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The hardest part of reading (not-simplified) German for me, as a sadly monolingual English speaker, is the word order. At times you have to sort of keep a ment
by tomjakubowski 8y ago
The hardest part of reading (not-simplified) German for me, as a sadly monolingual English speaker, is the word order. At times you have to sort of keep a mental stack of all the dative / accusative case nouns as you read, and then as you encounter the verbs at end of the sentence you kinda pop the nouns off that stack and piece together what's happening.
Reading Spanish has no such difficulty for me. The word order is much more like in English.
- ummonk 8y agoYup. SOV word order is natural conceptually and generally has less ambiguity in parsing, but the working memory requirements are really high. This is why simplified modern languages tend to shift to SVO word order. It is similar to how math operators are written in infix which makes equations easier to read than if we had written then as postfix.