EXACTLY my first european experience. Having just landed in Frankfurt Int’l, I was very thirsty, and went into the first restaurant I could find, which just happened to be a McDonald’s. One of my friends was in line just ahead of me. Doing his best to practice his German, he polietly asked the clerk for “Ein grosse Coke, bitte.” Immediately the woman behind the counter repeats back to him “You want a big Coke?”
I’ve found that, with my fluent German, I can read most basic Dutch without significant problems, at least enough to get the gist of it. Certainly I couldn’t speak it, and would never even attempt to converse in it, but when it comes to headlines and short blurbs, it’s not much of a problem.
Initial Entry, thanks for the info. Having heard a brief demo of the langauge, though, I couldn’t particularly understand the difference between clicks. It might have been the individual speaker- is there a distinct difference between clicks? (Keep in mind that my hearing isn’t that great, and I might just have been missing it.)
What constitues “difficulty” in a language, though? Difficulty can be entirely subjective. I’m willing to bet that things like regional accents can affect coffect pronunciation and so on and so forth… and for that matter, every language has its own unique dialects. I remember how my Argentinian ex would laugh at my attempts at a Castillian accent…
I get a good understanding of written germanic and romantic languages just by careful logical observation of their form, but I can’t speak it… Like, I understood what Coldfire said in Dutch (the thing about wierd Americans and translators) just by analyzing it, but I swear, I cannot learn to speak another language for the life of me. I can do a fair amount of spoken Spanish, and I can write it like crazy, I just have trouble speaking it.
And I do recall that there are like, 50 odd sounds available to us when we’re a baby, but when we start learning our ‘native’ language, we slowly whittle them down to however many our language has and lose the rest. I guess then, the easiest way to figure out the hardest to learn is to find the language with the sounds most different from English (Chinese, IIRC). I guess whoever has the most sounds used in their language, total, would find it easiest to learn other languages (or at least pronounce them well).
Damn right ! I challenge any non-Dutch speaking person to attempt to speak it. Learning it is no problem. However…
I am convinced that the Dutch have some kind of DNA mapping that allows them to contort their throats and produce phlegm at a rate which outstrips the rest of their genetically deficient European cousins. I believe that during WWII, the Dutch resistance would ask people to pronounce a certain town’s name - Scheveninge (?) - that sorted out the good guys from the bad. Might be folklore, might be true - perhaps someone really knows !
The reason why Dutch shopkeepers always switch to English despite our best attempts to blend in, is that they don’t fancy an earful of spittle from our pitiful attempts.
Goed. (wipes face)
As far as learning a language - try something like Japanese, or even Swedish for the most bizarre constructs you will ever come across.
(P.S. The first Dutch person who wholesales Febo style Frikandel sausages to the UK will profit entirely from my custom !)
Japanese is one of the easier languages to learn. It doesn’t have many sounds, and it’s a syllibary language. Makes it easy on us. What’s really difficult? I would say Dutch is up there. God know’s I tried when I lived there. What else is tough? Chinese because of the tonal variations. French has a number of sounds we are unfamiliar with. I imagine there are some difficult Native American ones too.
How about, what native speakers have the hardest time with english.
Yup. In Xhosa there are three different clicks. (Don’t worry though, they’re pretty easy to distinguish from each other) First off there’s the “lateral click” (not a technical term necessarily) which is represented in writing by the letter X. It’s made by pressing the side of the tongue firmly against the side of the mouth and then sharply pulling it away. There’s also the frontal click (which really sounds an awful lot like “tsk”) made by doing the same thing with the tip of the tongue(placed right behind the front teeth). This one is written as “C” The final one (which I don’t really know any way of referring to it) is done by placing the tongue further up (ie just before the roof of the mouth slopes sharply down to meet the teeth) and snapping it down into the soft part of the lower jaw(just behind the teeth). It is written as a “q”.
Once you learn to make them as consonant sounds (ie, to just insert them into consonant-vowel combinations) they’re pretty easy to distinguish and use. It usually takes a few days of practice to be able to combine them properly, but it’s not awfully dificult.
As far as dificulty goes, well, Xhosa, being a Bantu language, is certainly harder to learn then, say, Spanish (completely different grammatical structure from English) but probably not as hard as, say, Mandarin. The language spoken by the San is dificult because of the larger number of clicks (to the point where punctuation marks have to be used when writing it out) and also because of the rarity in which it is used/it’s separation from nearby languages.
