similarities.
Just as it would be easy to learn a Latin-derived language if you speak another Latin-derived language. Case in point: Learning Spanish is a LOT easier when you know Italian. They're similar, and once you know one, it's easier to learn the other.

Someone who speaks French would probably have a harder time learning English then someone who speaks German.

The amount of difficulty can all vary.

[Mugiwara_no_Ice]

No particular spot in mind. Maybe a new, general languages thread or something.

[maxterdexter]

Yeah, I will start to try to learn japanesse.

I now can read numbers from 1 to 88.. except any number that has a nine, the little bugger can't get registered in my brain.

[dirt monkey AL]

What, because it looks similar to ka or something?

And besides, if you know 1 through 88, believe me, you basically know it all.

[Malintex_Terek]

One of my main worries about learning Japanese is one needs CONSTANT exposure to maintain fluent. A friend of mine who was fluent in Japanese went to the Philippines for 6 years and didn't do much beyond translating some manga, so he's lost a lot of the kanji he used to know.

I myself am starting to forget stuff I learned in ~8th, 7th grade, I know because I look over my old notes and can't remember some of the stuff I wrote down.

[Kaiolino]

The difficulty of learning English is different for people depending on what their primary language is. Learning English will probably be easier for people who speak German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. because they're all (including English) Germanic Languages, and all have similarities.
Just as it would be easy to learn a Latin-derived language if you speak another Latin-derived language. Case in point: Learning Spanish is a LOT easier when you know Italian. They're similar, and once you know one, it's easier to learn the other.

Someone who speaks French would probably have a harder time learning English then someone who speaks German.

The amount of difficulty can all vary.

This.

French is a much easier language to learn than English in theory, because it has much less rules concerning grammar and the like. However, people who speak a Gemanic language have more trouble with it, because it sounds so different.

Then there's the fact that people will learn a language faster if they're constantly exposed to it, preferably when they're young and their brains absorb everything. For example, I'm Dutch and almost nothing is dubbed here, not even the cartoons, and as a result I could understand English when I was 12 or 13. In the past years though, cartoons have been dubbed in Dutch (and some live action stuff like Hannah Montana) and now my cousins, who are around the age of 12, can't follow a word of English. But when they grow uo and watch live action shows, which are still in English, they'll learn to understand the language after a certain amount of time, be it much longer than if they were exposed to it as a child.

[Bucephalus]

Even though I can't say that I'm the best source, I'd definitely put English down as one of the easiest languages to learn. English (or Spanish) really is the language to know. It's easy to learn as a second language, and it helps a ton for learning other languages, as many European languages share cognates.

I still laugh at that retarded Mandarin Chinese craze a few years ago. Even if it outweighs every other language there is in terms of population of speakers, it's too much of a pain in the ass for it to become a "universal language" as some predicted it to be.

[MANUELF]

My main language is Spanish but I can understand English pretty well even though when I was little I didnt know a single word and I concur with Bucephalus learning English is relatively easy but speak it is a real pain for me at least.

[Sakonosolo]

I'm about to shed tears of joy over this thread.

So, I'm going to be majoring in Linguistics and trying to take pretty much every language that OSU has to offer. Except French. French can go and die.

My native language is English and I've taken 4 years of Spanish so I can speak that fairly well, though I'm nowhere near fluent. I've taken 1 year of bother German and French so I can do some basic conversations in those. I know odd bits of several other languages including Russian, Japanese, Italian, Hungarian, Basque, though most of those are just a few words worth of knowledge .

Others that I'd like to learn include:
- More of the languages above, including Basque because it's awesome
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Latin
- Bulgarian
- Zulu
- Ukrainian
- Different Aztec and Mayan languages
- Greek
- Finnish
- Maybe Korean
- etc, etc

Yes, I'm sorry but I just love this stuff.

And here's an awesome website: www.omniglot.com

[LaCaSiNa]

Others that I'd like to learn include:
- More of the languages above, including Basque because it's awesome
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Latin
- Bulgarian
- Zulu
- Ukrainian
- Different Aztec and Mayan languages
- Greek
- Finnish
- Maybe Korean
- etc, etc

Yes, I'm sorry but I just love this stuff.

And here's an awesome website: www.omniglot.com

Good luck dude. Nah, Finnish isn't THE HARDEST language in the world I'd say, even though I once read in a school book that it's considered to be one of the hardest. Hell, Finns don't really know their own language themselves, the spoken Finnish is so much different from the written one. Over half the students I knew and went to school with didn't like studying mother tongue, because it's so difficult for them to remember all the weird shit that goes on with the grammar. Well, I can only really speculate on behalf of other people. I never had a problem myself, not in learning written Finnish or other languages such as English and Swedish.

Oh yeah, I belong to the "English isn't hard" camp only because I'm fairly good at it myself, after 12 years of almost constant learning. Living in the UK for six months also really improved my English speaking, whereas before I excelled in writing and sounded kinda weird when speaking.



Also, Swedish.

It seems that when I was in school pretty much 98 % of my fellow students absolutely HATED having to study Swedish. "It sounds retarded, it's hard and I don't need it anyway." Again this is just me, but I never saw it that way, hating the language just for the purpose of hating. Of course my skill has slackened since I'm not in school anymore, but I'd like to keep up basic knowledge. I always had some problems with it, but I never saw it as being deadly hard, in fact I think Finnish is more difficult from a non-native speaker's point of view.