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Reasons some languages are harder to learn

103 points by prostoalex 5y ago

DennisP 5y ago
Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed," just "flashed." Seems like it was Mojave, not sure.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  > a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time Is this actually true? From a quick look at Wikipedia, it doesn't seem to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
  - DennisP 5y ago
    My professors were pretty big Whorf fans, in general.
- masklinn 5y ago
  There are a fair amount of langages which interestingly break western assumptions about langage logic and reasoning. A pretty famous example is Aboriginal Australian langages where directions are always absolute (cardinal), not relative. So in e.g. Guugu Yimithirr you'd tell a guest that the food is in the living room on the southern table, rather than e.g. the table to the left of the entrance, or the table in front of the balcony. In at least some of these langages, time is also cardinal: where most western cultures order timelines left to right, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do so east to west. IIRC there are also cultures where time goes back to front (because you can see the past so it’s obviously in front of you).
  - xenocratus 5y ago
    Link for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language#Lexical_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language#Lexica...
- umvi 5y ago
  Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. As soon as you can have multiple things that flash or multiple modes of transportation your language would become too ambiguous. That's not to say the native Americans that speak it couldn't evolve the language to accommodate modern society, I'm sure they could.
  - katmannthree 5y ago
    Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is fairly common in some languages and even happens in English under some circumstances (generally in either very informal or highly technical communications). In contexts where inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping nonessential fillers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode. That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.
    - fpig 5y ago
      > I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me That's a ridiculous statement. When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance. Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide". That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context. Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  > distances were always expressed in terms of travel time That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.
  - curiousllama 5y ago
    Facts - I honestly dont know how far apart cities on the US East Coast are, but I know exactly how long it would take to drive between them. I’d have to work backwards to figure out distance.
  - anthk 5y ago
    In Spain too. How long is X from there? About 10 minutes by car.
- Jenk 5y ago
  One of my former employers participated in a goodwill project to help Maasai tribes in Kenya build infrastructure like schools and wells. The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest la vie" but explicitly time) When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.
- VoodooJuJu 5y ago
  >distances were always expressed as travel time I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars. For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square feet or square cubits or square whatever it is. I have a domain-specific (farming) definition that actually communicates something more useful to me than arbitrary distance units.
  - fpig 5y ago
    How is such a definition more useful? It's certainly not more useful to me. If someone tried to sell me such a quantity of land, the first thing I'd ask would be what the actual size is in standard units. A universal, precisely defined system of units is superior because it works in any context, you just need to know the system. Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.
    - Kalium 5y ago
      It's a tool that can be very helpful for describing the logistics of travel. Depending on where you are and the context of the conversation, knowing that something is fifteen miles away might tell you shockingly little about the experience of getting there. There are places where that distance in one direction might take hours, but in another direction minutes. As you might imagine, this can be important to know.
- bradrn 5y ago
  > we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expression of time. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy [EDIT: Whoops, didn’t realise MaxBarraclough already mentioned this, sorry…]
q-big 5y ago
Archive.is: https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D
Clewza313 5y ago
https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D
RandomWorker 5y ago
When I started learning Chinese the grammar really made think hard about what I needed to say first. Then put it in the right grammar order, then translate the words, which is like a inverted 3D lookup table, sounds/tone/meaning. Memorizing the lookup table which people say is the hard part is actually the easy bit. It’s the restructuring of my thoughts to fit in the grammar. I find English I get you can get away with a lot of thinking while you talk..example; I would generally make up a sentence like this.. “hey why don’t we go for a run, somewhere next Monday maybe around noon, just the two of us. I think there’s a nice track close to my place.” I though of the activity first then the time then the person. Generally that’s how I come up with how to plan activities. In Chinese its subjects, time location, verb. I’m just beginning, but that has been the hardest part for my brain in particular.
- magpi3 5y ago
  I am in my third year of Chinese. Ultimately I think it's best to figure out how to say things the Chinese way, and then just say that sentence a thousand times until it starts to feel more natural. If you have to think about it, you're gonna mash it up. That's my experience so far.
- eloisius 5y ago
  I’m about a year in studying Mandarin and feel the same way. All the “exotic” features people say make it hard to learn, like tones and writing characters, aren’t that hard to remember and use. English let’s us have a lot of flexibility when it comes to putting prepositions like “last week” before or after the main clause in a sentence. Maybe Mandarin too has this flexibility and I just haven’t gotten that far in my studies, but it sure feels like I can’t make up what I’m saying as I say it. Aside from that, I’d say some features of the language are quite nice, and feel like they were created with human experience in mind more than rules of logic. For example, it relies on specialized complements, like 過 guò (past experience), or 完 wán (finished something), to modify the action of a clause. Unlike English which uses the same past-tense grammar to describe that I ate something in the past and a tree fell in the woods. There are even complements to express the result perceiving with ones senses “I looked and saw”, and the result of cognition “I looked and understood.”
