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Re: New to the list

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 11, 2000, 0:49
On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Patrick Jarrett wrote:

> Okay okay, I sit corrected. It is a natural language, but from my experience > in Latin speaking the language is very tedious, and I wish my language to be > more fluent, easily spoken.
IMHO "easily spoken" depends on what language you come from! Since English has lost most of its cases (pedants like me who use "whom," things like "whose," etc. remain), English speakers may find case language problematic. But I bet people used to free word order and cases find more analytic languages with their tiresome word-order rules a pain to learn. If you don't like cases, sure! But when you say "easily spoken" I have to wonder: easily spoken by *whom*? From my experience with working with foreign-language native speakers at Cornell's Writing Walk-in Service, "easy" and "hard" are very relative terms when it comes to language. Some generalization-examples: Most Asian language speakers find the English article system nigh-impossible to learn perfectly. I've been able to give them rules-of-thumb (in half-hour sessions) that let them use it correctly some 80% of the time, but that last 20% is the killer. And yet native English speakers may make any number of "mistakes" (depending on how prescriptive your grammar is) but they rarely make the kinds of article-use errors that these foreign speakers do. Chinese-native speakers seem to have trouble with various verb conjugations, aspects, what-have-you when they're starting out. I've known English speakers to run into real trouble with the topic vs. subject particles in Korean. I'm betting the same happens with English speakers learning Japanese. I'm sure examples could go on and on. So the question is, again: for *whom* is your language supposed to be easy? YHL