Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[Saim]

But at least prepositions aren't fusional, the way Indo-European cases tend to be. I have nothing nice to say about fusional languages as a language learner; give me an isolating or agglutinative language any day, so that I can deal with each grammatical issue separately instead of smooshing them into a blob. I admit that this is an unfair personal prejudice, probably the result of memorizing way too many tables of Latin endings in my youth.

You're lucky you haven't had to learn any of the languages (common in the Americas and Australia) that are so inflecting that entire clauses are expressed through a single word.

Here is an example from Yupik courtesy of the English Wikipedia:

tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq
tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq
reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative
"He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer"

Or without leaving Europe, Basque conjugations can be a nightmare in that they change according to subject and up to two objects (I give him the book, I give him the books, I give you the book, I give you the books would all have different conjugations of the auxiliary), although at least only a handful of verbs can be conjugated (the others have two aspectual forms that are then combined with auxiliaries).

[Chung]

I always hear people talking about grammatical cases as if they are the devil. However in my experience so far, the only difficult thing about grammatical cases is that it multiplies the number of words that a learner must learn.
[...]
What do you guys think? What do people here who have mastered languages like Hungarian, Finnish or Estonian think? Am I just optimistic and "seeing the glass as half full," or have other people come to these conclusions also?

I've increasingly come to the view of grammatical cases being considered difficult in language learning as a sign of the domination of views by native speakers of English and most Romance languages, abetted by native speakers of languages which have extensive declension. I roll my eyes at Finns and Hungarians who boast how inpenetrable their native languages are to outsiders because of the volume of cases used (14-15 and 16+ respectively), to say nothing about say Poles or Russians who do similarly by trotting out their native languages' case systems which have fewer cases but must account for gender and number.

I'm pretty much of Josquin's view that the difficulty in learning grammatical case arises in using the endings correctly (including declension per the rules) which goes beyond mere knowledge of the specific endings or the ability to regurgitate declined forms isolation. This difficulty is dependent on one's linguistic background, although I'd argue that a conceptual understanding of case only helps so much because not all case systems are equal.

E.g. “I live in a big city / in a small vıllage”.

- Finnish: Asun isossa kaupungissa / pienessä kylässä (case ending is -ssa/-ssä and is attached to both the attributive adjective and the noun. Moreover the ending here is attached to a stem which can differ from the basic form because of consonant gradation (kaupunki "city" + -ssa = kaupungissa "in a/the city" i.e. -nk- ~ -ng- or vowel alternation pieni "small' + -ssä = pienessä "in a/the small..." i.e. -i ~ -e)

- German: Ich wohne in einer großen Stadt / in einem kleinen Dorf (case ending is applied to the attributive adjective and indefinite article but is dative feminine for Stadt but dative neuter for Dorf)

- Hungarian: Egy nagy városban / Egy kis faluban lakom (case ending -ban/-ben signals inner or interior position but is attached here to the nouns only whose respective forms don't differ from the basic form. As tarvos' has noted, adding a case ending in Hungarian can sometimes change a stem's final vowel e.g. alma "apple" vs. almában "in(side) (an) apple".)

- Polish: Mieszkam w wielkim mieście / w małej wiosce (case endings for locative go on the attributive adjectives and the nouns, and reflect gender and number. Furthermore, adding the case ending can trigger changes to the stem itself. The changes here are palatalization and in the case of miasto a vowel alternation too. Miasto "city/town" and wioska "village" become w mieście and w wiosce "in a/the city" and "in a/the village" respectively)

- Turkish: Büyük bir şehirde / Küçük bir köyde yaşıyorum (case ending -da/-de signals innter or interior position but rather like Hungarian is attached to nouns only (here: şehir "city", köy "village") whose stems don't differ from the respective basic forms. However, the stem can differ from the basic form as the case ending can set off changes to certain final consonants of a stem e.g. balık "fish" vs. balığın ~ "of a fish" (genitive))

Let's not muddy it further with adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) since they can impose requirements of the associated nominal to bear a case ending although the degree to which this applies varies from one language to the next. Some Hungarian postpositions are a bit like English prepositions in that the associated noun/adjective stays in the basic form (or nominative).

