2 ms·

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.

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.