6 ms·

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information den

by lolc 8y ago

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the language will be easier to learn once it's gone. As the cases are lost, preposition will be added in many places. The choice of prepositions will likely come from English, which means it's arbitrary from a grammatical point of view. I claim that reaching spoken proficiency requires the same effort in all human languages. If you want to speak at the level of a native, prepare for ten years of study. As a learner you'll use strings of terms that don't follow the arbitrary conventions, and people will have a hard time understanding. It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn all while using unfamiliar preposition-verb combinations in unexpected order. You can't leave hard parsing work to the recipient and say it was easy!

liftbigweights 8y ago
> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent. One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing ). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.
- FabHK 8y ago
  I've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well"; however, I can't find a reliable citation. At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.
  - tormeh 8y ago
    But I think this is the way languages have to work if they're supposed to be spoken by non-native speakers or just spoken by a large number of geographically dispersed people. Even German is losing a lot of its initial complexity because of the last decades of immigration. This is mostly just in spoken German for now, but the written word will eventually follow. And all languages with wide geographic dispersion have a disconnect between the spoken word and the written spelling, the most extreme example being Chinese.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    > English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master. You imply the goal was to be precise. The crux is, what you call slightly different connotation is often enough ambiguity and the goal is to be as ambiguous as possible to be understood by as many people as possible without loosing precision, that is without mistakenly falling in the trap of a nuanced connotation. Point in case for you, my spelling correction does not know "connotated", so that may be a nuance of the English language I was not aware of. Point in case for me, connotated nuanced synonyms (or synonymous nuanced connotations) is a redundant bag of words with something for everyone, yet unspecific enough to leave me guessing, finding no difference between those my two expressions above. ...
  - lolc 8y ago
    > English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master. At some point I accepted that this is true for every language. First there's training basic grammar and initial vocabulary (a few months' study) and then there's mastering the long tail of idiomatic expressions (years of study). The first gives you the ability to talk about any topic. Only the second gives you effortless communication.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  "simple" is not synonymous with "easy to learn". There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic. In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words. The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency.
  - lolc 8y ago
    Interesting! Can you recommend papers on that?
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      I learned this from a linguistic typology course a few years back, and that professor didn't use slides, so I had to do some digging on my own, and this paper seems to cover all the bases, with a nice literature review to boot: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01141/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0114...
  - liftbigweights 8y ago
    > "simple" is not synonymous with "easy to learn". I used simple in reference to "gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages". In that specific context, it does make it easier to learn english than german or spanish. > There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic. English is a germanic language and hence a synthetic language. Not sure why you lumped it with Mandarin. I don't know mandarin but I've heard that spoken mandarin is easy to learn since it very regular and has fairly limited vocabulary. Their tonal system make it extremely hard for people from non-tonal languages and their writing system is notoriously difficult. > In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words. Yes. It is easier to learn english on the front end because we lack the gender+conjugation+declension. My point is that what makes english difficult is the irregularities and exceptions. > The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency. In other words "simple is easier to learn"?
- egeozcan 8y ago
  I always say, English is easy with the basics, yet, hard to master while German exposes all the complexity from the very beginning.
Lunatic666 8y ago
There are definitely languages which are a lot easier to learn than English or German, like Malay. It has a simple grammar and no intonations, so you should be able to speak properly after 2 months full time study. I'm pretty sure you can learn most of the language within a year, faster if you are exposed to other native speakers.
- DonaldFisk 8y ago
  Most of the effort spent in learning a language isn't mastery of pronunciation or grammar, but memorization of vocabulary.
willyt 8y ago
English is not easy: Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation — think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough — Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!! (Apparently excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.)
projektfu 8y ago
Don't know German, but I've learned Spanish. I feel that English is easy because it's relatively hard for a learner to accidentally completely change the meaning of a sentence and make themselves misunderstood or, worse, say something offensive. In Spanish, a single letter changes the subject from him to me, the mood from indicative to subjunctive, etc. The use of pronouns in Spanish is especially difficult for English speakers.
- BrandoElFollito 8y ago
  This is very similar to French. I always said that French language and our love for philosophy means it that when someone makes a mistake, we will try to make sense of that when other countries would have guessed that this obviously was a mistake.
- h1d 8y ago
  Same for Japanese I guess. 1 letter change and your tone can suddenly become aggressive but of course when non natives speak, people will try to understand their intentions.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People say English is easy to learn because it's both fairly easy and very useful in the modern world. There certainly are languages that are even easier (e.g. Spanish, as soon as I've started learning Spanish I found myself wondering why would somebody need to invent something like Esperanto (which has cases!) when there is Spanish already).
dyeje 8y ago
Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.
- lolc 8y ago
  Not being too much of a linguist but ever ready to expound on the concept of economy in speech: We have a strong pressure to minimize communication effort both for speakers and for listeners. I would assume that genders help disambiguate and aid the listener discern words with higher certainty without increasing the syllable count. Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Without this, we couldn't follow a conversation. You can decide faster on what you heard the more the words preceding a noun preclose on the choice of noun. So gender can make communication more robust over a noisy channel, or more compact over a clear channel. In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. I'll go further out on that limb conjecturing that if you haven't been exposed to a gendered language as a kid, that facility will be untrained and quite the bother to acquire as an adult. If acquiring it as an adult is possible at all. After all that wild guessing, I should close with the observation that in this case German would be more difficult to learn than ungendered languages, _for untrained adults_. To close off (and to partially answer your question) I'll just say that gender takes little neurons overall in the habit that is language. Whether it'd come out a net plus in syllable economy I can't say.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    > In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I also noted the ease that comes from omission of a noun after an article if the grammatical gender hinted at by the article already indicates the noun (Was there anything else you were trying to say?). It's comparable to use of the indefinite it. I've seen that exposed as "omitting a word if the article makes it (word) clear" - you'd use "the" instead, then omit the noun, getting "... makes the clear". It's used especially in subsentences "_Der_ Hund in dem Haus, _der_ dieses und jenes tat, ist ...", so the referred noun does not have to precede the subsentence directly. However, I find this a bad use of the language and think it's unnatural for spoken speech. I suppose relational algebra would be informative to understand the problem better. One thing I remember from a first course is the limitation of one primary key per table. I like to liken this to the definite article. Hence, I find your first sentence is missing a definite article, but I don't know where to put it (there's so many options).

