# Are analytic (or synthetic) languages harder to learn?



## Tim~!

*(Attempt to**)** split off from this thread.
Frank, moderator*



sokol said:


> It's just relatively easy to communicate in English even if it is not your mother tongue because if you have learned some basics English native speakers understand you even if you do make mistakes, and they patiently bear with your faults in idiomatic use.



I think there's more to it than that, though it's very kind of you to give us some (undeserved!) credit 

English has advantages over the other languages that I know that mean that making progress is relatively easier _in the initial stages_.

Conjugating verbs is very easy, be that the present tense (which features few traps), or easy-to-use futures and conditionals, very regular past forms (such as "used to" and "would"), and other past forms that, though irregular, don't have a different form for each person.

There are no agreements to make on adjectives, no gender-dependent articles, few instances where you have to worry about switching mood, and so on.

Because of these features, I imagine that it's easier to become reasonably proficient in English than would be the case for French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and so on.

After a while, I feel that things level off: Once the hard work's out the way, the other languages throw up few things that would cause problems.  English, on the other hand, is riddled with the horrors of phrasal verbs, a huge vocabulary, and irregular spelling, which make it harder to progress from a level  of competency (acquired reasonably easily) to full-on mastery.

That's the way I've seen things for years and years anyway.


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## palomnik

Tim~! said:


> I think there's more to it than that, though it's very kind of you to give us some (undeserved!) credit
> 
> English has advantages over the other languages that I know that mean that making progress is relatively easier _in the initial stages_.
> 
> Conjugating verbs is very easy, be that the present tense (which features few traps), or easy-to-use futures and conditionals, very regular past forms (such as "used to" and "would"), and other past forms that, though irregular, don't have a different form for each person.
> 
> There are no agreements to make on adjectives, no gender-dependent articles, few instances where you have to worry about switching mood, and so on.
> 
> Because of these features, I imagine that it's easier to become reasonably proficient in English than would be the case for French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and so on.
> 
> After a while, I feel that things level off: Once the hard work's out the way, the other languages throw up few things that would cause problems. English, on the other hand, is riddled with the horrors of phrasal verbs, a huge vocabulary, and irregular spelling, which make it harder to progress from a level of competency (acquired reasonably easily) to full-on mastery.
> 
> That's the way I've seen things for years and years anyway.


 
Not to mention a subtle and quite complicated syntax in the verbal system.  You mention phrasal verbs, and there are the additional bugbears of the perfect tenses (which are pretty confusing in English) and the infinitive/gerund/participle confusion.


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## EdwardJ

palomnik said:


> There's a subtext to this argument that bothers me.
> 
> It's the inherent assumption that analytic languages are "easier" than synthetic languages are.
> 
> I don't necessarily think that this is true.  Classical Chinese is the epitome of an analytic language.  And after you set aside the hurdle of the writing system, it is still formidably difficult.  Things like plurality are indicated by adverbs as often as not (this happens in modern Chinese as well) and sentence structure can be very complicated.



Still, Classical Chinese is nowhere as difficult as Ancient Greek or Latin. *[ad hominem remarks snipped, Frank, Moderator]*

In the end, "synthetic" languages do require more mental activity than "analytical" languages. There are a lot more nuances to keep an eye on. 

I do agree with the thesis that is supported by some linguists: languages follow a ‘downhill’ simplification          in inflections, etc. by natural processes. Grammatical improvement comes only through conscious human intervention.


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## Frank06

Hi,


EdwardJ said:


> Still, Classical Chinese is nowhere as difficult as Ancient Greek or Latin.


Let's not start (or rather, continue) comparing the perceived difficulty levels of language X and Y. That's an endless exercise in futility.



> In the end, "synthetic" languages do require more mental activity than "analytical" languages. There are a lot more nuances to keep an eye on.


Interesting thought, but can you please back this up with some arguments (any research in this area, maybe)?



> I do agree with the thesis that is supported by some linguists: languages follow a ‘downhill’ simplification          in inflections, etc. by natural processes. Grammatical improvement comes only through conscious human intervention.


Can you please explain what exactly 'grammatical improvement' is?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## EdwardJ

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Let's not start (or rather, continue) comparing the perceived difficulty levels of language X and Y. That's an endless exercise in futility.



Maybe it is futile, but I do think that it can be _objectively _said that some languages are harder than others. This is by no means an attempt to depreciate any language.




Frank06 said:


> Interesting, but can you please back this up with some arguments (research, maybe)?



An argument to back up the case that an inflected language, like German, is harder than a non-inflected one like English? Well, frankly, I think this goes without saying. When writing in English, you don't have to worry about the word's syntactic function. When writing (or speaking properly  ) in German, you do have to think about that, if you want to get your declensions right.






Frank06 said:


> Can you please explain what exactly 'grammatical improvement' is?



To have more features.


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## Toma

Hallo to everyone.
I allow myself to add my oppinion to the wonderful things you discuss.
I personally regard all languages, be they synthtic or analytic, as hard.
If that was not the case then there would have been a marked tendency towards a preconceived goal, i.e. simplcity. This would sound too teleological and convenient. 
The reason things don't stand this way is that languages transcend the concepts of complexity and ease and are there to serve a goal, i.e. communication. We are all slaves to communication and to the langauge which binds us to its present concepts and to the universe that can be defined thorugh it. This nature of language as a tool in communicaton is also what makes langugae learnign possible. 

Back to the question originally asked. There are no languages that are perfectly synthetic or only analytic. Even the most analytical langugae in the world has some synthetic elements in it. Each language also has at its disposal a huge instrumentarium of ways of expressing one and the same thing. This may be regarded as a redundancy, but this redundacy is exactly what provides the building blocks for future language change and for the development of new categories. I am tryign to think of an example and the only thing that comes to my mind is the post-positive article in Bulgarian, whcih comes from an old deictic pronoun. Another thing that comes to mind are the three voices in Indo-European and the subsequent loss of the middle voice, only to see it sticking around in the reflexive forms. And if we regard the Spanish and Italian way of adjoining the reflexive pronoun to the verb, well in a few hundred years we may come to find a new verbal category springing out of it.
I personally prefer to think that a lot of this has to do with mental categories, which find different ways of expression and would recommend to everyone the wonderful book of Charles Kahn on the verb 'to be' in Greek. 

We should not forget that languages also serve a political and maybe (religeous) function. This is what made possible to revive a dead language and to institutionlaize it as the language of the Jewish state, a feat by itself, or to create a completely artficial rule, such as the accord between the direct object and the transitive verb in French.

I think I wrote a mess of an oppinion, but I prefer to leave it as it is, so that I may read the cherrished oppionions of the other memebers.

Salvete


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## Frank06

Hi,


EdwardJ said:


> Maybe it is futile,


It certainly is off topic .



> An argument to back up the case that an inflected language, like German, is harder than a non-inflected one like English? Well, frankly, I think this goes without saying.


Please do say...
But any which way, I was more thinking in the direction of native speakers learning their language...

You previously wrote:


> I do agree with the thesis that is supported by some linguists: languages follow a ‘downhill’ simplification in inflections, etc. by natural processes. Grammatical improvement comes only through conscious human intervention.





> To have more features


Grammatical improvement? I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Can you be a bit more specific and give some examples, please.
What would be an instance of 'grammatical improvement'?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## modus.irrealis

EdwardJ said:


> When writing in English, you don't have to worry about the word's syntactic function. When writing (or speaking properly  ) in German, you do have to think about that, if you want to get your declensions right.


Sure you do, if you want to get the order of words right. What's so different (in terms of complexity) between indicating a word's syntactic function through its position in the sentence and indicating it through a change of ending? And I have to say that as a speaker of English and Greek, I haven't noticed any extra thought being necessary in the latter in order to put sentences together.


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## palomnik

EdwardJ said:


> Maybe it is futile, but I do think that it can be _objectively _said that some languages are harder than others. This is by no means an attempt to depreciate any language.
> 
> An argument to back up the case that an inflected language, like German, is harder than a non-inflected one like English? Well, frankly, I think this goes without saying. When writing in English, you don't have to worry about the word's syntactic function. When writing (or speaking properly  ) in German, you do have to think about that, if you want to get your declensions right.


 
Edward: Inflections that reflect differences in meaning that your native language does not differentiate can make a language harder to learn. Hence, most English speakers have a hard time internalizing Russian case systems and verbal aspect. However, I don't think English speakers have much difficulty with verb tenses in French or German, since English has tenses too, although it may form some of them more easily than other languages do.

Having said all that, I have to say that I agree with your thesis about some languages being harder than others. However, I don't agree that inflections are the major difference. I think that If we were to imagine an alien landing on Planet Earth and trying to learn the way earthlings talk, they would find the easiest languages to be the ones with 1) a fairly simple phonetic system, 2) mostly multisyllablic words, 3) a straightforward grammatical system with few irregularities, and 4) relatively relatively little differentiation in speech depending on social structure.

For myself, the easiest language I ever studied was Swahili, which fulfills all of the above requirements, and which is quite synthetic.  Japanese would fulfill them, but item (4) blows it out of consideration, and there is the extra issue of the writing system.  English falls down in (1) and (2) - and of course the writing system again.


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## EdwardJ

Frank06 said:


> In this particular context I was more thinking in the direction of native speakers learning their language...



It doesn't really matter, in this context, whether you are a native speaker or not. German has extra features, that English does not have. Hence it is harder. It will certainly be easier for a German speaker to learn English than the other way around (given that both have similar levels of intelligence, obviously).





Frank06 said:


> Grammatical improvement? I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Can you be a bit more specific and give some examples, please.
> What would be an instance of 'grammatical improvement'?



I made a reference to "grammar" as the whole set of rules that govern a language. These rules will expand, making the language richer. Sokol gave a few interesting examples of what I would consider to be improvements to languages.


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## Frank06

Hi,


EdwardJ said:


> It doesn't really matter, in this context, whether you are a native speaker or not.


Okay, so you're not going to back up the claim that "'synthetic' languages do require more mental activity than 'analytical" languages'", also for native speakers. No problem.



> I made a reference to "grammar" as the whole set of rules that govern a language. These rules will expand, making the language richer.


I still don't get it... Why the use of 'richer', 'improvement', 'downhill' and other adjectives denoting an _evaluation_, assessment.
I fail to understand the concept of a 'richer' or 'improved' language.



> Sokol gave a few interesting examples of what I would consider to be improvements to languages.


Which examples? Please...
What I do find in Sokol's post is "the loss of complexity is being balanced with new developments", hence putting the idea of 'richer', 'improvement' on a slope, at least if I understood both well.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## sokol

EdwardJ said:


> It doesn't really matter, in this context, whether you are a native speaker or not. German has extra features, that English does not have. Hence it is harder. It will certainly be easier for a German speaker to learn English than the other way around (given that both have similar levels of intelligence, obviously).


Not quite (please read my post carefully, the answer is already there), and German is not the best of examples really, if it comes to that. But anyway discussing what is easier and what not really does not contribute here - there exists already a thread elsewhere on WRF (I just can't find it right now); easiness hugely depends on your mother tongue, and on how many additional features the language you want to learn has.



EdwardJ said:


> I made a reference to "grammar" as the whole set of rules that govern a language. These rules will expand, making the language richer. Sokol gave a few interesting examples of what I would consider to be improvements to languages.


Oh, did I?
Then please read my post again.

It doesn't say that 'analytical' or 'synthetic' is better but only that if means for expressing something get lost (as when we have a loss in declension) then this loss of complexity many times is balanced with new features: what I said that what a synthetic language becoming more analytic *adopts other means of expressing the same,* basically.
There isn't any value attached here to any means of expressing anything; I am fanatically egalitarian as far as languages and grammatical structures are concerned.

So if you have got the impression that I am speaking of 'improvements' then I am sorry: this wasn't intended. I only speak of change. Which is something altogether different.


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## Athaulf

EdwardJ said:


> Maybe it is futile, but I do think that it can be _objectively _said that some languages are harder than others. This is by no means an attempt to depreciate any language.



To convincingly claim that, you'll have to devise some plausible way to quantify language difficulty and then demonstrate that for some languages, the measure ends up higher. When it comes to all objective measures I can think of -- for example, how long it takes native children to master the language, or how long it takes adult learners speaking unrelated languages to reach near-native fluency -- the results, to the best of my knowledge, turn out to be roughly the same for both analytical and synthetic languages.



EdwardJ said:


> It will certainly be easier for a German speaker to learn English than the other way around (given that both have similar levels of intelligence, obviously).



Do you have any empirical data to back that claim?



EdwardJ said:


> An argument to back up the case that an inflected language, like German, is harder than a non-inflected one like English? Well, frankly, I think this goes without saying.



