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I'm curious if the converse applies: e.g. English is more difficult for native Chinese speakers than for native Hindi speakers. > The higher up the scale you g

I'm curious if the converse applies: e.g. English is more difficult for native Chinese speakers than for native Hindi speakers. > The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might look to an English-speaking monoglot. Author seems to imply a "distance" between 2 languages that would go both ways. For practical purposes though, I'd think other factors like the popularity of English/Western media and artifacts of British colonialization would make learning English for non-native English speakers slightly easier, than the other way around, as a result of greater chance of previous English exposure.

adimitrov 9y ago
Yes, the converse applies, at least with the caveat that the week estimates are pretty much bullshit, and the map in general is very speculative. In foreign language teaching, you will typically speak of L1 and L2, L1 being your native language, L2 being the language you're picking up. The typological distance (linguistically) between languages plays a major role in acquisition, both positively and negatively. A positive L1 transfer is something the learner can infer about the target language from their own, while a negative L1 transfer is something they assume about the target language based on their own, but it's wrong. Overall, positive L1 transfer in closely related languages will overwhelmingly outweigh negative transfer, but be a lot more tricky when the languages aren't closely related typologically. Note that typological similarity often coincides with distance in the historic sense, but isn't the same thing. For example, both Thai and Chinese are tonal isolating languages (same typological features) but aren't related at all. Also, Russian and Bulgarian, for example, are very closely related, but have a vastly different grammar, making Russian harder for a Bulgarian speaker than, say, for a Polish speaker.
- gajomi 9y ago
  I pretty much agree with most everything you write, but just want to add the caveat that this is all a function of relative competence or learning stage in an L2 language. That is to say, some languages that may be relatively easier to partially acquire then to fully master and visa versa. A case in point, and dear to my heart at that by way of experience, is the relative difficulty for an L1 English speaking in forming simple grammatically correct sentences in German and Mandarin, respectively. Whereas there is no question that Mandarin is the harder language to master (especially if we are talking about literacy), the high degree of analyticity relative to German makes forming sentences from words rather intuitive for the English speaker (even if English isn't quite as analytical as Mandarin in it's core modules). In other words, at least from the perspective of grammar, the beginnings of Mandarin are much easier than the beginnings of German, despite typological similarity even in inflections for plurality and the like shared between English and German.
- laurieg 9y ago
  The negative transfer that Japanese people are faced with when trying to learn English is really a incredible. Not only do they have a huge number of mis-leading false friends and corrupted loan words (for example the word for plug socket is "consent") but a lot of the core grammar concepts of English do no exist in Japanese. Plural/singular, subject verb agreement, perfect tenses. And on top of that the Japanese language has many fewer sounds than English. Most Japanese people will never be able to discriminate between L and R, or have a good command of all the Japanese vowels.
kijin 9y ago
Between Cat IV and Cat V languages, colonial influence and other cultural factors will probably outweigh any difference between the languages as you said. But I wouldn't be surprised if, as a broad generalization, people who speak Cat I languages find it much easier to learn English than people who speak Cat V languages do.
freeloop3 9y ago
Chinese has symbols which do not correspond to pronunciation. Each symbol represents a syllable and there are no spaces between words and no capital / lowercase. IT WOULD BE SIM A LER TO LEARN ING ENG LISH WRIT TEN LIKE THIS.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  thats plain wrong. each chinese symbol has a unique prononciation. Japanese is way more ambiguous because the Japanese transposed chinese characters to a language with a totally different structure.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > each chinese symbol has a unique pronunciation Your overall point is correct, but this isn't true. Compare 长 zhǎng "grow" with 长 cháng "long", or 行 xíng "walk; be permissible" with 行 háng "line".
    - jpatokal 9y ago
      In Chinese these are rare exceptions. In Japanese, having at least two (and sometimes four, ten or sixty) possible pronunciations is the rule, and it's the single-reading characters that are rare.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        Again, I understand the situation in Japanese, which is why I headed my comment with "your overall point is correct". And also again, it is not true that Chinese characters with multiple readings are rare exceptions, unless you want to measure rarity by dividing the count of "characters with multiple readings" by "all characters ever attested". Characters with multiple readings are extremely common; one of them, 的, is the most common character in written Chinese by a wide margin.
  - freeloop3 9y ago
    I meant that from looking at the character you can't determine how to pronouce it
fbarred 9y ago
I think the converse doesn't always apply. I imagine it is easier for an English speaker to learn Spanish than it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English. To see why, look at the common English-Spanish cognates. Most English speaker will recognize the cognates that one learns in Spanish 101 - dormir (to sleep, from dormitory), comenzar (to begin, from commence), mascota (pet, from mascot). But reverse isn't true - words like "sleep", "begin", "pet" will sounds completely foreign to a Spanish speaker. Sure, the cognates will help them learn "dormitory", "commence", and "mascot", but those are advanced words that a learner of English may not encounter in a long time, if ever.
- DiThi 9y ago
  Definitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced from the spelling. One has to be prepared to spend a lot of time learning _two_ language vocabularies: written and spoken. This is not true of most European languages (you can exactly know how a word is pronounced from the spelling).
  - dep_b 9y ago
    English is like a good board game. Easy to learn, hard to master.
- dep_b 9y ago
  True, my wife speaks Spanish and I was amazed at first about what fancy words she usually picked in a conversation. But those are the words that are Latin based and are common words in Spanish. In English there's often a more common Germanic word.
j7ake 9y ago
It's clear that Korean speakers will have an easier time learning Japanese than English speakers.
- DiThi 9y ago
  They are as similar as English and Russian...
  - malloryerik 9y ago
    Far more similar, really.
hiram112 9y ago
>>The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might look to an English-speaking monoglot. Should I be triggered?
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
One of the main reasons that Chinese/Japanese are so difficult is kanji (漢字). Having to learn thousands of unique symbols really cranks up the difficultly quick.
- rekado 9y ago
  (In Chinese they are called Hanzi.) It wasn't very hard for me to learn to read and to type with a Pinyin input method by simply writing office email. It's much easier to recognize characters (e.g. by picking them from a Pinyin conversion, or by reading them), when the context is known. You don't need to know how to use a pen to learn how to speak Mandarin.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    For what it's worth, Japanese kanji are much more difficult than Chinese hanzi. Kanji each have at least 2 and often up to 4 or 5 different readings in different situations, and can be combined in different ways (with hiragana to make 訓読み and with other kanji to make 熟語).

