toshiromiballza Wrote:Studying both Japanese and Korean, Japanese is definitely easier vocabulary-wise or speaking/listening comprehension-wise. The grammar is similar in both. The thing that makes Japanese rather difficult are kanji.

I have no experience with Chinese, so I don't know how hard it is to master the tones to the point where you're able to differentiate them mid-speech, but my Korean listening comprehension is quite bad. I often don't understand what my professor is saying (even though I'd understand it if I had the text in front of me) unless he slows his speaking to the point where it's just plain silly.

So if Chinese is anywhere near as hard as Korean, add to that the one thing that makes Japanese difficult, hanzi, and it wins in the difficulty among the languages hands down.

The African or Native American languages have a very small vocabulary, and you have to take that into account, so I don't think they even count.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies? These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually. They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Well u haven't gotten there but one day you'll realize that Korean grammar is more complicated than Japanese.

toshiromiballza Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies? These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually. They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

Well they do. Sotho has around 20,000 words, Zulu and Xhosa have around 30,000, Yucatec Mayan has around 20,000, Nahuatl has around 27,000. Then there are some Creole and Australian languages that have less than 2,000 words.

How many words does an educated person fluent in English understand/recognize? Probably 30,000 or more. And if English (or Russian, Japanese, ...) has over 300,000 words, and around 30,000 are "common," I'm thinking you would need to know at least half less of that for the aforementioned languages to be considered "fluent."

Wikipedia Wrote:Comparisons of the vocabulary size of English to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.

vonPeterhof Wrote:Looks like it's time to throw in my favourite quote again, even though the subject isn't just English:

Quote:with 356.881 headwords in the list

Wikipedia Wrote:Comparisons of the vocabulary size of [INSERT LANGUAGE HERE] to that of other languages are generally not taken very seriously by linguists and lexicographers. Besides the fact that dictionaries will vary in their policies for including and counting entries, what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions. Also, a definition of word that works for one language may not work well in another, with differences in morphology and orthography making cross-linguistic definitions and word-counting difficult, and potentially giving very different results. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has gone so far as to compare concerns over vocabulary size (and the notion that a supposedly larger lexicon leads to "greater richness and precision") to an obsession with penis length.

toshiromiballza Wrote:Well they do. Sotho has around 20,000 words, Zulu and Xhosa have around 30,000, Yucatec Mayan has around 20,000, Nahuatl has around 27,000. Then there are some Creole and Australian languages that have less than 2,000 words.

EratiK Wrote:Knowing personally someone who speaks Yolŋu Matha, and knowing a bunch of French Creole speakers, this claim is ridiculous without further precisions.

vonPeterhof Wrote:Is the point clearer now?

toshiromiballza Wrote:The point is, those languages have less words, and I doubt native speakers know all of them, much like we don't know all of ours, thus you need to learn less words to be considered fluent.

magamo Wrote:I heard languages spoken in Africa and regions geographically close to Africa typically have richer phonetical inventories because they tend to retain older phonemes like clicks. Don't quote me on this though.

delta Wrote:Hungarian is certainly difficult for English speakers, but it can't be considered harder than Japanese which has such things as Kanji that can have multiple readings. Both Japanese and Hungarian are very different from English in terms of grammar rules, but which one is more different?. Well, Japanese is more isolated than Hungarian, which albeit belonging to a totally different branch of languages, is still a European language and cultural exchange has been present between its speakers and the rest of the world for a longer period of time than in Japanese. The same idea applies to Arabic, but I guess the FSI puts it in the top because of its writing script which is more complicated than say, the Greek or the cyrillic alphabet.

EratiK Wrote:First, I don't see any sources. And for every source should be examined how the words were counted.

Quote:It is estimated that each Aboriginal language comprises approximately 10 000 words – about the same number of words that the average English speaker is familiar with (Blake 1981).

toshiromiballza Wrote:And again, I don't think any native Australian speaker knows all 10,000 words in his language, so vocabulary-wise, these should be the easiest languages to learn.

EratiK Wrote:the lesser the vocabulary, the more likely it is for a user to know it exhaustively.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:I think the code talker idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

lead me to believe it?

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:Could you give me an academic source of where it says this?

I am usually a good judge of whether these things are right as you can see at the end of this thread?http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=9087&page=5

toshiromiballza Wrote:

EratiK Wrote:the lesser the vocabulary, the more likely it is for a user to know it exhaustively.

That's your opinion, and my opinion is that I don't think their entire vocabulary consists of only essential/basic words that are known by all. I'd say some 7,000 are "common" and the rest are words that their spiritual leaders (or whatever they're called) know, etc.

toshiromiballza Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies? These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually. They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

Well they do. Sotho has around 20,000 words, Zulu and Xhosa have around 30,000, Yucatec Mayan has around 20,000, Nahuatl has around 27,000. Then there are some Creole and Australian languages that have less than 2,000 words.

How many words does an educated person fluent in English understand/recognize? Probably 30,000 or more. And if English (or Russian, Japanese, ...) has over 300,000 words, and around 30,000 are "common," I'm thinking you would need to know at least half less of that for the aforementioned languages to be considered "fluent."

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Well u haven't gotten there but one day you'll realize that Korean grammar is more complicated than Japanese.

Well, I did notice it is a bit harder, but I guess I just haven't gotten far enough with the grammar yet to go into WTF mode. Definitely not far enough to see the point of learning hanja. Actually, unless I'd be studying some historical texts or whatever, I really don't see the point. I could as well add a comment with Japanese kanji for clarification to the vocabulary I'm studying, and potentially learn two words for two languages at the same time.