August 03, 2004

• Damn, I wish I'd read this before I learned Japanese...
• Haven't tried Japanese, but when I was preparing to go to Greece some years ago, I thought it would be neat to learn how to speak the language in an elementary manner. Got a book, and found that how one talked not only depended on tense and gender, but also on who one was in relation to the person one was speaking to, etc. I wound up learning the words for "hello", "goodbye", "please", "thank you", "yes", and "no", and memorized the sounds of the alphabet. It worked out, since eveyone I dealt with spoke English, except the taxi drivers and the guy in a colony on the back of the Acropolis who kept trying to direct me to the Parthenon when I wanted to get to the Agora.
• I did one semester of greek in college. it was my first encounter w/an inflected language. to this day I am pretty sure everyone else in the class was making fun of me in greek & laughing (I was the only non-greek descent person in the class)... however, it left me prepared for when I started studying Latin. ah! one of those inflected thingys with the declensions, so I did quite well... now I have heard that Japanese is difficult & the grammatical strux is a bit...byzantine? irrational? however, I did once half-translate several pages of liner notes w/the help of a jap-eng dictionary & mild obsession (no japanese lessons) to the horror and astonishment of a japanese-studying friend, so it can't be THAT hard, cause I am not a linguistic genius :D
• I did take Latin, but Greek was something else.
• Hiragana and Katakana are pretty easy to learn. Kanji is different, it is fairly difficult, not just because the sheer number of characters, but because there are several pronunciations of each, depending on the context. The grammer is very regular, albeit perplexing with the different formality levels. This guy sounds bitter for flunking it in 9th grade or something. If he wasnt living there, he probably would not have much luck, as I would expect with most any other language.
• He says at the bottom that he's a Japanese major, lkc, and that it's mostly a joke. =) It's over-the-top in rantiness but it does pretty much cover why I never wanted to attempt Japanese (or similarly, Chinese). Greek was plenty hard for me (and with four years of no review I'm pretty sure I couldn't do much more than recite the alphabet in that!).
• Chinese grammer is actually much like English grammer, so much so that you can use English grammar rules to speak in Chinese and still be understood (you'd be wrong some of the times, but still comprehensible). It's much simpler, in fact, since tense is not important, or even non-existent*. The two major drawbacks of Chinese are the tones (ranging from 4 for Mandarin to 7/9/11 (depending on which linguist you talk to) for Cantonese) and that you must, absolutely must memorize every single word. Guessing the meaning of a word by looking at its component parts will get you wrong at least half the time, and guessing the pronunciation doing the same will get you wrong more than 30% of the time. I've been trying off and on to learn Japanese for the last two years. Still at the copying-out-hiragana-for-individual-words stage. *Just out of sheer procrastination, let me give an example of Mandarin grammar, so you'll know what I mean about tense (no tones to keep things simple): I went to the market - Wo(I/me) qu(go) le(already) cai shi chang(market, 3 words) When asked, "Where are you going?" I am going to the market - Wo qu cai shi chang I will be going to the market - Wo hui(will) qu cai shi chang So the sentence structure doesn't change. It's only a matter of inserting certain words to indicate a time reference. *scratch head* Not sure if I'm making any sense here though....
• This is why my Cantonese sucks...
• I am gobsmaked that people have the balls to advertise their intellectual incapacity in the manner of this article. Even though it's a "joke".
• Chinese grammar is very easy for Anglophones. Saying the Chinese in a way that anyone would understand you - a terror. It's not just the tones - the consonants include phonemes that don't exist in English and so are very hard to learn to pronounce. /took 1 course of Chinese, and all I remember how to say is "Wo bu shi Meiguoren"
• This page made me laugh. I studied Japanese on my own for 5 years and felt the same kind of frustration. But I toughed it out as this guy is going to have to if he's majoring in the language. Something that this rant should mention is Japanese in the Defense Language classifications. The Military classifies languages 1,2,3,or 4. 1 being the easiest to achvie ' situational functional ' fluency ( which means you can ' function ' " Where is the bathroom ? " " I would like to purchase stamps ... " " My hovercraft is ... " ) from English. Spanish is a 1, the easist langauge to learn from English ( " Where-o the room-o el bath-o ? " is basically correct ) 2 is nuanced ' romance ' languages with masucline and feminine endings and all that. When you get to 3 you're at Russian and languages with different alphabets, Greek, African languages etc. At 4 there's a big jump. The structure of the language changes form SVO to SOV ( subject - verb - object to subject - object - verb ) and you're dealing with ' tones ' etc. Level 4 is Chinese, Korean and Turkish. Then there's a special class ... 4a ... with one language in it ... Japanese. Mindbendingly complex. I'll have a rant of my own about it someday when I get around to putting up a webpage.
