5 ms·

First 5 languages are the hardest ;)

by dvh 5y ago

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a few katakana characters. Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.
- astrange 5y ago
  I assume those 5 or 6 are all PIE variants and you don't know Basque/Finnish/Hungarian?
sshine 5y ago
Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation. As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-for-a-native-Chinese-speaker?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...) Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one. Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
  - nicolas_t 5y ago
    > Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead. Here's the opening of a Latin poem: Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato Pyrrha sub antro? Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved: What many slender you boy in rose soak liquid press odor pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave? Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])
      - DFHippie 5y ago
        Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other. Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what: > [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis. > [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”) Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat. The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!

First 5 languages are the hardest ;)

by dvh 5y ago

First 5 languages are the hardest ;)

Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a few katakana characters. Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.

astrange 5y ago
I assume those 5 or 6 are all PIE variants and you don't know Basque/Finnish/Hungarian?

sshine 5y ago

Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation. As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-for-a-native-Chinese-speaker?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...) Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one. Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
- nicolas_t 5y ago
  > Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead. Here's the opening of a Latin poem: Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato Pyrrha sub antro? Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved: What many slender you boy in rose soak liquid press odor pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave? Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])
    - DFHippie 5y ago
      Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other. Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what: > [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis. > [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”) Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat. The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!