by lolc 8y ago

liftbigweights 8y ago

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People think english is simple because we don't have the gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages. So initially, english appears simple. A boat is a boat is a boat. But everywhere else - from spelling to grammar to phonetics, english is irregular and has so many exceptions that it really requires effort to become native or even fluent. One cow or many cows vs one sheep vs many sheep? One goose or many geese vs one moose vs many moose? Though goose can become gooses if you use it as a verb. Or look at envelope. You pronounce it differently depending on whether you use it as a noun, verb or adjective ( though it might be a regional thing ). And of course the nearly non-systematic accent/emphasis of syllables which you simply have to learn through listening. Whereas languages like latin have fairly consistent and systematic rules for accent/emphasis. And then there is the british insistence on adding a 'u' to words like labor or harbor.

FabHK 8y ago
I've seen this quote attributed to G B Shaw: "English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well"; however, I can't find a reliable citation. At any rate, I think it captures something about English. As you say, languages like German and French take more effort to learn initially (conjugation and (in German) declension), but then there are only a few ways of expressing something correctly. English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master.
- tormeh 8y ago
  But I think this is the way languages have to work if they're supposed to be spoken by non-native speakers or just spoken by a large number of geographically dispersed people. Even German is losing a lot of its initial complexity because of the last decades of immigration. This is mostly just in spoken German for now, but the written word will eventually follow. And all languages with wide geographic dispersion have a disconnect between the spoken word and the written spelling, the most extreme example being Chinese.
- posterboy 8y ago
  > English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master. You imply the goal was to be precise. The crux is, what you call slightly different connotation is often enough ambiguity and the goal is to be as ambiguous as possible to be understood by as many people as possible without loosing precision, that is without mistakenly falling in the trap of a nuanced connotation. Point in case for you, my spelling correction does not know "connotated", so that may be a nuance of the English language I was not aware of. Point in case for me, connotated nuanced synonyms (or synonymous nuanced connotations) is a redundant bag of words with something for everyone, yet unspecific enough to leave me guessing, finding no difference between those my two expressions above. ...
- lolc 8y ago
  > English has so many synonyms with slightly different connotations and idiomatic nuances that it is hard to master. At some point I accepted that this is true for every language. First there's training basic grammar and initial vocabulary (a few months' study) and then there's mastering the long tail of idiomatic expressions (years of study). The first gives you the ability to talk about any topic. Only the second gives you effortless communication.
hannasanarion 8y ago
"simple" is not synonymous with "easy to learn". There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic. In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words. The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency.
- lolc 8y ago
  Interesting! Can you recommend papers on that?
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    I learned this from a linguistic typology course a few years back, and that professor didn't use slides, so I had to do some digging on my own, and this paper seems to cover all the bases, with a nice literature review to boot: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01141/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0114...
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  > "simple" is not synonymous with "easy to learn". I used simple in reference to "gender+conjugation+declension system of many languages". In that specific context, it does make it easier to learn english than german or spanish. > There is some research that suggests that it is easier for adults to learn isolating languages, like English and Mandarin, than it is for adults to learn synthetic languages like German, Russian, or Arabic. English is a germanic language and hence a synthetic language. Not sure why you lumped it with Mandarin. I don't know mandarin but I've heard that spoken mandarin is easy to learn since it very regular and has fairly limited vocabulary. Their tonal system make it extremely hard for people from non-tonal languages and their writing system is notoriously difficult. > In other words, adults are better at learning lists of words than systems for constructing words. Yes. It is easier to learn english on the front end because we lack the gender+conjugation+declension. My point is that what makes english difficult is the irregularities and exceptions. > The fewer grammatical morphemes they need to learn, the faster they can reach functional fluency. In other words "simple is easier to learn"?
egeozcan 8y ago
I always say, English is easy with the basics, yet, hard to master while German exposes all the complexity from the very beginning.

