A native speaker of English shouldn’t have much of a problem pronouncing Japanese comprehensibly. The biggest problem is probably distinguishing n as a separate syllable (ん in hiragana, or ン in katakana) from n as the start of a syllable, even both sounds are present in English, because that’s a distinction that English doesn’t make. The Japanese r is different from English r or l, but Japanese doesn’t distinguish those three sounds, so you could use any of those to pronounce r, and a Japanese speaker would understand fine.
The biggest problem with Japanese is the writing system, and even the Japanese find that hard, because they spend so much time at school learning all the kanji (traditional Chinese characters), and because most kanji can be pronounced in two or more different ways.
My father, who speaks Hungarian as a mother-tongue, has had during the course of his life to learn German, English, and French as second languages. He told me that of them, English was the easiest.
Indeed, all the science indicates that all languages are equally easy to acquire as first languages by children in the first years of life, in the sense that they are all learned at about the same speed.
We played tennis.
We were playing tennis.
We had played tennis.
We had been playing tennis.
We did play tennis.
We will have been playing tennis.
I’ve always thought that English nouns would be a breeze to learn, but the verbs a bitch. The grammar, that is.
The impression that your own language is hard to learn probably comes from listening to inexperienced people speak it.
There was a really nice, general-public-level linguistics book I read, and I wish I remembered the name and author so I could recommend it. But anyway, the author asserted that languages naturally grow more complex; they acquire more irregularities, idioms, and other “rococo” over time. Young languages (creoles, for instance) tend to be more regular and have simpler grammar. But an old language can be “rejuvenated”, simplified, by stress such as an influx of non-native speakers, a non-native ruling class, or a bottleneck. English, for instance, lost a lot of it’s original grammar when England was invaded by the Danes; it was partially creolized. The author mentioned Malay as a fairly young language which has been gaining in complexity. Has anyone tried to learn Malay?
Of course English is the hardest language to learn! Look at the native speakers. If they have so much trouble with the basics what about the poor non-native speakers!
Old joke:
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks a single language? An American.
I’ve talked to people who are non-native speakers and most find English not that difficult. The problems are exceptions, but even the most regular languages have regular and irregular verbs. And, the extensive vocabulary. English has one of the most extensive vocabularies of any common language. That’s partly due to our mixed Anglo/Latin/French roots and the fact that we don’t have a language police, so new words are added all the time.
Besides that, English has no feminine/masculine issues with noun/verb agreements. There is very little verb congregation. Grammar rules tend to be simpler than in most other languages. Plus, there are thousands of ESL curriculums out there which means if you want to learn English vs. Latvian, there is just a lot more material out there for you to use. And, that in itself can make a language much easier to learn.
A language could be simple, clear, and logically constructed, but if you don’t have course materials, it still could be extremely difficult to learn.
We were about to play tennis.
We’re about to play tennis.
We have played tennis.
We play tennis.
We can play tennis.
We would play tennis.
We could have played tennis.
My point was more that many different forms of tense are in use in everyday spoken English, more so than some other languages. Many languages have convoluted tenses, but they are mostly confined to the written language. In German, for example, the present perfect, equivalent to the English “I have played”, is also used in cases where we would use the simple past or preterite, “I played”. In German*, the preterite is used much less often in everyday speech. So, in that regard, English is more difficult.
[ETA] I suppose I should instead say “in some parts of Germany”
I was never taught that, in 20 years of ESL lessons. As a matter of fact, I found out about English metrics being in “feet” thanks to the Gutenberg project: I checked the character recognition on a translation of some Espronceda works and the prologue explained that in Spanish metrics work in sillables, in English in feet. Once I’d investigated the concept, it suddenly made sense why some native English speakers will break sentences in places where someone from a sillable-based language never would.
We were taught to use the same intonation as in Spanish, and that’s about it for stress.
English doesn’t have exceptions… it is an exception (Only half joking, yes there’s rules but there’s also a lot of things like the aforementioned phrasal verbs where “it’s just like that”) Bisected8, English has some sounds Spanish doesn’t. The English J and R don’t exist in Spanish, Spanish has a LOT less vowels, Spanish doesn’t have all those “th” sounds.
Bisected8, English has some sounds Spanish doesn’t. The English J and R don’t exist in Spanish, Spanish has a LOT less vowels, Spanish doesn’t have all those “th” sounds (we have “d” and some of us have “z”, but not all of us have “z” and we don’t have the intermediate “th” sounds).
Comparing grammars is one thing, but English spelling must be brutal to learn.
Words that look like they should rhyme but don’t: cough, tough, through, thorough, hiccough…
Words that don’t look like they should rhyme but do: to, too, two, gnu, true, you, Sioux, ewe, grew…
I’ve heard that the Japanese figure no non-native can master their language. From a psych class in college I seem to recall that the Japanese don’t use left brain or right brain for language—they use the front of each half.
