Content for a new site- language profiles, etc.

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
Cavesa
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Aug 03, 2015 5:35 pm

"more and less difficult that English", that sounds theoretically nice but I'd say it is very subjective, especially when it comes to languages from different families. And I'm not sure it is even possible to establish. Natives cannot, in my opinion, compare difficulty of other langauges to their own and others are heavily influenced by other things than just difficulty. English is supported by an ocean of media and learning sources that make some aspects easier than they trully are and don't forget the influence of pro-English propaganda in the langauge teaching industry and education politics all over the world.
Vast majority of sources anywhere will preach French being much more difficult than English but I think the opposite is true, that's just an example. English is better supported and has PR noone else can dream of, that is all.
I don't think it is a bad idea, not at all, just something impossible to reach any kind of reasonable concensus in.

As well difficulty for a native English speaker is found everywhere.Perhaps we could have a base good enough to compare a bit differently. To put together a difficulty rating for natives of at least the most represented languages/groups of langauges among the userbase. Most difficult languages for English speakers, German speakers, Romance speakers, Slavic speakers, Scandinavian speakers, etc. Do you think we could do that? This is something most sources do not cover at all. Those who address the issue usually don't give it much thought.
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby iguanamon » Mon Aug 03, 2015 6:49 pm

I also like rdearman's ideas for interviews with people about language learning- written and/or voice.
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Hrhenry » Mon Aug 03, 2015 7:15 pm

I don't know that I'd even bother to list difficulty. What I'd love to see, but would probably be more time-consuming, is a comparison listing similarities with such-and-such language(s). That may be overly involved, though. Even so, with the number of times "What language should I study next?" comes up, it would be a great starting point.

R.
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Cavesa
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Aug 03, 2015 7:27 pm

Yes! I thought about it but didn't find the right words to describe the idea, thank you for them.

I think we could do with something like the tables of similarity % on the old htlal but perhaps somehow better. A table or a map of languages showing hot distant they are from each other from a learner's point of view, whether they are totally grammatically different, the vocabulary overlap, cultural overlap. It would be much harder to put together than just copy the fsi grading. But it might be a really nice lead.
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Chung » Mon Aug 03, 2015 9:31 pm

Hrhenry wrote:I don't know that I'd even bother to list difficulty. What I'd love to see, but would probably be more time-consuming, is a comparison listing similarities with such-and-such language(s). That may be overly involved, though. Even so, with the number of times "What language should I study next?" comes up, it would be a great starting point.

R.
==


Take it from me: this kind of endeavour, while the result can be fascinating to read (and compile), is indeed involved. The necessary fact-checking and distilation comes from a willingness to pore through some fairly technical manuals on the languages / language families involved to verify assertions. In addition, such comparative analyses for the forum must be presented so that someone without a linguistics' background can grasp them. For example I don't see the point in expounding on the Slavonic second palatalization unless I can bring up examples from a few Slavonic languages, living and dead, and show to the modern some "trick" to link say a Russian consonant to a Polish one. Because I don't have especially high competence in any language other than English and French, I spend a lot of time doing research and make sure that I understand what I glean from research before putting it out there lest my observation or attempt at showing a pattern be invalidated. Putting together the group profiles was especially time-consuming.

1e4e6 wrote:This is absolutely true, if one wants to give a profile of a language, it should be done without bias (in terms of L1), saying like "Russian, Czech, German, Icelandic is difficult...for an Anglophone...because it has cases" not only 1) makes no sense to someone whose L1 is not English, but 2) is stating diffuculty based on how that particular Anglophone feels that cases are hard. Hell if I know why, but I found Mandarin characters to be on the same difficulty of determining whether to use "saber" or "conocer" or using the pretérito indefinido or the imperfecto de indicativo in Spanish, pronouncing French nasal sounds, and in general French lifted itself higher than Mandarin in terms of difficulty for me. Why this happened I do not know, but that is just how my brain works. But if a language description just says, "German/Russian/Czech/Icelandic is difficult because of cases" does not take into account that a Russian or Czech speaker already knows how cases work and the concept is usually not foreign if they learn German. I am sure that a Cantonese speaker finds French a bit quite different compared to Mandarin, Shanghainese, or Toisanese compared to an Anglophone, or a Lusophone finds Spanish a bit more similar than it is for an Anglophone.

English is such a mixed up language, that if they wanted to take the attitude of (unfortunately) many of my fellow countrypeople (actually more precise would be my fellow L1-people), every other language is hard because it is not like English in many ways. Spanish is "hard" because so many tenses, French "hard" because of the sounds, Russian "hard" because of the alphabet, Czech "hard" because of the consontants, actually a lot of native Anglophones say that Dutch is hard as hell, yet it is the major language closest to English. So if close languages in the same family are hard, then the whole damn classification is skewed up.

