4 ms·

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech. Arabic is probably easier if you know another Semitic language such as Hebrew, or at least

by danjac 5y ago

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech. Arabic is probably easier if you know another Semitic language such as Hebrew, or at least another language written in the Arabic alphabet, such as Farsi or Urdu. Also "hard" is difficult to quantify. Humans are odd and quirky, and so are the languages they create (with perhaps the exception of conlangs like Esperanto or computer languages, but even those inherit the idiosyncrasies of their creators - Perl is a good example). Every language has its weird and difficult aspects, some more than others. Japanese is "hard" because it has a complex writing system, but (for an English speaker) the pronunciation and grammar aren't particularly difficult: in fact I'd argue that Japanese is probably easier to learn to pronounce for an Anglophone than, say, French, and the verbs are considerably easier too. And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. Having once taught English, I'd say it's no cakewalk either, even for speakers of other Germanic languages: the spelling system barely deserves the name "system" and English verbal phrases are downright weird (put up with == "tolerate"? How?).

Toutouxc 5y ago
> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure. Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.
- ceceron 5y ago
  That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)
  - qsi 5y ago
    I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything. [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/ http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
    - Toutouxc 5y ago
      Interslavic is like 95 % intelligible for me, a Czech, and has a strong southern (ex-yugoslavian) vibe. I wonder what Poles think of it.
      - gnosek 5y ago
        Same. It takes a little effort to read but it's understandable and it does feel Croatian or thereabouts. On a somewhat funny note, Chrome decided to translate the page in Interslavic from Czech to Polish and did a passable job. What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest). * the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.
        0ld 5y ago
        > I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    There is a saying that both Poles and Czechs perceive the other language as if small kids were speaking. From a Czech perspective, this seems to be true. And the resulting cuteness is a major source of fun :)
- danjac 5y ago
  Sorry that sentence wasn't clear: Finnish is easy if you know Estonian, and Polish is easy if you know Czech.
  - euroderf 5y ago
    The grammatical differences between Finnish and Estonian are largely systematic, except in the declining of nouns (where Estonian is kind of chaotic). Fully 35% of Estonian word stock is Germanic, so knowing some German would help.
    - danjac 5y ago
      Yes: I noticed in Tallinn the police cars were called "Politsei" (from German Polizei) in contrast to Finnish "Poliisi" (from Swedish Polis).
geraneum 5y ago
Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.
- danjac 5y ago
  Sure: the point is that every language has its own set of difficulties and hurdles, and your existing knowledge of other languages may remove or lessen some of those hurdles. So a Farsi speaker will not need to learn the Arabic alphabet from scratch, but (other than loanwords) the languages' vocabularies are different. On the other hand, a Maltese speaker will need to learn the Arabic alphabet, but will find Arabic vocabulary familiar as both Maltese and Arabic are Semitic languages.
FabHK 5y ago
The linguist John DeFrancis (author of the insightful and somewhat controversial The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) opines (in that book, IIRC) that among character-based writing systems, Japanese is the worst, and among alphabetic ones, English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...
gnoll_of_gozag 5y ago
> And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  That the nice thing about Japanese. It's pretty easy to guess the meaning of a word by only knowing the kanji. For example, the word 配信, meaning "stream" or "broadcast", is made up of the kanji that generally indicate "distribution" and "signal". Conversely, English doesn't have as much of that benefit for unknown words. After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice. The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.

by danjac 5y ago

Toutouxc 5y ago

> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure. Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

ceceron 5y ago
That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)
- qsi 5y ago
  I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything. [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/ http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/
  - Toutouxc 5y ago
    Interslavic is like 95 % intelligible for me, a Czech, and has a strong southern (ex-yugoslavian) vibe. I wonder what Poles think of it.
    - gnosek 5y ago
      Same. It takes a little effort to read but it's understandable and it does feel Croatian or thereabouts. On a somewhat funny note, Chrome decided to translate the page in Interslavic from Czech to Polish and did a passable job. What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest). * the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.
      - 0ld 5y ago
        > I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  There is a saying that both Poles and Czechs perceive the other language as if small kids were speaking. From a Czech perspective, this seems to be true. And the resulting cuteness is a major source of fun :)
danjac 5y ago
Sorry that sentence wasn't clear: Finnish is easy if you know Estonian, and Polish is easy if you know Czech.
- euroderf 5y ago
  The grammatical differences between Finnish and Estonian are largely systematic, except in the declining of nouns (where Estonian is kind of chaotic). Fully 35% of Estonian word stock is Germanic, so knowing some German would help.
  - danjac 5y ago
    Yes: I noticed in Tallinn the police cars were called "Politsei" (from German Polizei) in contrast to Finnish "Poliisi" (from Swedish Polis).

geraneum 5y ago

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

danjac 5y ago
Sure: the point is that every language has its own set of difficulties and hurdles, and your existing knowledge of other languages may remove or lessen some of those hurdles. So a Farsi speaker will not need to learn the Arabic alphabet from scratch, but (other than loanwords) the languages' vocabularies are different. On the other hand, a Maltese speaker will need to learn the Arabic alphabet, but will find Arabic vocabulary familiar as both Maltese and Arabic are Semitic languages.

FabHK 5y ago

The linguist John DeFrancis (author of the insightful and somewhat controversial The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) opines (in that book, IIRC) that among character-based writing systems, Japanese is the worst, and among alphabetic ones, English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...

gnoll_of_gozag 5y ago

> And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences

nonbirithm 5y ago
That the nice thing about Japanese. It's pretty easy to guess the meaning of a word by only knowing the kanji. For example, the word 配信, meaning "stream" or "broadcast", is made up of the kanji that generally indicate "distribution" and "signal". Conversely, English doesn't have as much of that benefit for unknown words. After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice. The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.