Clewza313 5y ago
Some examples of language features alien to English speakers: * Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu). * Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. * Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc. * Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages. * Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS): https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdest-languages/ https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  > Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)
    - ben_w 5y ago
      This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter. When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
    - liversage 5y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.
slibhb 5y ago
It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me. > Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways. It does not follow that languages having different features results in "slicing up reality differently". That's only true if you believe some form of Sapir-Worf. > Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae). Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding). > Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii) Great, and in English dark blue might be "navy". All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school. If you're thrown into a situation where you need to acquire a language, odds are you'll figure it out. This topic (differences between natural languages) always ends up as amateur sociology like "foreigners see things differently". It might be true but there's no evidence for it. Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. To me, it all sounds like "inuits have 87 words for snow".
- Clewza313 5y ago
  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both. The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.
Razengan 5y ago
+ “for English natives.” Because you didn’t grow up with them.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Have any of you learned any Malay/Indonesian? Fantastically easy. Purely phonetic, simple grammar, not tonal or anything else weird. I seriously think, as an English speaker, it’s easier to learn than German or French or whatever, even though it has no relationship with European languages (unlike Hindi, which is part of the same Indo-European languages... in spite of the “Indo” prefix, there’s no relation). It helps that there are many loan words from English, but it seriously is an extremely easy to learn trade language.
- bradrn 5y ago
  That’s basically because Standard Indonesian has been artificially Europeanicised, or so I hear: > In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfil the functions of a "national language", it must have a "well-developed" system of grammar. Unfortunately, the only type of grammar that the language planners are usually familiar with is the Eurocentric grammar of European languages.Thus, Standard Malay / Indonesian has had a variety of linguistic features artificially grafted onto it that are reminiscent of European languages, including nominal number marking, verbal active and passive prefixes, and others. — Gil 2001, Escaping Eurocentrism: Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning (https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd0429820316cf75d28ad81c82880aaa5c03/monography/eurocent.pdf https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...)
  - adamjb 5y ago
    >Malay / Indonesian is one of the world's major languages, with up to two hundred million native speakers. Actually, though, it is not one language, or even two, but a family of languages with about as much internal diversity as the Slavic or Romance language families. My dad had a gig teaching Indonesian to members of the ADF in the lead up to to their peacekeeping mission in East Timor (INTERFET). Quite logically he taught them Timorese Indonesian, which got him in trouble because they wanted him to teach standard Indonesian.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure I have read that same paper back when I was in university. Odd coincidence. :)
tomcooks 5y ago
> In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over. TL;DR: Anglo-saxon approach to foreign cultures.
cletus 5y ago
I'm no expert but I find the hypothesis that all languages are basically a wash in terms of complexity... unconvincing. Some examples: 1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that? 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht". 3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from the verb conjugation. 3. Writing system. Asian languages are the poster children for complex writing systems that often don't delineate word boundaries and may have thousands of characters. I think I read once that in Taiwan in high school they have competitions for how quickly you can find a word in a dictionary. Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted. 4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be native English bias. I find it fascinating that through a variety of means a lot of this linguistic cruft disappeared between Old English and Middle English. English really is the red-headed stepchild of languages. In my experience, no one is the least bit concerned loan words in English whereas in French there's a Ministry dedicated to coming up with French words for foreign concepts to keep French "French". This is why I find the hypothesis that languages constrain cultures so interesting. If your mindset has shifted to preserving your language (in essence, to resist change), how can that not impact your culture?
- q-big 5y ago
  > 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht". "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" -> "I have needed my wife". brauchen -> to need bringen -> to bring; Partizip II: gebracht umbringen -> to kill; Partzip II: umgebracht There is no word "umbrauchen", of which the fictional Partizip II would be "umgebraucht".
thedogeye 5y ago
Dutch is the hardest language to learn because all of its speakers will just switch to English immediately when you try to speak to them.
- kashyapc 5y ago
