What kinds of things do you think make a language difficult to learn (or even to speak)?

My mother tongue is English; I learned Irish in school between the ages of 12 and 17, and I'm currently learning Lao (I've been immersed in it for four weeks now and I've started getting one-hour-long one-on-one lessons every day with a native Lao man who has pretty good English).

I've no conscious memory of learning English so I can't really comment too strongly on how easy or hard it is to learn, but when I take a look over books for learning English I can see how a lot of things can be difficult. For instance we make the past tense by sticking "ed" onto the end of a verb, but then we have bucket-loads of verbs that do their own thing "fly, flew, flown". Also think about how we make the negative of adjectives "unfair" "disrespectful" "impolite". Also we have the confusion of there/they're/their, not to mention all the contractions that leave us with "'s".

Now it's easy to say that you can say "I flied" instead of "I flew" and everyone will still understand you, but the problem arises for the listener when he hears "flew" and he hasn't a clue what the word is (even though he already learned the word "fly"). When speaking English over here I regularly say stuff like "I go to shop yesterday" because I know they might be confused if they hear "went". I even use "no" instead of "not", e.g. "I no go shop yesterday".

The language I'm learning at the moment is very different to the two languages I've previously been exposed to. If you take a look at Irish grammar for instance, it's as if somebody actually sat down and said I'm gonna make this language as elaborate and difficult to get a handle on as possible. For instance let's say somebody learns the word "fiach" but then later hears somebody say "fhéich"... they won't have a clue what word they've just heard! And I'm not just talking about irregular nouns in Irish either, I'm talking about a couple of hundred (if not thousand) of perfectly regular words that change their sound altogether leaving them sounding nothing like the original form of the word. And then you have verb conjugations... and don't forget the contracted prepositions "ag + mé = agam".

The Lao language is, in a word, simple. By "simple", I don't mean primitive or unexpressive; I simply mean simple. Efficient even. Words don't change, ever. If you know that the word for "water" is "nam", then you'll never hear it spoken any differently regardless of the context.

Even the pronouns are shockingly regular over here. Both "me" and "I" translate as "koy". Both "he" and "him" translate as "lao". There's no different forms for subject and object. When you want the plural of a pronoun, just stick "puak" in front of the singular form. "We" and "us" both translate as "puak koy". There's no complicated verb conjugations either, you just stick a single syllable before the verb to express tense. Go = bye. Went = die bye. Will go = ja bye. It's as if they sat down to a table and said we're gonna make this language as straight-forward and uncomplicated as possible without any extraneous superfluous flowery bullshit.

In English, you can have a word like "finance" that's not made up of smaller words that explain the idea. In Lao however, you can be sure that any "big word" will be made up of smaller words that explain it, and the same goes for small words. For instance, the word for "ice" is "tablet of water" (think of the tablets that Moses wrote on). The word for lavatory is "water room".

Of what I've seen of the Lao language so far, I've haven't seen any unnecessary complication. For instance, in English, you have "he walked slowly". "slow" turned into "slowly" but there was no real need for that to happen. Similary in Irish, you have "cuid" turning into "coda" in some places. I haven't seen anything like that in the Lao language.

From my experience so far, I think the hardest thing you face when learning a language is words changing. For instance you can learn that the word for man is "fear" but then you won't have a clue what's going on when you hear "fhir". Same goes for "go" and "went".

Another interesting topic is how quickly an infant will be able to pick up the language and communicate. I wonder how a child actually makes the connection between chuaigh, téann, rachaidh, théadh, rachfá, théidis. Surely it would take them much longer to solve that puzzle than it would to work out bye, die bye, ja bye?

I hear that the most elaborate language, in terms of unnecessary complication, is Icelandic. I wonder if, as a result of this, Icelandic children take longer to start communicating proficiently... or even if it leads to them being a little bit more intelligent because their brain is working overtime at such a young age???

I haven't seen Jonas post here in a while. Last I heard, he could speak in the region of ten languages. I'd be interested to hear what he finds difficult in learning a language. (Give us a shout Jonas if you're still around :-D )

Everyone please feel free to throw in comments and share your experience on learning languages (including Irish!)

All the bar staff at a local pub here had a great laugh at my expense when I inadvertently asked for "breast milk" the other night. (Bottled water = nam dum. Breast milk = nam num). :-D

I politely asked a room full of people for group sex one time...

