Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Feb 28, 2018 3:46 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Cavesa wrote:Also, there is one issue that hasn't been discussed at all. Difficulty of achieving what level?
I am convinced the whole "this language is easy/hard" idea is based on just a narrow and vague idea of learning it. We all know this from the Spanish learning example. People say how easy it is. And sure, the Spanish beginners don't need to deal with a lot of stuff the French ones (for example) have to face. But at some point, Spanish becomes very challenging, and there are not that many advanced learners to support the "Spanish is easy" theory (and the overall level people achieve in English despite being pushed so hard to, that doesn't look like "English is easy" either). So, isn't it possible, that the cases are a similar example? Something, that might actually create a hurdle at the beginning, but streamline the later learning phases?

Someone once said that English is easy for the first year, then really hard after that, whereas French is really hard for the first year, then really easy after that.

It's an exaggeration, of course, but once you've nailed down the grammar stuff, there isn't much to surprise you. English is riddled with near synonyms and unpredictable collocations (e.g. phrasal verbs).

I don't believe there's anything uniquely challenging about Spanish, but the biggest difficulty I had was that no-one had explained the difference between [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_framing]verb framed and satellite framed languages
to me, and I got stuck at a point where I couldn't work out how to talk about walking out etc. Once that obstacle was removed, I was fine.

Random Review wrote:FWIW I think Spanish is "easy" in the sense that people will understand English speakers who speak bad Spanish with typical Anglo errors with bad (Anglo) pronunciation. This isn't always the case with French or Chinese (to take two examples).

That's an interesting point that I was thinking about earlier when talking about English declensions. It's rare that a missing S/'S will make a sentence impossible to understand, so you don't have to learn it.... but...
I think there's an important difference between a language being easy to use and easy to learn. If you can survive without learning it properly, it might actually make the language harder to learn....

[/quote]
I agree (except for the thing with English being easy at the beginning, I know hundreds of prooves of the opposite), my point was: it is impossible to judge that one language is the easiest to learn. Especially if you take just one tiny bit of grammar and make that bold and wrong assumption based on it.

The cases are a good target for the "that language is too hard, it has cases" accussation. Because their existence is obvious at first sight. Many of the difficult things in languages considered "easy" are less obvious. You get to them only after having spent a bit of time with the language, not during the first few units of a coursebook.

I'd say that is one of the reasons for which cases and languages with cases are considered so hard. The difficulty is easily visible. It's like the diseases. People naturally assume that the disease that looks horrible on the outside is the most horrible and dangerous one. Nope, many conditions which are just as horrible and dangerous, or even much more, can't be seen immediately.

If you can survive without learning it properly, it might actually make the language harder to learn....

This is so good I couldn't resist quoting it once more.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tarvos » Wed Feb 28, 2018 4:25 pm

The best example being depression.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Feb 28, 2018 4:48 pm

Yes, that is one of the good examples.

I remembered a tv documentry about a family with bad luck and both kids having been born with a health condition. One was without an arm, the other had a problem of the autism spectrum. One of the things frustrating their mother very strongly was the attitude of people. They automatically thought the kid without the arm was the one to pity and the other was healthy, just making problems instead of helping the disabled sibling. In reality, the kid without the arm was ok, it just needed assistance which it was perfectly capable of asking for every time, and it was naturally learning how to compensate. The other kid, which had all the physical pieces, had very low ability to communicate or to play, and required much more work than the people judging from the appearance would have guessed.

That is the analogy. A language with the obvious challenges like the cases is like the kid without an arm. People think it has a huuuge problem. But it is something you can learn to live with and overcome with lots of work and stubborness. I know quite a lot of very good non native Czech speakers and the cases are not a huge problem for them, even though they used to be challenging at first. Some mistakes in the pronunciation, vocab, or sentence construction are more common. Sure, there are occassional case mistakes but they are rather rare, much rarer than you'd think.