  It depends where you are, I guess. What you say is perhaps more true in the Netherlands, my experience in Belgium (particularly Flanders, where I live) has been different. People seem to appreciate my efforts and forgive my mistakes. Granted, this is only possible after you've gained a certain competency level where you don't make your interlocutor impatient, or they notice you making too much effort. And you only have three seconds to make that first impression. ;-) I've taken two years of night classes, and gained a so-called 'C1' competency[1], but in practice I'm a moderate 'B2'. I strongly recommend taking long-term formal classes; makes life so much more pleasant. FWIW, I try to keep my Dutch relatively sharp by listening to the radio, reading the local newspaper, and importantly talking only in Dutch with some of my local friends, and in everyday interactions with the society. An interesting (but more effortful) method to improve Dutch is: if you've read and enjoyed a book in English, read its equivalent Dutch translation, while having the English copy nearby. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
laurieg 5y ago
I broadly like the idea of "slicing up reality differently". Usually when this it comes up the focus is on grammar, but I think this explains the relative ease/difficulty of learning close/distant languages quite well. You can argue about whether grammar or vocabulary acquisition is more difficult but it's certainly true that there's just more of the latter. One way I look at this to pick a word with many quite different meanings. "Set" can mean a group of things or something to turn hard (like a jelly) along with plenty of other things. Since European languages tend to share ancestors you aren't surprised that these multiple distinct meanings are shared. But with distance languages you have to learn a completely different word for each particular meaning. In fact, I'm sometimes surprised when two different meanings line up between English and Japanese, as I'm so used to them being completely separate.
idlewords 5y ago
There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the grammatical apparatus of noun declensions, verbs of motion, and the perfective/imperfective distinction, all of which are profoundly alien to an English speaker. So Russian departments end up teaching the material three times through—first years are overwhelmed and try to retain what they can, in second year you are expected to absorb the material, and in third year you're supposed to internalize it. That means you study for three years to reach a level of proficiency other students gain in one. Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle? Meanwhile, fellow students learning German or French can speak proficiently after one year and start reading literature after two. It's a bitter pill.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  > Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle? Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".
lazyant 5y ago
Non-paywalled https://outline.com/PsFJw2 https://outline.com/PsFJw2
morekozhambu 5y ago
नासतो विद्यते भावो नाभावो विद्यते सतः | उभयोरपि दृष्टोऽन्तस्त्वनयोस्तत्त्वदर्शिभिः ||
kashyapc 5y ago
A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my brain in interesting ways. • Verb comes at the end ... except when not. A dead-simple example: the phrase "because it is difficult" is translated as omdat het moelijk is. The verb is is here. And omdat means "because" and it has a synonym called want (yes, it's a Dutch word). However, the-verb-comes-at-the-end rule doesn't apply to want, so the same Dutch phrase with want becomes: want het is moelijk (here, the verb sits in the 'normal' position). This subject/verb order can get really complex. • Split verbs. The verb "invite" (uitnodig[en]) in the sentence "I invite you all" gets split in two: "in" and "vite"; and the first part goes to the end of the sentence: "I vite you all in" The sentence in Dutch reads: Ik nodig jullie allemaal uit (notice the verb split: nodig ... uit). My frustration here is hilariously expressed by Mark Twain in his essay[1] on German. NOTE! — Before you take offence at the title[1], Mark Twain was an accomplished German speaker, he wrote this in a fun spirit! "The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance [...]" • • • And there are many other subtleties like "inversion", and usage of grammatical articles ("de" vs. "het") is arbitrary enough that there's an entire website[2] that helps you learn which article to use when. [1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html — "The Awful German Language" [2] https://www.welklidwoord.be/ https://www.welklidwoord.be/ — the website name means "which article is it?"
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  Not sure if you know this, but both of the examples you mention are the same in German: "..., weil es schwierig ist" and "..., denn es ist schwierig" both mean "... because it's difficult", but "weil" and "denn" have different requirements for where the verb goes. And "ich lade euch ein" is also a mandatory splitting of "einladen", "to invite".
tragomaskhalos 5y ago
A shout out to Sanskrit (for European learners at least) - its trick is to be complex on a number of orthogonal axes, with few obvious shortcuts for the learner: - Writing system (devanagari) - conjunct consonants will keep tripping you up long after you've mastered the basics; - Vocabulary - the hope of familiarity due to a common Indo-European vocabulary quickly dissipates; - Noun morphology - approx twice as many forms per paradigm to learn compared to classical Greek, and many more paradigms; - Sandhi - a difficulty so disruptive that it is often ignored initially, and the GCSE exam has a non-sandhi section, but must be mastered in order to read original texts
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D
kaiwen1 5y ago
Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."
- randomraccoon 5y ago
  Less descriptive, but I would think "Let's forage for food at low tide" would convey much the same meaning more succinctly. Still cool, thanks for sharing!
- tape_measure 5y ago
  Let's go tidepooling! Almost the same, but it doesn't imply collection, just observation.
- xenadu02 5y ago
  What are examples of the opposite? English words that convey concepts that require lots of words in other languages?
  - onorton 5y ago
    Not quite the same but the word "run" in English can express a lot of different concepts.[0] [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run
karatinversion 5y ago
The article states that the hardest thing to learn in a language are structural distinctions which one's native language does not make. Does anyone here have experience of such features that English has, coming from a different language?
- avidiax 5y ago
  Gendered pronouns Some of the verb tenses (e.g. past perfect continuous) don't exist in other languages. Verb inflection
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    What's your native language?
    - avidiax 5y ago
      I don't speak it, but this is relative to Cantonese.
- yakireev 5y ago
  Articles, as in "a" and "the". Slavic languages don't have them, and we Russians can never learn to use them properly. Alas. Some languages don't mandate always keeping track of whether something is "an object" or "the object", can you imagine?
29athrowaway 5y ago
Some languages are more regular than others. Phonetically, English is irregular AF.