Bearn, what does that got to do with this, it don't contribute to anything...

Tuigim do Bhearn a Thrigger. Tharla tuaiplis chainte dó i dteanga éigin eile.

An-an-spéisiúil a Thomáis, grma. Is léir gur tháinig tú ar theanga atá iontach furasta a fhoghlaim. Go n-éirí sí leat.

Má thosaíonn tú ag scríobh corrfhocail de chuid na Laobhaise anseo taobh lena leathbhreac Gaeilge, beidh daoine in ann cuairt a thabhairt ar an suíomh abhus amach anseo le roinnt Laobhaise a fhoghlaim trína gcuid Gaeilge. Cá bhfios.

Coinnigh scéala linn ar aon chaoi.

I would have thought that any language is easy to learn from birth. Especially with total immersion in it. Even Icelandic.

I mean, here in Korea, one Sunday morning, my Korean friend and I were in one of the Kim Bab noré shops that you see everywhere here, and I was recounting something in a language class of mine. Given the tendency to run things together, I mispronounced a phrase, and in the context of telling him about it, started to sing the phrase aloud. He started to laugh, and explained. I'll ask him what it was and post it in Hangeul as an example

quote:

From my experience so far, I think the hardest thing you face when learning a language is words changing.

I think the hardest things is the words, full stop. Think of how many hundreds of distinct lexemes you need for even the most simple communication. A reasonably educated speaker will know many, many times that number--and that's before we even get into fixed phrases and idioms! I have a reasonably sizable vocabulary in German, but I'm always concerned that I'm combining the words in such a way that makes me sound ignorant.

As you say, a Thomáis, everyone will still understand you if you say "I flied" instead of "I flew". They'll also likely understand "I fled off the handle" in the place of "I flew off the handle". But by the time you get to "Go let a dragon climb!" you've completely lost them. The more I learn of any given language, the more I realise how much everyday communication consists of certain fixed phrases and consecrated expressions. Mastering even a small number of these is a task that makes learning a few noun declensions child's play.

The case in point is my experience with Chinese. Talk about a language where you can know every single word in a sentence and still not have a clue what it says! If you were right about inflections being the hardest thing to master when learning a language, then Chinese (where every word is essentially invariable) should be the easiest language in the world to learn. How many people do you know who would agree with that statement?

Ah, I remember -the kids in one class had this slang term, maybe they coined it themselves, pronounced as if in Irish as 'geo'. (It means kind of like 'you're a bit geo' (wonky if I must be polite). Now, adults I think can't pronounce an inital g in this position, why the kids are doing it, I dunno, but anyway, I was relating how 'cool' I was (with tongue in cheek) by having written up on the board, to riotous laughs)

At this point in the eatery, I stated to call out what I thought was 'ná naon/nun geo imnika', as part of the story, and being a bit rude, asked an 'ahjumah' thinking she would not get it, but forgot the subject marker and coalesced it to 'nahn geo imnika', to more laughs...

[Sorry have not hangeul-mal keys on my keyboard]

(Message edited by Bearn on October 01, 2008)

As regards non-native speakers learning a language it goes without saying - and nevertheless, it should not be forgotton - that the open-minded, multi-lingual enthusiast with a cultivated sense of curiosity is a completely different kettle-of-fish from an unmotivated second-level monoligual student.

A multilingual Dutch person will find German easier than a monolingual French person.

So it depends too on what language base you're coming from and where you're heading for.

A Sheáin, tá do thuairisc an-shuimiúil.

OK, gotta chime in.

Maybe one thing that can make Finno-Ugric languages difficult, is the agglutination - when you add suffix after suffix to a word, need to maintain the right sequence, and may even need to conjugate not only the word but some or all of the consecutive suffixes.

In Finnish, the word roots often aren't changed a lot in conjgation, and luckily we are saved from initial mutations... Our most irregular verb (and word for that matter) is "olla" (to be) and it varies a lot with the case it is put in. Other than that, I can't readily remember a case where a conjugated word doesn't resemble the root much, but with Irish, for example, you will rather early run into words that behave like this.

I'm a native and fluent Finnish speaker, but the part that may befall me especially in speech, are some heavily agglutinated words. In simple sentences, our word order is rather logical to English speakers, as well as speakers of some African languages.

