Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

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Dtmont
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Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby Dtmont » Wed May 26, 2021 1:23 am

In your mind what languages require the least amount of grammar study for English speakers. Languages where the majority of study will be focused on vocabulary and not grammar. In my opinion are the following languages: Indonesian/Malay,Norwegian/North Germanic languages,Afrikaans,Turkish/Turkic languages,Creole languages(Papiamento,Hatian Creole),Swahili,Spanish. Listed are languages closely related to English(Norwegian,Afrikaans),languages with grammar that English speakers would find simple(Indonesian/Creole languages),and languages that English speakers would find grammatically regular(Turkish,Swahili,Spanish). Do you agree? What languages would you add or change? Not included are languages that are grammatically simple or logical but have aspects that take a long time of mastery like Chinese and Japanese. Also languages that are wrongly considered to have very few exceptions Finnish,Hungarian(especially when compared to Turkish),German(I have no idea why it has picked up the reputation of being logical.)

*My definition of "logical" in this case is a set of patterns that follow set rules with few exceptions as according to an English speakers point of view.Depending on ones native language what one considers logical will change.
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sherbert
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Re: Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby sherbert » Wed May 26, 2021 4:14 pm

I think Persian/Farsi deserves to be on that list.

It could be argued that it is easier than Spanish, in that it has no grammatical gender. Adjectives follow nouns, as in Spanish.

Also it has a SOV word order, with no exceptions. Other Indo-European languages, like Russian, have a much more flexible word order.

The accent always falls on the last syllable.

It has only two cases, nominative and accusative. It is less heavily inflected than other Indo-European languages.

English learners may be put off by the Arabic plurals, but they are written more often than spoken. The English equivalent of an Arabic plural would be saying "geese" instead of "gooses," or "deer" instead of "deers".

Dr Arguelles has written about Persian being a "Beta-Alpha" language, a language that is difficult at first, mainly because of having to learn the flowing script, written from right to left, but becomes much easier as you go along. Russian for example is an "Alpha-Beta" language and is relatively easy at first but it's easy to soon sink into the quicksand of verb aspect, genitive plurals, inanimate nouns in the accusative, etc.

Even though Persian is a Level III language like Russian it just seems more logical to me. The most illogical aspect of it is the verb stems in the present tense, which often stray very far from the stem in the infinitive.
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Dtmont
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Re: Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby Dtmont » Wed May 26, 2021 9:28 pm

This morning I woke up and thought "Shoot! I forgot Persian!", thanks for the reply you definitely explained better than I could. I totally agree.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu May 27, 2021 10:06 am

sherbert wrote:I think Persian/Farsi deserves to be on that list.

It could be argued that it is easier than Spanish, in that it has no grammatical gender. Adjectives follow nouns, as in Spanish.

Also it has a SOV word order, with no exceptions. Other Indo-European languages, like Russian, have a much more flexible word order.

The accent always falls on the last syllable.

It has only two cases, nominative and accusative. It is less heavily inflected than other Indo-European languages.

Totally agree - Persian almost seems too logical to be a real language from the wild. The grammar is like a well-designed conlang, beautifully simple but functional.
But then it's also a perfect example of why using the FSI ratings, which are based on how long it actually takes to master a language, is more useful than trying to establish which should be hard theoretically. Persian has plenty of features that make it hard to master, Beta-Alpha or not.
And I think Arguelles focused on reading for Persian, which meant that he missed the diglossia and the complex cultural/status/manners issues of ta'arof, which would have simplified things substantially?
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Re: Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby basica » Thu May 27, 2021 11:15 am

As someone with no real qualifications to speak on this issue, how do the languages of the Philippines sit on this scale? I think Malay, Indonesian and say Tagalog are all in the same family group? If so, what would be the rough order of difficulty they have?
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Re: Listing the least grammar heavy languages for English speakers to learn

Postby Deinonysus » Thu May 27, 2021 4:04 pm

basica wrote:As someone with no real qualifications to speak on this issue, how do the languages of the Philippines sit on this scale? I think Malay, Indonesian and say Tagalog are all in the same family group? If so, what would be the rough order of difficulty they have?

I don't know much about Tagalog or any other languages of the Philippines but I do think they would be harder than Indonesian. Indonesian is zero-marking, meaning that words don't inflect to show how they relate to other words in the sentence, so in other words verbs don't mark person and nouns don't mark case. That means that you only need to know one form of a verb or noun to use it in a sentence. Also, many things such as verb aspect are handled by particles, not verb inflection.

However, from what I can tell, Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines have a healthy amount of inflection, including Austronesian alignment, so they should be more difficult than Indonesian.

If you did learn both Indonesian and a Philippine language such as Tagalog, you would probably get a bit of a vocabulary bonus due to their shared Austronesian roots.
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