103 points by prostoalex 5y ago

Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.) Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed," just "flashed." Seems like it was Mojave, not sure.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
> a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time Is this actually true? From a quick look at Wikipedia, it doesn't seem to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
- DennisP 5y ago
  My professors were pretty big Whorf fans, in general.
masklinn 5y ago
There are a fair amount of langages which interestingly break western assumptions about langage logic and reasoning. A pretty famous example is Aboriginal Australian langages where directions are always absolute (cardinal), not relative. So in e.g. Guugu Yimithirr you'd tell a guest that the food is in the living room on the southern table, rather than e.g. the table to the left of the entrance, or the table in front of the balcony. In at least some of these langages, time is also cardinal: where most western cultures order timelines left to right, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do so east to west. IIRC there are also cultures where time goes back to front (because you can see the past so it’s obviously in front of you).
- xenocratus 5y ago
  Link for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language#Lexical_semantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language#Lexica...
umvi 5y ago
Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. As soon as you can have multiple things that flash or multiple modes of transportation your language would become too ambiguous. That's not to say the native Americans that speak it couldn't evolve the language to accommodate modern society, I'm sure they could.
- katmannthree 5y ago
  Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is fairly common in some languages and even happens in English under some circumstances (generally in either very informal or highly technical communications). In contexts where inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping nonessential fillers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode. That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.
  - fpig 5y ago
    > I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me That's a ridiculous statement. When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance. Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide". That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context. Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
> distances were always expressed in terms of travel time That is also true for large English-speaking portions of the US.
- curiousllama 5y ago
  Facts - I honestly dont know how far apart cities on the US East Coast are, but I know exactly how long it would take to drive between them. I’d have to work backwards to figure out distance.
- anthk 5y ago
  In Spain too. How long is X from there? About 10 minutes by car.
Jenk 5y ago
One of my former employers participated in a goodwill project to help Maasai tribes in Kenya build infrastructure like schools and wells. The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest la vie" but explicitly time) When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
>distances were always expressed as travel time I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars. For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square feet or square cubits or square whatever it is. I have a domain-specific (farming) definition that actually communicates something more useful to me than arbitrary distance units.
- fpig 5y ago
  How is such a definition more useful? It's certainly not more useful to me. If someone tried to sell me such a quantity of land, the first thing I'd ask would be what the actual size is in standard units. A universal, precisely defined system of units is superior because it works in any context, you just need to know the system. Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    It's a tool that can be very helpful for describing the logistics of travel. Depending on where you are and the context of the conversation, knowing that something is fifteen miles away might tell you shockingly little about the experience of getting there. There are places where that distance in one direction might take hours, but in another direction minutes. As you might imagine, this can be important to know.
bradrn 5y ago
> we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expression of time. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy [EDIT: Whoops, didn’t realise MaxBarraclough already mentioned this, sorry…]

