Re: New to the list

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