• I took Japanese for seven weeks in high school for many of the reasons stated in the linked ranticle. I realized I was having enough diffficulty learning German, so I dropped it. Most of the Japanese folks I've met suggested learning Chinese was a smarter move anyway if I was going to go through the trouble of learning a new orthographic system, etc. Besides which, I've come to the conclusion that understanding Japanese won't help you grok anime any better. (-:
• Spanish is a 1, the easist langauge to learn from English ( " Where-o the room-o el bath-o ? " is basically correct ) 2 is nuanced ' romance ' languages with masucline and feminine endings and all that. Gee, I wonder if Spanish has masculine and feminine endings and all that? And is it nuanced? *dials Zemat*
• I only speak in maths
• I thought Chinese was subject verb object? Also, I suspect the only reason that Spanish would be rated as easier than French is if the classification were American - so many Americans have experience with Spanish from a young age. I would have though French was the easiest from English - half the time we copied the word from them in the first place, and if you say the English word in a French accent you've got it right. I'm not joking - there was a French for reading class I took that used this as a teaching priniciple, getting people to guess the meanings of "hopital" and "foret" (I know those should have accents, but don't know how to type them on my Anglo keyboard). Apparently the Anglo-Norman (french spoken by Norman nobility in England) had vestigal esses, thus leading to the English words. Does Spanish have genders as well? This is something that challenges people in French, but I don't think you'd be incomprehensible if you messed them up (I do all the time).
• All romance languages have genders. As do many others.
• Yes, spanish, as Wolof said, has genders. I imitate English accents in French by: - Stressing syllables in words (there are no compulsory stresses in French) - Using the wrong gender Also, learning Spanish before French (or the inverse) will get you in gender-confusion land, since a lot of words have inverse gender in these languages. And actually, before 18th century ortographic reforms, "forêt" and "hôpital" were written "forest" and "hospital" in mainstream French (well, Parisian, since there are many romance languages spoken in France even nowadays).
• there are no compulsory stresses in French That would be apart from the one on the last syllable of the word, no?
• Now I know my computer is very screwed up - not only do I not know how to type accents, but I can't read Richer's : ) Anyone know how to fix that?
• I'm also sure that whenever I use my halting baby-French, I have a pronounced English accent, mixed with Quebequois.
• At the Catholic school I went to for K-8, we had french lessons starting in 1st grade. I think all I ever got from it was the names of some colors in french and the memorization of several Catholic prayers in french.
• Just incidentally, I think the reason I think Spanish is so incomprehensibly is easily is that I learned French first. But really, you guys, you could try a little harder to be inaccessible to foreigners, really.
• Who wants a copy of my thesis in French (pdf, probably about 15 errors in 280+ pages)? Gob, only a masochist would email me for that.
• Can anyone report on, for a non-English speaker, how difficult English is compared to other languages?
• "languagehat paging languagehat" "will languagehat please come to the thread."
• So what is your thesis on, Wolof? Was it on French language, or is it in French because it was submitted to a French institution?
• After 10 years of English classes (from 4th grade on), I'm one of the very few people from my high school class who speaks/writes english fluently. The English classes were dead easy for me (I averaged 95% on tests) but I picked up most of the language from TV/computers/videogames. I find English quite a bit easier than French, and I can't see myself learning French if I only spoke English: the many verb tenses, irregularities, gender, etc. blow my mind when I think about French as a second language. On the other hand, the humongous number of words in the English language sometimes poses quite a challenge.