Then how do you explain the fact that English spoken by immigrants and foreigners here in Canada is on average no less broken than German spoken by immigrants and foreigners in Germany? And the fact that even after 17 years of learning English and five years of living in an English-speaking city (which included teaching at an English-speaking university), I still wouldn't bet $50 that I got the articles right in the English sentence I just wrote? Or the fact that foreign learners of my native language, which is almost as synthetic as Latin, usually still have problems with its _analytic_ aspects (i.e. syntax) years after they've learned to readily recite all the declensions and conjugations?

There is more to language than just inflectional morphology.


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## EdwardJ

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> Okay, so you're not going to back up the claim that "'synthetic' languages do require more mental activity than 'analytical" languages'", also for native speakers. No problem.



Just because someone is German, has learned German declensions from his youth and thus by now they seem to him ridiculously easy, it doesn't detract from the fact that non-declined languages are easier (at least on this aspect - declension). Is that clear?

Declined languages are harder on this aspect and thus require more mental activity. Even native speakers DO make mistakes regarding declensions. 




Frank06 said:


> I still don't get it...



Frankly, I'm not sure you are being honest. Seems more like you are making an attempt at political correctness. But here we go.



Frank06 said:


> Why the use of 'richer', 'improvement', 'downhill' and other adjectives denoting an _evaluation_, assessment.
> I fail to understand the concept of a 'richer' or 'improved' language.



A richer language has more possibilities of expression.


Let me put it in the clearest possible terms, maybe then you will be able to grasp it. Let's compare the conjugations of the verb "to love", in english and in portuguese:

ENGLISH----- PORTUGUESE

Present----- Presente 
I love------- eu amo
you love----- tu amas 
he loves----- ele ama
we love----- nós amamos
you all love--- vós amais
they love ----- eles amam

Past--------- Pretérito
I loved------- eu amei
you loved----- tu amaste
he loved----- ele amou
we loved----- nós amamos
you all loved--- vós amastes
they loved----- eles amaram

Future--------- Futuro
I will love------- eu amarei
you will love----- tu amarás
he will love----- ele amará
we will love----- nós amaremos
you all will love--- vós amareis
they will love----- eles amarão


 The English variation comprises 3 different endings. The Portuguese variation comprises 18 endings. 18 > 3. Hence the Portuguese conjugation is harder. I hope that is understood.



Frank06 said:


> Which examples? Please...
> What I do find in Sokol's post is "the loss of complexity is being balanced with new developments", hence putting the idea of 'richer', 'improvement' on a slope, at least if I understood both well.



No, that is not quite what he said before, though now he appears to have changed his mind somewhat. 

Let it be quite clear, that I love all languages myself, as many of you do. I do not think that any language is "better" than others, but some are harder than others, this is an obvious fact. It is not my intention to come of as rude or anything.


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## Frank06

Hi,



EdwardJ said:


> Just because someone is German, has learned German declensions from his youth and thus by now they seem to him ridiculously easy, it doesn't detract from the fact that non-declined languages are easier (at least on this aspect - declension). Is that clear?


It's clear that you cannot substantiate your claims. You're just repeating things.



> Declined languages are harder on this aspect and thus require more mental activity. Even native speakers DO make mistakes regarding declensions.


Arguments, please.
Listen, you might be completely right. But is it really asked too much to substantiate your claims with some references to scientific and linguistic publications on this? That's all I am asking.



> Frankly, I'm not sure you are being honest.Seems more like you are making an attempt at political correctness.


I'll politely ask you one time to skip this kind of personal attacks. Thank you.


Groetjes,

Frank


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## Athaulf

EdwardJ said:


> Frankly, I'm not sure you are being honest. Seems more like you are making an attempt at political correctness. But here we go.



For what that's worth, I certainly have no problems calling spade a spade even when it's highly un-PC to do so. In fact, I have opinions on a variety of subjects that would make a typical politically correct person scream in shock and disgust. However, in this case, the prevailing opinion of experts is firmly grounded in objective fact. By any reasonable measure of complexity, there is little, if any difference between human languages, even when the opposite might seem "obvious" to most people who have thought about the subject only casually. In all fields of human knowledge, there are many things where thorough and exact examination leads to highly counterintuitive and seemingly paradoxical results. 



> The English variation comprises 3 different endings. The Portuguese variation comprises 18 endings. 18 > 3. Hence the Portuguese conjugation is harder. I hope that is understood.
> [...]
> Let it be quite clear, that I love all languages myself, as many of you do. I do not think that any language is "better" than others, but some are harder than others, this is an obvious fact. It is not my intention to come of as rude or anything.


But you keep comparing _particular traits_ of languages and then jumping to the unjustified conclusion that the same conclusion follows for the these languages _overall_. In Portuguese as in English, conjugations are in fact a minuscule part of the overall complexity of each language. With enough dedication, one can memorize the entire Portuguese conjugation tables and drill them to perfection in a few weeks, with irregular verbs and all, and yet, it takes years of incessant practice to become a fluent speaker of either Portuguese or English (and even then, there will be things that any non-native speaker will still be tripping over -- and these are the _really_ difficult ones). 

Your above argument is akin to claiming that since it's easier to learn to play the C-major scale on the piano than on the violin, it must be easier to become a virtuoso pianist than a virtuoso violinist.


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## EdwardJ

Athaulf said:


> For what that's worth, I certainly have no problems calling spade a spade even when it's highly un-PC to do so. In fact, I have opinions on a variety of subjects that would make a typical politically correct person scream in shock and disgust.
> However, in this case, the prevailing opinion of experts is firmly grounded in objective fact.



What experts are those? What "objective facts"? Where is the data?




Athaulf said:


> By any reasonable measure of complexity,


What exactly are you measuring? What is a "reasonable measure of complexity" to you?



Athaulf said:


> there is little, if any difference between human languages, even when the opposite might seem "obvious" to most people who have thought about the subject only casually.



This is not my field of research, but I have more than a casual interest in languages. I have written and spoken fluency in 3 languages, and I can read in another 2. I can distinctively tell that some of the languages I know are harder than others. Many people agree with me (some of them apparently inhabit this forum).



Athaulf said:


> In all fields of human knowledge, there are many things where thorough and exact examination leads to highly counterintuitive and seemingly paradoxical results.



You tell me... I work with cutting edge science and sometimes I feel like I can't trust my senses. But I don't think this is the case here.



Athaulf said:


> But you keep comparing _particular traits_ of languages and then jumping to the unjustified conclusion that the same conclusion follows for the these languages _overall_.





Where exactly did I "jump to an unjustified conclusion?" You are the jumping to conclusions, not me.



Athaulf said:


> In Portuguese as in English, conjugations are in fact a minuscule part of the overall complexity of each language.



I don't think that verb conjugation is a "minuscule part of the overall complexity" of a given language. In fact, it is one of the points that I would take into account if I were to "quantify" the complexity of a language.



Athaulf said:


> With enough dedication, one can memorize the entire Portuguese conjugation tables and drill them to perfection in a few weeks, with irregular verbs and all,



Doubtful.



Athaulf said:


> and yet, it takes years of incessant practice to become a fluent speaker of either Portuguese or English (and even then, there will be things that any non-native speaker will still be tripping over -- and these are the _really_ difficult ones).



There will be things that even *native speakers* will still be tripping over - _these _are the really difficult ones. 



Athaulf said:


> Your above argument is akin to claiming that since it's easier to learn to play the C-major scale on the piano than on the violin, it must be easier to become a virtuoso pianist than a virtuoso violinist.



Completely false assertion.



Athaulf said:


> Then how do you explain the fact that English spoken by immigrants and foreigners here in Canada is on average no less broken than German spoken by immigrants and foreigners in Germany?



Maybe you could give me some "empirical data" to back up this one? 

Kind Regards to All


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## Outsider

palomnik said:


> I think that If we were to imagine an alien landing on Planet Earth and trying to learn the way earthlings talk, they would find the easiest languages to be the ones with [...] 2) mostly multisyllablic words [...]


Why that one? Shouldn't monosyllables be simpler than polysyllables?


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## Flaminius

Well, polysyllables are easier to distinguish from each other.  Speaking from my own experience, I don't have much problem with Latinate polysyllables but I always confuse Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as "stack" vs. "stuck."


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## Outsider

I don't think the problem there is the size of the word, so much as the vowels that make it up, which do not exist in Japanese.


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## palomnik

Outsider said:


> Why that one? Shouldn't monosyllables be simpler than polysyllables?


 
I agree with Flaminius' observation in post #19.  I have consistently found that languages that have mostly polysyllables are easier for a learner to comprehend aurally than languages with a lot of monosyllables.  It's one reason why English speakers consider Spanish to be "easy."



Outsider said:


> I don't think the problem there is the size of the word, so much as the vowels that make it up, which do not exist in Japanese.


 
I don't think I understand your point, Outsider.  It sounds as if you're saying that Japanese has no vowels.


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## Outsider

palomnik said:


> I agree with Flaminius' observation in post #19.  I have consistently found that languages that have mostly polysyllables are easier for a learner to comprehend aurally than languages with a lot of monosyllables.


Even when it's a language with mile-long polysyllables, like German? 



palomnik said:


> I don't think I understand your point, Outsider.  It sounds as if you're saying that Japanese has no vowels.


The English words that Flaminius mentioned have vowels that do not exist in Japanese. At least, one of them does ("stuck"), and the other ("stack") has an "a" which may be more front than the Japanese /a/.



Athaulf said:


> When it comes to all objective measures I can think of -- for example, how long it takes native children to master the language, or how long it takes adult learners speaking unrelated languages to reach near-native fluency -- the results, to the best of my knowledge, turn out to be roughly the same for both analytical and synthetic languages.


That would indeed settle the discussion, as far as I'm concerned. I would be interested if you could list a couple of references.


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## sokol

EdwardJ said:


> Let me put it in the clearest possible terms, maybe then you will be able to grasp it. Let's compare the conjugations of the verb "to love", in english and in portuguese:
> (... cut - click to original post if you like ...)
> The English variation comprises 3 different endings. The Portuguese variation comprises 18 endings. 18 > 3. Hence the Portuguese conjugation is harder.



Let me put it in most simple terms:

- YES, the Portuguese *endings *are harder to learn, because there are more of them
- NO, the English *tenses *are not easier to learn, because easiness depends on wether the tense system of the language you intend to learn roughly corresponds to the tense system of your mother tongue or other languages you already speak very well

*Easy *to learn always is what is *not quite new* but known to you from your mother tongue (or other languages you already know).

For *speakers with Slavic mother tongues* (to don't complicate things I should probably exclude here Bulgarian and Macedonian, but that just as a sidenote) it is *very easy to learn the conjugation and declension of other Slavic* languages. This is due to the fact that they are rather similar up to even some fine details. They mainly will have to substitute the endings of their mother tongue with the ones of the Slavic language they intend to learn (except BG+MK) and adjust to some irregularities and specialities of the language they intend to learn.

For speakers with Slavic mother tongues, which are quite synthetic (except for BG+MK), this however does not mean that for them it would be much easier to learn Sanskrit than English; I would expect that this were not the case. Nevertheless, for Slavic language speakers it would be much easier to learn Sanskrit as it would be for German or English language speakers, because in Slavic languages quite some of the old Indoeuropean declension system which of course is present in Sanskrit has survived.

So it is not 'just' synthetic or analytic languages being easier - it's not as simple as that.
And I would ask you to please not refer to grammatical categories as being 'richer' or 'poorer' because this brings biased thinking into this discussion even if it weren't intended by you.

Grammatical structures have no 'moral' value as such; they have only syntactical value. So let us please keep emotions out of this, yes?




Athaulf said:


> There is more to language than just inflectional morphology.


I only can support this opinion.
Concerning the comparison with Latin you made, for what it's worth*) I still think that for people with Slavic mother tongues (except BG+MK) it is easier to cope with the five cases of Latin than for native speakers of German where technically we have four cases of which in some dialect regions only two to three are actually used in colloquial speech.
*) Of course, as I am no native speaker of a Slavic language I can only guess here.




Outsider said:


> Even when it's a language with mile-long polysyllables, like German?


Oh, but they're dead easy!


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## Joannes

Outsider said:


> Athaulf said:
> 
> 
> 
> When it comes to all objective measures I can think of -- for example, how long it takes native children to master the language, or how long it takes adult learners speaking unrelated languages to reach near-native fluency -- the results, to the best of my knowledge, turn out to be roughly the same for both analytical and synthetic languages.
> 
> 
> 
> That would indeed settle the discussion, as far as I'm concerned. I would be interested if you could list a couple of references.
Click to expand...

 
I agree , although I don't quite like the idea of reaching "near-native fluency" in that matter because it's hard to define. It had struck me before in threads with similar topics, btw, that Athaulf's idea of proficiency in a language must be a quite firm one. The fact that he seems to be a terrible gambler illustrated this to me once more  :


Athaulf said:


> I still wouldn't bet $50 that I got the articles right in the English sentence I just wrote?