Everyone here seems to be focusing on pronunciation difficulties and not considering how hard it can be to grasp the grammar of another language.
I would offer the opinion that noun cases are one of the hardest things for English speakers to get their heads around. English for all intents and purposes has only two noun cases (nominative and possessive/genitive), as compared to German with four, Russian with six, and Hungarian with seventeen!
So whereas the word “train” would be spelled and pronounced one of only two ways in English (“train” or “train’s”)regardless of the context it’s used in, you would have to spell its equivalent differently in many other languages depending on whether you were saying “the train left the station”, “I arrived by train”, “I missed the train”, “He was hit by a train”, etc. Just imagine having to memorize 17 different ways to say every Hungarian noun you learn!
(That said, I believe Dutch only has two noun cases, so obviously there’s a different problem at work with that particular language!)
Prepositions are a bastard as well. In English you’re married to someone; in Spanish you’re married with them. In English you take medication for an illness; Germans take meds against it. The Gaelic languages require prepositions in places you’d never expect to see them. And the list goes on…
I never learned a foreign language in grammar or high school, but I learned a little Japanese in college. I didn’t find it hard to learn, though I heard it spoken of by non-Japanese speakers as incredibly difficult. Therefore, I got all puffed up and considered myself a language genius. oldscratch, Nihongo ga dekimasu ka? Nihon-no sushi ga daisuki desu, ne? Hakujin-no sushi ga suki ja arimasen . . .
Then I hit age 42 and tried to learn French for the first time.
Sleeping Jesus, Japanese was a cakewalk compared to French! It had no genders, no plurals, no hard pronounciations (except for the Japanese “R”) . . . easy! French is another story. Shoulda tried to learn a Latin language when I was young. I still can’t say “un” (one) convincingly . . .
Coldfire, I’m disappointed that wasn’t you we met. We plan a trip to Norway at some point in the future. Hope the next Dutchman we see there will be you . . .
Part of your difficulty in learning French compared to Japanese may be due to your age at the time. The ability to learn foreign languages declines with age.
I have not gotten close to fluent in any language, but studying languages is one of my hobbies. I like to learn a little of one language and move on to the next. The languages I’ve tried, from hardest to easiest are below. Except for the first four, I can read a newspaper in these languages with a little help from a dictionary[ol][li]Finnish[/li][li]Welsh[/li][li]Icelandic / Old Norse[/li][li]Dutch[/li][li]German[/li][li]Latin[/li][li]Norwegian Bokmål[/li][li]French[/li][li]Spanish[/li][li]Norwegian Nynorsk [/ol][/li]However, the ease or difficulty depends in large part on languages I learned before. For instance, I found Icelandic to be easier to learn than would have been the case if I hadn’t studied Latin first (they are both highly inflected). I found Norwegian easier than I otherwise would have because I studied Icelandic first (the vocabulary is similar, but Norwegian’s grammar is much simplified). French and Spanish were easier because I studied Latin first.
The irony of the difficulty of Dutch is that it is more closely related to English than almost any other language. Only Frisian, and possibly Plattdeutsch (Low German) are closer. Scots is closer yet, but it usually not classed as a separate language. One reason Dutch is difficult is that English has lost most of its inflections, so English speakers aren’t prepared to deal with them. This is one reason I found learning to read Norwegian languages (Nynorsk and Bokmål) so easy: like English, they have lost most of their inflections.
The hardest for anyone to learn is Xhosha, the click language of Africa. It has a tongue on the back of the throat click and a lip-teeth-action click. Strange to listen to.
Kalahari, there isn’t “a” click language of Africa, but several, in several different language families, of which Xhosa is one. Others include San (which used to be called Bushman) and !xo.
As someone pointed out, difficulty in language learning is largely subjective, although there are common threads.
Ha, bibliophage I have to agree with Finn being difficult. Both my parents spoke Finnish and yet none of their three children could master it (I’m still at the swear word level). Of course, it could be that my parents used it as a conspiracy language (the kids can’t understand what’s in the works for them) or maybe it’s just me. I’m still a French verbal illiterate despite all those years of coursework.
Magnox: Febo Frikandellen to Scotland? I’ll make a few calls
And welcome aboard, BTW.
