5 ms·

I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to lear

by sethg 17y ago

I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to learn Japanese, then a native Japanese speaker with comparable intelligence in comparable circumstances would be just as frustrated trying to learn English.

dcurtis 17y ago
Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.
- ars 17y ago
  You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles. The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct. Specifically: "Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall." and "A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely." as two examples.
compay 17y ago
Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common. However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.
alex_c 17y ago
I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.
- sethg 17y ago
  English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
  - alex_c 17y ago
    English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms). On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible. So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
    - decode 17y ago
      "On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down" My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
      - danohuiginn 17y ago
        I'm not convinced by this. If you're just aiming to communicate in German, you can ignore noun gender, valency, many tenses, etc. It's all stuff you'll need to come back and learn later. [maybe this depends on how you learn. My approach was, roughly, first learn to communicate, then learn to communicate correctly]
        17y ago
wheels 17y ago
There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute. For example, comparing English and German: - English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken. - English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines. - English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five. - English does not have formality encoded in its grammar. It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
- riobard 17y ago
  Learning German right now. Yes, irregular plurals and gendered nouns are killing me!!!! Just doesn't make too much sense to me :(
  - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
    English has a lot of irregular words as well. Of Spanish and German, however, German is much more difficult to learn.
    - riobard 17y ago
      Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
- tokenadult 17y ago
  It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English. I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German. The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_Koineization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_... and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
Tuna-Fish 17y ago
There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word. That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :). There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
  s/decades/centuries/
- delayclose 17y ago
  "to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word." This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider: herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment. Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).

by sethg 17y ago

dcurtis 17y ago

Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.

ars 17y ago
You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles. The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct. Specifically: "Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall." and "A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely." as two examples.

compay 17y ago

Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common. However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.

alex_c 17y ago

I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.

sethg 17y ago
English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
- alex_c 17y ago
  English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms). On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible. So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
  - decode 17y ago
    "On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down" My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
    - danohuiginn 17y ago
      I'm not convinced by this. If you're just aiming to communicate in German, you can ignore noun gender, valency, many tenses, etc. It's all stuff you'll need to come back and learn later. [maybe this depends on how you learn. My approach was, roughly, first learn to communicate, then learn to communicate correctly]
      - 17y ago

wheels 17y ago

There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute. For example, comparing English and German: - English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken. - English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines. - English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five. - English does not have formality encoded in its grammar. It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.

riobard 17y ago
Learning German right now. Yes, irregular plurals and gendered nouns are killing me!!!! Just doesn't make too much sense to me :(
- BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
  English has a lot of irregular words as well. Of Spanish and German, however, German is much more difficult to learn.
  - riobard 17y ago
    Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
tokenadult 17y ago
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English. I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German. The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_Koineization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_... and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.

Tuna-Fish 17y ago

There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word. That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :). There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.

Tuna-Fish 17y ago
s/decades/centuries/
delayclose 17y ago
"to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word." This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider: herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment. Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).