Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[Seneca]

Very true. In fact German cases are not difficult to learn (even for self-study), if you pick the right teaching material that gently and thoughtfully introduces concepts/cases. It also helps to jump onto uni-language (all German) textbooks as soon as possible.

To me it is never a good idea to experiment with using only free material online. It just slows you down in the long run and induces invisible cost. Expedient is not the synonym of efficient.

To declare logical and meaningful stuff meaningless just shows you are a beginner. To insist on your limited view based on your limited knowledge is amateurish.

Which teaching materials for German would those be? I was going to go poke around your log, but didn't see German listed under your username, so I wasn't sure if your German experience predated your time on this site and if that meant, in turn, no resources for it on your log.

[s_allard]

As has been pointed out, in the realm of Western European languages - I apologize for being so limited in scope - English has neither grammatical noun gender nor noun declensions.

Not true. English nouns decline for plural number and for possessive case. This is very much what noun declension is, and I'm surprised that a professional such as yourself can't see that.
...

I have edited my post to replace "declension" by "case" for further clarification. However, I think I am in good company in my original usage. To wit, the following quote:

In Modern English, the system of declensions is very simple compared to some other languages, so much so that the term declension is rarely applied to English in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

English certainly does have some noun inflection as Cainntear has rightly pointed out, but one can hardly speak of English as a grammatical case language. Neither can English be called a grammatical gender language despite some morphological markings of pronouns and possessive adjectives.

[s_allard]

...

I want to draw people's attention to something that is happening right now, in the midst of which English is a beacon of simplicity. I'm referring of course to the important trend in many (Western European) languages to make the language gender neutral in terms of women, men and transgenders.

You're really overegging the pudding here.

1) English has mandatory gendered pronouns in singular, so it is not neutral for transgender.
2) While many people use "they" as gender neutral, others don't. For me, they is "gender unknown". It's difficult to use without looking awkward. I try to write things in plural if I want to be gender neutral -- "users should", not "a user should", leading to "they" as plural.
3) Attempts at equal opportunities writing have not led to degendered writing. It is now common convention for programmers and designers to be referred to as "she". Where you're talking about the designer and the user, the user is then referred to as "he".

You're lionising a fantasy here. This ain't no "shining beacon" and it sure as hell ain't simple.

Any moves to changing how a language deals with gender -- even as lightly gendered a language as English -- will be met with huge resistance. Grammar (including grammaticalised/function words) is a fully internalised, unconcious system. Our native grammar hardly changes in our lifetimes, and we rarely make any conscious decisions of functional vocabulary.

If you tell an Italian to make everything gender-neutral by replacing -o and -a nominal endings with -u, you're going to drive them round the twist because you are forcing them to think instead of doing something automatic on ever single noun and adjective. It's a real mental burden.

Even for us English speakers, consciously replacing "he" and "she" with anything you would care to come up with forces us to make an active choice to override something which is second nature.

When people call it "thought control", they're not wrong -- overriding instinct can be a very painful process.

It is true that many people have problems adapting to linguistic change. We often show our age by the way we speak or write. I myself do not feel comfortable with the écriture inclusive in modern French.

The wonderful thing about English, and the reason I say a beacon of simplicity, is that insofar as gender-neutral language is concerned - of the languages listed in my original post, English is the simplest.

As for the pronouns, English easily adapts to all preferences. Sure, some people may find they as a singular awkward but this is actually not new in English and only takes a little getting used to.

I see people trying very hard to prove that English is very complicated and difficult to learn with its vestigial case system. Sure, English has its complexities. But the plain fact of the matter is that compared to the other languages that we are talking about here, gender-neutral language in English is much simpler because of the lack of grammatical gender and grammatical case.

[Josquin]

I still don't understand how we got from "Why are cases so hard?" to "Which language is best suited for gender-neutrality?".

Your argumentation has taken a wild detour just in order not to be proven wrong. I (and many others in this thread) don't see how the concepts of gender and cases are even related and why a lack of cases should allow for gender-neutral language.

Yes, English has a simpler morphology than most of the other languages by which it's surrounded. However, in grammatical terms, gender and case are two completely different things and you're just mixing them up in order to win the argument here. You don't improve your argument by focussing on major Western European languages only, by the way.

