What actually makes a language easier/harder to learn?
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2019
- Big thanks to my friends Sitora and Ethan for their help and advice!
Corrections: • Corrections on the fir...
Visuals translations (all Russian):
1:05 : “In Soviet Russia, language learns you”
1:30 : “WHAT IS THIS????”
1:44 : “My Russian writing has improved recently, but conversations are still hard for me because I can’t understand [speakers]. Luckily, I remember Russian words easily because I talk [in Russian] a lot with my friends.”
Link to my first video, which I said I'd link to in the description, regarding English spelling exceptions: • Why is English so hard...
If you need to learn what the symbols in slashes are: • How to read the IPA Ch...
the true number one marker of how hard a language is to learn is availability of resources.
If UA-cam added a built in viewer-heart for comments, this comment would get a rare heart from me.
Exactly, like "dialects", without any government support and no resources.
100%
@@insising So likes...
English has the most resources for learning and I can tell you, it is not easy to learn.
the one hidden variable in how hard a language is to learn is the accessibility of resources. It's a lot easier to learn a hard language with a lot of resources than one that might has very similar vocabulary or grammar but has no easy accessible learning resources fit to your learning style.
I'd have put a giant asterisk next to Phonemes and phonotactics. There are situations where that will be a nightmare, e.g. imagine a monolingual speaker of a Polynesian language trying to learn Georgian or an indigenous language of the Pacific Northwest.
Hard agree on the first point. The one thing I've noticed when it comes to language learning discourse online is that it's dominated by casual first impressions that cause a distant observer to gloss over the language, rather than actual hardships that would make a learner quit, kinda like how a lot of the discussion and memes about french is that it has weird vowel combos and silent letters, which is a pretty simple phoneme lesson away from becoming a non-factor.
So yeah I do think that instead of taking it as a way to dunk on 'other people' not being engaged enough in language related stuff to know that, I like to use it to remind myself that I'm the 'other people' in most fields, and use that as a way to surpass my flawed first impression of things.
1:30 Personally have experienced that. Literally just browsed Wikipedia looking at language things and by the end of the day Greek words had come up so much I'd been able to figure out how to read that alphabet.
As a kid I learned a bit of Amharic by looking at street signs (the names) and then looking at the English transliteration. Soon I could read three letter words that weren't names.
How to make language learning even easier:
1. Study the writing system WHILE listening to the language so that you
1.5 Learn the sound of the word before/while learning to write the word
2. Throw away textbook grammar studies. Learn language by understanding (chunks of) sentences, which teaches you the grammar naturally. You also get to avoid the stress of irregularities. If you never even conceive of "leafs", then you won't stress when you hear "leaves"; don't focus on the rules.
3. Listen to the language whenever you have time, especially while you're reading (if possible). This will +1 your listening comprehension whenever possible.
Since you focus on sentences, you learn words in context, rather than using faulty or incomplete translation services. You've now solved the troubles of language learning! Now all you need to do is find resources you're interested in and dedicate time towards learning each day! How quickly you learn the language will then be, directly, a result of how much time you choose to allocate to your learning each day!
The writing system thing is so true. I can "read" a bunch of languages but I have no idea what I'm reading.
Facts. Alphabets are ez to bang out while grinding the vocab and things you just have to learn (exceptions in conjugations) are slow. Each letter/sound feels in the same ballpark of difficulty of each new word.
Now looking back on this, you're going to be seeing each letter in an alphabet (or abjad/abugida) very often so they'll be reinforcing themselves more often than a new word so possibly they are easier to learn. Take the ñ in Spanish you may be told about it once when learning Spanish and you'll remember the meaning of the symbol very quickly, though this is probably the optimal case since you know the entire alphabet except the ñ before learning Spanish.
The real hardest language to learn is one that:
- anyone who knew it is dead.
- it has never been translated into anything else.
-not a lot of written documents.
- is dissimilar enough to other languages.
An example of this is the Minoan language, but there are thousands of extinct languages from the distant past that no one knows and it's nearly impossible to decipher them. Sometimes they get partially reconstructed, but even still, it's basically impossible for most people to do.
A step even further is an extinct language that has never been written down and no one even knows it existed, but it's actually impossible to learn that. So, I think that disqualifies it from the question. People dedicate their lives to deciphering and reconstructing written extinct languages, so it's possible and very very difficult.