• I wouldn't worry about the words, Richer - just use whatever is closest, and if it's unusual in those circumstances, it will probably just sound poetic. A Taiwanese friend of mine makes wonderful innovations in English. She once described a flower as being "without a wound", meaning unbruised, but with a better visual image. But the best was when she made a transitive verb out of "bitch". We decided we were keeping that one - "To bitch (someone)" or "to be bitched" is like to bully or be bullied, but specifically that really nasty verbal kind of bullying that girls perfect. (Her sentance was "Were you bitched at school?" and the answer was "oh god, yes. Not bullied, but bitched")
• jb: What browser/os? And to input on windows, you can always use charmap.exe wolof: I always thought of French as an atonic language (whereas Spanish is a tonic one). In poetry, for instance, you stress the syllables according to fixed form: The 6th and 12th syllables of a French alexandrine are always stressed, and so are two others, one in each half-verse. But then, French is my first language, so I might be stressing the last syllable of every word without realizing it. rolypolyman: see also on the difficulty of teaching correct English pronunciation to advanced French students.
• jb: that's what I do. And like your friend, I sometimes unwittingly create naive poetry. What I meant is that writing in English poses different challenges than writing in French. English has a huge number of words, most of them with very concrete meaning. You have to find the right one for the job. French, on the other hand, gets by with less words, but tends to be more abstract. One textbook example is the translation of "spun": "ayant subi une rotation".
• Or "knuckles".
• jb - my thesis is an overview of just about all existing theoretical models for the use of sound in the cinema with a few of my own modest proposals mixed in with the soup. I wrote it in French because I did a double major in French and Screen Studies, and I wanted to keep studying both. My current institution is here in Australia, but I did a previous degree on more or less the same subject at the University of Paris.
• *dials Zemat* Wha... What?... *Hurries in while putting pants on* Ohh... yeah! yeah! What everybody already said. Seriously, since spanish is my first language I don't know shit about it and never cared, regardless I can speak it fluently. All I can say from comparision is that it's easier than french because it's phonetical (almost every letter has an unique associated sound). Has very few conscice and specific rules regarding tone, grammar and accentuation and very few exceptions for any one of those, unlike french, which has loads. English is harder for spanish speakers rather than the other way around 'cause you don't have respect for tone or phonetics (l33t speak could never have evolved in spanish). German is actually more easier to learn than english for hispanoparlantes.
• Zemat has just reminded me of a joke I was once told by a doctor from Beijing (the original was about Chinese - but it fits Japanese just as well): "Japanese must be easy to learn. Even three year olds in Japan can speak it."
• Wolof: your post was so small I just about missed it, but that sounds fascinating. Did you look at primarily speech, or all sounds, including special effects and music? Speech wouldn't be designed conciously, would it?
• *All* sound. And it's *all* conscious.
• can I just maybe take a looksee wollie?
• I just realised we don't have to post small - this is as interesting as the original discussion. If you don't mind continuing, Wolof, I'm curious to know how speech enters into sound design. Because I would have thought that the script writer works on speech, while the sound designer and director work on other sounds - with knowledge of the speech, of course, but not yet with knowledge of how the speech will come out sound wise. I know that this is probably getting into the heart of your thesis, and so probably impossible to explain in a few words.
• I just wrote a big comment and then erased it ... suffice it (I think) to say that recorded speech is pure sound as much as it is a carrier of semantic content, and the actor's voice is a major determinant of that effect. Sure, most cinema is logocentric, and created off the page, but that's often a reason it's tone-deaf, too. It's the presence (or perhaps I should say the insistence) of the body that subtends (proffers) the voice in the tissue of the overall soundtrack that interests me. BTW, 90% of the dialogue you see in a typical Hollywood film is dubbed, as are the actors' footsteps, the rustling of their clothes, the noise produced by lifting a cup from a saucer and so forth. There's a kind of fantomatic aspect to this play of presence and absence that I find fascinating, although I'm well aware that I'm just a kid playing peek-a-boo. Or the Fort-Da game.
• *pops open beer, moseys close, listens, gives up, advances, spins chair round, hunkers down, cups hands behind ears*
• Oh, jinxies.
• jb: A machine-independent way of typing in non-ASCII characters is with HTML entities. You can use the Unicode number (e.g. é = é, Æ = Æ, ð = ð) or various short forms (é = é, Æ = Æ, ð = ð). (Oh, and & = &.)
• I think the best thing about French is that it feels so good in the mouth, compared to English. I think of it as a language meant to be spoken rather than listened to. Random thoughts.
