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> Everyone learns it in China, and everyone there will tell you that it's perfectly readable and you don't need to be extraordinarily intelligent to speak it.

> Everyone learns it in China, and everyone there will tell you that it's perfectly readable and you don't need to be extraordinarily intelligent to speak it. I'm not sure Chinese is necessarily a good example for the point you're trying to make. Native Chinese speakers _probably_ spend more effort acquiring full competency in Chinese than native English speakers need to learn English. For one thing, reading and writing is harder to learn, even for natives (source: am Chinese and haven't acquired full literacy, despite years of half-hearted effort). English is generally easier to learn, not only for German and Dutch speakers, but for most people in the world who speak languages that are unrelated to both of them. One hypothesis[1] is that English has been learned by foreigners multiple times in the past and slowly lost it's more difficult native features (noun declension, many forms of inflection). Chinese has tones, which are rare amongst world languages and, as many learners will tell you, difficult to achieve proficiency with as as an adult. On a practical level, the British and Americans have had hegemonic influence over the world for about 2-3 centuries, so many idioms and concepts in the language will be familiar to a learner; less so Chinese, which is far more coupled to the culture of China and its history. Like, every schoolchild in China learns a bit of Tang poetry as part of their education, and 成語 idioms are part of daily speech across all social classes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...

gnulinux 7y ago
> hypothesis[1] is that English has been learned by foreigners multiple times in the past and slowly lost it's more difficult native features (noun declension, many forms of inflection). The claim that noun declension and inflection is harder to learn isn't well founded. If your native language has these, it'll be more natural for you. All languages have semantic declension and inflection, in the sense that context signals the kind of each word even if it's not syntactically inflected. For example in English the position of the word can signal whether a word is an object or subject "John hit Sally" vs "Sally hit John", the order of John and Sally signals who hit whom. In an agglutinate language you could signal this by putting a prefix like "John hit Sallyum" or "Sallyum hit John" would be parsed the same. My native language is Turkish, I've been learning English since I was 5 years old, but this "order matters" thing eternally confused me. It doesn't make sense to me when people say suffixes are more confusing than this order thing.
lioeters 7y ago
> English is generally easier to learn..for most people in the world Ohoh, this line sparked a thought in my head: "English is the JavaScript of human languages." > ..slowly lost it's more difficult native features That may be true of creole and English spoken as a second language (which, I believe, is more dominant in the world than English spoken by natives). Maybe also true about losing inflections, thank goodness, that surely must have made the language easier. On the other hand, English as spoken by natives do contain plenty of quirks, exceptions, phrases that don't make sense explicitly (with implicit meaning you have to have learned/memorized)..

gnulinux 7y ago

> hypothesis[1] is that English has been learned by foreigners multiple times in the past and slowly lost it's more difficult native features (noun declension, many forms of inflection). The claim that noun declension and inflection is harder to learn isn't well founded. If your native language has these, it'll be more natural for you. All languages have semantic declension and inflection, in the sense that context signals the kind of each word even if it's not syntactically inflected. For example in English the position of the word can signal whether a word is an object or subject "John hit Sally" vs "Sally hit John", the order of John and Sally signals who hit whom. In an agglutinate language you could signal this by putting a prefix like "John hit Sallyum" or "Sallyum hit John" would be parsed the same. My native language is Turkish, I've been learning English since I was 5 years old, but this "order matters" thing eternally confused me. It doesn't make sense to me when people say suffixes are more confusing than this order thing.

lioeters 7y ago

> English is generally easier to learn..for most people in the world Ohoh, this line sparked a thought in my head: "English is the JavaScript of human languages." > ..slowly lost it's more difficult native features That may be true of creole and English spoken as a second language (which, I believe, is more dominant in the world than English spoken by natives). Maybe also true about losing inflections, thank goodness, that surely must have made the language easier. On the other hand, English as spoken by natives do contain plenty of quirks, exceptions, phrases that don't make sense explicitly (with implicit meaning you have to have learned/memorized)..