Which would it be?
(I know it depends on a lot of various factors, but fact remains: some languages are just easier than others, right?)
Guess which two European languages are actually the same? Spanish and Italian, that's which two! Think I'm lying? Listen for yourself, then apologize... to Mr. X!
>>69
Can you tell me what steps you went through when putting together those sentences in your post? Just because you don't notice them doesn't mean they aren't there.
I'd imagine that a native Latin speaker would claim to "just know" how a sentence is supposed to look, and laugh at your "sequence of steps" theory of Latin.
My own view is that you can only move complexity around, not get rid of it. Languages do tend to get somewhat streamlined over time, after all. Why haven't they all evolved to super-efficient minimalist transmitters of information by now? Where does the complicated stuff come from?
>>51
The Lao script is actually based on an 18th-century Thai script. And Lao and Thai are MUCH closer to one another than English and Swedish -- more like Spanish and Portuguese, or even closer.
They're basically almost mutually intelligible, although the Lao understand Thai better than the Thai claim to understand Lao, as is typical when rich/powerful languages interact with poor/less powerful languages.
Lao people watch Thai television and read Thai magazines, for example.
Khmer uses its own script, distantly related to the scrips for Lao and Thai, although more complicated than either of these, and descended (like the rest of Southeast Asia's snaky-letter alphabets and abugidas) from the ancient South Indian Brahmi script.
See here: http://www.ancientscripts.com/khmer.html
>> 83
"Can you tell me what steps you went through when putting together those sentences in your post? Just because you don't notice them doesn't mean they aren't there."
Actually, if you read the post, I expained the steps already.
The first step is to decide what I want to say.
Now, as a native English speaker, I know the vocabulary, so I chose the words that express my idea best.
English has a SVO word order, so I arrange the words in that order.
After that, I need to make sure that everything is in the right tense. In English (fortunately) I only need to worry about verbs. So I fix the tenses.
Then you put the sentence on paper or on the internet.
I find Welsh, German and Japanese pretty easy to learn. But it's all relative, isn't it?
> Actually, if you read the post, I expained the steps already.
Not really.
Here's a challenge. What's wrong with this sentence?
"They set up us the bomb."
It passes all of your steps:
(1. choose what to say)
2. Choose words. "They", "us", "the bomb", and "set up". (There's room for improvement here, but still.)
3. SVO order. "They", S, "set up", V, "us" and "the bomb", O. There are two objects here, but no rule for that so we just put both at the end.
4. Verb senses. Well, "set up" becomes "set up". Done.
Therefore, the sentence matches all of the criteria and is correct. Right?
Point is, there really are more things to it than that in a language as English. You have to realize that "set up" cannot have two meanings simultaneously ("they set us up" and "they set up a bomb"), the word order is not as simple as "always SVO", and there are tons of those annoying little words like "with" and "for" that you have to know when to use. If you learn a language as a second language you are always painfully aware of how simple things aren't. And presumably also when teaching, which might be an interesting experience.
For Westerners whose first language is a Romance or Western Germanic language, Latin would probably be easiest (pivot, slot, pivot, slot, ad nauseum). Personally I find Japanese easy from a grammatical standpoint but hard as hell orthographically. Also its agglunative morphology presents problems when trying to predict how one might construct certain words...though in some respects I suppose it makes it easier.
+1.
Technically you're incorrect here.
[set up] should be considered a ditransitive verb as it takes two objects ([us] and [the bomb]). By their very nature ditransitive verbs often lead to semantic and/or lexical ambiguity, leading to two readings of this sentence:
They [set up us the bomb].
lit. [Certain people mechanically facilitated the use of an explosive incendiary device for me and my comrades.]
and
They set up [us the bomb].
lit. [Certain people mechanically facilitated the use of me, an explosive incendiary device.]
Whilst the second of these is nonsense it's still a valid reading, therefore it could be argued that it has two different readings.
Also in English, word order is ALWAYS SVO. Sometimes we can omit the agentive object or passivise it to become the subject, but you'll never see a verb or object initial sentence in English.
Also, WITH and FOR are prepositions that can only occur in certain circumstances (ie. prepositional phrases indicating certain situations) and therefore are not difficult for non-native speakers to learn.
Otherwise...you're correct. Lol ^_____^.
japanese is the easiest language to learn if you have not meet a single language before, it is it's simplicity that causes ppl from english/ other backgrounds can't help thinking complicatedly
in japanese understood things are left from the sentence, thus it's a non-moron language
altough it's sov in structure, your hardly find sov in conversation, usually you only see ov as subjects are mostly understood
english is quite easy after i've been educated for years, it only needs activation basics and after you passed that activation basics, viola you own the language!
chinese is also quite easy for westerners after the grammar is romanized , which before was like japanese/korean , though the hardest part of chinese is the writing, i can't imagine how long will it take me to fully understand commonly used characters if my mom didn't send me to a chinese school since primary education
I don't know, Dutch is pretty easy to learn. HTML is pretty easy to learn too, as is PHP....Or even Gnome (http://gnome.ulmb.com)?
English is pretty easy.
Also, non-written japanese is pretty simple (because 57357357657675 kanjis make it pretty imposible to read/write)
I don't think you know much about Japanese.
There are 2000 recommended Kanji that are composed of a few hundred radicals and parts. Most Kanji even consist of other Kanji, which is exactly the same as combining letters in English to form a word.
I found Cantonese REALLY easy once it was romanized for me.
Right now I've been starting Japanese and Spanish at the same time.
Here's to Taco Sushi!
>>91
Of course the "They set up us the bomb" example isn't exactly good English in the first place. It's like "Write me a letter", the proper form would be "Write a letter TO me", or "They set up the bomb FOR us."