True, but this is very abstracted from the more general use cases i believe this video is addressing :)
Actually everybody being dead makes it easier because it means nobody can judge you if you mess up
Vocab is 100% the most challenging part of learning any language. I've learned one language other than my native English to fluency (that being Swedish) and have spent the last three years or so learning Finnish - thanks to the familial relationship, vocab in Swedish was a lot easier to pick up once I got past the chunk of simpler vocab that English threw out its cognates for somewhere in its history. The vast majority of more complex vocab in Swedish is either a. written the same as the equivalent word in English but pronounced differently, b. cognate to some word that exists in English but is kinda old-fashioned or c. a compound of simpler parts (most of which I had already picked up on earlier).
Finnish, of course, is a whole 'nother story. While there is an elegant and surprisingly regular system of word derivation (using affixes on nouns and verbs to indicate a whole host of various forms: -ttAA makes a causative form of a verb, -tellA makes a frequentative form and so on, and there has been comparatively little semantic drift in those derivations to boot), it doesn't change the fact that if you don't know at least the word root, you're just completely lost. That has been a big kick in the teeth for me, coming from years of foreign language learning where my native language gave me the ability to guess if I didn't know a word and be correct (at least a lot of the time).
It's fun though! Swedish felt familiar right from the start, but now it's really felt like I've been learning a *foreign* language.
I’m so glad that u are learning Russian! It’s definitely not so easy language for non-Slavic speakers. But the examples in Russian in your video was very ungrammatical((( You’ve messed up with gender and some translations. But your writing Russian is still understandable even if u don’t look at English translation, it’s the most important!
Also, it is very strange for me, as for a native Russian speaker, to hear about dual infinitive system in Russian, cuz we do not consider these forms as just different aspect forms of one verb, but rather two absolutely different verbs. For example, verbs делать (to do) and сделать (to have done) aren’t the forms of the same verb, but different verbs (even though they’re related)
Sorry for mistakes, English isn’t native for me
It’s not about делать-сделать, it’s about летать-лететь, which are also different verbs.
_Complains about an English person not knowing Russian well_
_Can't speak English_
*IQ = 999999*
One of the most important aspects (for self learners) is the availability of material online, for example, Catalán is a simpler language than french, phonetically, but the widespread availability of awesome content on the Internet in french over Catalán means french will be orders of magnitude easier to learn despite being more complex.
Similarly Russian should be a lot more complex and hard to learn than, let's say, Indonesian. There are a TON of complex grammatical aspects to Russia that make it pretty complex, specially compared to a "simple" language like Indonesian. But...
Learning Russian to me has been FAAAAAAAR easier than Indonesian due to the fact that I can just hop on UA-cam and watch some pretty cool content made by Russian people for free and in a huge amount, and there is a lot of content that can guide you through the intermediate level (Where you already understand the basics and want to find some real content, but are not quite ready to understand what they transmit in, say, television). None of this is easily available in Indonesian. There IS good Indonesian content in UA-cam, but the relation between quality over quantity in Russian really overshadow Indonesian by far. Making the learning process of Indonesian very very had in comparison, despite being the "easier" language
Thank you for the explanation! My mother tongue is Chinese, and when I started to learn Japanese it really comforted me because it shares a lot of vocabulary with Chinese, so it was not difficult at all, despite all the other differences. And it gave me so much confidence in learning languages. Sadly people in China, Japan and Korea do not share the same level of interest or curiosity in each other's languages as they do in Europe due to political reasons. Such a waste. I enjoyed this video a lot, knowing it's totally understandable for myself to spend more time on European languages.
Thanks for a more nuanced video on this topic
so impressive how much you've learned!
"Writing systems are easy, vocabulary is hard." A couple of personal experiences:
I had a brief encounter with Russian decades ago when I was a teenager. The alphabet is about the only thing that I remember, but why wouldn't I remember it? Cyrillic is a cousin of the Latin alphabet, and even has six letters that are the same or nearly the same: KOMETA.
I tried Indonesian last year because it's exotic and reported to be easy. It doesn't help that Duolingo's course never seems to explain anything, but my biggest problem was remembering the vocabulary. While struggling to recall words that had been introduced ten minutes ago, I often found that I still knew the equivalents from French and German, which I did forty years ago in school, and I decided that my time would be better spent refreshing my knowledge of those two languages.
So glad to hear someone making sense out there! 100% agreed on all points there!
Great channel
For whatever reason my brain assumed this would be a programming related video. I was, evidently, incorrect in this assumption but fuck it, we ball.
You're right about the Russian alphabet. Although the language is crazy complicated otherwise, the alphabet is ridiculously easy.
Good list. I approve.
