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.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 languagesRandom 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....
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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.