Re: Rating Languages
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 25, 2001, 0:54 |
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On Mon, 24 Sep 2001 13:15:30 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>Among the languages I've tried to learn, until now the most difficult was
>Arabic, because of it throat-cutting phonology. Nevertheless, I found the
>grammar and the syntax quite easy. Even the so-called "broken" plurals were not
>much more difficult than the irregular preterites of English.
...
>Until now, the only language that resisted even an approach from me was Hindi,
>and it's the alphabet that put me off. Devanagari is beautiful, but I cannot
>recognize a single letter out of it, how hard I try to. Even the Arabic script
>is simpler for me (and I'm not talking about the Armenian alphabet which looks
>to me like a single letter repeated X times). Maybe if I could learn it in
>transcription I would discover that it's not that difficult.
Hmm... the Arabic alphabet is one I've never really learned to read well:
too many of the letters are similar (especially ghayn and fa, in the middle
of a word), and the small print in some of the books I've tried to use
doesn't help. I haven't even tried learning to read Arabic text without
vowels. But I didn't have as much trouble with Devanagari.
It'd be interesting to put together a list of the features of various
languages that are considered difficult (at least to English speakers).
Here's a few examples I can think of (not all of these are languages I've
actually tried to learn, but at least ones I know something about -- and
it's nowhere near a complete list of "difficult" features, just a few that
come to mind).
Ancient Greek: verb conjugations.
Arabic: tricky alphabet, short vowels unwritten, emphatic consonants.
Chinese: writing system, tones.
Finnish: noun declension, consonant gradation.
Georgian: consonant clusters.
Irish: spelling, initial consonant mutation.
Japanese: writing system, levels of politeness, syntax.
Korean: "tense" consonants.
Russian: palatalized consonants, perfective vs. imperfective verb stems.
Thai: no spaces between words, complicated spelling of tones.
Tibetan: spelling.
Vietnamese: unfamiliar vowels, tones.
Zulu: clicks.
--
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