That being submersed in an English pop culture helped them? Of course it is true, I said they took that into account. But even then they said they find German and Russian harder (one of them had spent some time in Germany, but never in an English speaking country).
Would your Japanese friends not have been surrounded by English in many parts of everyday life, but instead the language of modern pop culture there would have been Russian, or Chinese, or whatever, then certainly for them it would be mucheasier to acquire proficiency in Russian, or Chinese, or whatever.
Of course. But it would still be much harder than to acquire proficiency in English. I do think that the simplicity of the Modern English language helped the USA to attain the position it has today.
Proficiency in a language is very much about using (and getting used to using) a language; this nowadays is rather easy with English, in Western society countries, but rather difficult with German or Russian (unless you live permanently or at least for some years in one of the German or Russian speaking nations).
Yes... I would say that spoken proficiency is even more dependant on this, obviously.
English is especially easy to native speakers of German, but this is mainly because both languages are closely related.
Same goes for Scandinavian languages.
Oh is that so? Then I will let you on a secret - Modern English is not exactly a "Germanic Language" (as I'm sure you know!). The huge masses of French/Latin comprise about 80% of the vocabulary, or so I read. Take my own relationship with the English language as an example: I am a Brazilian of German ancestry and I grew up bilingual (Portuguese/German). I am pretty sure that most of my English vocabulary is drawn from my Portuguese, NOT from my German!
But for Berbers in Algeria, for example, who will be used to Arabian and (if they are educated) French English won't be that easy - would be my guess.
Don't know a whole lot of Berbers. But I would tend to disagree.
Apart from that, yes there are some factors which contribute to English being not so difficult to learn as quite some other languages,
OOOOOH, thank you.
but don't you ever forget that English has a huge vocabulary which compensates for the loss of inflection.
Hehe, that is what is usually said, that English is the simplest European language in terms of grammar, but has the largest vocabulary "to compensate". It is usually said that there is always a "compensation" for any simplification that languages go through... That is hard to measure, though.
There's some compensation, you know, for the sheer number of endings with substantive declension and also derivative suffixes in languages like English where you do have to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings.
Well, to me, the necessity of having to learn more phrasal verbs and vocabulary to express the same meanings only denotes lack of expressive potential, it doesn't make it harder than other languages.
(And then some additional vocabulary, in the case of English, like with food: two names for a) the flesh still walking on its two or four legs: flesh and b) the meat on your plate: beef, pork, etc. one with Germanic origin - the walking one - and the other one with Romance origin.)
This is also the case for any language whose nation has been subjected to foreign invasions. Portuguese, for example, has many words of Arabic origin. It also has many words of Germanic origin.
Oh, you can get by with a basic English vocabulary and grammar, that's the beauty of international languages like English: you do not have to acquire proficiency for being able to communicate with sufficient success.
I think you do have to acquire a certain level of proficiency to be able to communicate with any success. It's not impossible to speak incomprehensible english, you know.
It's just that to acquire a certain level of proficiency in English is not as hard as it is in other languages.
So, to cut a long story short, a predominantly analytic language may be easier to learn- especially to acquire only basic knowledge - even if it is not related to your mother tongue and not an international language like English,
Oooooh okay!
but synthetic languages also have an element of easiness: you learn a declension paradigm and it is essentially the same for all substantives (with the odd exceptions of the rules as they do exist in all languages) - so with a paradigm of endings which, admittedly, is at first easier to learn you cover much more meanings.
Well, again, in non-declined languages this "element of easiness" does not exist for the simple fact that there aren't even any declensions in the first place. If the error rate regarding declensions for Germans is 0,001% for English speakers it is zero because there are no declensions.
This becomes even more obvious if you know a Slavic language and have learned at least the basics of the Slavic verbal aspect: it is extremely difficult to learn for anyone not knowing the principle from his mother tongue, but if you have achieved it you can cover more meanings with it than a rather analytic language like German (let alone Enlish) can.
I agree, but I fail to see how this favors your side of the argument.
(The English progressive form is not quite the same as verbal aspect, by the way.) In more analytic languages you need much more vocabulary to express the same.
And you think this is good?
No, it's not.
It also depends on what level you do compare. On a level of basic knowledge analytic languages most likely always will be the easiest to learn; on a level of proficiency this may not be so
Please elaborate further on this. Thanks.
They are for me, and they are for you.
But this may not be true for speakers of other languages.
It depends on where they are on the ladder?
For me Slavic languages are very hard to learn, which I know from experience (I tried very hard with Slovene and only acquired slightly above basic knowledge).
But for a hypothetical Old Aryan (Sanskrit) speaker Slavic languages would be rather easy except probably concerning phonetics.
That is the basic point I'm trying to make in all my posts: for a hypothetical Sanskrit speaker all European languages would be rather easy, excepting, probably, what concerns phonetics! I realize where I am going here - but I can't help but think that all european languages could be arranged in a hierarchichal fashion with PIE on top and perhaps English at the bottom. This is what I was talking about in my first post: it seems that languages, left by themselves, follow a ‘downhill’ simplification process.
But who "made" PIE? Questions along that line are what I find fascinating. If anyone has any interesting links/articles and would like to contribute to my education, please message them to me.
As someone who comes from an area with many "endangered species" I sure can appreciate sokol's position. I think everything should be preserved.
Thank for the replies folks.
Kind Regards to All
Well, whenever I read anything written by real linguists on this topic, I always find these facts mentioned casually in passing as a well known matter of consensus.
Lol, of course! You sure are not going to find any "scientific" article stating that language X is more complex than language Y!
And the reason for my opinion is certainly not political correctness -- anyone who has read my old posts on this forum knows that I have huge quarrels with many fashionable PC attitudes
, but in this case, it really seems to me that the available evidence does support the equal complexity hypothesis.
Well the author of the article you just posted (the only solid reference you have posted so far) hints that he disagrees with you. He is probably more knowledgeable than you or me.
Particularly interesting is the abstract 2.4., in which the author measured rates of accidental errors in the speech of native speakers of several languages as a complexity metric. The rationale is that in a truly more difficult language, even native speakers can be expected to produce a greater number of accidental errors. The conclusion: "No overall differences were found in the numbers of errors made by speakers of the five languages in the study [English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish]."
Again, Athaulf, just because someone is trained in something hard, and somebody else is trained on something easy, and by measuring the error rate of these 2 groups you can't find any significant discrepancy, it does not follow that if you pick one of the people who had initially been trained in something hard and put him/her to execute the easy task, that he will present the same error rate that the people from the second group had been presenting.
The quality of the research that has been conducted in this area is very questionable by scientific standards.
Take a look at "Hypothesis B", from that abstract, Athaulf.