(I just called at *[a certain bookmaker's office - snipped by Joannes, before Frank does]* and they calculated that the rate for Athaulf making articles mistakes in English in WRF in his next 15 posts is 1.1, i.e. you'd have to bet $500 to win only $50 _if_ he does make such mistake. )

I think an assessment in terms of the possibility to perform certain speech acts would be a better one - but I'm afraid we'll just have to settle with the research that has been done. I know little about language learning (L1 or L2), and even less about 'empirical data' in it (which seems to be very necessary in this thread), so I'll go back to 'reading and learning' modus.


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## EdwardJ

sokol said:


> Let me put it in most simple terms:
> 
> - YES, the Portuguese *endings *are harder to learn, because there are more of them
> - NO, the English *tenses *are not easier to learn, because easiness depends on wether the tense system of the language you intend to learn roughly corresponds to the tense system of your mother tongue or other languages you already speak very well



The argument you are trying to advance here is very old - namely that the difficulty of any language depends upon your previously known languages.
That is only *partly* true. _*Remember: eighteen is greater than three.*_ If an alien landed here from outer space (completely ignorant of any earthly language - just to make sure  ) and had to learn English and Portuguese verbs he would still find the Portuguese conjugation harder because, remember, 18 > 3. I have a couple of Japanese friends who speak flawless English but less than perfect Russian and german. Their first tongue didn't help them to learn these languages (that is what I heard from their mouths). They agree with me that Russian and German are harder than English, even taking into account the fact that they grew up surrounded by English.



sokol said:


> *Easy *to learn always is what is *not quite new* but known to you from your mother tongue (or other languages you already know).



So do you think that English is easy, but only compared to German?  No need to reply...

See above... I of course agree with this point. The English speaker grows up without a clue of what declensions are and hence when he has to speak German he encounters difficulties. The German speaker, on the other hand, just shoves the declensions off his head when he has to speak English. Modern English doesn't add a whole lot to German (or to any other European language, for that matter). English phonetics, perhaps, could be considered harder than German phonetics.





sokol said:


> For *speakers with Slavic mother tongues* (to don't complicate things I should probably exclude here Bulgarian and Macedonian, but that just as a sidenote) it is *very easy to learn the conjugation and declension of other Slavic* languages. This is due to the fact that they are rather similar up to even some fine details. They mainly will have to substitute the endings of their mother tongue with the ones of the Slavic language they intend to learn (except BG+MK) and adjust to some irregularities and specialities of the language they intend to learn.







sokol said:


> For speakers with Slavic mother tongues, which are quite synthetic (except for BG+MK), this however does not mean that for them it would be much easier to learn Sanskrit than English; I would expect that this were not the case.



Certainly not! 





sokol said:


> Nevertheless, for Slavic language speakers it would be much easier to learn Sanskrit as it would be for German or English language speakers, because in Slavic languages quite some of the old Indoeuropean declension system which of course is present in Sanskrit has survived.







sokol said:


> So it is not 'just' synthetic or analytic languages being easier - it's not as simple as that.



Huh?   This sentence doesn't seem, to me, to follow logically. Maybe I misunderstood, could you explain? So it is not 'just' synthetic or analytic languages being easier -- but rather "the more synthetic they are, the harder". Would that be it?

As for the "ratings" of languages, it is as simple as that in a given point: declension, for example. It could be the case that some non declined language has another aspect that is harder than the declined language's and thus balances things out. But I don't think this happens often! Almost all declined languages are harder overall, in my opinion.

Slavic languages are even more synthetic than German and thus are harder than German. 



sokol said:


> And I would ask you to please not refer to grammatical categories as being 'richer' or 'poorer' because this brings biased thinking into this discussion even if it weren't intended by you.



To say that grammatical categories are "richer" or "poorer" does not necessarily imply bias. But I will comply with your wish.



sokol said:


> Grammatical structures have no 'moral' value as such;



Uh? No I guess not. 



sokol said:


> they have only syntactical value. So let us please keep emotions out of this, yes?



I'm not the one bringing emotions into this, but yes let's drop it. 



sokol said:


> I only can support this opinion.
> Concerning the comparison with Latin you made, for what it's worth*) I still think that for people with Slavic mother tongues (except BG+MK) it is easier to cope with the five cases of Latin than for native speakers of German where technically we have four cases of which in some dialect regions only two to three are actually used in colloquial speech.
> *) Of course, as I am no native speaker of a Slavic language I can only guess here.



I think you are right here, too. We agree on many points.



Kind Regards to All

PS: Frank06: I am sorry, I don't know what you are talking about. I do use capitals and they seem fine here.


----------



## sokol

EdwardJ said:


> The argument you are trying to advance here is very old - namely that the difficulty of any language depends upon your previously known languages.
> That is only *partly* true. _*Remember: eighteen is greater than three.*_ If an alien landed here from outer space (completely ignorant of any earthly language - just to make sure  ) and had to learn English and Portuguese verbs he would still find the Portuguese conjugation harder because, remember, 18 > 3. I have a couple of Japanese friends who speak flawless English but less than perfect Russian and german. Their first tongue didn't help them to learn these languages (that is what I heard from their mouths). They agree with me that Russian and German are harder than English, even taking into account the fact that they grew up surrounded by English.


But it is true.

Would your Japanese friends not have been surrounded by English in many parts of everyday life, but instead the language of modern pop culture there would have been Russian, or Chinese, or whatever, then certainly for them it would be *much *easier to acquire proficiency in Russian, or Chinese, or whatever.
Proficiency in a language is very much about using (and getting used to using) a language; this nowadays is rather easy with English, in Western society countries, but rather difficult with German or Russian (unless you live permanently or at least for some years in one of the German or Russian speaking nations).



EdwardJ said:


> So do you think that English is easy, but only compared to German?


No I don't, not at all.

English is *especially *easy to native speakers of German, but this is mainly because both languages are closely related.
Same goes for Scandinavian languages.
But for Berbers in Algeria, for example, who will be used to Arabian and (if they are educated) French English won't be that easy - would be my guess.

Apart from that, yes there are some factors which contribute to English being not so difficult to learn as quite some other languages, but don't you ever forget that English has a huge vocabulary which compensates for the loss of inflection.

There's some compensation, you know, for the sheer number of endings with substantive declension and also derivative suffixes in languages like English where you do have to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings. (And then some additional vocabulary, in the case of English, like with food: two names for a) the flesh still walking on its two or four legs: *flesh* and b) the meat on your plate: *beef, pork*, etc. one with Germanic origin - the walking one - and the other one with Romance origin.)
Oh, you can get by with a basic English vocabulary and grammar, that's the beauty of international languages like English: you do not have to acquire proficiency for being able to communicate with sufficient success.

So, to cut a long story short, a predominantly analytic language may be easier to learn - especially to acquire only basic knowledge - even if it is _not _related to your mother tongue and _not _an international language like English, but synthetic languages also have an element of easiness: you learn a declension paradigm and it is essentially the same for all substantives (with the odd exceptions of the rules as they do exist in all languages) - so with a paradigm of endings which, admittedly, is at first easier to learn you cover much more meanings.
This becomes even more obvious if you know a Slavic language and have learned at least the basics of the Slavic verbal aspect: it is extremely difficult to learn for anyone not knowing the principle from his mother tongue, but if you have achieved it you can cover more meanings with it than a rather analytic language like German (let alone Enlish) can. (The English progressive form is not quite the same as verbal aspect, by the way.) In more analytic languages you need much more vocabulary to express the same.





EdwardJ said:


> So it is not 'just' synthetic or analytic languages being easier -- but rather "the more synthetic they are, the harder". Would that be it?


No, it's not.
It also depends on what level you do compare.
On a level of basic knowledge analytic languages most likely always will be the easiest to learn; on a level of proficiency this may not be so and may depend on other factors (as described above).




EdwardJ said:


> But I don't think this happens often! Almost all declined languages are harder overall, in my opinion. (...)  Slavic languages are even more synthetic than German and thus are harder than German.


They are for me, and they are for you.
But this may not be true for speakers of other languages.

For me Slavic languages are very hard to learn, which I know from experience (I tried very hard with Slovene and only acquired slightly above basic knowledge).
But for a hypothetical Old Aryan (Sanskrit) speaker Slavic languages would be rather easy except probably concerning phonetics.
And for speakers of Finnish and Hungarian probably a Slavic language wouldn't be too difficult too even though structures between both language families differ vastly; but Finnish and Hungarian are languages with even more grammatical cases, so probably the six ('and-a-half' with vocativ) Slavic cases would be neither unfamiliiar nor (probably) unwelcome to them (because if you are familiar with the concept of putting new meanings to words with putting endings to them then you may appreciate learning a paradigm of be it even 25 endings to use on several thousands of words). However, of course, Finns and Hungarians would have to answer this point, I can only guess here.


----------



## Athaulf

EdwardJ said:


> What experts are those? What "objective facts"? Where is the data?
> 
> What exactly are you measuring? What is a "reasonable measure of complexity" to you?



I have already mentioned two reasonable measures: the average time that native children take to acquire the language, and the time that adult learners who speak unrelated languages take on average to reach near-native fluency. If there is indeed a significant difference in the overall complexity of two languages, then it would be reasonable to expect a drastic difference in these times across them. Of course, both definitions are fuzzy and imprecise, and it's difficult to establish what counts as roughly the same level of proficiency across different languages, but still, if there are really significant differences in language complexity, then some measurable effect should exist. So far, however, as far as I know, none has been found.

Now of course, this by itself is hardly a conclusive argument, but at least it indicates that the mental effort necessary to learn and use any human language is roughly the same if one is starting from scratch, which could be taken as a reasonable definition of "equal complexity".

On the other hand, you have claimed that "an inflected language, like German, is harder than a non-inflected one like English" and that "this goes without saying". However, you have neither provided a useful definition of "hardness", nor any evidence for this claim.



> This is not my field of research, but I have more than a casual interest in languages. I have written and spoken fluency in 3 languages, and I can read in another 2. I can distinctively tell that some of the languages I know are harder than others. Many people agree with me (some of them apparently inhabit this forum).


I don't know what languages these are, but people's experiences with learning foreign languages are usually heavily biased. For example, if some of these languages have greater similarities to your native one or other languages you've learned previously, or even if you're just studying your second foreign language after the first one has taught you to think outside the box of your native one, your impressions of difficulty will likely be very skewed. 



> Where exactly did I "jump to an unjustified conclusion?"


I had in mind your above cited claim that supposedly "goes without saying", and your other statements in which you assumend that it's plainly obvious that analytic languages must be easier/less complex overall. 



> I don't think that verb conjugation is a "minuscule part of the overall complexity" of a given language. In fact, it is one of the points that I would take into account if I were to "quantify" the complexity of a language.


But the conjugation tables in Romance languages comprise a relatively small amount of information, which can be learned by heart and drilled to perfection in a time that is certainly much, much shorter than the time necessary to start speaking anywhere near native level. Therefore, it seems obvious to me that they can't contribute much to the overall difficulty of the language. 



> There will be things that even native speakers will still be tripping over - these are the really difficult ones.


Not necessarily. Native speakers usually trip over things where prescriptivist standards are different from the actual spoken language, while foreigners will often be taught according to the prescriptivist standard in the first place. But that's beside the point - I had in mind things where even very advanced non-native speakers will make mistakes that sound ridiculous to any native speaker, such as e.g. articles in English or verbal aspects in Slavic languages. _These_ are the very hardest ones, and even in highly inflected languages, people will trip over them long after they've mastered all the inflection tables.



> Maybe you could give me some "empirical data" to back up this one? [that immigrants and foreigners in Canada on average speak English equally broken as German spoken by immigrants and foreigners in Germany]


You're right that there is no objective measure there, but I really didn't see any significant differences.


----------



## Athaulf

EdwardJ said:


> Just because someone is German, has learned German declensions from his youth and thus by now they seem to him ridiculously easy, it doesn't detract from the fact that non-declined languages are easier (at least on this aspect - declension). Is that clear?



This is what I had in mind in my above post when I used the C-major scale as a metaphor. The key words in the above paragraph are "at least on this aspect". Of course that if language A has complicated noun declensions, and language B does not, then B is easier when it comes to declensions. That's just a tautology. But to conclude that B is easier than A overall, you have to make two additional assumptions:

(1) That B doesn't have other issues, some of which may be entirely outside of inflectional morphology, that are more complicated than the corresponding issues in A and therefore compensate for the simplicity of B in the issue of declensions.

(2) That declensions, or inflections in general, are a significant part of the overall language complexity, i.e. that they stand out significantly alongside other (especially syntactic) issues. Because if they don't, and the main difficulty lies outside of them in both languages, then simpler inflections are no more significant for someone who aims at near-native proficiency than the fact that playing a scale on the piano is simpler compared to violin for someone who aims at being a virtuoso player.

In my opinion, and in my experience, both these assumptions are likely to be false. So far, you haven't offered any arguments to the contrary.