Spanish could be an example of the kid with the neurological disorder (ok, the first part of the analogy was better, I know). It looks perfectly ok at first. Then you get to know it and find a lot of challenging stuff that takes time to master and most learners don't ever make it (a complex tense system, subjuntivo, creating naturally sounding sentence structures, and so on). I highly doubt the advanced Spanish learners make fewer mistakes than the advanced Czech learners, just because there are no cases. And I am absolutely sure the % successful learners, from the 100% being the beginners, won't be higher for Spanish.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tarvos » Wed Feb 28, 2018 5:09 pm

I think the eventual error rate is similar, there's just a bigger quantity of Spanish learners.

As someone who actually has an autism spectrum disorder AND mental issues (anxiety/panic disorder) and other health issues (let's not count the medical gender stuff), there's a damn load you need to compensate for right there.

But attitude is a big problem in general. People see something they're unfamiliar with and go "why do I need to learn this?" when it's not a matter of "why do I..." . You're learning a language with cases, so you don't get a say in the matter. Want to learn German? Cases are part and parcel of your job. Do it. It could be easier without cases, but then it's not German (or Czech).
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Feb 28, 2018 6:36 pm

tarvos wrote:I think the eventual error rate is similar, there's just a bigger quantity of Spanish learners.

As someone who actually has an autism spectrum disorder AND mental issues (anxiety/panic disorder) and other health issues (let's not count the medical gender stuff), there's a damn load you need to compensate for right there.

But attitude is a big problem in general. People see something they're unfamiliar with and go "why do I need to learn this?" when it's not a matter of "why do I..." . You're learning a language with cases, so you don't get a say in the matter. Want to learn German? Cases are part and parcel of your job. Do it. It could be easier without cases, but then it's not German (or Czech).


I know my medical analogies may look weird, sorry if I accidentally said anything offensive.

It's just that difficulty of anything should never be judged based on the first impression. And people still do it all the time in all the areas of life.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby hilalkizilors » Thu Mar 01, 2018 10:16 pm

I'm not trying to be the grammar police here, but I love funny juxtapositions and this line in the original post struck me as funny given the context: "for someone who's native language does not have articles"

The line should read: for someone whose native language does not have articles.

"Who's" (who is) is the nominative case of the pronoun, while "whose" is the genitive case.

It's a mistake that native speakers make all the time, but I thought it was funny in a post asking why grammatical cases are considered so hard.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri Mar 02, 2018 12:30 am

hilalkizilors wrote:I'm not trying to be the grammar police here, but I love funny juxtapositions and this line in the original post struck me as funny given the context: "for someone who's native language does not have articles"

The line should read: for someone whose native language does not have articles.

"Who's" (who is) is the nominative case of the pronoun, while "whose" is the genitive case.

It's a mistake that native speakers make all the time, but I thought it was funny in a post asking why grammatical cases are considered so hard.



Except the mistake you pointed out isn't an example of the author mistaking the case. It's an example of the author using the wrong orthographic rule for homonyms. Who's and whose sound the same in English, so the author still had the right case. They just chose the wrong spelling, which is orthographic, not case.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tiia » Fri Mar 02, 2018 12:03 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:
hilalkizilors wrote:I'm not trying to be the grammar police here, but I love funny juxtapositions and this line in the original post struck me as funny given the context: "for someone who's native language does not have articles"

The line should read: for someone whose native language does not have articles.

"Who's" (who is) is the nominative case of the pronoun, while "whose" is the genitive case.

It's a mistake that native speakers make all the time, but I thought it was funny in a post asking why grammatical cases are considered so hard.



Except the mistake you pointed out isn't an example of the author mistaking the case. It's an example of the author using the wrong orthographic rule for homonyms. Who's and whose sound the same in English, so the author still had the right case. They just chose the wrong spelling, which is orthographic, not case.