I also agree with a previous post that extensive declension allows more scope for speakers to use word order to convey emphasis, definiteness, quantity, rather than just make a sentence intelligible by signalling how the elements relate to each other. It sometimes reduces the need for adverbs, particles, auxillaries or pronouns, which has also been mentioned.

I think that a good way to start to teach grammatical case and whittle down the prejudice against heavy declension is to explain to the learner what's going on before plunging into details. Taking a monoglot of say English or French, it'd be helpful to compare short sentences from a strongly analytic language with those from a fusional or agglutinative language, and explain that despite the differences, a native speaker encountering the sentences would draw almost the same, if not identical messages from the sentences. I know that the first time I learned Latin in high school, I had no friggin' idea of what the teacher was talking about with the "dative", "ablative" or "vocative". It wasn't until I started learning Hungarian on my own not long after that I finally got the idea of how and why grammatical case can be used especially when comparing heavily agglutinative Hungarian sentences with their semantic counterparts in the heavily analytic English versions. I suspect that a monoglot of a Sinitic language would also find grammatical case baffling and a chore to figure out.

For more discussion on paying due care to learning any case system as a language uses it (including a few examples from Uralic and Slavonic languages) see the following:

Words to the wise from Holland
Are we talking about the same thing?
The original purpose of "dative" verbs

[Iversen]

I've increasingly come to the view of grammatical cases being considered difficult in language learning as a sign of the domination of views by native speakers of English and most Romance languages, abetted by native speakers of languages which have extensive declension. I roll my eyes at Finns and Hungarians who boast how inpenetrable their native languages are to outsiders because of the volume of cases used (14-15 and 16+ respectively), to say nothing about say Poles or Russians who do similarly by trotting out their native languages' case systems which have fewer cases but must account for gender and number.

In my opinion the number of cases is not important - after all even Hungarian or Finnish have fewer cases than English have prepositions. And learning the role of some twenty or so different cases is not in itself a problem since many of them have a clear definition (mostly something to do with place or movement). In some cases I do get shocked, like when I'm told that a subject predicative in Russian can be either in the nominative or in the instrumental case - for God's sake, how did the instrumental come into the game here? Is "being something" similar to the kind of action you perform with a hammer? And as in many cases with competing cases the borderline here is hard to describe in a concise way. I have also read that some cases in Finnish behave in ways that aren't immediately obvious to foreign learners, to put it mildly. But in general my main problem with cases is not that they exist, but that all kinds of endings in morphology-rich fusional languages tend to end up as a hopeless mess.

[reineke]

I realized how simply ideas are able to be expressed in Polish, because of the cases. You simply don't need as many words.

Yeah, but the average length of a word in English is maybe 7 letters, whereas for Polish it is maybe 25. And 6 of those are the case endings.


English:

The man wrote a letter to his neighbor with a pen

Polish:

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada za pomocą długopisu

Less words, but is it any shorter? Is it any clearer? What did we gain here?

This is google translate because I don't know Polish.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would've just used the instrumental rather than the construction za pomocą + genitive.

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada długopisem.

And in Serbian you would have no prepositions in this sentence (please correct me Reineke if it's not idiomatic):

Muškarac je napisao pismo (svom) susedu/komšiji (hemijskom) olovkom.

You guys working for BIC or something? The pen is on the table sounds like high quality prose compared to this. It's not your fault, since you're only translating:

A male person has written/wrote a letter to his neighbor using a pen.

Muškarac - I'd use that if I had a good reason to mention that a male person did something.
I am reading the sentence as if you were emphasizing the fact that he wrote a letter using a (special kind of) pen. If you were to remove what's in parentheses I'd still wonder why you're telling me this but the sentence does sound better. Let's assume that the man died in Stephen King fashion and that we can read the letter because it was written in ink. Now we are retelling the facts to someone, trying to remain succinct.

[Saim]

I somehow missed the part of the Xmmm's post where he says that the Polish sentence was produced by Google Translate.

