Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 01:04:04PM -0700, Philippe Caquant wrote:
> But Russian is definitively harder than German, for
> English people just like for French, I guess, this
> mainly because of the aspects. French, German and
> English have no real aspects, anyway, nothing like the
> Russian ones.
Ah, but English has aspect aplenty.  It's confused with
tense in the grammatical descriptions, but it's
there nevertheless in all the compound tenses.
I was going vs. I went vs. I have gone vs.
I was going to go . . .

> Compared with this, alphabet is relatively anecdotical.
I think you mean "incidental".  And I respectfully disagree - learning
to read and write French, German, Spanish, etc. is made vastly easier
for someone otherwise literate only in English by the fact that they
share the same alphabet.  Sure, there are extra squiggly bits here and
there, but it's fundamentally the same, whereas Russian is a whole
nother matter.  There are all sorts of new, subtle distinctions between
letters to learn, especially in cursive (which we were required to use
at all times in class; I don't know what the actual patterns of use for
cursive vs. print are like in Russia) - who would have thought that a
lowercase T would look it should be a lowercase M, or that a lowercase M
would look like it should be a lowercase U, etc?  I don't think
it's incidental at all.  Unless, of course, your goal is strictly
oral proficiency and you don't care about reading and writing.


-Mark

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