On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 06:22:49PM +0200, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).

Every language is trivial to a native speaker.

As for which languages are brutal or trivial to an L2 learner, that depends on whether the target language makes distinctions that aren't present in one's native tongue.

Now, "Asian languages" as a category doesn't make very much sense, because it encompasses far too wide a scope to be a useful category. You have language isolates like Japanese and Korean, with rather distinctive grammars, then the numerous Chinese "dialects" (which are properly languages in their own right), which are part of the wider Sino-Tibetan languages (including things like Vietnamese, Burmese, possibly Thai, among others), the Austronesian languages, and a whole variety of others, that have basically no resemblance with each other.

As far as the Chinese languages are concerned, one common difficulty for foreign language learners is the tonal distinctions, which are basically absent from European languages. Hence, a word like "ma" can mean a whole variety of different things depending on its pitch contour, but the problem is your typical European language speaker can't even *hear* the difference to begin with, so it sounds almost like pulling magical bunnies out of the air. (Some of the Chinese "dialects" sport up to 9 distinct tones -- L2 learners have enough trouble telling the 4 tones of standard Mandarin apart, let alone the fine distinctions between 9!) However, grammar-wise, the Chinese languages are far simpler than the European languages; so once you get over the tonal hump, it's actually a lot easier to learn than, say, English or French. Or Russian.

Of course, the other great difficulty is the writing system, which requires the memorization of between 1000-2000 different glyphs just to be able to read with some fluency.  But hey, that beats learning Japanese, which has *three* different writing systems, all of which you must master in order to be able to read at all!

Austronesian languages, by contrast, are almost trivial in terms of pronunciation, and for the most part have adopted the Latin alphabet, so reading and writing isn't hampered by the need to learn a whole new writing system. However, the grammar, while not exactly as complex as, say, Russian or Greek, significantly diverges from the way grammar usually works in European languages, so some amount of effort is required in order to get it right.

Japanese and Korean appear to be language isolates, and their respective grammars are quite unique. Korean writing is relatively easy to master -- it's phonetic, like the Latin alphabet, just composed differently -- but Japanese requires mastery of 3 different writing systems. Both languages also sport a system of honorifics that mostly doesn't exist in European languages, and may be difficult for an L2 learner to pick up -- addressing somebody with the wrong honorifics can sound extremely insulting or needlessly polite.


On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 07:40:29PM +0000, Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> Many Asian languages are much more straightforward then any of the romance languages. In Chinese verbs aren't even inflected for tense, voice, etc., much less this silly gendered noun stuff. It's extremely refreshing and quite simple grammatically.

Yes, though the tonal system and the writing system are two things that usually discourage many foreign learners from even trying.



On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 08:33:47PM +0000, tsbockman via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 2 May 2016 at 19:09:41 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> >For every rule, there are 101 exceptions. :-)
> >
> >http://shirah-goes-again.blogspot.de/2011/01/entire-english-language-is-big.html
> 
> As an educated native English speaker, I must say that poem is horrifying.
> 
> Clearly, spelling reform is urgently needed:
>     http://www.ashvital.freeservers.com/ze_dream.htm

Spelling reforms have a spotty history... Spanish had one relatively recently (i.e., within the last few hundred years), and is therefore much easier to read today than back then.  Russian had a major overhaul in 1917, which dropped a large number of silent vowels and redundant consonants, so today Russian is also relatively easy to read once you master the Cyrillic alphabet. (And so the story goes, this reform saved millions of dollars (rubles?) in printing and paper costs, due to the elimination of said silent vowels which were present at the end of almost every word in the old spelling.) French and English are both overdue for reform, though, their respective spelling rules having been codified about a half millenium ago, and between then and now pronunciation has changed so drastically that, as the above poem shows, the current spelling conventions are verging on being completely arbitrary. (The joke goes that "ghoti" is a valid spelling for "fish", if you take "gh" from "enough", "o" from "women", and "ti" from "nation".)  Basically, learning English spelling is essentially learning to reproduce about 500-600 years' worth of gradual sound change since the codification of English spelling in the 1400-1500's, which is no trivial feat indeed.

However, various recent attempts to reform English spelling have for the most part failed, mostly due to inertia and the presence of a substantial (and very fast growing!) body of literature in current spelling, which would require a monumental effort to respell. It's difficult to convince the myriad writers and publishers to adopt a new spelling system when the current one has been ingrained for so many centuries.  But hey, if Chinese could simplify the original characters (at much protest, I must say), and if the Russians could pull it off in 1917, who's to say we can't do it in English too?