4:40 Irish is laughing
Under which of these groups would something like the honorific system in Korean or Japanese fall? For me, it's difficult to understand how I would adjust how I speak depending on the age, rank or closeness of a person I'm speaking to or about. In English, there's not much of that.
And I wonder if the difficulty with phonemes and phonotactics ranking so low might be a bit anglocentric? With the vowel variety in English, I feel like it's easier for an English speaker to pronounce Russian, than maybe it would be for a Russian person to pronounce English, for example. I feel like some people will just never ever figure out how to pronounce ы or ع
I think the most problematic for non native speakers of Russian might be palatalised consonant, like the difference between нос and нёс, быт and быть and so on
For Russian speakers English phonology is kinda hard because of very rich vowel system, which is very hard for Russian speakers to pronounce. Also, English r-sound, w-sound, ng-sound and especially th-sounds are hard for us
honorific systems easily fall under grammar
6:10 it's interesting 'cause my dialect of English uses some regular past tenses where they're irregular in the standard.
I t'mornin, Aw wok up. Aw went to t'shop an bowt some dooafnuts. Den Aw drooav tul a farm an rooad some hosses. At-after dat, Aw heeard summat, soo' Aw run back to t'car park an seed at somedy stooal mi car! Aw immeadiately telled t'poleace an dey flew up in a helicopter to look for it, becoss Aw gev em ole t'necessary information. After a two-or-thry minutes, dey fun mi car on t'moatorway. A chase begun an t'criminal fleed through t'forest. Aw nobbut got into mi car, et dinner, then kept livin life yon day.
Another issue that could pose a problem is the availability of learning materials. Try to learn Albanian or any Arabic dialects, and you'll see what I mean...
I actually feel like even though vocabulary for certain languages can sometimes be hard to remember, it's one of the most fun parts of the process (for me personally). I'm in high school and for the first two years, I had to take Spanish. I always hated Spanish since its vocabulary was too similar to English. The fact that there were so many cognates between the two languages made learning Spanish boring for me. That's why when I started learning Turkish the summer after my freshman year, I immediately fell in love with it since there were fewer shared words. There's more I could say about this but my main point is that a language being harder, whether by having more distinct vocabulary from one's native language or otherwise, doesn't make the language worse or less worthy of learning. For some people, it can make the process a lot more interesting.
About your statement about Romance vocab in English. While this is true, almost all often used words are Germanic where Romance words are very specific. So this does nuance it quite a bit since in just plain conversations an English speaker will use more Germanic words than Romance words
I find that this is actually even more of a point in favor of romance languages. Often, the romance vocab in an English sentence is the more "challenging" bit of the vocab. It's more specific and therefore easier to forget without help. The words that you use the most often must be memorized, but since "to help" comes up so often, you don't need to worry about forgetting it.
So words like "morning," "green," "to run," or "to speak" are easy to learn without help from similar lexicons, but a word like "sophisticated" is really easy to forget unless you have some help from your native language. ("sofisticado")
@@natekite7532 but we aren’t talking about non-English speakers learning English but the other way around. And for English speakers understanding another Germanic language is way easier than understanding a Romance language since the standard vocabulary is so alike with the Germanics
I think italian is less wrought with verb exceptions. Certainly on some of the more common verbs, like andare, dire, bere and fare are all combinations of two verb forms. But compared to Spanish I think it's a bit more consistent. Partially with the loss of usage of passato remoto, but also definitely most of its exceptions are with verbs as you said
This may not be a factor of a language itself, but... Okay, the first two comments I see below...from Sandalwood and Farahen Den (and 'm sure there are many more)...just beat me to it... But yes, resources, and entertainment that you actually find entertaining are major factors. The online and offline resources for Japanese I'm sure are much more plentiful than for Amharic, and there's anime, video games, and other things that are from that country and can often be set to be in that language, and are interesting. Studying some old religious text with fewer resources available would definitely hamper learning a language such as, say, Aramaic or Sanskrit, in comparison, unless you are totally into that.
Yeah you really understand this stuff 👍 makes total sense and agrees with my personal impression. The feature i hate the most though is orthography that doesn't reliably correspond to phonemes. This drives me nuts cuz it undermines my most favourite way of learning languages by reading tons of stuff in them. There are workarounds, but i just hate the unnecessary stupidity of such writing conventions/traditions.
