3 ms·

This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two

by anthk 3y ago

This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian. At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).

zozbot234 3y ago
Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
  - kragen 3y ago
    no, 'inflectional language' means that different independent axes of meaning are encoded in a single word. french verbs are inflected for time (present, imperfect, simple past, simple future), mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative), number (single, plural), and person (first, second, and third). so 'parler' can be realized as 'parle', 'parles', 'parlons', 'parlez', 'parlent', 'parlais', 'parlait', 'parliez', and so on https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler lists all of the forms unless there are other inflected forms that are only preserved in literary french the crucial thing that distinguishes inflections from simple agglutination (where instead of the isolating 'will talk' that english uses, you write the future as 'willtalk') is that they interact. so, for example, second-person plural indicative present 'parler' is 'parlons'. second-person singular indicative present 'parler' is 'parles', pronounced [paRl]. second-person singular indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlais'. so you might guess that second-person plural indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlonais' or 'parlaisons', depending on which order the suffixes go in, but it's not, it's 'parlions' that's a lot to memorize for a new language learner. there are 36 distinct forms of 'parler' in that page, and the reason 'parler' is used is that it's a regular verb; some verbs have even more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language describes the concept in english and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle in french
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written. However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the way we write them in a reliable way and we have so many sounds that are so close to them spanish speaking people don't see the difference.
      - kragen 3y ago
        it's still a lot to memorize to get started, and as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if your background is an isolating language like chinese, the entire concept of inflection is going to be an unnecessary obstacle also, you're only talking about the most surface aspects of learning a language in general pretty much every natural spoken language is equally difficult to learn, because if it's easier than what an average person can learn in their first five years of life, its speakers will invent new complexities that allow them to communicate more eloquently and efficiently. sometimes those complexities are very obvious like a larger inventory of phonemes (french has a lot of vowels, spanish doesn't), sometimes they're slightly more subtle (larger vocabularies, less regular inflection, phrasal verbs, higher segmental rate), and sometimes they're very subtle indeed (a larger inventory of idiomatic expressions, a greater cultural expectation that you will recognize literary allusions) but about the same amount of complexity is are always there. conlangs and pidgins can avoid them (until they become native languages, as swahili and indonesian are, and i know someone who was raised speaking esperanto) and written languages aren't constrained by them because they don't rely on native language acquisition mechanisms
  - derjames 3y ago
    By how you accentuate the word while speaking and by context. papá has the accent in the last syllable, while papa in the first.
materielle 3y ago
Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations. But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech? Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years. I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me! But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Yes but conjugations is not something you have to worry about, especially at the beginning. In a language with articles, you can do mistakes in conjugation, yet if you use the article people will understand what/who is the subject and still understand. When you learn a language, focus on present tense. By using words like before/after/yesterday/tomorrow you can keep using present tense and be understood by a native speaker and you are likely to learn quickly the past and present tense by listening to their answers. People usually understand that you are learning and don't mind you using present tense.
  - anthk 3y ago
    This. Also, you don't need to use compound conjugations at first. This might be wrong for the Spanish Iberian dialects the same way it's a bit wrong too in English, but if you don't say "I've just eat" instead of "I ate" everyone will understand you fine.
ramraj07 3y ago
Spanish is not dumb simple. A friend transferred a PhD there and could never get to the level of comfortable conversations with her lab mates and had a hell of a time. Same with French or any European language not English to be frank (have German stories as well). So it’s perhaps not a great analogy, and folks who learned a language as kids or are polyglots should recuse themselves from commenting on how easy those languages are to others.
asoneth 3y ago
> Spanish it's almost dumb simple Sure, the FSI ranks Spanish as a category 1 language along with other Romance languages, Norwegian, Swedish, etc which means it's simpler for English-speakers to learn than most languages, but I'm not sure I'd describe learning any natural human language as "dumb simple" -- at least for me, Spanish was the hardest thing I ever attempted to learn by a wide margin. After a couple thousand hours spread over twenty years I could read simple texts and communicate simple concepts as long as I maintained an exhausting level of concentration and stopped worrying about conjugating properly. I eventually gave up after realizing that improving would require a significantly larger time commitment than I could afford.