Then the language is also prone to redundancy when holding up to official grammar. "You are my destiny" translates word-to-word into "Sinä olet minun kohtaloni", but "Olet kohtaloni" will communicate the same meaning.

Boy do I know many Finns who have problems writing or speaking logically formed sentences, understanding written or heard language, etc... and they too have been involved with the language from birth. So it may well be a difficult language. Go figure.

English has been the most logical foreign language to me after some initial problems. Some of the few words and phrases I have learned in Irish, appear to have a very Finnish logic behind them. Perhaps every language is logical after you figure out the logic.

quote:

Perhaps every language is logical after you figure out the logic.

I think that's very true and it's one of the reasons I find vocabulary a far greater challenge than morphology or even syntax. Sure, there are patterns to all these aspects, but there are only a finite number of ways to organise a sentence whereas there's simply no limit to number of possible words and phrases.

We have a tendency to still think in terms of our native language, even after much study of a second language, and so when there are mechanical elements of the language that do not have corresponding mechanisms in our own (like initial mutation for english speakers) we find it "hard" and "confusing."

We are asking our brain to perform an extra analytical step before we utter a sentence we've constructed.

In a "properly learned" native language, all of those rules become part of our way of thought, and we follow them (for the most part) without thinking about them or manually running through a checklist.

But there are things like rules alien to our own language, use of prepositions (why we speak "faoi rud" in Irish and not "timpeall rud"), and idiomatic expressions that can only be acquired (not just "learned") through immersion and extensive reading...two things that get lost in the shuffle (in any practical way ) in all US foreign language study, and, I suspect, Irish Gaeilge-as-second-language study.

Vocabulary can be learned with flash cards and reading...simple memorization of lists, if you want to get "old skool"...but grammar, in order to be useful when speaking, needs to be completely internalized and transcend being a collection of rules and simply become the natural way a speaker thinks in that language.

I once heard someone at one of the daltaí weekends tell me that she struggled for years to understand the gender rules and how to decline the nouns. She never did get it from study, but something just "clicked" and now the right form just pops into her head when she needs it. She was amazed, but I knew exactly what was going on. Although she never "learned" the rules for that, she "acquired" them and now (at least as far as gender and declension are concerned) has an understanding more approximate to that of a native speaker - who also probably couldn't tell you "why" they do it the way they do...

quote:

Vocabulary can be learned with flash cards and reading...simple memorization of lists, if you want to get "old skool"

Oh, I disagree--the counterevidence is right there in your post where you point out that Irish requires faoi rud and not timpeall ruda. The latter is exactly the kind of mistake you'd expect from someone who memorised "timpeall" from a flashcard with "about" written on the back.

My father told me that, when he was younger, he thought learning a language like Spanish was simply a matter of learning the Spanish word for everything. It was only when he actually tried to learn Spanish that he realised what a misconception this is. The problem isn't just the grammar, but the fact that you can't make one-to-one equivalences between lexemes in different languages. Prepositions like faoi and timpeall are one example, but this really applies to everything.

Say you want to learn how to say "to know" in Irish. What do you put on the back of your flashcard? How about "can" or "time" or "two"? Even the seemingly simple case of a concrete noun like madra is not without its complications (and I'm not even referring to dialectal variance). Knowing madra and uisce won't prepare you for the fact that a madra uisce is an otter, not a water dog. And who would guess from knowing the meaning of the word bán that madraí bána are what beekeepers call bee larvae? (Also called bráithre bána. Bet you didn't see that coming either!)

Then there are all the metaphorical compounds like madra draoibe or madra gaoithe and expressions like tá an madra marbh or madraí a chur i bhfuinneoga. Every one of these has to be memorised individually--even with a perfect knowledge of the grammar and all the words, how likely would you be to guess their meaning? This is what still bedevils me, long after I've mastered the morphosyntax and lexicon of a foreign language. Heck, every now and then I still come across words and expressions in my native language that I've never heard before and can't make heads or tails of!

"Yrittänyttä ei laiteta" - literally "that who tried won't be put". Even most Finns don't really know what this old saying means, yet they use it often. But it probably means something along the lines of "that who tries is not to be blamed".

