As a native English speaker, I hear things like “this” language is hard/easy to learn. Does this mean it is only hard/easy to learn coming from an English background, or would someone who speaks Spanish also find it similarly harder/easier to learn as well?
In: Other
Difficulty is relative. It really depends on what languages you know and what language you’re learning. So when people say “Chinese is hard” what they really mean is “Learning Chinese as an English speaker is hard”. Difficulty varies for each language combination. Learning resources are also not equally available in all languages. It’s easier to learn Japanese from English due to a wealth of available resources than it is to learn Japanese from Greek for example.
Other than that there is a host of parameters that determine how easy or difficult a language is. How many grammar rules they are and how strictly the language sticks to them or if there are many irregular verbs and forms that don’t follow these rules and you just have to memorise. How similar or foreign the sentence structure is and, again, how strictly the language sticks to this sentence structure or if you can switch it around and still be correct. How many tenses they are, how many voices, whether there are equivalents in your own language, how similar the writing system is, and so on.
The biggest mistake people make when learning a new language is assuming there is such a thing as a perfect translation, and that all languages have equivalents for everything in other languages. It’s inevitable when you start out that you have to translate in your head into your own language, but as you get better your goal should be to learn to think in the new language and use it intuitively rather than translating in your head. Too many people never get to that level even if they study for years. Some times translating gets a nearly identical meaning in structure and tone but other times it’s not possible, and you have to express yourself in a completely different way to get the same point across.
For me, and this is just my personal opinion, one of the biggest factors in how easy or hard it is to learn a language is how hard the writing system is. Most of our learning happens through reading and being able to read is crucial in being able to learn more. If you’re reading a passage in English for example you might see a word whose meaning you don’t know but you can still read it, and look it up. The same goes for most languages with alphabets, since alphabets are fairly straightforward, have around 20-40 characters, sometimes more but generally less than 100, which can be memorised and that enables you to read even if you don’t understand the meaning. But not all languages have alphabets. Some have syllabaries, logographies, or in some rare cases, ideographs. Some languages may have multiple different scripts or some may all share the same script despite being different languages. The problem with not having an alphabet is that this usually means you have to memorise a lot more characters, often most of them don’t follow concrete rules and so if you see a character you don’t know, you stop dead in your tracks. You can’t pronounce it, you don’t know how it’s read, and this makes it harder to look up as well. A classic example of this is Japanese. Some would say they have the most complicated writing system in the world. They have two syllabaries and also use Chinese characters in their writing. There are tens of thousands of characters, each with multiple different pronunciations and meanings, that you more or less have to just memorise, and that’s on top of the syllabaries which have 47 characters, which are on the higher end as far as “alphabets” go, even though they’re not alphabets but they work in a very similar way. So learning Japanese takes a lot of time because you have to memorize and learn all those characters. Chinese speakers have an advantage there because often the meanings of many characters are shared, but their pronunciation is often different.
Latest Answers