English always has enough breadth, this main forum is already in English, just like the last one, and Anglophones basically control (or more like try to) the world in terms of language trying to demand everything in English. I am sure that many non-native Anglophones are tired of this, and not to mention, how silly I find it that the EU, which only have 2 native Anglophone members, the UK and the Republic of Ireland, choose to try to do a lot of things in English when literally no country on the Continent speaks it natively. Gibraltar are just a British colony (oops, "British Overseas Territory"), and the Republic of Ireland have used English with the EU and business even though they are officially bilingual with Irish. Not to mention the irony, that the UK being the most influential Anglophone country in Europe, so many things in the EU are in English, but the UK just announced a few months ago a referendum to leave the EU, because many for some reason do not feel like the UK are part of Europe! Yet English is "so" important yet one wants to "Brexit"...

As not many native Anglophones seem to complain about their languge having enough spread, I as a native Anglophone would like to voice my concern. Everything is catered to us Anglophones (meaning catered to me), and everyone tries to form a description based on we Anglophones (like me). This is more "convenient" to some Anglophones, but I really do not like it. I would prefer what could be called "L1-neutral" descriptions of language, how about its grammatical description like how they conjugate if they do, consontants and dipththongs and vowels, list of countries who speak it with their populations, how the writing system works, a culture insight and history, maybe a few sound samples, perhaps a link to a log of someone who learnt it to a high level or is in the process, and written by a native speaker. That way everyone has an overview regardless of their L1, especially if for example, a native Dutch speaker writes the profile for Dutch and same for other languages. They can also continually update the profile with some new grammar point, official spelling change (like RAE for Spanish) or an article about how more people are learning it (Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin).


I tried to get the discussion "Cacti from non-native speakers of English" for languages perceived as difficult by native speakers of languages other than English, but it didn't really get off the ground as I had hoped. I guess that now is as good as time as any to resurrect it here or continue the discussion on the old forum.
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Serpent » Mon Aug 03, 2015 9:42 pm

As I said over there, the Slavic cases don't help much with German or Icelandic. Of course it's good that I know how they work, but you still need to learn the actual endings. At least the ones in other Slavic languages are similar, and the Latin ones have some principles in common too.
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Cavesa
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Aug 03, 2015 10:27 pm

Well, the endings are different but the logic is similar. I do not struggle that much with remembering a few endings, what is the challenge for me is placing the correctly in sentences and combination of the logic of Czech+Latin has been a very good lead so far. Not absolutely reliable, but still often perfect. It might be different for other slavic languages or just other learners though, I am curious whether the Russian cases won't torture me more than I expect.

I think a good parameter might as well be pronunciation. Today, I realized something. Many exchange students ask for a few Czech words in a conversation (usually things like thank you, good morning, blood sample, beer,etc. You get the idea). And usually German, Hebrew and Arabic natives pronounce the words much better after a few tries than natives of other languages, including some slavic ones. That might be a good thing to ponder as well. I have found Czech to be a great pronunciation starting point especially for Spanish and German, I suppose we might get more such (perhaps unexpected) combinations.
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby arthaey » Sun Aug 30, 2015 4:41 am

I'm really looking forward to this community putting together in one place suggested resources by language. I'm hoping we'll have something together by January, when my sister and I start studying French from scratch together! :)
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby astromule » Sun Aug 30, 2015 5:04 am

Perhaps this is too much http://japaneselevelup.com/japanese-quest-walkthrough/, but I'd also like to have "everything in one place". Although I think we should be synthetic, to avoid scaring people away. For example, for Swedish I'd mention Pimsleur, FSI, Assimil; a few series; a few books; the Routledge Grammar and Lexin (online dictionary). That would give a general overview without overwhelming the reader. We could also measure its "hardness" according to the Foreign Service, add similar or related languages and we could also put a phrase such as "what language do you want to learn?", then select a flag, then the resources.

arthaey wrote:I'm really looking forward to this community putting together in one place suggested resources by language. I'm hoping we'll have something together by January, when my sister and I start studying French from scratch together! :)
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Re: Content for a new site- language profiles, etc. formerly Language profiles- Why reinvent the wheel?

Postby arthaey » Sun Aug 30, 2015 5:35 am

astromule wrote:I'd also like to have "everything in one place". Although I think we should be synthetic, to avoid scaring people away. For example, for Swedish I'd mention Pimsleur, FSI, Assimil; a few series; a few books; the Routledge Grammar and Lexin (online dictionary). That would give a general overview without overwhelming the reader.

I'd like to see both a newbie-friendly list and a comprehensive collection of what folks here have recommended.
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