"not timpeall ruda. The latter is exactly the kind of mistake you'd expect from someone who memorised "timpeall" from a flashcard with "about" written on the back"

He did not say that was correct; in fact he used it deliberately to highlight what he was explaining -the idiomatic use of 'faoi'. He have contrasted 'i do thaobh' and how that could be confused too

Phrases are important too, or so i find. For example:
"Shíl mé /go raibh sé /déanta /agat /le fada" can be made into many other sentences by modifying the parts of speech:
Ceapaim /go bhfuil /le tosú /aige /anois
Beidh sé /críochnaithe /agam /amáireach

I agree that words are not everything -maybe it is a sort of conceptual laziness that makes people think it is, or some sort of general conception that deludes people into thinking they are talking about material things all the time, when in fact they are speaking about actions, states, beliefs, and desires. Perhaps that is why Buntús Cainte is so useful -there is a comparative paucity of nouns, but a great deal of adverbs and interjections, which extend ones expressiveness and are easy to learn.

Another problem I find with English books here, and Irish books, it that the real structures of usage are so often ignored. Here is a quote from MacGinley in his 1902 book:

"In taking down Series in Donegal I found great difficulty in getting them in the first person singular, which seems to be little used ; while the speakers generally dropped into the conditional mood if allowed to do so"
Since the conditional is used so much (and definitely in questions) why is it so under used in teaching materials? You could be forgiven for thinking that tense, mood, the conditional and aspect were the same in both English and Irish

Yes, my point was simply that vocabulary is not the most difficult part...in fact it may be the easiest.

Internalizing the rules (and idiom) that enable you to use that vocabulary correctly is a different matter altogether.

Vocabulary can be memorized, but rules cannot in any way practical for conversational use.

I'm afraid I don't follow you, Antaine. How is memorising "This is when I use fios and this is when I use eolas" any easier than remembering "This is when I lenite and this is when I don't"?

One thing I'll never do again is learn a language outside of where it's spoken because it just leads to a very mechanical process.

Because I'm here in Lao surrounded by people speaking the language, I can listen to the phrases they use, I can hear the pronunciation. When I'm chatting with them, I can hear the kind of acknowledgements they use.

Take the English saying, "it doesn't work". You might bring your motorbike to the mechanic and say "the lights don't work". I know the Lao verb for "work", so at first I was using it to say "the lights don't work". It turns out, however, that they say it in a totally different way. They say "baw die", which translates word-for-word as "can not".

Another thing I was doing was translating "I'll see you later" literally using the verb I know for "see". I was getting strange kinds of looks though when I said this because they have a totally different way of saying "see ya later".

I can speak Irish fairly decently but as I'm speaking I tend to second-guess whether my speech is natural-sounding because I've never been immersed in the language.

From now on I'm not even going to pick up a language book unless I'm located where it's spoken.

Another thing, a Thomáis, is that learning with a personal tutor or in contexts where you see it working, is that one is primed before seeing it already, and is not shocked by the form it takes so much, (changes in grammar or pronunciation).

What I've done here is to simply memorize (like the Koreans) an English book into Korean, line by line. Dunno if it is the best way tho

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, Antaine. How is memorising "This is when I use fios and this is when I use eolas" any easier than remembering "This is when I lenite and this is when I don't"?"



You can always find words that may be tricky in their usage, but I still say that even they are easier if you can draw parallels in your native tongue. I would say that a beginner would do well to tell himself that eolas is nonspecific knowledge while fios is specific knowledge...in the same way that we avoid confusion by labeling aithne as "acquaintance" in our heads and would rarely if ever get aithne confused with fios.

But that actually goes some way toward proving my point. You can easily memorize that both eolas and fios mean "knowledge" (off a word list or flashcard)...but the nuance of when to use it might fall under the umbrella of idiom (or perhaps I'm just using too broad a definition of "idiom"). Read the newspaper long enough and you will natrually begin to distinguish the difference.

Memorizing words with definitions is the easy part, grammar and idiom (nuance) have to be internalized in order to be effective, not simply "learned."

In my opinion learning a language should be more about practising than learning!

A Antaine,

We seem to be talking about the same thing just in different ways. "Idiom", to me, has a more specific definition than the one you're using. (For a look at this definition, complete with examples, see: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIdiom.htm.) In short, it is an expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its constituent parts. In my post above, tá an madra marbh and madraí a chur i bhfuinneoga are idioms.

