Thanks!
and meaning would change with punctuation (? vs !)
No problem, and I am relieved that you took my advice in the spirit it was intended.
I’m not trying to sound like some language expert. Learning Mandarin is taking me much longer than I could ever have expected, and I wasted a lot of time along the way, so I’m just trying to help others not do what I did.
You research and models are interesting to me and I would appreciate it if you could update me somehow on your progress (PM or another thread?)
I think you’ll find Mandarin an interesting area to test ideas about memory.
Because people coming at it whose first language is a European language, initially have no idea how to memorize words. You can’t use the same methods that might work for learning French say.
It’s like going to a party and the first five women you meet are called Louise, Louisa, Lou, another Louise and Louie. And you can’t abbreviate anyone’s name. Where do you start?
Well, like I say, many Mandarin learners have a Eureka moment where they think they’ve found a way to remember everything. But over time, most tend to end up with a toolkit of several ways of remembering.
I think the toolkit approach is best in all memory systems. Indigenous cultures use a vast array of mnemonic technologies in various combinations - they had to - their survival culturally and physically depended on only the knowledge they could remember. They have a lot to teach us.
Are those verbs, in Thai, something like infinitives? In English, you could get several “real” verbs (not just helper-verbs) in a row with infinitives: I “want to learn to speak Thai” has three verbs in a row. Your quote could possibly be translated as: They plan to walk to go to arrange to purchase to bring to keep to entertain …
Can someone come up with a not-too-contrived English sentence with more verbs in a row than “I want to learn to speak Thai” ?
“I want to learn to teach speaking Thai”?
“I’d like to want to learn to teach speaking Thai”?
“I considered liking to want to learn to teach speaking Thai”?
“I expected to consider liking to want to learn to teach speaking Thai”?
Thank you, lynne-42. Your contribution is the most fascinating yet.
Yeah, that’s kinda what I’m looking for – you can get a string of verbs in a row with a lot of infinitives.
I’m not sure that “speaking” counts as a verb in your sentences. I think it’s a gerund – a verbal form functioning as a noun. That might be true of “liking” in that sentence too, in which case it interrupts the chain of consecutive verbs.
Thus, my question: In that long chain of verbs in the Thai example that septimus gave, are they infinitives or something analogous?
Thai grammar is exceedingly simple: No words are ever inflected in any way! (There are a few “helping verbs” sometimes prefixed, e.g. to form gerund or passive voice.) I don’t know how a grammarian might parse that sentence, but the Thai words give no clue. (Confession: The final word in the sentence — sà-nùk (‘enjoy’) — might be better called a noun in this context, but I liked the idea of 12 consecutive verbs!)
For a comparable English example, I might try an order that a ship captain might give when he thinks land is near:
“Hurry, climb (up) (the mast), brace (yourself), squint, try to look, seek (the island) and point (at it)!” When unnecessary words (shown in parentheses) are eliminated, this sentence has just 8 verbs and an ‘and.’
As the OP understands, English is a hard language to speak well and write correctly. But it is widespread, so influential. As with any language - if you speak it without worrying about precise grammar or writing - it is easier.
Most languages are highly logical. They take a certain approach to things which is often much easier than English. So when they learn English, these differences become areas of difficulty. By comparison, things not in the English language are difficult when anglophones learn these languages - tones in Chinese languages are difficult since “tone” isn’t really a thing in English.
Some languages often omit the verb “to be” - it’s kind of assumed. Chinese languages don’t bother to conjugate verbs; the word “shi” is used for every subject. Similarly, for other verbs all subjects use the infinitive.
Tenses are very easy in Mandarin or Russian and many languages. You essentially add an extra word meaning “past” or “future” or “should” and/or a time phrase at the beginning of the sentence. Tenses in English are much more complex than the simple past, present and future that exist in some languages (with much easier modifications for imperative and conditional forms).
Latin is difficult because you have to conjugate nouns. In addition to verb endings, nouns also have declensions, endings which very much change the meaning to imply possession, commands, etc.
Hungarian is difficult because it phrases things in awkward (to an Anglo) ways, uses different sounds and accents. If you speak a language with fewer sounds it is a challenge to learn new ones. Russian has a few extra sounds, but supposedly compensates (like many languages) by having straightforward spelling - you hear the word, you know how it is spelled.
Hindi uses a large number of English words and has for three centuries. This makes it fairly easy to speak. Most Asian languages have complex writing systems. I’m told it can take eight years to learn written Chinese, which seems too high.
Ironically, most languages have features which are much easier than English, and even easier than a few different verb roots. English has an enormous vocabulary which, not infrequently, bamboozles aspirant communicators vis-a-vis excessively impenetrable phraseology; irregardless of deliberately obtuse jargon and iconoclastic interpretations of regional slang nomenclature.