----------



## Flaminius

Hello *EdwardJ*,

Here are the results of an empirical research by a US government agency regarding learning difficulty levels for English native speakers.  Not surprisingly, the smaller the linguistic and cultural distance between English and the target language, the shorter time learners to take to achieve intermediate proficiency.  Comparing the study with my experience in Japan, it seems that Indonesian and Swahili are easier languages independent of learners' background (Until one hits the glass ceiling, that is.  For near-native level of Indonesian proficiency, distinction of very subtle vocabulary nuance is indispensable).  However, I wouldn't rate Chinese as "exceptionally difficult," nor would a Chinese rate Japanese as such.  This is presumably due to a large common ground that the CJK languages share in regard to vocabulary and writing system.  As *Athaulf* has noted immediately above, measuring learning difficulty or distance between languages isn't an easy job.  The only conclusion that at present looks plausible is that language learning is influenced by languages that one knows already.  In other words, cognition is largely subject to experience.

Correct me if I am committing gross generalisation but I seem to hear you say that complex morphology enables richer expression by the language.  Latin has 10 tense/aspect categories for active voice paradigm.  I am not really familiar with Portuguese, but I hear it has some 18 categories.  If having more categories means having more nuances and, therefore, a stronger expressive power, can we not conclude Portuguese achieved this richness by simplifying verbal conjugations that it must have inherited from Latin?  Here, a shift from synthetic to analytical means a few more items for students to learn.


----------



## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Originally Posted by *Athaulf:*
> When it comes to all objective measures I can think of -- for example, how long it takes native children to master the language, or how long it takes adult learners speaking unrelated languages to reach near-native fluency -- the results, to the best of my knowledge, turn out to be roughly the same for both analytical and synthetic languages.
> 
> 
> 
> That would indeed settle the discussion, as far as I'm concerned. I would be interested if you could list a couple of references.
Click to expand...


Well, whenever I read anything written by real linguists on this topic, I always find these facts mentioned casually in passing as a well known matter of consensus. For example, I just did a Google search with a few relevant keywords, and here is the first serious reference that came up:http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cogs1/s07/Harrison_2007_ch7.pdf​Studies comparing acquisition rates of children learning different languages show slight differences for certain kinds of structures, but all kids still turn out to be fluent speakers of their native tongue by age 7 or so. [13]​The only time I encountered an opposite claim from a serious source was in a thread on this forum, but unfortuntely, I was unable to obtain any further references. In any case, I have yet to see a concrete account of a language whose speakers still grapple with morphology and syntax -- of their native dialect, of course, not the official prescriptive standard -- when they've already reached elementary school age. (Of course, when it comes to finer points of semantics and pragmatics, one learns until much older ages, perhaps as long as one is alive, but this has nothing to do with synthetic/analytic oppositions.)

The author of the above cited book chapter admits at one point that "ltimately, statements about the equal complexity of languages may owe more to political correctness than they do to any empirical evidence", arguing that "a fundamental quantitative problem with the claim [of equal complexity] remains: we have no established way to measure complexity within a single language or across multiple languages." Still, I believe that even just by _a priori_ reasoning, it's possible to establish that human languages should have equal complexity by any reasonable measure, absent some strong evidence to the contrary. I have written extensively on this topic in this old thread. And the reason for my opinion is certainly not political correctness -- anyone who has read my old posts on this forum knows that I have huge quarrels with many fashionable PC attitudes , but in this case, it really seems to me that the available evidence does support the equal complexity hypothesis.


----------



## Athaulf

Here is another interesting reference that I dug out during the above mentioned Google search (don't be put off by the silly-sounding URL  -- it's someone's personal website, but the document is an actual collection  of abstracts of academic papers and theses):
http://www.seek-fun.com/thoughts/language_complexity_panel.pdf

Particularly interesting is the abstract 2.4., in which the author measured rates of accidental errors in the speech of native speakers of several languages as a complexity metric. The rationale is that in a truly more difficult language, even native speakers can be expected to produce a greater number of accidental errors. The conclusion: "No overall differences were found in the numbers of errors made by speakers of the five languages in the study [English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish]."

It would certainly be very interesting to perform a similar experiment on groups of foreign learners  of different languages while carefully controlling for various confounding factors.


----------



## Athaulf

sokol said:


> I only can support this opinion.
> Concerning the comparison with Latin you made, for what it's worth*) I still think that for people with Slavic mother tongues (except BG+MK) it is easier to cope with the five cases of Latin than for native speakers of German where technically we have four cases of which in some dialect regions only two to three are actually used in colloquial speech.
> *) Of course, as I am no native speaker of a Slavic language I can only guess here.



I can certainly confirm this. Getting the intuition for Latin cases is indeed relatively easy for (non-Eastern Balkan ) Slavic speakers; after all, they all have pretty much the same old set of PIE cases. I had two years of Latin in high school, in which we never got very far, and it's been many years since then, but even nowadays, I can usually spot mistakes with cases in misquoted Latin proverbs.


----------



## Athaulf

Joannes said:


> I agree , although I don't quite like the idea of reaching "near-native fluency" in that matter because it's hard to define. It had struck me before in threads with similar topics, btw, that Athaulf's idea of proficiency in a language must be a quite firm one.



Not really.  I'll readily admit that you have near-native proficiency if you can -- with a chance of success of over, say, 90% -- talk to Joe Sixpack for 10-15 minutes about some trivial everyday topic without either (1) having such horrible pronunciation that he has to make extra effort to be able to understand you, or (2) saying anything that's going to make him think that you made a mistake in grammar or choice of words that sounds just plain weird and/or ridiculous. Of course, it's harder than it might sound. 

(By the way, I still couldn't pass this test in English, at least when it comes to No. 2. So much for the venerable simplicity of its analytic grammar. )



> (I just called at *[a certain bookmaker's office - snipped by Joannes, before Frank does]* and they calculated that the rate for Athaulf making articles mistakes in English in WRF in his next 15 posts is 1.1, i.e. you'd have to bet $500 to win only $50 _if_ he does make such mistake. )


That would depend on how well I'm proofreading what I write.  When I'm writing anything in English, including my posts here, I often stop and think where to put the articles, and sometimes I even google for similar phrases to resolve my doubts. The reason is not (well, not only ) perfectionist vanity, but rather hope to improve my language skills further. 

In any case, when speaking, I still make ridiculous mistakes with prepositions and articles all the time. Frankly, I have yet to see an example of a synthetic language whose morphology would be so complex to come even remotely close to the difficulty of syntactic issues such as English articles or Croatian clitics (although I've read that Georgian and Navajo might be candidates).


----------



## EdwardJ

sokol said:


> But it is true.



That being submersed in an English pop culture helped them? Of course it is true, I said they took that into account. But even then they said they find German and Russian harder (one of them had spent some time in Germany, but never in an English speaking country).



sokol said:


> Would your Japanese friends not have been surrounded by English in many parts of everyday life, but instead the language of modern pop culture there would have been Russian, or Chinese, or whatever, then certainly for them it would be *much*easier to acquire proficiency in Russian, or Chinese, or whatever.



Of course. But it would still be much harder than to acquire proficiency in English. I do think that the simplicity of the Modern English language helped the USA to attain the position it has today.



sokol said:


> Proficiency in a language is very much about using (and getting used to using) a language; this nowadays is rather easy with English, in Western society countries, but rather difficult with German or Russian (unless you live permanently or at least for some years in one of the German or Russian speaking nations).



Yes... I would say that spoken proficiency is even more dependant on this, obviously.




sokol said:


> No I don't, not at all.







sokol said:


> English is *especially *easy to native speakers of German, but this is mainly because both languages are closely related.
> Same goes for Scandinavian languages.



Oh is that so? Then I will let you on a secret - Modern English is not exactly a "Germanic Language" (as I'm sure you know!). The huge masses of French/Latin comprise about 80% of the vocabulary, or so I read. Take my own relationship with the English language as an example: I am a Brazilian of German ancestry and I grew up bilingual (Portuguese/German). I am pretty sure that most of my English vocabulary is drawn from my Portuguese, NOT from my German!




sokol said:


> But for Berbers in Algeria, for example, who will be used to Arabian and (if they are educated) French English won't be that easy - would be my guess.



Don't know a whole lot of Berbers. But I would tend to disagree.



sokol said:


> Apart from that, yes there are some factors which contribute to English being not so difficult to learn as quite some other languages,



OOOOOH, thank you. 



sokol said:


> but don't you ever forget that English has a huge vocabulary which compensates for the loss of inflection.



Hehe, that is what is usually said, that English is the simplest European language in terms of grammar, but has the largest vocabulary "to compensate". It is usually said that there is always a "compensation" for any simplification that languages go through... That is hard to measure, though. 



sokol said:


> There's some compensation, you know, for the sheer number of endings with substantive declension and also derivative suffixes in languages like English where you do have to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings.



Well, to me, the necessity of having to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings only denotes lack of expressive potential, it doesn't make it harder than other languages.





sokol said:


> (And then some additional vocabulary, in the case of English, like with food: two names for a) the flesh still walking on its two or four legs: *flesh* and b) the meat on your plate: *beef, pork*, etc. one with Germanic origin - the walking one - and the other one with Romance origin.)



This is also the case for any language whose nation has been subjected to foreign invasions. Portuguese, for example, has many words of Arabic origin. It also has many words of Germanic origin.







sokol said:


> Oh, you can get by with a basic English vocabulary and grammar, that's the beauty of international languages like English: you do not have to acquire proficiency for being able to communicate with sufficient success.



I think you do have to acquire a certain level of proficiency to be able to communicate with any success. It's not impossible to speak incomprehensible english, you know.  It's just that to acquire a certain level of proficiency in English is not as hard as it is in other languages.



sokol said:


> So, to cut a long story short, a predominantly analytic language may be easier to learn- especially to acquire only basic knowledge - even if it is _not _related to your mother tongue and _not _an international language like English,



Oooooh okay! 




sokol said:


> but synthetic languages also have an element of easiness: you learn a declension paradigm and it is essentially the same for all substantives (with the odd exceptions of the rules as they do exist in all languages) - so with a paradigm of endings which, admittedly, is at first easier to learn you cover much more meanings.



Well, again, in non-declined languages this "element of easiness" does not exist for the simple fact that there aren't even any declensions in the first place. If the error rate regarding declensions for Germans is 0,001% for English speakers it is zero because there are no declensions.





sokol said:


> This becomes even more obvious if you know a Slavic language and have learned at least the basics of the Slavic verbal aspect: it is extremely difficult to learn for anyone not knowing the principle from his mother tongue, but if you have achieved it you can cover more meanings with it than a rather analytic language like German (let alone Enlish) can.



I agree, but I fail to see how this favors your side of the argument.




sokol said:


> (The English progressive form is not quite the same as verbal aspect, by the way.) In more analytic languages you need much more vocabulary to express the same.



 And you think this is good?




sokol said:


> No, it's not.
> It also depends on what level you do compare. On a level of basic knowledge analytic languages most likely always will be the easiest to learn; on a level of proficiency this may not be so



Please elaborate further on this. Thanks.




sokol said:


> They are for me, and they are for you.
> But this may not be true for speakers of other languages.



It depends on where they are on the ladder? 



sokol said:


> For me Slavic languages are very hard to learn, which I know from experience (I tried very hard with Slovene and only acquired slightly above basic knowledge).
> But for a hypothetical Old Aryan (Sanskrit) speaker Slavic languages would be rather easy except probably concerning phonetics.



That is the basic point I'm trying to make in all my posts: for a hypothetical Sanskrit speaker all European languages would be rather easy, excepting, probably, what concerns phonetics! I realize where I am going here - but I can't help but think that all european languages could be arranged in a hierarchichal fashion with PIE on top and perhaps English at the bottom. This is what I was talking about in my first post: it seems that languages, left by themselves, follow a ‘downhill’ simplification process.

But who "made" PIE? Questions along that line are what I find fascinating. If anyone has any interesting links/articles and would like to contribute to my education, please message them to me.

As someone who comes from an area with many "endangered species" I sure can appreciate sokol's position. I think everything should be preserved. 



Thank for the replies folks.

Kind Regards to All



Athaulf said:


> Well, whenever I read anything written by real linguists on this topic, I always find these facts mentioned casually in passing as a well known matter of consensus.




Lol, of course! You sure are not going to find any "scientific" article stating that language X is more complex than language Y!



Athaulf said:


> And the reason for my opinion is certainly not political correctness -- anyone who has read my old posts on this forum knows that I have huge quarrels with many fashionable PC attitudes , but in this case, it really seems to me that the available evidence does support the equal complexity hypothesis.



Well the author of the article you just posted (the only solid reference you have posted so far) hints that he disagrees with you. He is probably more knowledgeable than you or me.