by anthk 3y ago

zozbot234 3y ago

Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.

prmoustache 3y ago
What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
- kragen 3y ago
  no, 'inflectional language' means that different independent axes of meaning are encoded in a single word. french verbs are inflected for time (present, imperfect, simple past, simple future), mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative), number (single, plural), and person (first, second, and third). so 'parler' can be realized as 'parle', 'parles', 'parlons', 'parlez', 'parlent', 'parlais', 'parlait', 'parliez', and so on https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler lists all of the forms unless there are other inflected forms that are only preserved in literary french the crucial thing that distinguishes inflections from simple agglutination (where instead of the isolating 'will talk' that english uses, you write the future as 'willtalk') is that they interact. so, for example, second-person plural indicative present 'parler' is 'parlons'. second-person singular indicative present 'parler' is 'parles', pronounced [paRl]. second-person singular indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlais'. so you might guess that second-person plural indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlonais' or 'parlaisons', depending on which order the suffixes go in, but it's not, it's 'parlions' that's a lot to memorize for a new language learner. there are 36 distinct forms of 'parler' in that page, and the reason 'parler' is used is that it's a regular verb; some verbs have even more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language describes the concept in english and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle in french
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written. However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the way we write them in a reliable way and we have so many sounds that are so close to them spanish speaking people don't see the difference.
    - kragen 3y ago
      it's still a lot to memorize to get started, and as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if your background is an isolating language like chinese, the entire concept of inflection is going to be an unnecessary obstacle also, you're only talking about the most surface aspects of learning a language in general pretty much every natural spoken language is equally difficult to learn, because if it's easier than what an average person can learn in their first five years of life, its speakers will invent new complexities that allow them to communicate more eloquently and efficiently. sometimes those complexities are very obvious like a larger inventory of phonemes (french has a lot of vowels, spanish doesn't), sometimes they're slightly more subtle (larger vocabularies, less regular inflection, phrasal verbs, higher segmental rate), and sometimes they're very subtle indeed (a larger inventory of idiomatic expressions, a greater cultural expectation that you will recognize literary allusions) but about the same amount of complexity is are always there. conlangs and pidgins can avoid them (until they become native languages, as swahili and indonesian are, and i know someone who was raised speaking esperanto) and written languages aren't constrained by them because they don't rely on native language acquisition mechanisms
- derjames 3y ago
  By how you accentuate the word while speaking and by context. papá has the accent in the last syllable, while papa in the first.

materielle 3y ago

Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations. But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech? Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years. I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me! But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.

prmoustache 3y ago
Yes but conjugations is not something you have to worry about, especially at the beginning. In a language with articles, you can do mistakes in conjugation, yet if you use the article people will understand what/who is the subject and still understand. When you learn a language, focus on present tense. By using words like before/after/yesterday/tomorrow you can keep using present tense and be understood by a native speaker and you are likely to learn quickly the past and present tense by listening to their answers. People usually understand that you are learning and don't mind you using present tense.
- anthk 3y ago
  This. Also, you don't need to use compound conjugations at first. This might be wrong for the Spanish Iberian dialects the same way it's a bit wrong too in English, but if you don't say "I've just eat" instead of "I ate" everyone will understand you fine.

ramraj07 3y ago

Spanish is not dumb simple. A friend transferred a PhD there and could never get to the level of comfortable conversations with her lab mates and had a hell of a time. Same with French or any European language not English to be frank (have German stories as well). So it’s perhaps not a great analogy, and folks who learned a language as kids or are polyglots should recuse themselves from commenting on how easy those languages are to others.

asoneth 3y ago

> Spanish it's almost dumb simple Sure, the FSI ranks Spanish as a category 1 language along with other Romance languages, Norwegian, Swedish, etc which means it's simpler for English-speakers to learn than most languages, but I'm not sure I'd describe learning any natural human language as "dumb simple" -- at least for me, Spanish was the hardest thing I ever attempted to learn by a wide margin. After a couple thousand hours spread over twenty years I could read simple texts and communicate simple concepts as long as I maintained an exhausting level of concentration and stopped worrying about conjugating properly. I eventually gave up after realizing that improving would require a significantly larger time commitment than I could afford.