q-big 5y ago

Archive.is: https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D

Clewza313 5y ago

https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D

RandomWorker 5y ago

When I started learning Chinese the grammar really made think hard about what I needed to say first. Then put it in the right grammar order, then translate the words, which is like a inverted 3D lookup table, sounds/tone/meaning. Memorizing the lookup table which people say is the hard part is actually the easy bit. It’s the restructuring of my thoughts to fit in the grammar. I find English I get you can get away with a lot of thinking while you talk..example; I would generally make up a sentence like this.. “hey why don’t we go for a run, somewhere next Monday maybe around noon, just the two of us. I think there’s a nice track close to my place.” I though of the activity first then the time then the person. Generally that’s how I come up with how to plan activities. In Chinese its subjects, time location, verb. I’m just beginning, but that has been the hardest part for my brain in particular.

magpi3 5y ago
I am in my third year of Chinese. Ultimately I think it's best to figure out how to say things the Chinese way, and then just say that sentence a thousand times until it starts to feel more natural. If you have to think about it, you're gonna mash it up. That's my experience so far.
eloisius 5y ago
I’m about a year in studying Mandarin and feel the same way. All the “exotic” features people say make it hard to learn, like tones and writing characters, aren’t that hard to remember and use. English let’s us have a lot of flexibility when it comes to putting prepositions like “last week” before or after the main clause in a sentence. Maybe Mandarin too has this flexibility and I just haven’t gotten that far in my studies, but it sure feels like I can’t make up what I’m saying as I say it. Aside from that, I’d say some features of the language are quite nice, and feel like they were created with human experience in mind more than rules of logic. For example, it relies on specialized complements, like 過 guò (past experience), or 完 wán (finished something), to modify the action of a clause. Unlike English which uses the same past-tense grammar to describe that I ate something in the past and a tree fell in the woods. There are even complements to express the result perceiving with ones senses “I looked and saw”, and the result of cognition “I looked and understood.”

Clewza313 5y ago

Some examples of language features alien to English speakers: * Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu). * Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. * Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc. * Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages. * Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS): https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdest-languages/ https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...

hprotagonist 5y ago
> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter. When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
  - liversage 5y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.

slibhb 5y ago

It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me. > Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways. It does not follow that languages having different features results in "slicing up reality differently". That's only true if you believe some form of Sapir-Worf. > Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae). Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding). > Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii) Great, and in English dark blue might be "navy". All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school. If you're thrown into a situation where you need to acquire a language, odds are you'll figure it out. This topic (differences between natural languages) always ends up as amateur sociology like "foreigners see things differently". It might be true but there's no evidence for it. Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. To me, it all sounds like "inuits have 87 words for snow".

Clewza313 5y ago
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both. The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.

Razengan 5y ago

+ “for English natives.” Because you didn’t grow up with them.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Have any of you learned any Malay/Indonesian? Fantastically easy. Purely phonetic, simple grammar, not tonal or anything else weird. I seriously think, as an English speaker, it’s easier to learn than German or French or whatever, even though it has no relationship with European languages (unlike Hindi, which is part of the same Indo-European languages... in spite of the “Indo” prefix, there’s no relation). It helps that there are many loan words from English, but it seriously is an extremely easy to learn trade language.