Athaulf said:


> Particularly interesting is the abstract 2.4., in which the author measured rates of accidental errors in the speech of native speakers of several languages as a complexity metric. The rationale is that in a truly more difficult language, even native speakers can be expected to produce a greater number of accidental errors. The conclusion: "No overall differences were found in the numbers of errors made by speakers of the five languages in the study [English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish]."



Again, Athaulf, just because someone is trained in something hard, and somebody else is trained on something easy, and by measuring the error rate of these 2 groups you can't find any significant discrepancy, it does not follow that if you pick one of the people who had initially been trained in something hard and put him/her to execute the easy task, that he will present the same error rate that the people from the second group had been presenting.

The quality of the research that has been conducted in this area is very questionable by scientific standards.

Take a look at "Hypothesis B", from that abstract, Athaulf.


----------



## sokol

EdwardJ said:


> Oh is that so? Then I will let you on a secret - Modern English is not exactly a "Germanic Language" (as I'm sure you know!). The huge masses of French/Latin comprise about 80% of the vocabulary, or so I read.


I *do *know that English has a huge amount of Romance vocabulary, but it is* not nearly* 80% - or it only could be anywhere near this percentage if you include all scientific vocabulary which predominantly is of Romance origin.
If you count basic English vocabulary (probably about the 10.000 words used most) then this would be closer 50%:50% would be my guess - but anyway: this would be splitting hairs, and is off topic here anyway.

One thing however certainly is true: English is really rather easy to learn for speakers with German mother tongue, much easier than for speakers of Romance or Slavic mother tongues.
And certainly French or Italian is so much more difficult for speakers with German mother tongue than English, and Slavic languages even more.

(Concerning compensating lack of declension and other means of expressions with more vocabulary in analytic languages)


EdwardJ said:


> And you think this is good?


I didn't say anywhere that this is good or bad.
It's neither.
It is only different. Meaning: different types of languages mean different means of expression. This makes for differencies concerning easiness. If you are accustomed to the one type (synthetic languages) then you easily adopt to another one of that type (another synthetic language). If you are more accustomed to analytic languages then it is especially difficult for you to adopt to any synthetic language.
And if your mother tongue is rather synthetic and you are learning an analytic language then typical faults in expressivity occur (especially with vocabulary and phrasal verbs and, if you take English, especially with the progressive forms); thing is that these errors usually are not so grave as far as communication is concerned as errors with declension and conjugation with synthetic languages.

This is one of the main causes why to most people synthetic languages look so very difficult, the other main reason (and probably the most important one) is that the most important languages of our times are rather analytic (like most Germanic and Romance languages) or extremely analytic (like English and Chinese), so naturally there are more people speaking rather analytic languages.



EdwardJ said:


> This is what I was talking about in my first post: it seems that languages, left by themselves, follow a ‘downhill’ simplification process.


*No they aren't!
*And I really have to admit that I won't reply my arguments over and over again.

It is not just 'downhill' development synthetic towards analytic.
The whole concept is wrong from the beginnning: first, development away from synthetic is not 'downhill' at all, but only just 'change'.
Secondly, there are developments of new synthetic elements in European languages - in French already shown above, and I could show further examples from colloquial Austrian German.

But really I don't see the point of repeating the same all over again if you do not want to see the point.


----------



## Athaulf

EdwardJ said:


> Hehe, that is what is usually said, that English is the simplest European language in terms of grammar, but has the largest vocabulary "to compensate". It is usually said that there is always a "compensation" for any simplification that languages go through... That is hard to measure, though.
> [...]
> Well, to me, the necessity of having to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings only denotes lack of expressive potential, it doesn't make it harder than other languages.



But you keep ignoring one particular area that is, in my opinion and in my experience, _the_ greatest source of difficulty in the grammar of any language: *syntax*. My favorite example are English articles: how many non-native English speakers do you know who are able to write five pages of text or speak for several minutes without making a single mistake with articles that will sound awful to a native speaker? I'm not sure I know a single one, and I live and work surrounded by highly proficient non-native English speakers. Do you really think that mastering this particular area of English grammar is not vastly more difficult than, say, mastering Portuguese conjugations?

The problem with syntactic rules is that unlike inflections, they often _can't be presented and explained fully and precisely at all_. Even the most complicated and irregular inflections still comprise a finite amount of information, which can be learned and drilled in a finite period of time with enough work and dedication. Compare that to the issue of e.g. articles: you can give only an approximate set of simplified rules that will always have exceptions, because the _real _rules are not just mindblowingly complicated, but in fact _unknown_. Even though native speakers will agree on what is correct and what not, their feeling for what's correct is totally subconscious, and linguists are capable of reverse-engineering it only partially. You can learn only by very long constant practice, and even then, you're unlikely to ever learn to mimic a native speaker with full accuracy.



> That is the basic point I'm trying to make in all my posts: for a hypothetical Sanskrit speaker all European languages would be rather easy, excepting, probably, what concerns phonetics! I realize where I am going here - but I can't help but think that all european languages could be arranged in a hierarchichal fashion with PIE on top and perhaps English at the bottom. This is what I was talking about in my first post: it seems that languages, left by themselves, follow a ‘downhill’ simplification process.


If that were true, then all the world's languages would have become analytic many thousands of years before the first inscriptions were made in ancient Sumer and Egypt.  And your generalization isn't true even for Indo-European languages. For example, Tocharian language had reworked and expanded the PIE noun case system to nine cases, which probably wouldn't be that easy to master for a speaker of Sanskrit or Latin. 



EdwardJ said:


> Lol, of course! You sure are not going to find any "scientific" article stating that language X is more complex than language Y!



Why not? If you think that the reason is political correctness, I'm sure one could find a language spoken by a group that the PC-inclined academics are so fond of that they wouldn't mind extolling its superiority. 



> Well the author of the article you just posted (the only solid reference you have posted so far) hints that he disagrees with you. He is probably more knowledgeable than you or me.


But he doesn't mention any measure of _overall _complexity except the time it takes native children to acquire the language, and in this regard he mentions no evidence to the contrary. I wouldn't say that the disagrees with my opinion - my impression is that he merely argues that it's a shame that we're losing languages that have unprecedented (and thus highly interesting) levels of complexity _in some particular areas_, not in general.



EdwardJ said:


> Again, Athaulf, just because someone is trained in something hard, and somebody else is trained on something easy, and by measuring the error rate of these 2 groups you can't find any significant discrepancy, it does not follow that if you pick one of the people who had initially been trained in something hard and put him/her to execute the easy task, that he will present the same error rate that the people from the second group had been presenting.



But at least the author is trying to come up with _some_ reasonable metric of complexity. You just keep repeating your claim that synthetic languages are "harder" and that this is supposed to be plainly obvious, but you propose neither a useful metric of hardness/complexity nor any arguments except your personal experience. 

People's personal experiences with learning languages are usually so skewed as to be worthless for any objective metric. When I tried learning Spanish -- and I did it as a hobby to which I dedicated a very small amount of time -- I got further in a few months than in the first several years of learning English. But of course that my perspective is skewed, because of many factors -- English was the first foreign language I ever learned, I started Spanish with a much larger Romance vocabulary base, I had learned some Latin in high school, Croatian pronunciation is surprisingly similar to Spanish but horribly different from English, etc. Of course that it would be worthless to use this experience as an argument that Spanish is overall much easier than English. 



> Take a look at "Hypothesis B", from that abstract, Athaulf.


Hypothesis B: “The patterns of distribution of different types of errors will be distinct from one language to another.”​Well, duh. You can't make errors with articles in Croatian, because there are none. How does this refute the author's main point in any way?


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## Tagarela

Hi,

Athaulf, please, explain better this kind of English articles errors? 
I'm not saying that they're easy or hard, it's just that I'm not understanding what kind of error you're talking about. 

Good bye.:


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## Athaulf

Tagarela said:


> Athaulf, please, explain better this kind of English articles errors?
> I'm not saying that they're easy or hard, it's just that I'm not understanding what kind of error you're talking about.



I mean simply omitting "the" where it should be used and using it where it shouldn't be. And I don't have in mind nitpicking, but mistakes that really sound awful and/or ridiculous to native speakers. 

In my experience,  it takes many years of practice before you can get the English articles even approximately right, and I have yet to meet a non-native speaker of English who never makes mistakes with them. In fact, my very first post on this forum was about one particular sort of English phrases where the logic behind article placement was completely eluding me (which I realized only after a native speaker warned me that my usage sounded awful!).


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## Tagarela

Hi,

Thank you, Athaulf. Well, I must confess that I bother myself very little about it - sometimes I stop and think a little, but in general I use or do not use without thiking, and I cannot say if in most of times I am right or wrong.

But, for sure, my relation to article is a little bit difference from yours, since your mother tongue has none of them.
Anyway, I'm sorry to disagree, but I wouldn't say that it's much more harder to master than Portuguese conjugations. Not that Portuguese conjugations are one of the hardest things on languages, but this English article thing, I guess, isn't that much also. 

And, as Athaulf has said, telling which languages are hard to learn without concerning the origing language of the learner, may be dangerous, although, analysing many different groups of learners, we could tell which languages usually are easier for different origins. 

Good bye.:


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## james.

I agree with several posters above that determing and comparing languages' overall difficulties based on varying degrees of synthesis is an oversimplification. The goal of language is expression, and there are countless factors that make communication between two people easier of more difficult. For example, one that hasn't been mentioned is the degree to which native speakers, with whom non-native speakers would presumably be trying to communicate, are accustomed to hearing their language mis-pronounced. I've heard English speakers who have a good command of Spanish grammar and vocabulary communicate easily in Spanish with native speakers while making no attempt to de-anglicize their pronunciation (no rolled r's, no soft consonants, nothing). Try saying Norwegian words to a less-than-cosmopolitan Norwegian with English-style pronunciation and you won't get anywhere, even if your listener is trying to be accomodating. I believe many Spanish speakers may just be more accustomed to hearing their language mispronounced by Americans than Norwegian speakers would be, although there are clearly other factors involved as well. Anyway, we could go on forever trying to account for all of these factors, but I don't think anything can be conclusively proven. 

I would like, however, to respond briefly to a few of the above entries:

    It has been stated several times that childhood acquisition of a first language, under normal circumstances, generally takes about seven years, regardless of the language. This seems fairly obvious to me, though I know little of cognitive linguistics, because conscious awareness of grammatical structures is totally unnecessary for communication in any primary language. The study of a second language, however, particularly in adulthood, is governed by completely different rules. So we should at least clarify what hypotheses our arguments are attempting to defend, as citing studies of phenomena related to acquisition of natural language in a comparison of languages learned later in life makes little sense, at least to me. 

      It also seem self-evident to me that a language with greater similarities to one's natural tongue will be easier to pick up than a totally unrelated one, just as all humans who use some formal of verbal speech would find the transition to a complex communication system based on, for example, eye twitching, rather more challenging than the study of any other human language.  

     While synthetic vs. analytic _morphology_ has been the focus of this debate, my understanding (gleaned only recently from readings on wikipedia) is that these classifications of languages along the spectrum of synthesis, with isolating languages on one end and polysynthetic languages on the other, are based on a simple ratio of morphemes to words, with isolating languages containing words with just one morpheme (e.g. girl) and synthetic languages employing single words comprising many morphemes (e.g. suicidal, egalitarianism).  While English doesn't have the complex fusional morphology of, for example, Latin or Lithuanian, its varied lexical influences have created countless words that comprise smaller morphemes joined together from Latin roots. In this sense, English is far from an isolating language. This is also true to a large extent in the Romance languages, but in my studies of Spanish, I have found that the formations of an enormous number of vocabulary words follow fairly obvious patterns, and complex concepts can be expressed using consistent combinations of simpler, familiar vocabulary. This is the case in any language where the more technical, complicated terminology is formed from simpler, native roots, e.g. Icelandic, or, to a lesser extent (though in a language with which I am more familiar), Norwegian. The average English speaker may have a fairly large vocabulary of polysyllabic words, but the etymololgies of these words may be a total mystery without significant study of the various and completely haphazard ways in which Latin and French prefixes and suffixes were cobbled together to form new English words. So, while a student of Portuguese may have to spend hours studying conjugation tables and memorizing a handful of irregular verbs, the synthesis in English, if I may use that term here, found in its polysyllabic vocabulary, is far less regular and must be memorized almost on a word-by-word basis.  

  Finally, a brief, perhaps slightly off-topic comment on the classification of English as a Germanic language, which has been called several times into question here: I have never seen any figure stating that English comprises anywhere near 80 percent Latinate vocabulary (contrary to Edward J's claims above). The highest number I've seen from any respectable study is close to 60%, and that includes vast numbers of literary and even technical words (a computerized sample of 80,000 words). In studies of the 1,000 most commonly-used English words, the figure I've seen is ~85 percent Germanic, and of the 100 most frequently used words, all are of Germanic origin. I can think of many things we say daily that have only English words in them, but I would say that speaking with only Latin words in English likely can't be done. (That last sentence, by the way, used only Germanic vocabulary with little effort or compromise.) So I think we have less grounds to doubt the "Germanicness" of English that many believe. All the above information, which I've seen in various sources, is summarized well by the following Wikipedia article:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_vocabulary#Word_origins


Thanks, by the way, for a very interesting discussion. 

