Ease of language acquisition (Greek/English)

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akhooha

Senior Member
English - USA
A Greek friend of mine (without citing any specific reasons) maintains that it is easier for a Greek speaker to learn English than it is for an English speaker to learn Greek. In my opinion, since both languages are unrelated to one another, the difficulty should be about equal. Is there something intrinsically more difficult about Greek?
 
    • Perhaps the coexistence of various strata in Greek that can't be freely mixed. Αρτος is used in certain contexts alongside (or even to the exclusion of) ψωμί, but you can't send your child να πάρει δύο άρτους από το φούρνο. Of course, such things are met with in English, too -- I remember inadvertently shocking a British visitor to Greece by describing a depiction of the Holy Ghost in a church as a pigeon rather than a dove -- but in Greek, with its thrice millennial history, this is much more pervasive. Also, Greek morphology, with its declensions and conjugations, is manifestly more complicated than the rather minimal morphology of English.

    It is not quite true to say that the two languages are unrelated to one another. They are both Indo-European (you will realize how important that is when you try to lear a non-IE language, such as Turkish or Japanese) and they have both been strongly influenced by French, Greek more subtly than English but perhaps no less pervasively.
     
    Greetings

    Pardon me for intruding, but as a teacher (of languages, particularly Latin and Classical Greek) I have a couple of observations.

    Ἄγγελος (# 2) is of course quite right, that both Greek and English are Indo-European, and the older I become the more links I discern (I only spotted today that English 'begin' is related to classical Gk γίγνομαι).

    But crucially, he is also right that there are different levels, in both Greek and English (as there are in other tongues). And we must distinguish between the spoken and the written languages.

    Apart from the alphabet, basic English is probably easier: any Albanian lorry-driver can manage enough words to buy fuel, a sandwich or a berth for a night in a hostel. But he will never sound like a native, nor be able to read or understand a Times leader, let alone Milton or Shakespeare. On the other hand, modern (and for that matter ancient) Greek retains a more complex system of conjugation for the verbs and declension of substantives than English. But those systems are more swiftly learned than the peculiarities of English.

    Σ
     
    And when it comes to how you pronounce written words there's no comparison: English is often (at a surface and a, say, mid-way level*) a case of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey when it comes to how you pronounce something whereas in Greek, once you learn the rules, it's about 95% of the times if not more clear cut.

    *By that I mean that if you dig into the linguistic reasons of why something is pronounced this way or that way you will find the reason but it's not easily apparent.

    All in all, I would say that Greek is much more difficult than English at a beginner's level (wrapping your mind around the whole declension thing and other grammatical rules) but perhaps easier once you're past that level. The vocabulary of both languages presents its own challenges.
     
    Thank you all for your thoughtful replies. It would seem that while difficulty of vocabulary acquisition would be about equal, Greek conjugations and declensions (although regular) would be challenging for an English speaker. On the other hand, irregular English verbs would be challenging for a Greek speaker. All in all, would you agree that the difficulties would be about equal?
     
    Frankly, no.There are only a few dozen irregular verbs in English and only one or two forms (beside the dictionary form) to learn for each of them. There is no question that Greek morphology is much more complicated than English morphology. The difficulties of English lie elsewhere, starting with the inconsistencies of spelling and pronunciation.
     
    It's probably not useful to make such comparisons. but would you say that the English inconsistencies of spelling and pronunciation present as much difficulty for Greek speakers as does Greek morphology for English speakers?
     
    Greetings again
    Αγγελος said:
    Frankly, no.There are only a few dozen irregular verbs in English and only one or two forms (beside the dictionary form) to learn for each of them. There is no question that Greek morphology is much more complicated than English morphology. The difficulties of English lie elsewhere, starting with the inconsistencies of spelling and pronunciation.
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    I agree with a lot of this, but with one reservation. Apart from the inconsistencies and oddities of English orthography (both AmE and BrE), English is also very top-heavy in emphasis, idiom and register, and getting these right is, for a non-native speaker, very difficult indeed. A distinguished German journalist, now (I believe) on the editorial crew of Die Welt in Berlin, but for many years the London correspondent of the Rheinischer Merkur, used to be interviewed regularly on UK radio, for a continental European angle on British affairs. He must (I think) have had an English mother, for he always spoke fast, fluently, with hardly a trace of an accent, and with an astonishing command of arcane vocabulary that would put many natives to shame. But almost invariably, in any five-minute interview, there would be one or two tiny, but nevertheless revealing, slips of idiom or accentuation.
    I am moved to wonder what prompted the OP's question in the first place.
    Σ
     
    Scholiast said:
    I am moved to wonder what prompted the OP's question in the first place.
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    As I'd mentioned, a Greek friend of mine felt that Greeks learn English more easily than English speakers learn Greek. It was my opinion that the difficulties would be about equal. I was asking forf others' opinions.
     