But English movies and YouTube videos are everywhere and learning a basic form is easier. But not easy. How hard something is depends on where you begin, your rewards and motivations, your tools and how you view it psychologically.
Beautifully put!
Yeah, but as I already pointed out, the enormous vocabulary doesn’t affect the average speaker of English. The average speaker of English only knows about 20,000 words even as an adult. A fairly well educated speaker of English might know 40,000 words as an adult. So what? The huge vocabulary of English largely consists of technical terms, obsolete words, slang expressions from regional dialects, and other sorts of things that are irrelevant to speakers outside of a small group for each word. 3,000 words are enough to get by on, in fact. That huge vocabulary has no effect on how hard it is for an average language learner to learn english.
People learn English for different reasons. A study of two million learners through testyourvocab.com was published in The Economist. It implied most 4 year olds knew 5,000 words; most 8 year olds and foreign test takers know 10,000 words. I don’t know how many words are enough to get by. That would depend on whether you are studying in university, or conducting business (maybe in a specific field with related jargon), or just trying to get basic ideas across, say hello and order coffee.
As a result of this discussion, I now want to go back to university to study comparative languages. What an knowledgeable lot you are!
If you are studying a particular field in college or if you are working in a field which is one of the ones that means you have to know a lot of technical terms, it doesn’t matter what language you are speaking. You have to know a lot of technical terms from that field in your language. In fact, you have to know about the same number of technical terms in your language no matter what language you speak. The number of technical terms in a language has almost nothing to do with how hard it is to learn to speak the language for most people. If your language is one that doesn’t contain the technical terms for your field, what probably happens for everyone in your field is that you use the technical terms from some language with a lot of those technical terms from your field. Most of the time, the language with those technical terms will be English. Probably your instructors in that field will recommend that you learn English, since you need to read the technical papers in your field to keep up with what’s going on, and those papers are often in English. Occasionally the language that most of the technical papers are written in is some other language like French or German. In that case, you have to know the technical terms in French or German.
I’ll agree with that. I will also say vocabulary is not always the hardest part of learning a language - it improves with time. English learners average a new word a day until middle age; foreign learners with basic English average 2.5 new words a day (according to the same Economist article; google “Economist” and “testyourvocab.com” for details). I specifically like the Michel Thomas method since vocabulary and writing are de-emphasized.
My college town has lots of mainland Chinese students, who tend to hang around in Mandarin speaking groups. I’m sure a lot of them are pursuing technical degrees. But to study in another country requires more than the basics and technical vocabulary, and I know a lot of them find it hard because they have told me that. They would have to read journals, compose a thesis, socialize, adjust and climb a steep learning curve - even if they know the basics, which some do better than others. Their situation is perhaps similar to any number of other people.
Arabic and Turkish are two I know of that have practically no irregular verbs. (The morphology of the Arabic verb is extremely complex, but also highly regular.)
That’s true of Chinese and Malay, but not Russian. Russian inflects its verbs like other Indo-European languages.
Hungarian has 3 consonants and 4 vowel phonemes that don’t exist in English, but this is not notably more than the other languages we’re discussing. The difficulty of Hungarian is usually attributed to its lack of I-E cognates and its 18 noun cases.
Russian phonology is much more complex than Hungarian. but supposedly compensates (like many languages) by having straightforward spelling - you hear the word, you know how it is spelled.
[/quote]
That is not true of Russian. With all its reduced vowels in unstressed syllables and other complexities of stress and allophony, Russian is a mess. Finnish and Hungarian are good examples of language with a one-to-one mapping between sound and symbol; you hear it, you know how to write it; you read it, you know how to say it. Every time. Polish orthography, as crazy as it looks, actually has a very regular mapping to the sounds, once you learn how it works.
“Hindi” wasn’t even invented until the late 19th century; before that, everybody used Urdu. Most of the lexical borrowing from English took place in the 20th century, though. Hindi phonology has at least 19 consonant phonemes that don’t exist in English. It also has I-E inflectional verb morphology plus split ergativity, some vestigial noun declension, and a much more pervasive use of gender.
There are worse things than complexity. Tibetan and Burmese use alphabets, but the pronunciation has changed so radically since the spelling became fixed, the writing has an extremely poor correspondence with the pronunciation. Extremely poor, 10 times worse than even English.
n.m.
dup
I think it’s more accurate to say that the terms “Urdu,” “Hindi,” and “Hindustani” were used interchangeably for a range dozens and dozens of dialects of various class, prestige, and geographical variations. Today, “Urdu” indicates a much smaller set of dialects.
The majority of people of the subcontinent were certainly not speaking the most prestigious form of literary Urdu.