Lunatic666 8y ago

There are definitely languages which are a lot easier to learn than English or German, like Malay. It has a simple grammar and no intonations, so you should be able to speak properly after 2 months full time study. I'm pretty sure you can learn most of the language within a year, faster if you are exposed to other native speakers.

DonaldFisk 8y ago
Most of the effort spent in learning a language isn't mastery of pronunciation or grammar, but memorization of vocabulary.

willyt 8y ago

English is not easy: Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation — think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough — Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!! (Apparently excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.)

projektfu 8y ago

Don't know German, but I've learned Spanish. I feel that English is easy because it's relatively hard for a learner to accidentally completely change the meaning of a sentence and make themselves misunderstood or, worse, say something offensive. In Spanish, a single letter changes the subject from him to me, the mood from indicative to subjunctive, etc. The use of pronouns in Spanish is especially difficult for English speakers.

BrandoElFollito 8y ago
This is very similar to French. I always said that French language and our love for philosophy means it that when someone makes a mistake, we will try to make sense of that when other countries would have guessed that this obviously was a mistake.
h1d 8y ago
Same for Japanese I guess. 1 letter change and your tone can suddenly become aggressive but of course when non natives speak, people will try to understand their intentions.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn People say English is easy to learn because it's both fairly easy and very useful in the modern world. There certainly are languages that are even easier (e.g. Spanish, as soon as I've started learning Spanish I found myself wondering why would somebody need to invent something like Esperanto (which has cases!) when there is Spanish already).

dyeje 8y ago

Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.

lolc 8y ago
Not being too much of a linguist but ever ready to expound on the concept of economy in speech: We have a strong pressure to minimize communication effort both for speakers and for listeners. I would assume that genders help disambiguate and aid the listener discern words with higher certainty without increasing the syllable count. Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Without this, we couldn't follow a conversation. You can decide faster on what you heard the more the words preceding a noun preclose on the choice of noun. So gender can make communication more robust over a noisy channel, or more compact over a clear channel. In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. I'll go further out on that limb conjecturing that if you haven't been exposed to a gendered language as a kid, that facility will be untrained and quite the bother to acquire as an adult. If acquiring it as an adult is possible at all. After all that wild guessing, I should close with the observation that in this case German would be more difficult to learn than ungendered languages, _for untrained adults_. To close off (and to partially answer your question) I'll just say that gender takes little neurons overall in the habit that is language. Whether it'd come out a net plus in syllable economy I can't say.
- posterboy 8y ago
  > In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I also noted the ease that comes from omission of a noun after an article if the grammatical gender hinted at by the article already indicates the noun (Was there anything else you were trying to say?). It's comparable to use of the indefinite it. I've seen that exposed as "omitting a word if the article makes it (word) clear" - you'd use "the" instead, then omit the noun, getting "... makes the clear". It's used especially in subsentences "_Der_ Hund in dem Haus, _der_ dieses und jenes tat, ist ...", so the referred noun does not have to precede the subsentence directly. However, I find this a bad use of the language and think it's unnatural for spoken speech. I suppose relational algebra would be informative to understand the problem better. One thing I remember from a first course is the limitation of one primary key per table. I like to liken this to the definite article. Hence, I find your first sentence is missing a definite article, but I don't know where to put it (there's so many options).