Cheers, 

James


----------



## james.

I find with learning Spanish that the omission or inclusion of definite and indefinite articles, particularly in set phrases and idiomatic expressions, is one of the most challenging nuances that separate functional but clumsy Spanish from more native-sounding language. The most common mistakes made in English by non-native speakers absolutely vary according to a given speaker's language of origin. I find that Scandinavian speakers, who generally speak excellent English, rarely make errors in syntax or with articles, but often forget to conjugate verbs for person and number, as that concept no longer exists in their languages ("I were on a train", "you was...", etc.). Also, many expressions are very similar between English and Norwegian or Danish, often just using a different preposition, so this can lead to amusing errors.


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## Athaulf

Tagarela said:


> Thank you, Athaulf. Well, I must confess that I bother myself very little about it - sometimes I stop and think a little, but in general I use or do not use without thiking, and I cannot say if in most of times I am right or wrong.



But to native English speakers, such mistakes often sound no less bad than Portuguese with wrong verb suffixes would sound to you.  



> But, for sure, my relation to article is a little bit difference from yours, since your mother tongue has none of them.


In the beginner stages, definitely. Using English articles the way you use the Portuguese ones can serve as a useful first approximation. But later, you get to realize that there are in fact many differences, and learning all those differences is very, very hard (in fact, in more advanced stages, you might even be disadvantaged, since you'll have to unlearn some assumptions that you unconsciously carry from your native language). 



> Anyway, I'm sorry to disagree, but I wouldn't say that it's much more harder to master than Portuguese conjugations. Not that Portuguese conjugations are one of the hardest things on languages, but this English article thing, I guess, isn't that much also.


Well, it's not just my personal experience. I know many advanced-level non-native speakers of English (you get to meet many such people when you work at a North American university), and articles are definitely an issue over which most, if not all of them are stumbling at least occasionally.



james. said:


> While synthetic vs. analytic _morphology_ has been the focus of this debate, my understanding (gleaned only recently from readings on wikipedia) is that these classifications of languages along the spectrum of synthesis, with isolating languages on one end and polysynthetic languages on the other, are based on a simple ratio of morphemes to words, with isolating languages containing words with just one morpheme (e.g. girl) and synthetic languages employing single words comprising many morphemes (e.g. suicidal, egalitarianism).  While English doesn't have the complex fusional morphology of, for example, Latin or Lithuanian, its varied lexical influences have created countless words that comprise smaller morphemes joined together from Latin roots. In this sense, English is far from an isolating language. This is also true to a large extent in the Romance languages, but in my studies of Spanish, I have found that the formations of an enormous number of vocabulary words follow fairly obvious patterns, and complex concepts can be expressed using consistent combinations of simpler, familiar vocabulary. This is the case in any language where the more technical, complicated terminology is formed from simpler, native roots, e.g. Icelandic, or, to a lesser extent (though in a language with which I am more familiar), Norwegian. The average English speaker may have a fairly large vocabulary of polysyllabic words, but the etymololgies of these words may be a total mystery without significant study of the various and completely haphazard ways in which Latin and French prefixes and suffixes were cobbled together to form new English words. So, while a student of Portuguese may have to spend hours studying conjugation tables and memorizing a handful of irregular verbs, the synthesis in English, if I may use that term here, found in its polysyllabic vocabulary, is far less regular and must be memorized almost on a word-by-word basis.



This is an excellent point! Just observe, for example, the English negation prefixes (_un_-, _dis_-, _non_-, _in_-...). You have to learn by heart which one to use for each adjective, and sometimes there are even subtle differences in meaning depending on which one you choose (e.g. "unengaged" vs. "disengaged"). 

Another chaotic morphological mess is the English derivation of adjectives and ethnic names from geographical names. It's so wildly irregular that even native speakers will often stumble over less known ones.


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## vince

How about this test:

How common is it for foreigners to completely change the meaning of a sentence through a common non-native grammatical error?

An example in English would be:

"I am looking over your research" vs. " I am looking up your research".

In French, one would be:

"Tu me manques" vs. "Je te manques"

In German, one would be:

"Ich bringe sie bei" vs. "Ich bringe sie um" :O

Note: These errors have to be realistic errors that people actually hear foreigners committing. For example, no one, even if they're in Level 1 Ultimate Beginner English is going to confuse "I love you" with "I hate you".


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## palomnik

Athaulf said:


> This is an excellent point! Just observe, for example, the English negation prefixes (_un_-, _dis_-, _non_-, _in_-...). You have to learn by heart which one to use for each adjective, and sometimes there are even subtle differences in meaning depending on which one you choose (e.g. "unengaged" vs. "disengaged").
> 
> Another chaotic morphological mess is the English derivation of adjectives and ethnic names from geographical names. It's so wildly irregular that even native speakers will often stumble over less known ones.


 
Based on this, it would appear that we need to revise our definition of what an analytic language is. 

If we consider the morphological structure of words, then Chinese, presumably the analytic language _par excellence, _isn't really very analytic at all; most vocabulary in modern Chinese involves at least two morphemes, and possibly five or six; verb forms frequently require three morphemes. Of course, there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes a _word _in Chinese...


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## Athaulf

palomnik said:


> Based on this, it would appear that we need to revise our definition of what an analytic language is.
> 
> If we consider the morphological structure of words, then Chinese, presumably the analytic language _par excellence, _isn't really very analytic at all; most vocabulary in modern Chinese involves at least two morphemes, and possibly five or six; verb forms frequently require three morphemes. Of course, there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes a _word _in Chinese...



That's a nice observation that goes straight to the heart of the matter: in analytic languages, it's simple to form individual words, but this doesn't make the job of combining words into a meaningful utterance any less difficult. Extreme isolating languages show this very nicely, since in order to express the same information carried by a single word in a synthetic language, one still has to solve a complicated task of combining several morphemes, even though each one of those is formally considered as a single word. I don't know anything about Chinese, but even English, with its paucity of inflections, is enough to demonstrate this principle. Yes, there are no noun cases in English, but you still have to use prepositions to convey the information that would be carried by the case endings -- and the choice of prepositions is an issue of nightmarish difficulty. 

Why then are so many people under the impression that analytic languages are "simpler" and "easier"? My personal theory is that in analytic languages, it's much easier for people to overestimate their level of proficiency and underestimate the grossness of their mistakes. Missing the right verb conjugation or noun case is an undeniable mistake whose seriousness also cannot be denied. On the other hand, people are apt to underestimate or even deny their syntactic mistakes and perceive it as smart-ass nitpicking when one points them out. 

This certainly is a powerful psychological impulse, to which I'm not immune myself. Just the other day, I was watching the football game between Croatia and Germany in a pub, and there was a group of German girls at the table next to ours. At one point, I wanted to shout some witty (well, at least in my opinion ) remarks in German, but then I realized that I would probably get the genders wrong and I felt like I would sound ridiculous instead of cool, so I remained silent after all. Yet, several years ago, when my English was just as lousy as my present rusty German, I definitely wouldn't have hesitated to use English in a similar situation, even though I would have surely made equally bad mistakes.

As I've already remarked in other threads in this forum, this overconfidence of learners of analytic languages isn't necessarily bad. In fact, it's often beneficial -- it's good to have courage to jump into communication fearlessly, because that's the only way one can ever improve. But it certainly does leave many people with a very skewed perspective.


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## Outsider

Athaulf said:


> Well, it's not just my personal experience. I know many advanced-level non-native speakers of English (you get to meet many such people when you work at a North American university), and articles are definitely an issue over which most, if not all of them are stumbling at least occasionally.


I agree with this. Incorrect use of the articles (especially the definite article) in English is one of the mistakes I notice most often. And I'm sure I still make this mistake every now and then.

Another frequent mistake is incorrect choice of progressive versus simple tenses. And don't get me started on the present perfect, or the prepositions _in/on/at_!

None of this has to do with synthesis, it must be admitted...


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## Tagarela

Hi,



Outsider said:


> And don't get me started on the present perfect, or the prepositions _in/on/at_!



I would say in some cases even the native speakers wouldn't have a answer for this matter. 

In or on the street (and there are a lot of other threads about it)

Perhaps, it's because of lack of a real rule - and one may say - as in a way it  has already been said here - that it, lack of rules, happens in many English aspects, and thefore, it would be hard to learn - since one have to learn word-by-word, verb-by-verb, preposition-by-preposition. 

If it is harder or easier, better or worse, higher or lower, I prefer not to say.

Good bye.:


----------



## Outsider

sokol said:


> For me Slavic languages are very hard to learn, which I know from experience (I tried very hard with Slovene and only acquired slightly above basic knowledge).
> [...]
> And for speakers of Finnish and Hungarian probably a Slavic language wouldn't be too difficult too even though structures between both language families differ vastly; but Finnish and Hungarian are languages with even more grammatical cases, so probably the six ('and-a-half' with vocativ) Slavic cases would be neither unfamiliiar nor (probably) unwelcome to them (because if you are familiar with the concept of putting new meanings to words with putting endings to them then you may appreciate learning a paradigm of be it even 25 endings to use on several thousands of words). However, of course, Finns and Hungarians would have to answer this point, I can only guess here.


I'm not so sure that they would find them that easy. My guess would be that for speakers of Finnish or Hungarian (two very regular agglutinative languages) all the irregularities of Indo-European languages would be a serious hindrance. But yes, it would be better to hear from them.



sokol said:


> Apart from that, yes there are some factors which contribute to English being not so difficult to learn as quite some other languages, but don't you ever forget that English has a huge vocabulary which compensates for the loss of inflection.


Well, I for one am not fully convinced that English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages in any honest sense. And in any case counting how large is the vocabulary of a language is
a can of worms in itself. On this point I would tend to agree with EdwardJ.



EdwardJ said:


> Modern English is not exactly a "Germanic Language" [...] The huge masses of French/Latin comprise about 80% of the vocabulary, or so I read. Take my own relationship with the English language as an example: I am a Brazilian of German ancestry and I grew up bilingual (Portuguese/German). I am pretty sure that most of my English vocabulary is drawn from my Portuguese, NOT from my German!


About the composition of the lexicon of English, see the previous threads English: The weight of the Germanic component and English words having their origin in French.



EdwardJ said:


> That is the basic point I'm trying to make in all my posts: for a hypothetical Sanskrit speaker all European languages would be rather easy, excepting, probably, what concerns phonetics!


I don't believe that. Speakers of Indo-European languages _today_ don't find other IE languages easy, for the most part. How could someone from another time, speaking a language with a very different structure and vocabulary, find all of them easy?

As for the difficulty of synthetic versus analytic languages, let's examine the evidence:



Flaminius said:


> Here are the results of an empirical research by a US government agency regarding learning difficulty levels for English native speakers.  Not surprisingly, the smaller the linguistic and cultural distance between English and the target language, the shorter time learners to take to achieve intermediate proficiency.


If the _only_ factor that determines how easy or difficult a language is to learn is its "closeness" to one's native language, then that's evidence against some languages being intrinsically more complex than others. Otherwise, we would expect other factors to influence the ability to learn, besides similarity.

Now, I admit that "similarity" and "analysis" are somewhat confounded in this case, as many of the languages closest to English are somewhat nearer the analytic side of the spectrum than the synthetic side. I am not claiming that the evidence here is definitive -- but it does seem suggestive.



Athaulf said:


> Well, whenever I read anything written by real linguists on this topic, I always find these facts mentioned casually in passing as a well known matter of consensus. For example, I just did a Google search with a few relevant keywords, and here is the first serious reference that came up:http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cogs1/s07/Harrison_2007_ch7.pdf​Studies comparing acquisition rates of children learning different languages show slight differences for certain kinds of structures, but all kids still turn out to be fluent speakers of their native tongue by age 7 or so. [13]​





Athaulf said:


> Here is another interesting reference that I dug out during the above mentioned Google search (don't be put off by the silly-sounding URL  -- it's someone's personal website, but the document is an actual collection  of abstracts of academic papers and theses):
> http://www.seek-fun.com/thoughts/language_complexity_panel.pdf
> 
> Particularly interesting is the abstract 2.4., in which the author measured rates of accidental errors in the speech of native speakers of several languages as a complexity metric. The rationale is that in a truly more difficult language, even native speakers can be expected to produce a greater number of accidental errors. The conclusion: "No overall differences were found in the numbers of errors made by speakers of the five languages in the study [English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish]."


Again, very suggestive. I agree that if some languages were inherently more complex than others, we should expect native speakers to struggle a little bit more with them, too. Yet these findings indicate that no measurable difference is found in practice.