adimitrov 9y ago

Yes, the converse applies, at least with the caveat that the week estimates are pretty much bullshit, and the map in general is very speculative. In foreign language teaching, you will typically speak of L1 and L2, L1 being your native language, L2 being the language you're picking up. The typological distance (linguistically) between languages plays a major role in acquisition, both positively and negatively. A positive L1 transfer is something the learner can infer about the target language from their own, while a negative L1 transfer is something they assume about the target language based on their own, but it's wrong. Overall, positive L1 transfer in closely related languages will overwhelmingly outweigh negative transfer, but be a lot more tricky when the languages aren't closely related typologically. Note that typological similarity often coincides with distance in the historic sense, but isn't the same thing. For example, both Thai and Chinese are tonal isolating languages (same typological features) but aren't related at all. Also, Russian and Bulgarian, for example, are very closely related, but have a vastly different grammar, making Russian harder for a Bulgarian speaker than, say, for a Polish speaker.

gajomi 9y ago
I pretty much agree with most everything you write, but just want to add the caveat that this is all a function of relative competence or learning stage in an L2 language. That is to say, some languages that may be relatively easier to partially acquire then to fully master and visa versa. A case in point, and dear to my heart at that by way of experience, is the relative difficulty for an L1 English speaking in forming simple grammatically correct sentences in German and Mandarin, respectively. Whereas there is no question that Mandarin is the harder language to master (especially if we are talking about literacy), the high degree of analyticity relative to German makes forming sentences from words rather intuitive for the English speaker (even if English isn't quite as analytical as Mandarin in it's core modules). In other words, at least from the perspective of grammar, the beginnings of Mandarin are much easier than the beginnings of German, despite typological similarity even in inflections for plurality and the like shared between English and German.
laurieg 9y ago
The negative transfer that Japanese people are faced with when trying to learn English is really a incredible. Not only do they have a huge number of mis-leading false friends and corrupted loan words (for example the word for plug socket is "consent") but a lot of the core grammar concepts of English do no exist in Japanese. Plural/singular, subject verb agreement, perfect tenses. And on top of that the Japanese language has many fewer sounds than English. Most Japanese people will never be able to discriminate between L and R, or have a good command of all the Japanese vowels.

