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What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.
by idlewords 15y ago
What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.
- anghyflawn 15y agoUh, really? Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories? Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax? That's just off the top of my head But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on. I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.
- tty 15y agoI'd say the fact that Japanese is a head-last language is enough to complicate the matter greatly for any non-native speaker of Japanese.