From English to Japanese
Hi, there is a theory: when you travel from England to Japan, all the language you hear are more difficult and they are also less evolved.
You can see:
1. English-French-Spanish. No cases, plural in -s, similar words, 1-2 genders.
2. German. Cases, irregular plural, 3 genders
3. Russian. More cases, 3 genders, other alphabet
4. Arabic. Cases, other alphabet, other linguistic family with different words.
5. Chinese, Korean, Japanese: other writing system, tones, other linguistic families, completely different words.
(I know that there are some exceptions, but that is only a simple scheme)
Why each language you hear to the East is more difficult? Why are they less evolved?
<<Why each language you hear to the East is more difficult? Why are they less evolved? >>
Concerning Indo European languages this is true, because the Urheimat of Proto Indo-European is in the area where Slavic languages now dominate. There have been massive migrations OUT of this region since the diffusion of IE, but none to few INTO it. Therefore, the IE languages endemic to this region have not been impacted in such as way as to cause their case systems to break down, unlike in the areas of Western Europe where Celtic, Italic and Germanic languages have all been convoluted over time.
Your theory related to the Asian languages does not fit this paradigm, and I twy (doubt) that it hold much water if any.
Why each language you hear to the East is more difficult? Why are they less evolved?
This statement is completely stupid. You can hear Portuguese to the West and it's pretty much harder than Spanish and French
No. Portuguese is in the first group, It has not cases, it has only 2 genders and the vocabulary is similar to French, English and Spanish. It is a little more difficult.
Chinese is an earnestly analytic language, very different from Korean and Japanese and less complext for sure than Russian, which happens to be to its West.
Korean is more complex in my opinion than Japanese (to its East), being more conservative by maintaining Vowel Harmony to the present where Japanese lost this attribute during or shortly after the Old Japanese period.
Student do you think genders or cases are the most difficult thing in a language?? What about verb tenses, moods (subjective, optative and stuff like that??), articles, prepositions?? For a Slavic person the use of articles may be quite difficult sometimes, because their languages don't have them. Chinese or Indonesian are very very easy grammatically. Portuguese or Spanish verbs are much harder than the Russian or Polish ones. In my opinion, just a being from Mars can jugde objectevely the difficulty of a earthly language. We are all influenced by our own language to be impartial and neutral
Are you sure?
Chinese is a tonal language with a very, very difficult writing system. On the whole, including the writing system, Chinese is more difficult than Russian.
You are right about the comparison between Korean and Japanese. But the writing system of Japanese is more difficult than the Korean. Japanese people use several writing system using them at the same time.
I usually do not deem writing systems as *part* of a language. Rather, the writing system is the man-made representation of the language, but remains separate from it.
A writing system can be changed, like it was with Vietnamese, Turkish, without affecting the actual language itself.
opinion,
Well, perhaps you are right and Slavic people can have other opinion. I was only considering Anglo-French-Spanish opinion.
Anyway, almost all people in the World study English, Spanish or French as mother tongue or second language. So, even if they have other point of view considering their mother tongue, they have also "an Anglo/French/Spanish point of view".
So, I am sure that for a Chinese is easier French than Indonesian. The Chinese person know almost half of the French vocabulary because he studied English at school. On the other hand, Indonesian words are not familiar for him.
Another example, a Peruvian which mother tongue is Quechua, is likely to consider easier French than Indonesian because he studied Spanish at school.
PD. It would be interesting to know the opinion of a Turkish or a person from another language family
Hahaha why don't you learn English before you make judgements about which languages are easy or difficult?