A language can have a gazillion cases and still be gender-neutral. A language can have a gazillion genders and still have no cases. You're confusing two very different concepts, because in the case of German they are somehow intertwined. If you really take up Hungarian you will find a complex morphology, but only one 3rd person pronoun for all genders. How does that fit into your musings?

And all that nonsense about how English is easier to learn because of the lack of gender and cases... Well, once again, morphological complexity is not the same as difficulty. I'll admit that, for a European language, English has surprisingly little morphology and is therefore perceived as easy by speakers of closely related languages, such as French, Spanish, or German, most of whom don't master the language to a very high degree though.

However, once you go out of this "comfort zone", this statement will soon be put into perspective. And your unwillingness to leave this comfort zone just shows how thin your argumentation really is.

[Cavesa]

I wholeheartedly agree with Josquin.

Gender and cases are two separate things. Cases would work fine even if German or Czech went through a huge reform removing grammatical genders. Such a change would create trouble in the use of language and would require some compensatory changes, sure, but the cases would work. The opposite: Let's imagine we removed the cases and introduced a crazy rigid syntax way to compensate for it. But the gender would still stay. The German verbs don't reflect it, unless I am mistaken. But in Czech, there would still be a difference without the cases: stůl stál, židle stála, détě stálo (the table stood, the chair stood, the child stood). That was the grammar gender.

Are we really trying to mix this with the sociological issue of whether or not a culture accepts non-binary people in general or non-cis-men in traditionaly masculine roles, and reflects it in the language? That is a separate issue. It is something worth a discussion per se, not something that should be used to create weird arguments here, when the logical ones are missing.

And the argument "English is the easiest language to learn, because it doesn't have cases" is simply wrong and not founded on anything at all. I find it especially arrogant and ignorant, when an English native feels qualified to judge this. And it is very sad and unsettling, when they are a language teacher. Unfortunately, there are many natives and teachers with the same opinion.

I loved Reineke's post quoting a research on difficulty and making mistakes in various languages. It supported the obvious: the difference lies in what features are considered difficult, not in the amount of difficulties.

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?

[Cainntear]

As has been pointed out, in the realm of Western European languages - I apologize for being so limited in scope - English has neither grammatical noun gender nor noun declensions.

Not true. English nouns decline for plural number and for possessive case. This is very much what noun declension is, and I'm surprised that a professional such as yourself can't see that.
...

I have edited my post to replace "declension" by "case" for further clarification. However, I think I am in good company in my original usage. To wit, the following quote:

In Modern English, the system of declensions is very simple compared to some other languages, so much so that the term declension is rarely applied to English in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

No, you're not.
A) Since when was Wikipedia any sort of authority.
B) If you said "Cainntear is not a homo sapiens", you would be completely wrong. The fact that the term "homo sapiens" is rarely actively used to describe me (true) does not mean that I am not a homo sapiens (false)

English certainly does have some noun inflection as Cainntear has rightly pointed out, but one can hardly speak of English as a grammatical case language. Neither can English be called a grammatical gender language despite some morphological markings of pronouns and possessive adjectives.

Look, would you just leave the goalposts in one place for two seconds please?

You said English is the easiest language to learn because it has no cases.
But English does have cases, so if the case system is such a determining factor in the difficulty of learning a language, then surely a language with no cases (Chinese, maybe? Japanese? Patwa? Haitian Creole?) would be the easiest language to learn...?

The wonderful thing about English, and the reason I say a beacon of simplicity, is that insofar as gender-neutral language is concerned - of the languages listed in my original post, English is the simplest.

"Beacon" just seems like bigotry. English is an accident of history, not an example for others to follow. You're painting it as somehow superior and wonderful, and that just smacks of nationalism and cultural imperialism.

I see people trying very hard to prove that English is very complicated and difficult to learn with its vestigial case system.

No, what you see is several people picking holes in an extremely weak argument, and one person trying extremely hard to redefine the problem until the holes don't exist.

Now we seem to be on "English is the easiest language in the world (out of English and German) and has no cases (apart from the ones it does) and is completely gender neutral (or at least it could be if speakers stopped referring to each other as he and she)."