    In my opinion, I agree with your friend that it is more difficult for an English speakers to learn greek rather than vice versa! To begin with, spelling in greek is much more difficult, as there exist many different vowels that sound exactly the same. For example, ι-η-υ-ει-οι sound exactly like ι, ο-ω sound like o, ε-αι like ε. However reading is much easier in greek because when this little symbol on top of vowels (e.g. ό, έ, ί)exists, it shows where you sould emphasise more. Let's not talk about the endless amount of grammar. And last but not least, Greeks have difficulties learning greek, imagine what it would be like for foreigners! :):):D:D
     
    akhooha said:
    A Greek friend of mine (without citing any specific reasons) maintains that it is easier for a Greek speaker to learn English than it is for an English speaker to learn Greek. In my opinion, since both languages are unrelated to one another, the difficulty should be about equal. Is there something intrinsically more difficult about Greek?
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    At beginner level, I agree that the difficulty may be equal. I still remember how big my difficulty was to learn how to form an interrogative sentence (do/did + verb) or to learn phrasal verbs. I am sure English speakers also have equivalent problems learning Greek.
    However what has helped me a lot to reach an advanced level was (apart from my personal effort) the fact that on TV you have the oppurtunity to watch many programms, like movies, in English, you can also find an abudance of books written in English in the stores, let alone internet lately. English speakers don't have the same oppurtunity in their effort to improve their basic Greek.
     
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    Greetings once more, everyone
    Perseas said:
    what has helped me a lot to reach an advanced level was (apart from my personal effort) the fact that on TV you have the oppurtunity to watch many programms, like movies, in English, you can also find an abudance of books written in English in the stores, let alone internet lately. English speakers don't have the same oppurtunity in their effort to improve their basic Greek
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    It is always a pleasure to read Perseas' perceptive observations. Yes, movies (and, one might add, pop-music) provide abundant material for what one might call 'middle-brow' acquisition of English, while little such matter exists for Greek. But (from anecdotal experience), even a fairly basic schoolboy-knowledge of classical Greek gives a native English-speaker a huge leg-up in coming to terms with the modern language, particularly the inflected noun- and verb-forms.
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    I agree with @Perseas , too. I believe that watching movies in the language you are learning can make it much easier. I will be taking the CPE exam in November and during the summer holidays I watched many movies and TV shows with and without english subtitles, which I feel that actually had an impact on my fluency, as I found the speaking part to be rather difficult. In addition, I think that listening to songs in English helped me a lot, as I am one of those people who like to analyse the lyrics of each song!
     
    From outside: both are quite the same difficult -independent on the level- but there is a lot of good stuff (grammar, vocabulary, idioms, etc) for English and much much less for Greek. There are also more good English teachers in most countries and only a few good Greek teachers.
    And another interesting thing: its easier to find a native English/American than a native Greek who is aware of his own language and is able to explain language phenomena (and: the Germans or the Hungarians tend much more to correct mistakes when chatting, the Greeks almost not at all, really rarely, English speakers a bit more). But English is a bit easier to "just" pick up, everyday conversations have more topics than in Greece.
     
    In my humble opinion, as far as language difficulty is concerned, it is always extremely hard to compare two or more languages in this regard. Personally, I reckon all languages are equally tough at an advanced level. Having said that, Greek morphology (as has already been said) is way more complicated than the English one, but this is probably true for most IE languages. On the other hand, English has its own oddities and difficulties: the syntax is often unpredictable (this is quite typical of languages with poor morphology) lots of idioms and phrasal verbs, the pronunciation is certainly harder than the Greek one, let’s think vowels as an example. So, it is difficult to say...
     
    Greetings all once more

    Olaszinhok (# 17) is quite right. There are so many different aspects to learning (or using) a language other than one's native tongue: there is vocabulary, the grammar, pronunciation, idiom, accentuation, intonation, emphasis, and sometimes just the alphabet. And it also depends rather on what the student needs to learn it for: I became first acquainted with German (for example) through classical music, but had to force myself to learn to read it for academic purposes when I was a student. I acquired a passable competence (for those purposes), but that did not make me a fluent speaker.

    And I would add, to re-address the specific OP's question about Greek vs. English here: quite apart from the pronunciation, the gigantic array of confusing or confusable homophones and homographs in English, without the guidance of a ruled-based inflexional system, must make it horrendous to learn except as a native infant.

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    bearded said:
    I suppose you mean ....for English people to learn, and much less for Greek people....? The Greek grammar is way more complicated than the English one, it seems to me.
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    For learning English and not for the English :)
     
    I see things very much in line with what has been said. I have learnt both English and Greek from the point of view of a Spanish native speaker. It wasn't easy for me to learn English as a boy, although I liked it. And neither has it been for Greek some years ago. My Greek is not so old yet and still I find difficulties and matters.
    In my view the process of language acquisition in both English and Greek takes a long time of learning. Greek is more complex and nearer to a Romance language than English (although loanwords are not strange). I have found several things in Greek similar to Spanish and I have found several other things really different.
    That was my experience. I have had time to learn on my own both languages and I can say that, together, they make a good vital process.
     
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