bradrn 5y ago
That’s basically because Standard Indonesian has been artificially Europeanicised, or so I hear: > In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfil the functions of a "national language", it must have a "well-developed" system of grammar. Unfortunately, the only type of grammar that the language planners are usually familiar with is the Eurocentric grammar of European languages.Thus, Standard Malay / Indonesian has had a variety of linguistic features artificially grafted onto it that are reminiscent of European languages, including nominal number marking, verbal active and passive prefixes, and others. — Gil 2001, Escaping Eurocentrism: Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning (https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd0429820316cf75d28ad81c82880aaa5c03/monography/eurocent.pdf https://git.rahona.be/luigi/sose2020/raw/commit/89acbd042982...)
- adamjb 5y ago
  >Malay / Indonesian is one of the world's major languages, with up to two hundred million native speakers. Actually, though, it is not one language, or even two, but a family of languages with about as much internal diversity as the Slavic or Romance language families. My dad had a gig teaching Indonesian to members of the ADF in the lead up to to their peacekeeping mission in East Timor (INTERFET). Quite logically he taught them Timorese Indonesian, which got him in trouble because they wanted him to teach standard Indonesian.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure I have read that same paper back when I was in university. Odd coincidence. :)

tomcooks 5y ago

> In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over. TL;DR: Anglo-saxon approach to foreign cultures.

cletus 5y ago

I'm no expert but I find the hypothesis that all languages are basically a wash in terms of complexity... unconvincing. Some examples: 1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that? 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht". 3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from the verb conjugation. 3. Writing system. Asian languages are the poster children for complex writing systems that often don't delineate word boundaries and may have thousands of characters. I think I read once that in Taiwan in high school they have competitions for how quickly you can find a word in a dictionary. Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted. 4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be native English bias. I find it fascinating that through a variety of means a lot of this linguistic cruft disappeared between Old English and Middle English. English really is the red-headed stepchild of languages. In my experience, no one is the least bit concerned loan words in English whereas in French there's a Ministry dedicated to coming up with French words for foreign concepts to keep French "French". This is why I find the hypothesis that languages constrain cultures so interesting. If your mindset has shifted to preserving your language (in essence, to resist change), how can that not impact your culture?

q-big 5y ago
> 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht". "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" -> "I have needed my wife". brauchen -> to need bringen -> to bring; Partizip II: gebracht umbringen -> to kill; Partzip II: umgebracht There is no word "umbrauchen", of which the fictional Partizip II would be "umgebraucht".

thedogeye 5y ago

Dutch is the hardest language to learn because all of its speakers will just switch to English immediately when you try to speak to them.

kashyapc 5y ago
It depends where you are, I guess. What you say is perhaps more true in the Netherlands, my experience in Belgium (particularly Flanders, where I live) has been different. People seem to appreciate my efforts and forgive my mistakes. Granted, this is only possible after you've gained a certain competency level where you don't make your interlocutor impatient, or they notice you making too much effort. And you only have three seconds to make that first impression. ;-) I've taken two years of night classes, and gained a so-called 'C1' competency[1], but in practice I'm a moderate 'B2'. I strongly recommend taking long-term formal classes; makes life so much more pleasant. FWIW, I try to keep my Dutch relatively sharp by listening to the radio, reading the local newspaper, and importantly talking only in Dutch with some of my local friends, and in everyday interactions with the society. An interesting (but more effortful) method to improve Dutch is: if you've read and enjoyed a book in English, read its equivalent Dutch translation, while having the English copy nearby. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

laurieg 5y ago

I broadly like the idea of "slicing up reality differently". Usually when this it comes up the focus is on grammar, but I think this explains the relative ease/difficulty of learning close/distant languages quite well. You can argue about whether grammar or vocabulary acquisition is more difficult but it's certainly true that there's just more of the latter. One way I look at this to pick a word with many quite different meanings. "Set" can mean a group of things or something to turn hard (like a jelly) along with plenty of other things. Since European languages tend to share ancestors you aren't surprised that these multiple distinct meanings are shared. But with distance languages you have to learn a completely different word for each particular meaning. In fact, I'm sometimes surprised when two different meanings line up between English and Japanese, as I'm so used to them being completely separate.

idlewords 5y ago

There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the grammatical apparatus of noun declensions, verbs of motion, and the perfective/imperfective distinction, all of which are profoundly alien to an English speaker. So Russian departments end up teaching the material three times through—first years are overwhelmed and try to retain what they can, in second year you are expected to absorb the material, and in third year you're supposed to internalize it. That means you study for three years to reach a level of proficiency other students gain in one. Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle? Meanwhile, fellow students learning German or French can speak proficiently after one year and start reading literature after two. It's a bitter pill.