[Cainntear]

1) English has mandatory gendered pronouns in singular, so it is not neutral for transgender.

Just apart from that, many trans people (see also: yours truly) fit the binary, so you would still refer to me as she. That's gendered, and I am perfectly fine with that.

Fair enough, but I don't think it's neutral as long as you have to ask. Pre-op trans men have to wear women's swimming gear in most swimming pools and will be presumed to be "she".

[s_allard]

I still don't understand how we got from "Why are cases so hard?" to "Which language is best suited for gender-neutrality?".

Your argumentation has taken a wild detour just in order not to be proven wrong. I (and many others in this thread) don't see how the concepts of gender and cases are even related and why a lack of cases should allow for gender-neutral language.

Yes, English has a simpler morphology than most of the other languages by which it's surrounded. However, in grammatical terms, gender and case are two completely different things and you're just mixing them up in order to win the argument here. You don't improve your argument by focussing on major Western European languages only, by the way.

A language can have a gazillion cases and still be gender-neutral. A language can have a gazillion genders and still have no cases. You're confusing two very different concepts, because in the case of German they are somehow intertwined. If you really take up Hungarian you will find a complex morphology, but only one 3rd person pronoun for all genders. How does that fit into your musings?

And all that nonsense about how English is easier to learn because of the lack of gender and cases... Well, once again, morphological complexity is not the same as difficulty. I'll admit that, for a European language, English has surprisingly little morphology and is therefore perceived as easy by speakers of closely related languages, such as French, Spanish, or German, most of whom don't master the language to a very high degree though.

However, once you go out of this "comfort zone", this statement will soon be put into perspective. And your unwillingness to leave this comfort zone just shows how thin your argumentation really is.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here that unfortunately I don't have time to comment. I will say however that I have tried to keep my eye on the ball and answer the question of the OP. As I have stated many times I don't believe noun cases are inherently difficult. I don't believe that the lack of cases makes a language necessarily easy. If I may quote myself:

Judging by my own experience in learning the German noun declensions and in teaching French, I believe that the reason the German noun case is so difficult is twofold: 1) duplication of morphological forms for different grammatical meanings and 2) the lack of meaning other than grammatical. In other words it is a complex system that is highly redundant and carries little useful meaning.

Why do I mention German and not, let's say Hungarian? First, the case system is considered difficult, which I'm trying to explain. Second, it's the only grammatical case language I know to some extent because I'm learning it right now.

Let me apologize for my limited knowledge of the other languages of the world. I am not a polyglot. My native language is French. I consider myself fluent in English and somewhat fluent in Spanish. Based on my current word counts my reading comprehension in German is around 47% and my listening comprehension around 53%. (This is an inside joke for old-timers).

I am in awe of the many hyperpolyglots here in this forum. I defer to those who can discuss the case systems of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Old Church Slavonic, Sorbian, Estonian, Finnish, Old Hungarian, Modern Hungarian, proto-Uralic, Obdorsk Khanty, Cambodian, Munda languages, Vietnamese, Proto-Austroasiatic, Korku, inter alia.

I have no doubt that there are case systems that can be considered easy, especially outside the world of the FIGS, if they meet the two criteria I adduced above. I will have to take other people's word for it.

In the meantime, I have a German exam at the end of March and I have to master the case system by then. So, I have to leave the forum and I'll be updating only my language blog. Ich darf keine Zeit verlieren. Es würde viel gelacht. Bis bald.

[tarvos]

Bulgarian and Macedonian have lost their case system mostly (there are some traces left but there isn't really a case system that is functional). They compensate for this by a ton of verb tenses.

[tarvos]

1) English has mandatory gendered pronouns in singular, so it is not neutral for transgender.

Just apart from that, many trans people (see also: yours truly) fit the binary, so you would still refer to me as she. That's gendered, and I am perfectly fine with that.

Fair enough, but I don't think it's neutral as long as you have to ask. Pre-op trans men have to wear women's swimming gear in most swimming pools and will be presumed to be "she".

Well, yeah, but that's a practical issue (and a reason I avoid the pool like I avoid hot lava.)