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>Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structu
by thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
>Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)
I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and refined consistently over many years. All of these become harder the further the target language is from the ones you already know. Would French really be significantly harder to learn if they said 'Je le ballon frappe'?.
I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms). Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you need to listen and read for.
Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.
- laurieg 6y agoA different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.
- adrianN 6y agoThe effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.
- munchbunny 6y agoI thought that too, but as a bilingual person who studied Latin for several years... either I'm linguistically handicapped, or the grammar was legitimately tough to wrap your head around. Or both. Some of it was that I really did struggle with the grammar. Some of it was that sometimes we really were reading syntactically complex writing.
- rangibaby 6y agoIf you're a master of the grammar, I think it's possible to start figuring things out from context once you've learned a critical mass of words
- adrianN 6y agoYes, but "critical mass" is much larger than you'd commonly think. It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence.
- imtringued 6y agoThat's not true. People usually learn around a thousand words per year. Someone in their 20s is expected to have a 20k vocabulary but much of that is academic or professional vocabulary. i.e. the overlap between a mechanical and a software engineer might only be 15k words.
- majewsky 6y ago
- bernulli 6y agoThere's a lot more to learning a different language than learning substitutions. For starters, there is hardly any bijective mapping between words. Translating 'run' to German could mean any of 'rennen, renne, rennst, rennt, renn, laufen, laeuft' and I am sure I am missing quite a bit. And that only scratches the surface, let's not get started about Grammar or idioms, etc. The word order really only adds negligible overhead.
- solarmist 6y agoYou get closer to something bijective when you only consider lemmas, but then you'll probably have around 1/3 that are bijective, 1/3 that 1->2 or 3 and 1/3 that are 2 or 3->1.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoSo learn it. You'll get to practice it with every sentence you ever use. Conversely, you'll only use 'ballon' when you take about un ballon. I hope that's frequently enough for you to remember the word & its gender. At least it looks like the word 'ball', something you don't get with Vietnamese's 'bóng' or Chinese's '球[1]' And you'll still get funny looks if you say you're getting ready to go to the New Year's ballon, because substitutions fail with homonyms in both directions. And you'll have to learn and relearn about ten thousand of these substitutions. [1]maybe?
- numpad0 6y agoMore like building a completely different persona for each family of languages. “Learn a bunch of substitutions” approach only goes so far, your language specific part of identity must be separated at where thought processes for languages diverge and necessary new parts must be built. Philosophers deny linguistic determinism(a notion that language sets the ceiling for thoughts) but that’s just talking Turing Completeness.
- chillacy 6y agoI think you're hinting at the fact that all language acquisition ultimately boils down to vocab acquisition for the long tail to mastery. As for why people complain about vocab, it's probably because the dropout rate for language learning is huge (look at the completion rates on duolingo or popularity of beginner resources vs intermmediate vs advanced). By the numbers I suspect most learners are struggling with grammar, and most will drop out before "finishing" with grammar and being left with the long tail of vocab.
- porknubbins 6y agoThis has been my experience that in the long run everything else is a distant second to vocab acquisition. I think even within vocab the long tail you have to worry about is overwhelmingly nouns. Verbs are also numerous but can often be inferred from context, replaced by simpler verbs etc. 95% of the time when I’m watching tv news and can’t follow its because they use some finance, politics, medical terms etc that cannot be guessed. There are simply far more ideas/things in the world than anything else. Unfortunately the truth that language learning is a long slow grind to learn nouns doesn’t fit well with those who want to make it a more intellectual exercise or other pedagogical goals of academic settings.
- kwillets 6y agoJust learning the words sounds great until you find out that Korean is agglutinative, and Koreans don't even agree on where the word boundaries are.
- rangibaby 6y ago> Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too. If you don't understand what a word means, can't you ask the other person?
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoNot in every situation & not if you're not good enough to understand the explanation.
- rangibaby 6y agoThat's an impossible bar to clear, considering that it happens to native speakers of any language too.