StavrosK 5y ago
> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle? Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".

lazyant 5y ago

Non-paywalled https://outline.com/PsFJw2 https://outline.com/PsFJw2

morekozhambu 5y ago

नासतो विद्यते भावो नाभावो विद्यते सतः | उभयोरपि दृष्टोऽन्तस्त्वनयोस्तत्त्वदर्शिभिः ||

kashyapc 5y ago

A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my brain in interesting ways. • Verb comes at the end ... except when not. A dead-simple example: the phrase "because it is difficult" is translated as omdat het moelijk is. The verb is is here. And omdat means "because" and it has a synonym called want (yes, it's a Dutch word). However, the-verb-comes-at-the-end rule doesn't apply to want, so the same Dutch phrase with want becomes: want het is moelijk (here, the verb sits in the 'normal' position). This subject/verb order can get really complex. • Split verbs. The verb "invite" (uitnodig[en]) in the sentence "I invite you all" gets split in two: "in" and "vite"; and the first part goes to the end of the sentence: "I vite you all in" The sentence in Dutch reads: Ik nodig jullie allemaal uit (notice the verb split: nodig ... uit). My frustration here is hilariously expressed by Mark Twain in his essay[1] on German. NOTE! — Before you take offence at the title[1], Mark Twain was an accomplished German speaker, he wrote this in a fun spirit! "The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance [...]" • • • And there are many other subtleties like "inversion", and usage of grammatical articles ("de" vs. "het") is arbitrary enough that there's an entire website[2] that helps you learn which article to use when. [1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html — "The Awful German Language" [2] https://www.welklidwoord.be/ https://www.welklidwoord.be/ — the website name means "which article is it?"

tom_mellior 5y ago
Not sure if you know this, but both of the examples you mention are the same in German: "..., weil es schwierig ist" and "..., denn es ist schwierig" both mean "... because it's difficult", but "weil" and "denn" have different requirements for where the verb goes. And "ich lade euch ein" is also a mandatory splitting of "einladen", "to invite".

tragomaskhalos 5y ago

A shout out to Sanskrit (for European learners at least) - its trick is to be complex on a number of orthogonal axes, with few obvious shortcuts for the learner: - Writing system (devanagari) - conjunct consonants will keep tripping you up long after you've mastered the basics; - Vocabulary - the hope of familiarity due to a common Indo-European vocabulary quickly dissipates; - Noun morphology - approx twice as many forms per paradigm to learn compared to classical Greek, and many more paradigms; - Sandhi - a difficulty so disruptive that it is often ignored initially, and the GCSE exam has a non-sandhi section, but must be mastered in order to read original texts

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/shK4D https://archive.is/shK4D

kaiwen1 5y ago

Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."

randomraccoon 5y ago
Less descriptive, but I would think "Let's forage for food at low tide" would convey much the same meaning more succinctly. Still cool, thanks for sharing!
tape_measure 5y ago
Let's go tidepooling! Almost the same, but it doesn't imply collection, just observation.
xenadu02 5y ago
What are examples of the opposite? English words that convey concepts that require lots of words in other languages?
- onorton 5y ago
  Not quite the same but the word "run" in English can express a lot of different concepts.[0] [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/run

karatinversion 5y ago

The article states that the hardest thing to learn in a language are structural distinctions which one's native language does not make. Does anyone here have experience of such features that English has, coming from a different language?

avidiax 5y ago
Gendered pronouns Some of the verb tenses (e.g. past perfect continuous) don't exist in other languages. Verb inflection
- meepmorp 5y ago
  What's your native language?
  - avidiax 5y ago
    I don't speak it, but this is relative to Cantonese.
yakireev 5y ago
Articles, as in "a" and "the". Slavic languages don't have them, and we Russians can never learn to use them properly. Alas. Some languages don't mandate always keeping track of whether something is "an object" or "the object", can you imagine?

29athrowaway 5y ago

Some languages are more regular than others. Phonetically, English is irregular AF.