The use of fios and eolas (and aithne) is not a matter of "idiom" in this sense; it's part of the fundamental meaning of the word fios that it's used for certain times of knowledge and not others (just as it's part of the meaning of "knowledge" that it is used to refer to some types of information and not others). An idiom would be a case like Ag Dia atá a fhios! or Who knows?. The first is not a statement of fact and the second is not an honest inquiry; both clauses have meanings which are rather divorced from what a literal parsing would suggest.

Read the newspaper long enough and you will natrually begin to distinguish the difference.

Again, you make my point for me: One doesn't learn the meaning of these words from reading them off a card and all a dictionary definition gives you is a fuzzy idea of how they map to concepts which you've already learned. The actual process of learning the meaning of the words is gradual and painstaking (and perhaps even open-ended, since words are constantly shifting in meaning even during our lifetimes).

I can't recommend enough reading the work of cognitive linguists like Eleanor Rosch, George Lakoff, and Gilles Fauconnier. One of the key insights of the field is that our word-related knowledge is encyclopedic. To understand the usage of madra, it's not enough to know that it has the core meaning of "a quadruped of the genus Canis" (in the words of the OED). You need to know all about its physical and behavioural properties, about how humans interact with these creatures and what they represent in their fables and tales. It's the only way to comprehend the panoply of metaphorical references and extensions that are intrinsic to competency in any language.

quote:

In my opinion learning a language should be more about practising than learning!

Déscaradh bréige is ea san!

The run-of-the-mill native speaker of a language uses a combination of shorter, "simpler" words to express something instead of the longer, more academic dictionary counterpart and that's the part the learner has little or no chance of absorbing unless immersed in the language.


For example, a focal ar fhocal consultation of a German dictionary will not reveal this one:
"Ich kann es nicht ab, wenn man nicht die Kirche im Dorf lässt."

And I remain of the opinion that morphology is a serious hindrance in the initial stages of learning a language when too much discouragement can be lethal.

When a learner encounters the word "small", it's a case of "if you know one small, you know them all". When a learner encounters "beag"...he then has to make his acquaintance with bheag, beaga, bheaga, bhig etc.

It does make a difference.

(Message edited by ormondo on October 03, 2008)

Es fällt kein Meister vom Himmel....

...agus scoth na Gaeilge ach oiread.

Agus mar a dúirt Euklid fadó: Ní théann bóthar na Gaeilge le fána an chnoic. (Es gibt keinen Königsweg zur Mathematik.)

Agus mar a deir an fear sa ghiom atá ag pumpáil iarainn (qui fait de la gonflette ~ que hace pesas), "no strain, no gain".

Pronunciation and practice speaking conversationally are the hardest things for me in learning a language.

Mé féin amháin - is féidir liom foghlaim; is féidir liom léamh; is féidir liom scríobh; ach, ní féidir liom caint i nGaeilge

unless I have someone (or something like Rosetta Stone) to talk with and practice having conversations. It really helps if that someone knows what they are saying and how to spronounce what they are saying.

I think a good way to partially compensate for our lack of immersion is to listen to RnaG.

But how do you get up to speed as regards simultaneous comprehension? How do you get that very important first foothold on the territory of the natively spoken language?

Recently I sent an email to RnaG requesting them to provide transcipts to one or two editions of the news during the week. That would be good for a start.

"Molaim na podchraoltaí go háirithe, nithe a chuireann ar mo chumas na cláir a chloisteáil ar mo sheinnteoir MP3...

Agus is é mar gheall ar na podchraoltaí úd go bhfuil iarratas - nó moladh - agam le chur faoi bhur mbráid. An bhféadfaí - uair amháin nó dhó sa seachtain b'fhéidir - an leagan scríofa den feasachán de chuid “Nuacht a hAon“, nó cuid mhaith de ar a laghad, a chur ar fáil mar chomhad PDF ar an idirlíon? Más féidir le gluais."

Even better, and more encouraging for learners encountering an chaint ó dhúchas for the first time, would be something similar to An litir bheag le Ruairidh MacIlleathain on BBC Alba http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/alba/foghlam/learngaelic/an_litir_bheag/index.shtm l which provides, on a weekly basis, speech and a transcript thereof with a glossary and explanations. The content of the subject matter is interesting and An litir bheag caters to two levels.

Does anyone know whether there is anything similar available in Irish, apart from http://www.rte.ie/nuacht/?