Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[s_allard]

My fundamental point is that, all things considered, the absence of grammatical gender and noun cases gives a language a huge advantage in terms of being easier to learn. In passing, we see this in creoles and pidgins. One of the first things to go out the window will be the complexities like gender and cases.

[Josquin]

English isn't being learnt all over the world, because it's so easy, but rather because of historical, political, cultural, and economical reasons. It's the lingua franca of the modern day because of Anglo-American dominance all over the world for the last 200 years.

In the Warsaw Pact countries, people used to learn Russian as lingua franca despite its being "difficult". The reason was the dominance of the Soviet Union in those countries.

For the whole topic of linguae francae, please confer this thread: The Problem with Linguae Francae

[aaleks]

My fundamental point is that, all things considered, the absence of grammatical gender and noun cases gives a language a huge advantage in terms of being easier to learn. In passing, we see this in creoles and pidgins. One of the first things to go out the window will the complexities like gender and cases.

In this case I think that articles and Present perfect should be thrown out of the same window

[Cainntear]

My fundamental point is that, all things considered, the absence of grammatical gender and noun cases gives a language a huge advantage in terms of being easier to learn. In passing, we see this in creoles and pidgins. One of the first things to go out the window will the complexities like gender and cases.

You have clearly stated that English is easier than Dutch, but that's an unproven assertion. Grammatical gender is one of the only real wrinkles in Dutch, and while it can be a big one, I'm not convinced it outweighs all the quirks and foibles of English... unless of course you're including pragmatic issues, because Dutch is hard to learn due to a relatively low availability of courses and materials, and the fact that anyone you might try to speak it to will be able to reply in fluent English...

[Cainntear]

As for the genitive in German, I have heard it said that people who say it's dead are generally from areas where Standard German wouldn't have been anyone's native language a few generations ago, and that people who are from the regions whose dialect Standard German is based on do. I cannot recall who said this, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

Either way, it doesn't matter how many individuals say to me "the genitive is dead", I'd need to see a claim based on corpus evidence.
It's like the subjunctive in English -- it may be dying, but then again it was dead a long time ago in some areas, and is still very much alive in the areas of England that our standard is most built on (the Home Counties and the South-East).

As a teacher, I long ago made the decision that I would not give any lessons on using the subjunctive unless strictly required to do so by my employer, and instead simply tell my students about the subjunctive so they won't get confused if they see it.

I know the subjunctive is a minority usage, and I'm pretty sure all the major exams now accept subjunctive or non-subjunctive forms, so I don't see teaching it as a valuable use of my students' time.

As a learner, I'm likely to try to learn the German genitive, although this discussion is making me wonder whether I'm being consistent with that.

[Cainntear]

« Les virgules et les accents, ça ne compte pas [comme des fautes] »

butbutbut....
é, è and e are pretty much different letters, and surely people who can't tell when to use which can't pronounce them right either. élève vs élevé etc.

As a teacher of French I cringe at the idea of not counting certain things as mistakes. It goes against all my training and teaching but I have to admit that in certain cases you have to lighten up and accept that the language in everyday use does not require perfection.

Wait... have I stepped into http://mirror-world.language-learners.org ?!?

Seriously though, I'm all for putting effort into the area of most benefit, but what gets me about that one of all the quoted rules is that it is quite a fundamental error, and can therefore have far-reaching consequences.

When I was studying French, I heard classmates asking on several occassions "What type of E is in <<word>>?" The reason they had to ask was because they couldn't pronounce the word. To me, classing this as an acceptable error is like accepting "attand" in place of "attend" in English.

Of course, the problem here is bad teaching, and the fact that French is so commonly taught without enough focus on correct vowel pronunciation is not the examiners' fault, but by making it permissible, they will encourage teachers to skip over it as "unimportant" when their main goal is getting students' good enough to pass the exam and get the job they're trying to get.

...the Spanish pronounce the h in el hombre, la habitación, la hora and el hospital.

WHAT?

How does someone who passed a Spanish C2 exam think this?!



The "h" in Spanish words is never pronounced. (Okay, I have heard it in "Sahara," I think, but in words of Latin origin it is always silent).

I was expecting this. I really should have said that in Spanish the h is the same as the h aspiré as in French that I was talking about.

That's still not right. H aspiré blocks elision in French, but there is virtually no vowel elision in Spanish, so even if there was no H in "habitación", it would be "la abitación". Compare "el hombre" with "el orden" or "el orbe", and "la habitación" with "la abismal" or "la abisinia".

H does nothing in those cases and is simply a fossil of the past, with no real meaning in the modern language, unlike the French H aspiré.

[Serpent]

One more point about German is that being replaced by a dative-governed preposition isn't the same as being replaced by the dative. at least to me it's just a coincidence that von happens to require the dative. It's completely different from the other structure.

[s_allard]

The questions isn't whether people are learning English because it is easy. The question is whether a language without cases and grammatical gender is easier to learn than a language with one or both characteristics. I am fully aware that in the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact countries more people learned Russian than English. Even today in Cuba one can find Cubans with some knowledge of Russian for reasons that we know. Today there are tens of thousands of immigrants learning German for very serious reasons that we also know. No matter how difficult a language is people will learn it when they have to.

I also know that the pervasiveness of English-speaking pop culture and Anglo-American political, scientific and military power make English attractive. This certainly makes English more attractive to Germans than Dutch which may be easier for them to learn than English. I'm also sure that today a significant part of the Ukrainian population - but not all - is more interested in learning English than Russian. I hear that some want to get rid of the Russian influence on the Ukrainian language.

Having said all that, I believe that grammatical gender and noun cases are complexities that make a language more difficult to learn than one without these features. I would think Dutch is easier for Germans than German is for Dutch speakers for those very same reasons. The same can be said for a complex writing system like Chinese or Arabic.

We just have to look at the difficulties of English speakers learning German. These are both Germanic languages with a so-called huge cognate discount between them. Shouldn't German be easy for speakers of English? For example Vater looks like Father, Mutter like Mother, Haus like House, etc. So German must be easier for English speakers than for French speakers. I'm not so sure of that. What I do know is that English speakers hit that double wall of gender and case. And in the end, despite all that cognate discount for English and German, Spanish is probably easier for speakers of English than German.

[aaleks]

I'm also sure that today a significant part of the Ukrainian population - but not all - is more interested in learning English than Russian. I hear that some want to get rid of the Russian influence on the Ukrainian language.

First of all, for a significant part of the Ukrainian population Russian is the native language. They don't have to learn Russian as a L2. Probably it will change with time. But either way, I think it would be better not to touch on this very sensitive topic.

edit: too much mistakes...

[Serpent]

Shouldn't German be easy for speakers of English? For example Vater looks like Father, Mutter like Mother, Haus like House, etc. So German must be easier for English speakers than for French speakers. I'm not so sure of that.

Many basic words are similar across Indo-European languages. padre is related to father, for example. Of course it doesn't look that similar until you've tried to learn a non-IE language

As for English speakers, well we do have plenty of successful German learners too. If we compare those who understand how the remnants of cases [are supposed to] work in English (who vs whom etc), I don't think the difference will be significant. And of course we should remember that English also has tons of Romance vocabulary (lots of words are less common than their etymological counterparts in French/Spanish, but still).

Also how many French speakers actually learn German before English?