My second language, in order of fluency would have to be German. It’s also the second language in order of acquisition. In terms of confusion caused by the “last language learned effect”, I noticed this when learning French afterwards. This was even more true with Dutch, which I attribute to its being so similar to German as to invite confusion in many areas. My favorite example is Dutch overleden (“perished”) vs. German ueberleben (“to survive”).
While I’ve always a few people assert that English is the hardest foreign language, it’s never seemed to me that most or all English speakers agree with that statement. On the other hand, it stands to reason that that the difficulty of a new language is, very generally speaking, a function of how distantly related it is to your first language, or to the language you now use the most… It’s got to be easier for a Baffin Island Eskimo speaking the Baffin Inuit language to learn the Greenlandic aboriginal language, than for a German or American person to learn either. On that premise it might be fair to argue that English is a difficult language with respect to the millions of East Asians who study it, and the vast differences between it and their native tongues. As for South Asians, I don’t know if one can make the same argument, as English seems never to have quite left the Subcontinent., and the people who live there continue to be exposed to it a good deal.
I can imagine that some of the subtle variations of usage and vocabulary in English might confuse some foreign students, although this might be said of any language. Within European languages, English seems to be more or less alone in having various vocabularies used for different settings. In the case of elevated or scholarly language the lexis is largely derived from Anglo-Norman, with additions from classical Latin and Greek, and bears no resemblance to words of everyday speech which have different etymological roots. This is also the case with many words of figurative meaning, or of meanings that deal with complexities of time, place, and plans. For example we have “to push”. We might speak casually of “pushing back” an appointment or a meeting, but formally we’d write “postpone”. The Latin roots “post” and “pone” mean exactly the same thing as “push back”, or more accurately, “put back”.
This is different from German, in which the words used for more complex or figurative senses share the same roots as the basic word: schieben (“to push”) and verabschieben (“to postpone”). Schieben is an irregular verb, but in mastering its irregularities I also mastered those of verabschieben and all other verbs that use schieben as their root.
> I’ve heard that the Japanese figure no non-native can master their language.
> From a psych class in college I seem to recall that the Japanese don’t use left
> brain or right brain for language—they use the front of each half.
That sounds like utter nonsense. The Japanese have a lot of silly urban legends about such things which surprisingly little of them question. A lot of them are about the supposed uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese.
While there are a lot of legends surrounding Japanese (many of them native to the islands), I wouldn’t say they extol the superiority of the Japanese language. Rather, Japanese speakers (and, ironically, foreigners even more so than native Japanese) love to tell of how difficult and convoluted and nonsensical Japanese is to learn and speak - but they don’t usually don’t do so to portray Japanese as a kind of über language. Rather, as a language that is knowingly and purposefuly impenetrable to unwashed gaijin.
Truth be told, Japanese grammar *is *fucked up. Japanese kanji are impenetrable. I strongly suspect they keep those half-dozen alphabets around just to make shit even more byzantine to figure out. Hell, even their own speakers are often reduced to decyphering furigana subtitles these days, and have trouble reading or writing common kanjis.
Now, that doesn’t make the language superior in any way, shape or form. Rather the opposite, really, if by “superior” one means “destined to dominate the world”. But it *is *ungodly hard to learn and speak fluently.
No, I meant that these legends portray the Japanese people as being superior. One way in which they portray themselves as being superior is to claim that the challenges that they face (like having a difficult language) are greater than other peoples. By claiming that they have succeeded against greater odds, they think that they are thereby superior.
As a Dutch native, I thought English was much easier to learn than French or even German.
I can understand most common German pretty easily, but I can’t speak a decent grammatically correct sentence of the damn language. As for French, forget it - except for a few words here and there.
As far as I can tell, the main advantage English had was just the sheer amount of subtitled UK/US TV programs and films and books we’ve got here (we don’t do dubbing over here. It’s for for kids). I strongly suspect I got most of my German from reading German programming books and watching German krimis* on TV.
There is good evidence of one way to divide the world’s languages into “relatively simple” and “relatively complex”: whether or not they are WRITTEN (and read).
That is, those “indigenous” languages which are not usually encountered by their speakers in written form tend to be quantifiably more complex over a range of syntactic and grammatical ways. This is because writing tends to standardize and simplify a lot of things.
Other than that, you are quite right that languages which are complex in one way tend to be simpler in another (and that which ways are which changes within a language over time). So, other than this written/non-written distinction, all languages, overall, have about the same degree of “complexity”.
I found this best explained in John McWhorter’s book The Power of Babel.
(Oh – Another way that languages can be “simplified” is through partial creolization, which happens when there are a LOT of adult second-language learners, as happened with English during the Danelaw of the Middle Ages. But this doesn’t tend to affect the language overall as much as introducing a writing system does.)
(Only half joking, yes there’s rules but there’s also a lot of things like the aforementioned phrasal verbs where “it’s just like that”)