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Depends. Difficult is a binary relation in my experience: _something_ is difficult to _somebody_. Is Mandarin Chinese difficult for a smart 10-year old, whose
by jll29 4y ago
Depends. Difficult is a binary relation in my experience: _something_ is difficult to _somebody_.
Is Mandarin Chinese difficult for a smart 10-year old, whose parents are Chinese (the mother a lawyer and the father a university professor, saY)? No.
Is English difficult for a dyslectic homeless U.S.-American citizen who got only minimal school education? Probably so.
I know a lot of people who admire Latin for its "logical" structure; I can only say that they probably haven't studied Spanish, where -um doesn't mean one of gazillion different things. I have three linguistics-related degrees, and I have yet to see a study that defines an objective "language difficulty" metric.
- dieselgate 4y agoDefining “smart” for a child in terms of language doesn’t really make sense here - their parents‘ careers being seemingly irrelevant. Our brains are prewired for language acquisition so if any “healthy” individual is around and exposed to a language at a young age they’ll learn it, regardless of parental status etc.
- abudabi123 4y agoTo the outsider, difficulty can be measured in the "effect" or "affect" the language has in settings such as diplomacy where the multilingual multicultural raised creme de la creme meet and talk behind closed doors say at the U.N.