5 ms·

This is similar to linguistics. People often rank languages in terms of difficulty, but in reality complexity is just moved around. For example in English word

This is similar to linguistics. People often rank languages in terms of difficulty, but in reality complexity is just moved around. For example in English words are often uninflected. Languages like Hungarian/Turkish have a lot of prefixes/suffixes. You'd think that means they're a lot more complicated, but in reality their prefixes/suffixes are very predictable whereas English is all over the place. Is it noninflected, disinflected, deinflected, ininflected, flected?

solardev 3y ago
Not being a linguist, what is a flec?
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Having a set of related wordforms of a single word expressing various grammatical features by (usually systematic) modifications of the word, such as the English 'work'->'worked', but on a much larger scale for most languages worldwide. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
andrewflnr 3y ago
Isn't that why English is usually the near the top of language difficulty rankings? I mean, your point is true, but I don't know of anyone actually confused about it.
- duderific 3y ago
  See: through, rough, cough, bough, dough, all of which are pronounced differently. My 5-year-old daughter is learning to read, and trying to explain all this is...challenging.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Are you truly starting with those words for a 5-year-old? Curious why? Hands down, teaching phonics is far and away the fastest route to being able to decode words. Similarly, reading to your kids is the fastest way to get them interested in reading. Using the motivation to learn to get going on the phonics is more than adequate to teach reading. And don't expect things outside of spelling/reading to be any more "logical." Try explaining the rules of any sport in a way that isn't dominated by the exceptions.
- taeric 3y ago
  Is it objectively at the top, or is that more an easy thing people love to assume is truly difficult? I don't think we have any evidence that kids are slower to learn in any particular language, do we? (Oddly, we do have evidence that moving away from a primarily phonics based teaching method was a terrible idea, but I haven't seen much to compare with other languages at the same ages.)
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    Objectively, probably not, but I'm only asking about perception, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
    - taeric 3y ago
      Fair. I'm more than a little worried on the perceptions, though. Having arguments with people who think that the English alphabet is not phonetic really hurt my views there.
      - andrewflnr 3y ago
        It's very much only approximately phonetic. This is painfully obvious when you compare with a language like Spanish that has very few exceptions to the 1-1 letter-sound mapping (and even those are fairly consistent). And yes, I did learn to read with phonics. But for the real difficulty learning English, consider all the forms of "be" and the weird rules for which one to use. (Spanish is only dubiously better in this respect; there are still a lot of verb forms you just have to memorize, but at least you can follow actual rules on which form to use.)
        taeric 3y ago
        It is phonetic, period. It is not 1:1 symbol to sound, but it is all sounds. Hence phonetic. This is in contrast to logographic symbol sets, that do not correspond to sound encodings. Think emoji. Advanced grammar is a trap in all languages.
- DonaldFisk 3y ago
  How difficult you'll find a language depends on what languages you already know, and the teaching materials available for it in your own language. These pages distinguish between first languages: https://blog.rosettastone.com/what-is-the-hardest-language-to-learn-for-non-english-speakers/ https://blog.rosettastone.com/what-is-the-hardest-language-t... https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/87jy70/rank_the_difficulty_of_different_languages_from_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/87jy70/ra...
- nicup12345689 3y ago
  Really, I always considered it as one of the easiest if not easiest.

solardev 3y ago

Not being a linguist, what is a flec?

PeterisP 3y ago
Having a set of related wordforms of a single word expressing various grammatical features by (usually systematic) modifications of the word, such as the English 'work'->'worked', but on a much larger scale for most languages worldwide. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection

andrewflnr 3y ago

Isn't that why English is usually the near the top of language difficulty rankings? I mean, your point is true, but I don't know of anyone actually confused about it.

duderific 3y ago
See: through, rough, cough, bough, dough, all of which are pronounced differently. My 5-year-old daughter is learning to read, and trying to explain all this is...challenging.
- taeric 3y ago
  Are you truly starting with those words for a 5-year-old? Curious why? Hands down, teaching phonics is far and away the fastest route to being able to decode words. Similarly, reading to your kids is the fastest way to get them interested in reading. Using the motivation to learn to get going on the phonics is more than adequate to teach reading. And don't expect things outside of spelling/reading to be any more "logical." Try explaining the rules of any sport in a way that isn't dominated by the exceptions.
taeric 3y ago
Is it objectively at the top, or is that more an easy thing people love to assume is truly difficult? I don't think we have any evidence that kids are slower to learn in any particular language, do we? (Oddly, we do have evidence that moving away from a primarily phonics based teaching method was a terrible idea, but I haven't seen much to compare with other languages at the same ages.)
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  Objectively, probably not, but I'm only asking about perception, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
  - taeric 3y ago
    Fair. I'm more than a little worried on the perceptions, though. Having arguments with people who think that the English alphabet is not phonetic really hurt my views there.
    - andrewflnr 3y ago
      It's very much only approximately phonetic. This is painfully obvious when you compare with a language like Spanish that has very few exceptions to the 1-1 letter-sound mapping (and even those are fairly consistent). And yes, I did learn to read with phonics. But for the real difficulty learning English, consider all the forms of "be" and the weird rules for which one to use. (Spanish is only dubiously better in this respect; there are still a lot of verb forms you just have to memorize, but at least you can follow actual rules on which form to use.)
      - taeric 3y ago
        It is phonetic, period. It is not 1:1 symbol to sound, but it is all sounds. Hence phonetic. This is in contrast to logographic symbol sets, that do not correspond to sound encodings. Think emoji. Advanced grammar is a trap in all languages.
DonaldFisk 3y ago
How difficult you'll find a language depends on what languages you already know, and the teaching materials available for it in your own language. These pages distinguish between first languages: https://blog.rosettastone.com/what-is-the-hardest-language-to-learn-for-non-english-speakers/ https://blog.rosettastone.com/what-is-the-hardest-language-t... https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/87jy70/rank_the_difficulty_of_different_languages_from_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/87jy70/ra...
nicup12345689 3y ago
Really, I always considered it as one of the easiest if not easiest.