Tellus Explorer Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Which language do you think is the most difficult to learn?I say French.Arabic. Latin. Hebrew. Mandarin. Oh and Finnish IMO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Arabic. Latin. Hebrew. Mandarin. Oh and Finnish IMO How is Latin remotely in the same league as Manderin? Anyway, clearing up a misconception about Finnish (as written in English this time), since I suspect the reputation of Finnish is an "everybody says it's hard" thing: The 14 cases (15 if you count the accusative) is not like it sounds. First off, six of those cases correspond to prepositions: what are prepositions in English (at, from, to) are turned into case endings in Finnish. Three more cases are fossilised such that, apart from rare expressions, you'll never see them in any realistic setting. Of the rest, the accusative is just the nominative or the genitive in drag, and both of those are pretty uncomplicated, seeing as the nominative is the basic form of the noun and the genitive case (of, possession) gives the inflectional stem. There's a couple more cases that see moderate use, but both of those have pretty clearly defined uses. That leaves the partitive, which is worse than all the others combined, but the partitive alone doesn't justify the scaremongering. The nastiest fish hook in Finnish isn't the cases, it's the consonant mutation that can happen when you add inflections. Ps turn into vs, and vice versa, ts turn into ds, and vice versa, and ks disappear or pop out of nowhere when you add inflections (something like huoata, to sigh, becomes huokaan, I sigh). There are also some harmless oddities in that Finnish lacks a verb meaning "have" (it's a case ending instead), and that it inflects "no". But the partitive and the consonant mutations are a small price to pay. Consider a language with no grammatical gender, for starters. And no future tense. There are pretty much only three irregular verbs to worry about (nähdä, tehdä, and käydä). Vanishingly few prepositions, and a few more non scary postpositions. A written language that is (essentially) completely phonetic, and a vocabulary that while very different from the European norm, is nevertheless built off logical foundations (kirja = book, the suffix -sto = group/collection of something, so the Finnish word for library? Kirjasto). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy Ent Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Thanks, RoBoPet! That was really informative. Partitive case, eh? Very cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Examples of the partitive case in action: Kesä on kuuma (nominative) = This particular Summer is hot.Kesä on kuumaa (partitive) = Summer (as an abstract) is hot. Abstraction would be fine, but the damn case also gets used elsewhere: everything from meaning "some", to being the case of the object in a negative sentence, to expressing quantity (does the equivalent of "two coffees" use the plural of coffee? No, it uses the partitive singular form!), to being a characteristic of divisible entities (but not indivisible ones), to being dragged in by various other words (like ilman = without), and so on. And then there is the partitive plural... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy Ent Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 But the behaviour of “some” (de) in French is almost as confusing, and in many of the same situations. In French, I have “no of eggs.” I like “the eggs” when I mean “eggs” (in general). But I buy “the eggs” when I mean a particular batch of eggs, rather than depleting humanity of its entire store of eggs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buckwheat Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Abstraction would be fine, but the damn case also gets used elsewhere: everything from meaning "some", to being the case of the object in a negative sentence, to expressing quantity (does the equivalent of "two coffees" use the plural of coffee? No, it uses the partitive singular form!), to being a characteristic of divisible entities (but not indivisible ones), to being dragged in by various other words (like ilman = without), and so on. And then there is the partitive plural... Well but is there partitive dual? ;) When you explain it like this, it does not sound so difficult. For most of the uses of partitive you used, Slovene uses genitive, what particularly surprised me is the object in a negative sentence. Like HE said, "I do not have of eggs", where of eggs is one word. Which coincidentally figuratively means "I have no balls." :leaving: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Marquis de Leech Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 I think it's more that as a native English speaker, I find it tough to adapt to something like that. One curiosity I did come across though: the verb naida. When the object is accusative, it means to marry, when the object is partitive, it means to fuck. (I also see a pattern with the eggs. Muna (egg) is also a slang word for balls). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Thursday Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 There was someone who mentioned Thai as a particularly difficult language to learn as a native English speaker, and I'll echo that. I would add that it seems to me that any language that uses tones to distinguish meaning automatically is on a plane above any non-tonal language in terms of difficulty for Anglophones, IMO. The link between intonation and word meaning is a very difficult habit to build for someone who is used to using tone to denote emphasis. That's why I've been told by many that Japanese is actually one of the easier Far Eastern languages to learn because it doesn't have the tonal component. ST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Unlady B Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 I thought it was embarrasing enough when once in class I was asked to define <noun> and I was like :uhoh:.Reading RoBoPet's grammar explanations I realised that I have definitely forgotten most of all the grammar I've ever learnt, if I learnt anything at all :wideeyed: ... By the way, I really like the nickname RoBoPet, I hope you don't mind that I call you like that =) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo498 Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 The French example shows that the genitive (du beurre) has partitive function in some indo-european languages. I am pretty sure I learned about a genetivus partitivus in either Latin or Greek 25 years ago in school, but I forgot the details. I am not sure if something like "nemo nostrum" = "noone of us" or plenus vini = full of wine count as example. As for difficulty it is hard to generalize, but the list further above seems not very credible. It's very hard to believe that Danish or even Icelandic (probably the hardest of the Scandinavian languages) should be harder for an English speaker than all slavic languages. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Summah Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 I don't think tones are all that hard if one is musical. Or so I've heard. I'm used to hearing and speaking some basic level of a tonal language since I can remember, so I find it easy, but in college musical friends who took tonal languages didn't seem to have too much trouble with tones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recovering forum addict Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 What I find hard about tones (in Mandarin) is not to move my head up and down in sync with the tone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 My very brief and very rudimentary attempts at a tonal language (Cantonese, I think) included inevitable hand gestures for tones. I just couldn't manage at all without them. (I also have to make hand movements to get through the last verse of the Internationale, so that might just be me.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Game Of Thrones Posted September 2, 2014 Author Share Posted September 2, 2014 There was someone who mentioned Thai as a particularly difficult language to learn as a native English speaker, and I'll echo that. I would add that it seems to me that any language that uses tones to distinguish meaning automatically is on a plane above any non-tonal language in terms of difficulty for Anglophones, IMO. The link between intonation and word meaning is a very difficult habit to build for someone who is used to using tone to denote emphasis. That's why I've been told by many that Japanese is actually one of the easier Far Eastern languages to learn because it doesn't have the tonal component. ST The Far East has only 4 major languages though, and only one is tonal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Thursday Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 The Far East has only 4 major languages though, and only one is tonal. Well Mandarin and Thai are two tonal languages right there, so I don't agree. I guess it comes down to how you define the 'Far East' - to me it's anything East of Bangladesh so that includes the South-East Asian languages, of which several (Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese) are tonal. ST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brAnthelAstgreenseer Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 Sanskrit is probably the most difficult i have come across . German seemed too easy in front of it hence my decision to drop Sanskrit and learn German in 8th grade . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
White Walker Texas Ranger Posted September 2, 2014 Share Posted September 2, 2014 The Far East has only 4 major languages though, and only one is tonal Does Chinese only count as one language? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Game Of Thrones Posted September 2, 2014 Author Share Posted September 2, 2014 Does Chinese only count as one language? By major language I'm talking about official languages. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Game Of Thrones Posted September 2, 2014 Author Share Posted September 2, 2014 Well Mandarin and Thai are two tonal languages right there, so I don't agree. I guess it comes down to how you define the 'Far East' - to me it's anything East of Bangladesh so that includes the South-East Asian languages, of which several (Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese) are tonal. STIMO the Far East is China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. So four official languages, and only Mandarin is tonal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy Ent Posted September 5, 2014 Share Posted September 5, 2014 J’achète ma nourriture avec des euros? For fucks sake, French pseudopartitive case bite my ass. I hope Finnish gets this right. J’aime les euros, right? (Mumblemumble. Probably because it’s plural. Gah.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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