Ruadh: Dutch actually had four noun cases, just like German. It’s just that we only USE two these days. The other two are not a part of the modern language, and only show up in some archaic proverbs, sayings and such.
As for your comment about the difficulty being in the grammar rather than the pronunciation: that’s my opinion too. Sure, Dutch has a few weird sounds like Magnox already stated, but that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is trying to get a feel for a set of grammar rules that is tiny, but comes with a huge list of exceptions. If you ask me to explain those exceptions, I’ll usually say “I don’t know why, it just FEELS better that way”. Which is something that is of little help to the other person, usually - but it’s true.
I will agree on the Icelandic being hard. My mother’s Icelandic and only one of her children picked it up b/c he learned a great deal of it when he was 2 years old. I can understand a great deal, but the grammar is too hard for me to grasp an ability to speak it without it being a complete grammatical disaster. There’s a different spelling for each noun depending on what it’s doing in the sentence, and then you can get on to the “regular” grammar structures after that.
At the moment I’m taking French and German as foreign languages at the same time. I have little to no problem with vocabulary, but the grammar tends to get a little harder for me to completely memorize every year. I’m thinking of dropping both languages and picking up latin next year b/c it’ll help me for the major I’m considering.
[hijack]
Matt, I have no clue where in Montreal YOU live, but speaking as an Anglo who struggles in French, I have NEVER had a salesperson switch to English for me!
[/hijack]
I have acted as a translator between a Scotsman and a ‘Geordie’ (= from the North-East of England). It was weird translating from English to English!
I’m a keen chess player and have played over 20 times in Holland. I have tried to speak Dutch. Every single Dutch person spots I’m English, and switches to my language. At the railway station I would simply say ‘Enkele reis, Beverwijk’ (sorry about the spelling; it’s supposed to be ‘A one way ticket to Beverwijk’). The clerk would tell me how much IN ENGLISH.
there is a chess opening variation named after a Dutch town, Scheveningen. The first time I pronounced this to a Dutch family, I tried Shay - ver - ning - en. They looked blank. Finally I showed them it on an atlas. ‘Aha - that’s pronounced Crrrevyh - ver - ning - en!’ If you’ve never heard Dutch, just try to imagine a guttural sound that isn’t a snarl. 20 years visiting the (delightful) country and I still can’t manage one particular sound?!
The spelling is 100% correct.
I always compare the Dutch “g” to the way the Spanish pronounce their “j”. It’s what comes closest, IMHO.
Also, have a Scotsman prounounce the word “Loch”. The “ch” is somewhat like the Dutch “g”.
Mind you, that’s how people from “above the rivers” (the Maas and Waal rivers - roughly, this is the northern part of the country, including all the major cities) pronounce their “g”. Below the rivers, where I come from, the “g” is softer. I’m thinking of something that’s like it, but there’s nothing in English. Come to think of it, I know of no example that suits it. You put the back of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and blow air through the remaining hole, without making it sound like you’re coughing up a hairball. That’s the one. When it DOES sound like a hairball, you’ve got the Northern “g”.
[hijack]Glee is back! I missed you! Where have you been?**
And to whoever it was that said us Americans should start teaching foreign languages in elementary school: Amen. I plan to thoroughly pick Coldfire’s brain on the Dutch method of teaching English when I meet him at DubDope.
When I was younger (grampa speaks ;)), I started learning English in the first grade of high school, which is at age 12. These days, they often start teaching English at age 10 or so, in elementary school.
Also, barring a few movies and programs for REALLY small kids, all TV shows and movies here are subtitled. And kids tend to pick up these things quickly…
The result is 8-9 year old kids that can hold up a conversation in English. I kid you not.
Some of these kids are so good, I often ask the parents whether one of them is English. But often, they’re not. These kids are just exposed to it a lot, and learn along the way. Amazing, and a very, very good thing.
That is exactly what I’m sending Nicholas to German school. And I have wondered whether the ready availabilty of English language media in Germany (and the rest of Europe) is one of the reasons why Germans seem to pick up on English more readily than the Americans pick up German. I have started to watch German TV (a fate I would wish on nobody) and read German magazines to try and improve my skills.
But, I am never learning Dutch because you people don’t seem to appreciate us furriners efforts.