• I'm a native English speaker and I've studied German, French and Spanish (in that order, but French for the shortest period of time). Spanish is definitely the easiest, for the reasons Zemat mentions and also the incomprehensible idiomatic expressions that French speakers are so fond of. I was really glad I took German first, both because it helped with the others (their grammar was similar but simpler) and because if I'd had a basis for comparison I would've decided it was too hard and quit early on. People in my Spanish class complained so much about learning genders that to shut them up I went and drew a table of Spanish adjective endings and a table of German ones. The Spanish table had masculine singular and plural, and feminine singular and plural. The German table was split into several parts, including masculine, feminine and neuter forms in the nominative, genitive, dative and accusative cases, and further divided into strong, weak, and mixed declensions with a short explanation of how to ensure the endings agreed (they're complementary, not identical) when using multiple adjectives. They shut up. If in the intervening years my memory has failed and I got part of the grammar posted above wrong, someone please correct me.
• Cool, Wolof - thanks. I have seen the production of a student film, but know little about professional films. I still hold out for French as the easiest, but that is also because, though I barely speak it, I had some when I was a kid, and I've been reading it off the back of cereal boxes all my life. I did have an interesting experience yesterday. At dinner there was a Slovenian post-doc with her cousins, whom she was translating for. Obviously I couldn't understand, but words would pop out, even in Slovenian, that I recognised from the English conversation. It makes you remember that no Indo-European language is ever totally foreign, what with all the borrowing all over the place.
• Goethe said: "Those who know nothing of foreign languages, know nothing of their own." Both my English grammar and French over-all improved infinitely when I started taking Latin in high school (as did my Latinate vocabulary, which I treasure and abuse in equal measure). and, off topic: jb's anecdote reminded me of my favourite snippet about the English language: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." (James Nicholl)
• A mini curious george: While learning french a while back I noticed something peculiar about the pronunciation of french words. Some particular words seem completely alien to me in written form, like aujourd'hui, but once I hear them in their proper french accent I found them quite familiar to their spanish translations. This makes me wonder that maybe most french words were borrowed from latin only by hearing and then the french went on and invented their own spelling for those words. That could explain why they have those wild and contradictory pronunciation rules and an insane amount of exceptions. Could that be the case? (Why I don't think is the other way around with spaniards being the one that invented their own spellings: Because spanish is quite similar to latin both in written and spoken form. No wonder it's somewhat easy for me to read latin without learning to much about it.)
• French has about a jillion times more vowels than Latin, which probably has something to do with it, and then the spelling hasn't changed like at all since the 17th century and the pronunciation has, since pronunciation does that, which probably also has something to do with it. (Paging language hat...)
• I tend to avoid discussions about which languages are "harder," since it all depends on your prior experience and what you personally find difficult to learn. The linked article was not meant to be taken seriously, as the author himself says at the end.
• A glory of the English language has been the ease with it admits words from other languages. French has not been as welcoming, with the result they have a burgeoning crop of idioms thanks to a limited vocabulary. The efforts of the Irish to update their nearly extinct language so that it has greater relevance to contemporary culture is in contrast to such a limitation. Be interesting to see what happens in future with the pair of 'em in such contrast.
• Way way off topic - Can I just throw something into the mix? It has been bugging me for ages, I thought of it with Wolof's post when he mentioned dubbing and it is this; why does so much animation use conventions from film which are solely due to the interactions of light with a lens? Like flare, in animation. Why on earth create flare? Modern lens systems have almost no flare at all, and yet there it is, turning up in all sorts of animated sequences (Titan AE, introduction to Homeworld, Final Fantasy etc etc). And depth of field? OK, I can almost see this one since it is a fairly simple way of forcing people to focus (no pun intended) on important individuals, scene elements...but still. OK, done now.
• Because it conveys realism, even if completely unrealistic, for those who are deeply influenced by less than perfect (70's & 80's) TV and cinema filming techniques.
• Hrm. Depth of field is quite realistic, IMO. I experience it daily. And see it in all sorts of post-1990 movies, too.
• I don't know about Spanish (or why it's so regular), but French has a pretty chaotic past: until about 1700, spelling was phonetic & a personal thing. When the French Academy gained influence, there were many spelling reforms as we tried to regularize the language. That leads to a language I couldn't begin to explain to a non-native speaker. Languagehat is probably right, though: learning a language is as hard as your background makes it.