4 ms·

Are you saying that "people in general" == "people whose native alphabet is Latin-based"?

• kbenson 9y ago
  Eh, sort of. I kind of got mixed up between the point of saying "I think people in general are more likely to attempt a language with less obvious initial hurdles given a relatively equal set of benefits from learning them (to their understanding)" and a statement about those languages in particular that follows along those lines. So, for your proposed equivalence, I think my original statement is true, and I also think the more general statement above is likely true in a wider sense.
  • Fins 9y ago
    Apart from relative usefulness of different languages (Latin script based Kazakh would probably be considered less generally useful than Chinese, say). Initial attempt maybe. But I think very soon most people will find out that if you are coming from an Indo-European background, Kazakh or Finnish, regardless of script used, is far more foreign than Russian or German.
    • kbenson 9y ago
      Sure, but the catch-22 is that most people won't have a good idea how to assess the difficulty of learning a language until they've tried, and it seems different people have different difficulties with the process. From the outside at the beginning, the different alphabet seems like quite a big deal. Thats how it feels to me at least when I think about learning another language. It's a data point of one, but I don't think I'm that unique in this.
      • Fins 9y ago
        I'm not sure if most people start learning languages just because they seem "easy" either. There has to be some reason. And once you do start, something like differences between analytic and synthetic languages probably would be more of a tripping point.