Isn't it funny, how native and non-native mistakes are treated different? Actually in my opinion it would make a lot sense to tell the native that it is indeed the wrong case, because that may help to distinguish the two more easily.
I don't know how differenciating homonyms is taught in English, but making sure to distiguish the meaning (which in this case is also about cases), will improve the writing. (Also German has homonyms, but I never considered them hard to learn, maybe except for people who indeed struggle with orthography in general.) Only explaining that there is a different spelling, but without explaining the different meaning, doesn't really make sense to me.

The other way round I often see problems, when a non-native makes a typo, it's often immediately treated as grammar mistake or wrong choice of words etc. - and not as what it actually is: a typo. This is not such an issue for a beginner (there you should handle it that way), but for someone, who is advanced/not learning the language actively anymore.
A similar issue is that, when expressing really complicated issues, that may sound weird, because the described issue is indeed very unusual, a learner might be told that s/he is using the wrong word (/case/whatever). The originally right word might be corrected into the complete opposite, because it seems more logical at first for an outsider.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Iversen » Fri Mar 02, 2018 12:22 pm

I have to agree with Tiia. I do my fair share of errors even in English (despite it being my best foreign language), but I have in a number of occasions tried to explain something complicated or to put a slightly unusual angle to some topic, and then I was told that I couldn't say like that - I should say.. and then I was served a formulation, which showed that the other person didn't know a thing about the topic and didn't or couldn't even understand what I was trying to say (or just didn't symphathize with my predilection for arcane antiquated vocabulary). For instance I once said in class during my French studies that a baby couldn't be used for other things than screaming (and I had the use as a fire alarm or something like that in mind), and the teacher said that it was wrong. I should have said that a baby couldn't DO other things than screaming - and she certainly didn't agree with that. But no, I actually intended to say what I said, and the grammar was correct.

For an example that relates to the question of cases: you can in some cases (for emphasis or whatever) do inversions, but rely on case endings to show the meaning in case rich languages. For instance I believe it is correct to say that "Canem homo momordit" (so 'cave hominem' - the translation is "the man bit the dog"), but a fool would assume that I meant to say "canis hominem momordit" and just made a grammatical error.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri Mar 02, 2018 2:07 pm

tiia wrote:Isn't it funny, how native and non-native mistakes are treated different? Actually in my opinion it would make a lot sense to tell the native that it is indeed the wrong case, because that may help to distinguish the two more easily.


The problem is that this doesn't distinguish between language and writing. Writing is not language, and is merely a way of expressing it. Nobody would realize, in speech, that who's and whose are different and thus one is in the wrong case. It's an error that doesn't exist outside of the orthography, therefore it can't be anything but a spelling error. This is not true if, say, someone was to say "I saw he". That is a case error, because it's not just choosing the wrong homophone. It's the same reason why mixing up "they're", "there" and "their" isn't any "grammar" error, but a spelling error.

I'd also be fine with explaining how to look at the meaning to distinguish the spelling. But that doesn't make it a case error, as it's not and error in speech, but merely part of English othoraphy's arbitrary (well, this one isn't really arbitrary as one is a contraction... which also shows that it's not a case error as "who's" isn't a "case" marking) way of representing homophones differently.


The other way round I often see problems, when a non-native makes a typo, it's often immediately treated as grammar mistake or wrong choice of words etc. - and not as what it actually is: a typo. This is not such an issue for a beginner (there you should handle it that way), but for someone, who is advanced/not learning the language actively anymore.


Part of this is the issue with how orthography is taught. So many people are taught that it's "grammar", instead of just some arbitrary spelling rule. I've seen many people who say that using "they're" in place of "their" is a "grammar error" when really it's nothing more than a spelling error as the two are indistinguishable in (most?) speech, and nobody would confuse which one you're using in speech. The difference just comes to the orthography's decision to use separate ways of spelling the same sounds, nothing grammatical behind it. And, of course, judging writing errors as grammar errors does lead to a lot of judgement, which is a shame as writing is taught, not acquired like language/grammar. That means with a worse education, your writing skills are likely to be worse, which basically opens the way to continuing education-related discrimination.
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