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Which language is difficult to learn?
But even Esperanto, for me, is riddled with a lot of irregularities
Sure, Esperanto was created by a polish doctor mainly for indoeuropean speaking people. So I think Esperanto might be not that easy for a chinese, japanese or thai.
indoeuropean speaking people
sorry, I meant Indoeuropean languages speaking people
I worte this posting:
Guest Sat Oct 20, 2007 5:06 pm GMT <<What's about idioms, which must be learnt additionally to the vocabulary, complex syntactic structures different from your mother tounge, government of prepositions, postpositons and verbs, i. e. the right noun case in association with prepositons, postpositons and verbs? Maybe different government belongs to different meanings!>> The postings from Guest after that aren't from me. Guest, it is highly recommended to quote passages form other postings, so you can see that it's a quotation. This makes things easier and looks more professional.
Russian is quite hard at a basic level when you've got to learn noun and adjective declentions. After that it's probably easier than other languages like English or Spanish.
It depends on many factors. Which aspects of a language are harder for you? I personally don't find comfortable reproducing strange sounds many languages have, so languages with difficult grammar but easy phonetics will still be easy for me and English , despite its childish grammar and complicated phonetics, remains difficult to master for me.
What's "childish" about English grammar? How does one even define "childish grammar"?
That's of course very sweeping. Most so-called "difficulties", like most non-linguistic reasons of learning, are just entirely subjective.
<<What's "childish" about English grammar? How does one even define "childish grammar"? >>
I assume this refers to English grammar (morphology, especially) being so trivial that even a child can learn it. :) BTW -- what's complex about English phonetics? I thought English had average (although nontrivial) phonetics compared to other languages?
In this world, Arabic might be the most difficult and frustrating language, absolutely much more afflictive than Greek, Russian, and German.
Russian and German aren't afflictive and frustrating at all. I have learnt them and I think they're as difficult as other languages. I mean Portuguese or Italian verbal system, for instance, is harder than the german one and much harder than the russian one. A rich noun and adjective morphology is just an aspect of a language.
I'm a Chinese, I don't know how difficult Arabic or Greek is, but I feel that Russian is harder than German in some respects. Does everybody think so?
Italian is not so hard, just a little harder than Spanish or French, but easier than German, much easier than Russian, and much much easier than Arabic.
"Italian is not so hard, just a little harder than Spanish or French, but easier than German, much easier than Russian, and much much easier than Arabic"
I was talking about the verbal system. Italian or Spanish verbal system is much harder than the russian one. Russian has fewer tenses: just present and future. No conditional or subjunctive mood. The only difficulty in Russian verbs is the verbal aspect.
It seems to me that all languages have their "challenging" areas. It DOES get easier to learn languages after you've studied other languages, but it still requires some effort or time.
I think it's important not to sweat the small stuff. If you can't master some area of speech or grammar one day, come back another day and break it down or bring it here and ask for help from a friendly native and language "expert"... A lot depends on one's native language. German is going to SEEM easier than Mandarin if English is one's first language. If you know Japanese, Korean isn't going to seem that difficult imo. |