kijin 9y ago

Between Cat IV and Cat V languages, colonial influence and other cultural factors will probably outweigh any difference between the languages as you said. But I wouldn't be surprised if, as a broad generalization, people who speak Cat I languages find it much easier to learn English than people who speak Cat V languages do.

freeloop3 9y ago

Chinese has symbols which do not correspond to pronunciation. Each symbol represents a syllable and there are no spaces between words and no capital / lowercase. IT WOULD BE SIM A LER TO LEARN ING ENG LISH WRIT TEN LIKE THIS.

ekianjo 9y ago
thats plain wrong. each chinese symbol has a unique prononciation. Japanese is way more ambiguous because the Japanese transposed chinese characters to a language with a totally different structure.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > each chinese symbol has a unique pronunciation Your overall point is correct, but this isn't true. Compare 长 zhǎng "grow" with 长 cháng "long", or 行 xíng "walk; be permissible" with 行 háng "line".
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    In Chinese these are rare exceptions. In Japanese, having at least two (and sometimes four, ten or sixty) possible pronunciations is the rule, and it's the single-reading characters that are rare.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Again, I understand the situation in Japanese, which is why I headed my comment with "your overall point is correct". And also again, it is not true that Chinese characters with multiple readings are rare exceptions, unless you want to measure rarity by dividing the count of "characters with multiple readings" by "all characters ever attested". Characters with multiple readings are extremely common; one of them, 的, is the most common character in written Chinese by a wide margin.
- freeloop3 9y ago
  I meant that from looking at the character you can't determine how to pronouce it

fbarred 9y ago

I think the converse doesn't always apply. I imagine it is easier for an English speaker to learn Spanish than it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English. To see why, look at the common English-Spanish cognates. Most English speaker will recognize the cognates that one learns in Spanish 101 - dormir (to sleep, from dormitory), comenzar (to begin, from commence), mascota (pet, from mascot). But reverse isn't true - words like "sleep", "begin", "pet" will sounds completely foreign to a Spanish speaker. Sure, the cognates will help them learn "dormitory", "commence", and "mascot", but those are advanced words that a learner of English may not encounter in a long time, if ever.

DiThi 9y ago
Definitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced from the spelling. One has to be prepared to spend a lot of time learning _two_ language vocabularies: written and spoken. This is not true of most European languages (you can exactly know how a word is pronounced from the spelling).
- dep_b 9y ago
  English is like a good board game. Easy to learn, hard to master.
dep_b 9y ago
True, my wife speaks Spanish and I was amazed at first about what fancy words she usually picked in a conversation. But those are the words that are Latin based and are common words in Spanish. In English there's often a more common Germanic word.

j7ake 9y ago

It's clear that Korean speakers will have an easier time learning Japanese than English speakers.

DiThi 9y ago
They are as similar as English and Russian...
- malloryerik 9y ago
  Far more similar, really.

hiram112 9y ago

>>The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might look to an English-speaking monoglot. Should I be triggered?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

One of the main reasons that Chinese/Japanese are so difficult is kanji (漢字). Having to learn thousands of unique symbols really cranks up the difficultly quick.

rekado 9y ago
(In Chinese they are called Hanzi.) It wasn't very hard for me to learn to read and to type with a Pinyin input method by simply writing office email. It's much easier to recognize characters (e.g. by picking them from a Pinyin conversion, or by reading them), when the context is known. You don't need to know how to use a pen to learn how to speak Mandarin.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  For what it's worth, Japanese kanji are much more difficult than Chinese hanzi. Kanji each have at least 2 and often up to 4 or 5 different readings in different situations, and can be combined in different ways (with hiragana to make 訓読み and with other kanji to make 熟語).