Wouldn't that just be an indirect object, with the (to) being understood?
>>97
The pronounciations are really very difficult (and often at disasterous results! e.g.: buy and sell sounds awfully alike, and often distinguished from context)
>>93
What is meant by "activation basics"?
TeX is easy to learn.
Nope. English does have some remnants of the dative case, though the declension is gone, you can still use the sentence structure as before, instead of using prepositions.
I.e. "Write me a letter" is correct, like German "Schreib mir einen Brief", or Russian "Напиши мне письмо".
In English, however, you can also use the preposition: "Write a letter to me"
In Russian, this is incorrect. "Напиши письмо для меня" won't do.
In modern German, I think you can do it, too, but I'm not sure. "Schreib einen Brief zu mir" (interestingly, the pronoun is still in dative, but that's because of the particular preposition, and thus irrelevant)
On the other hand, in New Norwegian, you can only say "Skriv eit brev til meg" with the preposition, while in Bokmål you can say "Skriv meg et brev" without the preposition, though that form is becoming obsolete here as well, since it's no longer a case language.
Interesting how languages evolve and shit.
Icelandic is widely speculated as being the hardest language in the world to date.
Ridiculous.
I like turtles.
I like turtles.
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
~Jane Wagner
Your internets had a deep inner need to complain.
>>115
Perhaps you're just a complete moron.
I blame Parkinsons.
It's easier to learn a language that shares more in common with a language you already know. This includes vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonology. For example, English borrows a wealth of words from French and Latin, which makes picking up the vocabulary faster. English and French also have both become less inflected and more isolating over time (that is, word order and linking words like prepositions and auxiliary verbs do more to determine syntax than various inflections of verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives do).Mandarin Chinese is an isolating language like English (even more so, actually); but the writing system, lexicon, and phonology are all grossly different.
Other factors are motivational: psychological and sociological. For example, you may be more interested in learning Russian because of romantic notions of old Czarist Russia or the Soviet Union, or you may simply enjoy Russian literature. On the other hand, an immigrant coming to the United States experiences considerable sociological pressure to learn English (employment, fewer xenophobic responses, etc.).
the navajo language is the hardest to learn i know that for sure
Aleut and some Papuan dialects are supposed to be miserably difficult.
I'm learning Russian (7th language up to now) and it's freakingly difficult. The writing more than the speaking though...
I think the easiest language to learn would be Hindi. I understand about 60% of the language, all learned watching Bollywood movies. Never picked up a book about it, seriously. And I don't even count this as a language I know, because i haven't learned to write it yet. Maybe next year.
Thai, I've been told, is remarkably simple.
There's not much to learn about Lojban, and if you're already at least a little familiar with modern programming languages (like Javascript), you can pick it up. There's a huge lack of learning materials for non-nerds, though.
As for understanding it; well, that's another matter. Take for example, the sentence:
.i lo broda cu me ko'a.o'onai co brode.pe'a ko'e
It takes some getting used to. Even after you've learned the grammar, you might want to tell the other speaker to
.i ko jabre lonu tavla
which means "Speak slower."
Keep in mind the method of teaching is most important.
My 8+ years of French in the Canadian school system taught me almost nothing. However, after one summer of self study and four months in Quebec, I could speak and understand French fluently and a friend told me that my French accent was indistinguishable from a native speaker's.
Also, some aspects of languages come easier for some.
For me, tonal languages are extremely difficult, but I have no problem with a new alphabet (Cyrillic fluency took one week). Also, memorizing noun genders comes easily, but I have some trouble with tenses and cases (Finnish rage).
>>Thai, I've been told, is remarkably simple
I don't know about "remarkably" simple, but it shares a lot of the characteristics that make it easy to pick up the basics of many Asian languages. It's an almost-entirely isolating language, so you don't need to change word forms to conjugate or decline words. And the syntax, once you get the patterns, is pretty straightforward. Also, like most Asian languages, there are no genders, no articles, etc.
With that said, it also has its challenging aspects. There are five tones--intone the word "five" wrong and it's an obscenity; intone the word "near" wrong and it means "far." Also, it has some vowels that European-language speakers have a hard time pronouncing correctly, as well as a few tricky consonants (syllable-initial /ng/, a crucial differentiation between voiceless aspirated and non-aspirated consonants--/k/ vs. /kh/ that a lot of people can't hear, etc.) My family lived in Thailand for a while when I was in high school, and my parents didn't have an ear for the language--they learned a lot of words and basic grammar, but nobody could understand them. I, on the other hand, picked it up quite readily.
The orthography's tough for a lot of people, too--it's an elaborate (60+ letters) and not-entirely-phonetic writing system, and written Thai doesn't use punctuation or put spaces between words--it can be hard if you're trying to look up unfamiliar words to know where they begin and end. As a result, I know many foreigners who've lived in Thailand for years without learning to read or write. It took me several years of fairly dedicated study to be able to read comfortably, and my handwriting looks like a child's.
Oh, and finally, as with all languages, there are many syntactic and stylistic nuances and idioms that may take years to master. So while it's pretty easy to learn to make basic conversation if you've got a good ear for tones and unfamiliar sounds, true mastery takes a long time. Which is true of all languages, of course, and which is why this thread is basically meaningless.
>>Mandarin Chinese is an isolating language like English
I'm not sure where you got this definition, but English is in no way an isolating language--of course, definitions vary, but no language with prefixes or suffixes of any sort (including plural markers, and most compound words) is considered isolating. Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, it just sprung to mind since I was writing about isolating languages just one post ago.
>>75
It's also been demonstrated that babies learn signed languages more readily than spoken languages.
interesting!