I speak Spanish natively and I've learned English, French, Portuguese and Italian. Now I'm learning Dutch and I have to admit it's the hardest language I've learned so far. The reason is vocabulary. English and to a lesser extent French help me but most words are very different. That's why I haven't improved that much. This is my second Germanic language after having learned Romance languages and English. I know other languages like Japanese and Chinese are harder though. I knew it wasn't going to be that easy. I tried to learn German first but vocabulary combined with difficult grammar was too much for me. That's why I'm learning Dutch first. It's much easier to pick up.
the hard thing about different scripts is not to learn them, but the fact that everytime you would digitally like to write a text you have to switch your keyboard, which depending on the device can be quite laborious. the barrier makes it harder to motivate yourself to write (which is a big part of learning)
7:30 it's not the percantage of of unrelated vocabulary, but the amount. a language can have a fraction the the vocabulary number of another. that means that the 30% germanic vocab in english is not necessarily less vocabulary than other languages have entirely
As someone who is learning latin I found it to be pretty straight forward but as an native english speaker I approach sentences with tons of analogies which just don't translate well so that is where I get tripped up, I just don't think latin.
What seems difficult at first glance, especially for the uninitiated: bottom to top
What's actually difficult: top to bottom
I so much relate to the vocab being top of that list.
Once I tried to learn Hungarian for no particular reason and what put me off after a few months was the vocabulary. I'm a native Russian speaker and I also speak Slovenian but while Hungarian does have some lexical similarities with Slavic languages, all this goes out the window. Sure it's cool that words like 'post' or 'fat' are similar in Hung and Rus but all the 'do' 'eat', 'tree' -- you know, all the common words -- were just random letters to me.
I think with Hungarian, in particular, people overestimate the case system which is grammar. Like 'oh there are 9357124 cases in Hungarian, how do you study *that*?' From what I could gather, Hungarian is a super logical language and cases in Hung are unlike cases in Russian which are just random letters that thankfully we natives learn from early childhood.
Oh man, how much I can agree that vocabulary is the hardest part. I'm learning Arabic, and the vocabulary part is what's slowing my progress like crazy. memorising it is so hard, along memorising those plurals. Also, for some reason, inflections are my huge weak spot and they can stop my progress in learning a language alltogether. Which is quite funny, since my native language (Polish) is inflected as f***k. Those inflections are the reason why I failed in learning German, even though I had been learning it for ~12 years, starting when I was a child. Even though the conjugation is not that complex, it is still beyond my comprehension. English however, despite all f its irregularities and grammar quite different from my native language, is the only foreign language that I can speak more or less fluently. Even though it is loaded with irregularities, the fact that it is an analytical language, with almost none inflection, made it soo much easier for me.
I really like your videos, they're very informative. My personal approach to learning a new language is always alphabet->pronunciation->listening (for phonetics)->grammar->speaking. And to make the frist 3 or even 4 steps easier, I listen to songs from the language (which is why I usually want to learn a new language anyways), that way I get to see the words and how they're written, how they're pronounced, and get to say them out loud. It also helps me gain vocabulary and never forgetting it.
One note though, the paragraph you wrote in arabic needs some work. You wrote some words the way you hear them. I know the lunar and solar articles can be confusing, but whether you pronounce the ل or not you should write it. Can't write a word with only ا and not ل, it's part of the article, the entire article is ال. They're inseparable. Also the grammar and vocabulary was a bit off. I think you're trying to translate the sentences directly inside your head from English to Arabic, which is a mistake I've seen so many people do when learning Arabic. Avoid direct translation and try to apply arabic grammar and syntax to the translation for it to be correct. Also, some words can have more than one meaning, system in English mean tons of things, in Arabic there are specific words for each meaning
You were trying to say writing system but it ended up being "writing gadget", when it should've been "نظام كتابة". Ofcourse it depends on context for a person to determine which meaning/word to use. You'll figure it out with time after you gain enough vocabulary and experience. I recommend watching spacetoon videos on youtube, they're an Arabic kids channel with tons of short videos and songs in arabic that are grammatically correct and have good useful vocabulary. It's also unironically entertaining lmao. Imo Lebanese and Syrian resources are the best to learn the language (which spacetoon is). Jordanian, too, since that's where the language originated historically speaking. Avoid African Arabic countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebiya, Tunisia etc. dialects because they're filled with French and amazighi words and isn't really good to learn Arabic. Golf countries and saudi arabia aren't that good either, they pronounce some consonants wrong and drop grammar a lot and spell/write wrong as part of their dialects, so they're not thag good at teaching or speaking Arabic. The countries I mentioned being good at it, while they don't speak it properly in their dialects, they still know how to teach it and speak it properly in situations where they're required to do so. Hope this helps! And good luck.
Wish I could like twice.