Muškarac - I'd use that if I had a good reason to mention that a male person did something.

Yeah, I was wondering about that but I didn't want to stray too far from the Polish sentence (although now that I see it wasn't a natural one I'm wondering what the point was ). Would you prefer čovek here, then?

You guys working for BIC or something? The pen is on the table sounds like high quality prose compared to this. It's not your fault, since you're only translating:

[...]

I am reading the sentence as if you were emphasizing the fact that he wrote a letter using a (special kind of) pen. If you were to remove what's in parentheses I'd still wonder why you're telling me this but the sentence does sound better. Let's assume that the man died in Stephen King fashion and that we can read the letter because it was written in ink. Now we are retelling the facts to someone, trying to remain succinct.

You do make a good point that it's a bit strange to argue about linguistic economy by using contrived examples.

[reineke]

I somehow missed the part of the Xmmm's post where he says that the Polish sentence was produced by Google Translate.

Muškarac - I'd use that if I had a good reason to mention that a male person did something.

Yeah, I was wondering about that but I didn't want to stray too far from the Polish sentence (although now that I see it wasn't a natural one I'm wondering what the point was ). Would you prefer čovek here, then?

You guys working for BIC or something? The pen is on the table sounds like high quality prose compared to this. It's not your fault, since you're only translating:

[...]

I am reading the sentence as if you were emphasizing the fact that he wrote a letter using a (special kind of) pen. If you were to remove what's in parentheses I'd still wonder why you're telling me this but the sentence does sound better. Let's assume that the man died in Stephen King fashion and that we can read the letter because it was written in ink. Now we are retelling the facts to someone, trying to remain succinct.

You do make a good point that it's a bit strange to argue about linguistic economy by using contrived examples.

Yes, "čovjek" sounds a little better but the second part is still a bit problematic. This company's financial documents were written using a pen:

"...financijski plan napisao kemijskom olovkom"

Pročitajte više na: https://www.vecernji.hr/vijesti/zivi-zi ... ke-1034640 - http://www.vecernji.hr

The fact is so funny that it's newsworthy.

This guy wrote on his (under)arm using a pen:
..."napisao kemijskom na podlaktici..."

"olovkom" (using a lead pencil) would have sounded unlikely/masochistic.

"krvlju na zidu" would indicate that the man had something really important to say.

Man, guy, dude, person, "the deceased" (as per above), the male suspect...it can all work depending on context.

[Theodisce]

"krvlju na zidu" would indicate that the man had something really important to say.

The protagonist of the Argentinian series Criminal writes his message ("Justitia", what else?) with a knife on the chests of his victims. Going back to cases, a conversation with an English native speaker who was speaking very good Polish with the small exception that all his nouns were in nominative has ultimately convinced me of the futility of the entire case system, a lesson Bulgarians and Macedonians have learned long before me.

[reineke]

"krvlju na zidu" would indicate that the man had something really important to say.

The protagonist of the Argentinian series Criminal writes his message ("Justitia", what else?) with a knife on the chests of his victims. Going back to cases, a conversation with an English native speaker who was speaking very good Polish with the small exception that all his nouns were in nominative has ultimately convinced me of the futility of the entire case system, a lesson Bulgarians and Macedonians have learned long before me.

"He's attacking a woman/his wife" could become "the woman is attacking". That's "Allo Allo" material. I love Allo Allo.

[Elenia]

The discussion on pronunciation really doesn't have any further place in this thread.

As for the difficulty of cases: I think I would also say that it's partly to do with us case-less learners being thrown headfirst into them, partly to do with natives playing up the difficulty for said case-less learners. I also agree with tarvos' that trying to compare the efficiency/precision of languages with cases vs. languages without is like comparing apples and oranges. Nimble users of each language can get across ideas with ease, clumsy users (native or otherwise) will have a much harder time.

[Serpent]

The discussion on pronunciation really doesn't have any further place in this thread.

Posts moved now. My point was simply that English native speakers ~misuse cases as rarely as other languages' native speakers do (not counting typos and spelling mistakes).