It's not _necessarily_ so. It might be, as I think EdwardJ and James meant to say, that all languages are pretty much equally easy for native speakers, but that the differences between them become important _only_ for non-natives. But the evidence so far does seem to point in the opposite direction. 



Athaulf said:


> It would certainly be very interesting to perform a similar experiment on groups of foreign learners  of different languages while carefully controlling for various confounding factors.





Athaulf said:


> [...] you'll have to devise some plausible way to quantify language difficulty and then demonstrate that for some languages, the measure ends up higher. When it comes to all objective measures I can think of -- for example [...] how long it takes adult learners speaking unrelated languages to reach near-native fluency [...]


That is the kind of study that seems to be missing...



vince said:


> How common is it for foreigners to completely change the meaning of a sentence through a common non-native grammatical error?
> 
> An example in English would be:
> 
> "I am looking over your research" vs. " I am looking up your research".
> 
> In French, one would be:
> 
> "Tu me manques" vs. "Je te manques"


And another common kind of error, in English as well as in French, are spelling mistakes. This isn't even a linguistic feature in strict sense, but can anyone be called proficient in a language when their spelling gives them away? My aim here is not to criticise Vince, but to make the point that, even if different languages have different linguistic (morphological + syntactic) complexities, that still won't be the last word on their difficulty.


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## palomnik

Athaulf said:


> Why then are so many people under the impression that analytic languages are "simpler" and "easier"? My personal theory is that in analytic languages, it's much easier for people to overestimate their level of proficiency and underestimate the grossness of their mistakes. Missing the right verb conjugation or noun case is an undeniable mistake whose seriousness also cannot be denied. On the other hand, people are apt to underestimate or even deny their syntactic mistakes and perceive it as smart-ass nitpicking when one points them out.


 
This reminds me of an ongoing debate that I had in college with the handful of students that, like myself, tackled Chinese and Russian at the same time. Most felt that Chinese was much easier; I disagreed - to me, Chinese was much more difficult than Russian.

My logic was not based around the writing system - after a couple of years' study you learn to cope with that - nor was it the phoemic or morphemic structure, or the absence of related words, since Russian and English really don't share that many related word either. For a long time I wondered whether it was just a tempermental eccentricity on my part, but I finally realized that the real problem was that learning the syntax of good, fluent Chinese was ultimately much more difficult than it was in Russian. Many differences that are expressed in Russian (and in English too) by the grammar are replaced by knowing the correct word or phrase in Chinese; not infrequently, one word in English will translate into several in Chinese, because Chinese frequently will use one word to represent a concept in the abstract and another to show its meaning in a particular situation.

In fact, Russian and English bear a similar relationship to each other as English has with Chinese; the difference between a perfective and imperfective verb in Russian is often expressed by two different verbs in English.


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## EdwardJ

palomnik said:


> This reminds me of an ongoing debate that I had in college with the handful of students that, like myself, tackled Chinese and Russian at the same time. Most felt that Chinese was much easier; I disagreed - to me, Chinese was much more difficult than Russian.
> 
> My logic was not based around the writing system - after a couple of years' study you learn to cope with that - nor was it the phoemic or morphemic structure, or the absence of related words, since Russian and English really don't share that many related word either. For a long time I wondered whether it was just a tempermental eccentricity on my part, but I finally realized that the real problem was that learning the syntax of good, fluent Chinese was ultimately much more difficult than it was in Russian. Many differences that are expressed in Russian (and in English too) by the grammar are replaced by knowing the correct word or phrase in Chinese; not infrequently, one word in English will translate into several in Chinese, because Chinese frequently will use one word to represent a concept in the abstract and another to show its meaning in a particular situation.
> 
> In fact, Russian and English bear a similar relationship to each other as English has with Chinese; the difference between a perfective and imperfective verb in Russian is often expressed by two different verbs in English.


 
So, in the end you did learn more Russian than Chinese? Are you reasonably fluent in Russian?


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## EdwardJ

There is a mention, in the study I have previously mentioned, of "closed-class forms" errors, relating to Japanese. Can any Japanese (or Japanese speaker) jump in here and explain what type of errors these could be?

Kind Regards to All


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## palomnik

EdwardJ said:


> So, in the end you did learn more Russian than Chinese? Are you reasonably fluent in Russian?


 
Yes. I learned much more Russian than Chinese, and in a lot less time.  

Of course, I'll allow that there are other factors involved in that too; when I studied Chinese (in the 1970's) the tendency was to push students into reading as soon as possible, and from the second year on much of the class work involved learning vocabulary for reading rather than dealing with new colloquial situations.  Things may be different now; there is certainly much more material on colloquial Chinese available now, but I don't really know whether colleges are stressing speaking ability more nowadays.


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## Outsider

palomnik said:


> My logic was not based around the writing system - after a couple of years' study you learn to cope with that - nor was it the phoemic or morphemic structure, or the absence of related words, since Russian and English really don't share that many related word either.


Really? What about all those words with common Indo-European roots? And what about all the recent loanwords from English, like _kompyuter_, or _pay_ and _chizkeyk_?


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## palomnik

Outsider said:


> Really? What about all those words with common Indo-European roots? And what about all the recent loanwords from English, like _kompyuter_, or _pay_ and _chizkeyk_?


 
As far as similarity with IE roots, they are about as obvious for the English speaker in Russian as they are in Sanskrit. As often as not, unless the similarity is pointed out to you or you research it, you don't notice it.

It's true that there are a fairly large number of borrowings from English in Russian, but not nearly so many, I think, as in German, French or Spanish - or Japanese, for that matter.  There are, indeed, more than in 1972, but I expect a lot of the newer ones will drop out of usage in a generation or so.


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## Outsider

Another point where Russian may be more similar to English than you suggest is in its structure. Yes, I know, English has no declensions, and Russian does. But one thing that several posters have argued in this thread is that declensions may be an overrated measure of complexity (and concomitantly of relatedness).

English and Russian are both Indo-European languages, while Chinese is not. I don't doubt at all that the connections between English and Russian are very thin and subtle, but still there must be some structural similarities between the former and the latter, quite possibly more than between either of them and Chinese. 

Could this not explain why you found Russian easier to learn than Chinese?


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## EdwardJ

Outsider said:


> But one thing that several posters have argued in this thread is that declensions may be an overrated measure of complexity (and concomitantly of relatedness).



Who is it that provided any good arguments to support this view? I think there is clear evidence, even in the articles posted by those who have argued in favor of this view, that morphological complexity adds to "error rates" of any language.


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## Outsider

Good evidence, such as...?


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## EdwardJ

Outsider said:


> Good evidence, such as...?



HYPOTHESIS B:[...]First, _morphosyntactic phenomena do represent real tasks with which the speech production system must cope_.[...]


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## Outsider

A hypothesis is evidence?


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## EdwardJ

Outsider said:


> A hypothesis is evidence?



As I understand it, the excerpt I posted is not a part of the hypothesis. The hypothesis were the following:

HYPOTHESIS A: "As measured in this way, languages are equally complex."

HYPOTHESIS B: "The patterns of distribution of different types of errors will be distinct from one language from another."

Both of these hypothesis were supported by the data, in their evaluation.


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## Flaminius

Reading the two hypotheses, can I conclude that all languages are equally difficult but where one encounters difficulties differs from language to language?


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## EdwardJ

I would need to know just what type of error each one of them committed. What type of error did the English speaker make? What type of error did the Japanese speaker make? To make sure they went through the same screening...



Flaminius said:


> Reading the two hypotheses, can I conclude that all languages are equally difficult but where one encounters difficulties differs from language to language?



Yes, that's what they think.

Do you speak Japanese Flaminius? Perhaps you could read the article in full and give an assessment as to what the Japanese speaker' mistakes could be?


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## Flaminius

Okay, *EdwardJ*.  Where can I find it?


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## EdwardJ

Flaminius said:


> Okay, *EdwardJ*.  Where can I find it?



Click on the link that is on post #31 of this thread. (I can't post URL's as I am a junior member).


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## Flaminius

EdwardJ said:


> There is a mention, in the study I have previously mentioned, of "closed-class forms" errors, relating to Japanese.


Ah....  I see what you are wondering.  I am afraid only Wells-Jensen would know how Japanese has richer systems of closed-class forms than other four languages.

Edit: Or it is just I am too familiar with Japanese to realise how it is rich with closed-class forms.


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## EdwardJ

Flaminius said:


> Ah....  I see what you are wondering.  I am afraid only Wells-Jensen would know how Japanese has richer systems of closed-class forms than other four languages.
> 
> Edit: Or it is just I am too familiar with Japanese to realise how it is rich with closed-class forms.



So you don't think it even has rich closed-class forms?

Note also that Wells-Jensen never mentions what are the "loci of complexity" of the English language.


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## palomnik

Outsider said:


> Another point where Russian may be more similar to English than you suggest is in its structure. Yes, I know, English has no declensions, and Russian does. But one thing that several posters have argued in this thread is that declensions may be an overrated measure of complexity (and concomitantly of relatedness).
> 
> English and Russian are both Indo-European languages, while Chinese is not. I don't doubt at all that the connections between English and Russian are very thin and subtle, but still there must be some structural similarities between the former and the latter, quite possibly more than between either of them and Chinese.
> 
> Could this not explain why you found Russian easier to learn than Chinese?


 
Not anything I'd feel comfortable quantifying.  True, both Russian and English are stressed-timed languages, but then arguably so is Mandarin Chinese (although this is not true for many other dialects).


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## Flaminius

EdwardJ said:


> So you don't think it even has rich closed-class forms?


Not being on the cutting-edge of anything, I don't share with the experts fine nuances of "closed-class" in the literature.  Japanese certainly has a lot of closed-class systems but I am not sure if they are richer than those of Turkish or English.

The referenced material after all is a collection of abstracts.  The details should be found in the respective reviewed works.


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## MarX

I need to read through the pages, but in another thread I posted in we were talking about Indonesian being the easiest language.
I wouldn't say it is the easiest language, but it is certainly one of the easiest.
Some of the reasons are mentioned in the thread.

I'm not saying this because I'm a native speaker. I never really thought about the grammar. But having explained to people how it works made me realize how relatively easy Indonesian is.

Plus, I was struck at how quickly my friend learned Indonesian.
He told me that all you need to learn is vocabulary, and some _imbuhan_ here and there.


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## Frank06

Hi,


MarX said:


> I posted in we were talking about Indonesian being the easiest language. I wouldn't say it is the easiest language, but it is certainly one of the easiest.


It's indeed one of the 6400 (or so) easiest languages spoken on this planet these days.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## MarX

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> It's indeed one of the 6400 (or so) easiest languages spoken on this planet these days.
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


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## trance0

A very interesting thread, I must admit. I am glad I stumbled across this forum because I really like languages. Anyway, as my mother tongue is Slovenian I can comment on the topic from the perspective of a Slavic speaking person. I can explain what I find difficult with English(as an example of a mildly inflected language) and another language(I am going to use German as an example of a moderately inflected language) with which I am acquainted. 

First, something about my language skills: I have good knowledge of English, passive, with limited active fluency, knowledge of German, solid knowledge of Croatian/Serbian, very limited knowledge of only written French(acquired through self-education years ago). 

Judging from my experiences I can say that all languages are generally equally difficult. While it may seem that some languages appear to be easier at first or in the early stages of acquisition, it later turns out that progress slows down significantly once one tries to become more proficient. This is my experience with English vs. German. I started learning English somewhere around the age of 10 and by the age of 14 I had gotten very good basic knowledge of English. With German on the other hand, progress was much slower in the beginning, but after 11+ years of learning it(with very long pauses between the start of learning and now) I am beginning to see that in fact I have less problems absorbing new German than new English words. Additionally, many phrases sound more logical to me in German than in English. The following is what I find especially difficult with English:

- complex orthography and pronunciation(with unclear vowels) and several sounds very foreign to a Slavic language speaking person(German is much much easier in this respect)

- syntax with a (very) rigid word order and the proper use of many prepositions in combination with many frequent phrasal verbs

- complex analitical verbal tense system unlike anything in any Slavic language(except for maybe Macedonian and Bulgarian)

- very large vocabulary and significant discrepancy(lack of consistency) in it(word formation using different germanic/latin prefixes and suffixes on latin and/or germanic stems)

- correct usage of English articles a/an, the

And above all, almost every time I come across a new word in English, I have great difficulties with the proper pronunciation(including proper stress position) of it.


If I compare the above with the subjective difficulties of German, I can say the following:


- German has a more conservative(from historical point of view!) morphology. Therefore it took me some time to learn several different case endings and declensions and to apply them correctly in practical speech. Even though I understood the case system in German very well from the beginning, because Slovenian has an even more elaborate system, there are a few differences in usage and it takes a while to get the hang of it.