T

-- 
They say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people. -- Eddie Izzard, Dressed to Kill

On 05/02/2016 05:49 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> Of course, the other great difficulty is the [Chinese] writing system, which
> requires the memorization of between 1000-2000 different glyphs just to
> be able to read with some fluency.

I'd argue that's really about the same as English:

It is, of course, mostly a myth that English is phonetic (it's what I would call "psuedo-phoenetic"). Partly because of that (and contrary to popular belief) reading/writing English is done per-word, not per-letter (much like Chinese) and requires memorization of thousands of "words", each one of which realistically amounts to a complex combination of several basic component glyphs (much like Chinese, see next paragraph below). And in English (unlike Chinese, to my knowledge) there can be up to six different versions of each word, depending on the combination of cursive-vs-print and lower-vs-capitalized-vs-all-caps (and that's ignoring the fact that there are two different versions of non-cursive lower-case 'g', which is a matter of font, not specific to the word itself).

What many westerners who haven't studied Chinese (or Japanese, which also uses the Chinese glyphs) don't realize is that all those thousands of Chinese glyphs are primarily built as combinations of basic "radicals". And there are only around 100 common radicals. That still sounds like a lot, but it's really about on par with English: While English is said to have 26 "letters", there can be up to four different versions of each one (uppercase, lowercase, and print/cursive versions of each).

So what we have between English and Chinese writing systems is:

- Both construct words as combinations of component parts.
- Both have around 100 symbols used as component parts.
- Both require heavy memorization of what components are used to construct each word.
- Both have alternate ways to write many words (Chinese: Simplified vs Traditional. English: Lower/Capital/AllCaps/Cursive/Print)

I say English and Chinese writing systems have roughly equivalent difficulty.

> But hey, that beats learning
> Japanese, which has *three* different writing systems, all of which you
> must master in order to be able to read at all!
>

That's not entirely true if you count English as having one writing system.

Two of the Japanese alphabets (Hiragana and Katakana) are phoenetic (much more phonetic than English, in fact), and while they're commonly called separate alphabets, it's more accurate to compare them to uppercase-vs-lowercase. They're exactly the same set of ~46 letters (not counting the ones like "d"/"p"/"b" etc that are treated more as mere variations on other letters), each one just comes in both a "Hiragana" version and a "Katakana" version. Much like how English letters come in an "Uppercase" version and "Lowercase" version (AND, "Cursive" and "Print" versions of each of those).

Granted, an alphabet of around 46 seems like a lot, but unlike English it has a grid-style organization (vertically: five vowels, then horizontally: each consonant combined with each vowel: http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hiragana-stroke-order-chart.pdf ). The organization makes it a lighter cognitive load than if you were to take English and simply toss in 20 more letters.

The only big difference here between English (upper/lower/cursive/print) and Japanese (hiragana/katakana) is *when* each character set is selected: For English, it's a matter a grammar (upper/lower) and font (cursive/print), for Japanese it's mainly whether the word is native or foreign. Note that, if anything, this makes English arguably more complicated, in that there's more variety in how each individual word might be written.

So if you want to compare to English, Japanese really comes down to two writing systems, not three: The phonetic "-kana"s and the Chinese set (And even then, depending on target audience, such as for kids, they may go easy on using the Chinese set or include the phonetic pronunciation right next to the Chinese character).

> Japanese and Korean appear to be language isolates, and their respective
> grammars are quite unique.

While I know nothing of Korean grammar, what I do find interesting is that the system of vocal sounds are very similar for those languages (also with Hawaiian, too): Both based largely on vowels and "consonant-then-vowel" combinations. I don't see that much in most other languages, but it appears to be a trait shared among Japanese, Korean and Hawaiian.

The geography suggests to me that Indonesian languages might also be like that, but as I have zero awareness of those, I wouldn't know.

> Both [Japanese and Korean]
> languages also sport a system of honorifics that mostly doesn't exist in
> European languages, and may be difficult for an L2 learner to pick up --
> addressing somebody with the wrong honorifics can sound extremely
> insulting or needlessly polite.
>

True, but those are pretty simple though, at least for Japanese (don't know about Korean). WAY simpler than (for example) word gender systems. There's really only a handful of common ones, and that's one thing you actually can pick up pretty easily just reading some English localized manga (pretty much all of them now even include a simple chart).

And anyone who's ever watched "The Karate Kid" already knows like 95% of what you need: Just always say "-san" (and don't omit it!) unless you know what you're doing. Hard to go too terribly wrong with that ;)