7:50 yeah is happening to me studying japanese, and they have so many homophones 😭😅
Don't know about the last one. I found German a lot easier than French because I already knew English. The percentages in English vocabulary origin probably look a lot different if you only look at the most used verbs.
bilingual here, so ... not really special, but I think writing systems are a huge factor, Chinese and Japanese writing is their main reason they contend for the (Hardest Language to learn) title.... while Phonatics put Arabic in the same competition, because it has plnety of hard o pronounce sounds, if you try to simplify a sound you'll be easilly identified as a foreigner....
some Caucasian languages have even harder phonetics, Arabic might give you 8 hard sounds, caucasian languages can give you a dozen....
7:00 I'm pretty darn sure that "which" is of Germanic origin.
5:47 as a native Spanish speaker I use "andé", probably a dialectal thing
I'm sorry if this is annoying, but you said моя писая, that directly translates into "my peeing"...
I think syntax is harder than vocabulary, but yeah vocabulary is the second hardest
Listening comprehension can be a big problem in Turkish, you can hear words like nabüün or nabaan, it depends on where the speaker is from. I have been living in Turkey for 11 years and i have never seen a single person who speaks normally.
Navajo is pretty difficult.
i agree, f vocabulary
Why of all languages, did I decide to learn japanese!
As a newcomer, I'd like to make an off-topic request. Does English have many etymologically redundant nouns, such as quagmire (or "swamp-swamp")?
Not that many that I know of, it’s mostly just some proper nouns like the Sahara Desert, Gobi Desert, and Kalahari Desert, all of which mean “Desert Desert”
@@watchyourlanguage3870 Thanks! Same with the River Avon.
And with the alleged Torpenhow Hill (or "hill, hill, hill, hill").
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpenhow_Hill
I was typing something else up, then I noticed a couple of things. 1) Your list is almost the inverse of what 'average joe' considers the most difficult aspects of languages. And 2) said ranking roughly corresponds to "how much trouble are you in if you forget part of this".
Vocabulary is interesting. Lacking knowledge there basically prevents you from interacting with a native speaker and makes reading/writing glacial as you need to open the dictionary every five words. Buuuuuut also looking up something in the dictionary is all it takes, it's easy to slot the word in once you have it, and you can sometimes infer a bit from context if you forget what a word means (There's false friends and such if you proceed without checking, but they're a minority of cases, and an educated person you're talking with might guess what happened). And as you note if you forget irregularities in writing/grammar you still get by. If you forget a REGULAR grammar rule however, you are liable to be misunderstood quite badly. And if you forget part of the writing system, you just cannot send or receive communications, do not pass go to not collect $200.
Memorizing the Cyrillic alphabet in just one day is impressive, some people do much worse with rote memorization. And you usually HAVE to do rote memorization of the worst kind to learn a new script, connecting abstract symbols with meaningless sound fragments. At least superficially, it's a very daunting challenge to overcome. I casually learnt Cyrillic as a native Czech speaker from when we covered Russian propaganda posters in history class, but those are very similar languages, most people won't have such privileges when learning new script.
That said, I think using little kids' songs to learn Arabic script is legitimately a good insight. Those things DO have people who can't yet read as their target audience after all.
To your point about my list being inverse what most people would think, lol ya, a big inspiration for me making this video was pure frustration with people who have limited experience with languages being like “Oh my god, languages are so hard, the writing systems are impossible to learn” and I’m like THAT’S NOT TRUE, THERE ARE MUCH BIGGER CHALLENGES TO OVERCOME. But now that I’ve made this, I can just be like “Well then do I have the video for you!” I still run into this problem lol
When it comes to irregular conjugation, icelandic and Old Norse are nightmares. This is due to umlaut. So much fucking umlaut.
Well... Vocabulary isn't superhard. It follows something of a Pareto principle where 20% of the words take up 80% of the conversation and other 80% you don't really need immediately and you'll learn them in time
An overlooked aspect is how big an area the language is used in. Because, the smaller the area, the less variation there is to the language and less time you have to spend practicing your language comprehension. On extreme end of this we have Arabic, that is not even a dialect continuum, but a language family. Tiny Danish and Slovac may look intimidating, but they don't have the variety of Spanish. 4 different ways to pronounce LL is literally the tiniest of your problems when it comes to Spanish dialect continuum
I don't know about Romance languages being easier, I personally find Dutch easier to learn than French.
> Writing system has the least impact on learning a language*
* offer not valid for Japanese and its 3 writing systems.
He already said that the Chinese writing systems (In this case Kanji) is really a matter of vocabulary. Of course the Kana is indeed easy to learn with the only hard part is writibg the kana