- Rektion(in German), I won`t go into the details of this, but many here will know it is a complex and inexhaustible part of German grammar

- word order differences between my mother tongue and German

- proper use of der/die/das, ein/eine articles

- and yes, having to learn almost every German noun with the right article(for grammatical gender) + plural nominative form is a pain in the ass. Additionally it is sometimes useful to remember the genitive singular(in order to know whether a noun is weak or strong/mixed).


I could also go into subjective difficulties of French, but I think I will leave this matter over for next time.


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## Athaulf

palomnik said:


> *Outsider:*
> English and Russian are both Indo-European languages, while Chinese is not. I don't doubt at all that the connections between English and Russian are very thin and subtle, but still there must be some structural similarities between the former and the latter, quite possibly more than between either of them and Chinese.
> 
> Could this not explain why you found Russian easier to learn than Chinese?
> 
> 
> 
> Not anything I'd feel comfortable quantifying.  True, both Russian and English are stressed-timed languages, but then arguably so is Mandarin Chinese (although this is not true for many other dialects).
Click to expand...


I have no experience with learning non-IE languages myself, but I meet many non-native English speakers here in Canada, and I have observed that speakers of non-IE languages sometimes have huge problems with certain issues that are for the most part trivial for IE speakers. This is especially true for non-IE languages that haven't had significant historical contact with IE languages (unlike, say, Hungarian or Turkish). 

The most striking example would probably be the plural of nouns: I have seen many Chinese and other East Asian people who, even after years of life and work in an English-speaking environment, still often omit plural suffixes and have problems with the concept of countable vs. non-countable nouns. Also, many of them slip into omitting tenses and third-person suffixes when speaking quickly and casually, and sometimes even in writing. Of course, beginner-level IE speakers also make mistakes with these concepts, but they tend to internalize them much more quickly and successfully so that they don't have to exercise conscious effort to use them more or less correctly all the time. I've never learned Chinese, but from what I know about its structure, this is consistent with its lack of plurals, tenses, and verbal inflections (in which it is different from, as far as I know, any IE language). Furthermore, when I read English written by Chinese or Japanese speakers, I often get an odd feeling that the sentences I'm reading aren't ungrammatical, but still reflect a very strange underlying reasoning on how thoughts should be expressed. 

Of course, I'm sure that the situation is completely symmetrical when it comes to how native Chinese speakers perceive Chinese spoken and written by IE and other non-Chinese speakers. I'd say that this does suggest that there are still many underlying similarities between IE languages that we take for granted and don't even notice normally.



Outsider said:


> Again, very suggestive. I agree that if some languages were inherently more complex than others, we should expect native speakers to struggle a little bit more with them, too. Yet these findings indicate that no measurable difference is found in practice.
> 
> It's not _necessarily_ so. It might be, as I think EdwardJ and James meant to say, that all languages are pretty much equally easy for native speakers, but that the differences between them become important _only_ for non-natives. But the evidence so far does seem to point in the opposite direction.



I agree that a study involving adult non-native speakers would be the really critical piece of evidence. The problem is that doing such a study properly would be a Herculean task because of so many confounding factors. Some of them are obvious and could be controlled for relatively easily, such as the level of similarity of languages and the previous linguistic experience of learners. However, there are also many factors that can skew the results, but would be extremely difficult to control for. For example, due to various economic, political, and cultural factors, it may well be the case that immigrants in one country have a much greater incentive and opportunity to assimilate into the mainstream society, rather than sticking to their own ethnic enclaves. This will obviously result in greater proficiency of an average immigrant in this country, everything else being equal. Or, to take an even more intricate situation, even if we control for "serious" economic incentives and cultural barriers, it may still be the case that pop culture and entertainment in one language is more appealing to immigrants and foreigners on average for purely subjective and whimsical reasons, and this will do wonders for their success in learning, perhaps even more than serious economic necessity. 

It would certainly take a truly ingenious and versatile mind with immense resources to lead such a study successfully.


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## Kanes

It all depence on what is your native language and how you are used to think. But the difference is important. For example I'm Bulgarian but learning other slavic languages is very difficult, because they are all synthetic. I don't think one or the other is harder though. They have cases, strange grammer... but we have more complex verbs.


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## vince

Someone mentioned spelling as making certain languages difficult.

This can make learning a second language difficult, but the writing system shouldn't matter when acquiring a language as a first language. Many languages do not even have standardized written forms but people still grow up speaking them.

Just because a random ESL student in Japan can spell "totalitarianism" and a little kid in 5th grade in New Jersey can't, doesn't make the Japanese person a better English-speaker than the American.


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## Hulalessar

palomnik said:


> Based on this, it would appear that we need to revise our definition of what an analytic language is.


 
I think the definitions are there, but are not used consistently. "Isolating" and "analytic" are often used interchangeably, when perhaps they ought not to be.

Languages may be classified according to how they form words (a question of morphology) and how the function of words in a sentence is shown (a question of syntax).

Morphologically, a language may be classified according to where it comes on the spectrum from "isolating" at one end and "fusional" or "agglutinating" at the other. An isolating language is one that has a tendency to have a one-to-one correspondence between words and morphemes. A fusional language is one that uses affixes, where the affix is "simple" and may imply more than one thing. (I shall not go into discussing the difference betwen derivational and inflectional affixes.) An example is Latin "amo" where the "-o" indicates (a) first person (b) singular (c) indicative and (d) active, as opposed to "amemur", where the "-emur" indicates (a) first person (b) plural (c) subjunctive and (d) passive. An agglutinating language will typically indicate person, number etc with different affixes.

Syntactically, a language may be classified according to where it comes on the spectrum from "analytic" to "synthetic". An analytic language typically shows the relationship between words in a sentence by word order and/or by using prepositions. A synthetic language typically shows the relationship between words in a sentence by altering the words in some way.

There is clearly a relationship between morphology and syntax. An isolating language must be analytic since it has no means to change words to show syntactical relationships, whilst a synthetic language must be fusional and/or agglutinating, since it needs to be able to change words to show syntactical relationships.

So, "isolating" and "analytic" are not synonomous. Whilst all isolating languages must be analytic, not all analytic languages are isolating.

Ideally, languages would be classified with a binomial system. Thus:

Chinese - isolating and analytic

English - fusional and analytic

Latin - fusional and synthetic

Turkish - agglutinating and synthetic


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## Outsider

It seems as though you view isolating/fusional/agglutinative as terms that refer to the structure of nouns, and analytic/synthetic as terms that describe the structure of verbs...


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## Hulalessar

Outsider said:


> It seems as though you view isolating/fusional/agglutinative as terms that refer to the structure of nouns, and analytic/synthetic as terms that describe the structure of verbs...


 
Not quite sure how that view came across.


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## Outsider

I'll take that as a "No", thanks.


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## Noise_in_the_Brain

I think, aglutinative languages are easier to learn than fusion language. But I didn't learn nothing exept English, German and a bit Spanish.

What could we recomend me, which aglutinative language I should try to learn? It must be language spoken by larger number of people and what's desirable, must have latin letters (or cyrilic). I have no ambition to be deply involved in learning it. Only for gaining a bit experience learning any exotical language.

Turkish seems me hard language to learn due to dynamic stressed acords in words. Which other aglutinative language I should try to learn? I was interesting in learning Georgian, but it has diferent letters, and is spoken by relative small number of people.


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## Noise_in_the_Brain

Tim~! said:


> *(Attempt to**)** split off from this thread[/url].
> Frank, moderator*
> 
> 
> 
> I think there's more to it than that, though it's very kind of you to give us some (undeserved!) credit
> 
> English has advantages over the other languages that I know that mean that making progress is relatively easier _in the initial stages_.
> 
> Conjugating verbs is very easy, be that the present tense (which features few traps), or easy-to-use futures and conditionals, very regular past forms (such as "used to" and "would"), and other past forms that, though irregular, don't have a different form for each person.
> 
> There are no agreements to make on adjectives, no gender-dependent articles, few instances where you have to worry about switching mood, and so on.
> 
> Because of these features, I imagine that it's easier to become reasonably proficient in English than would be the case for French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and so on.
> 
> After a while, I feel that things level off: Once the hard work's out the way, the other languages throw up few things that would cause problems.  English, on the other hand, is riddled with the horrors of phrasal verbs, a huge vocabulary, and irregular spelling, which make it harder to progress from a level  of competency (acquired reasonably easily) to full-on mastery.
> 
> That's the way I've seen things for years and years anyway.



Ha! I find English grammar fair harder to learn. But, numerous phrasal verbs idioms, and vocabulary seems easy, at least for me. Grammar, spelling and ortography ar far harder to me. Because of lacking cases, English syntax is much harder to learn.


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## raptor

I think that all the posts here capture a very good sense of how difficult quantifying language difficulties would be but personally, I don't believe it would be entirely impossible.

In the example of cases, one could firstly count them, identify the differences between these (ie extra - or lack of - cases, exceptions to grammatical rules, etc) and the native language, and make note of how similar the cases are phonetically.  Is it very easy to slip from one phonetically similar case to another?  How about how the sounds are integrated?  Does this present tongue-twister complexities?

Are there genders or necessary 'agreements' between words?  Is there any way to identify parts of speech with limited knowledge of the language?  (I think here, 'limited' would be a few lessons, maybe two weeks?)  For example, Spanish has verb endings (-ar, -er, and -ir, along with the conjugations that generally allow for identification).  

How difficult are these conjugations?  Is there a separate conjugation for each pronoun?  Each case?  Each tense?  Again, how ponetically similar are these, and will similarities hamper comprehension or speaking easily?

In fusional or agglutinative languages, how are the isolated forms integrated into the word/sentance, and what kind of rules apply?  How difficult will it be for someone native of an isolating language to learn one such as this, or vice versa?

Unfortunately, any 'difficulty' quantity would have to be relative to the native language of the person in question, and if necessary, take into account any contact/study etc that person has had with other languages.  I think that, for each linguistic/morphologic topic, a 'difference' quantity would have to be assigned, and then the difficulty quantity (possibly used in a logarithm) multiplied or raised to the value of the difference.

As was mentioned earlier, spelling and orthography would also need to be considered.  The Arabic script might be a medium difficulty to a native of (for example) the Latin alphabet, or even the Hebrew alphabet, and Chinese/Japanese might be the most extreme in this respect.

Unfortunately, even after identification, and the assignment of phonetic similarity values, all other necessary components, and then the integration of those values into some sort of equation, you still only have a number.  Then the native language would be considered, and contact/study with other languages guaged as helpful or harmful to the learning of the language in question, finally revealing a value of 'difficulty' for this person.

I know I have not identified all the topics or identities of language necessary to guage the net difficulty of learning the language, and that all steps of the process I outlined would be very labour-intensive and lengthy.  I don't even know if it would yield any useful results until we can identify, quantify, and use the intimate (native) knowledge of the language easily.

Of course, immersion in the language, ideally at a young age, would make for a much faster understanding of the language.  As a result, age and psychological makeup may also have to be taken into account in order to accurately judge the difficulty in learning the language.

So an overall difficulty rating would be very difficult to devise, but isolated topics, such as conjugation, or syntax, or cases may be feasible relatively soon.  The major barrier I think would be the immense amount of time, labour, and knowledge of each language necessary.


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## Todessprache

Ehmm...no one has mentioned Hungarian. There you go, possibly a clear winner or what about the polysynthetic Mohawk language?


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## Wilma_Sweden

EdwardJ said:


> I do think that the simplicity of the Modern English language helped the USA to attain the position it has today.


No, EdwardJ, there are all sorts of economic, historic and other reasons, and language is not one of them. However, the reverse is true: The position of the USA as a major superpower certainly helps keeping English as the preferred international/global language. Source: David Crystal (2003): _English as a Global Language_, (pp 9-10 for starters.)

I have read the whole thread, which is very interesting, and don't feel I have much to add except this: I do believe that all languages are - roughly - equally easy for native speakers to learn as children. I also believe it is impossible to prove scientifically which language would be the easiest or hardest to learn for non-native adult learners. If I find any additional literature supporting these statements above and beyond what has already been quoted, I shall be happy to provide the source(s).

/Wilma


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## Diaspora

As I said before, nobody is going to convince me that one language is naturally harder than another one. The easiest language is your mother language, everything else is a personal opinion. It is somewhat offensive to call English or for that matter any language "simple"


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## MarX

Diaspora said:


> As I said before, nobody is going to convince me that one language is naturally harder than another one. The easiest language is your mother language, everything else is a personal opinion. It is somewhat offensive to call English or for that matter any language "simple"


I think we need to remember that a language being easy or "simple" doesn't necessarily imply its being inferior. Which you didn't say, but I see no reason to be offended by someone's saying that one's language is "simple".


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## Frank06

*9th June 2008 : birth of this thread.
22th April 2009: end of this thread.
**Requiescat in pace.**

Frank,
Moderator

PS: After almost 9 months and 5 pages, a whole range of interesting ideas and viewpoints, we have the impression that this thread is coming to an end. We therefore decided to close it.
*


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