dizmox Wrote:Ok, but you still have to remember the pretty arbitrary string of sounds that go together to make the word.
Kanken

Yep, but it's quite different from having to remember both the arbitrary string of sounds and the arbitrary string of letters. My English is quite good (at least, compared to all the not-native-speakers I know, excluded those who have been living in England or the US for more than 10 years), but it was just last year that I discovered that "Leicester" is pronounced like if it was written "Lester".

Something like that couldn't happen with Italian, Spanish, Korean (I suppose), Chinese...

tokyostyle Wrote:If English does actually have a million words

The number comes from Google counting all the words in over 5 million English language books published in the past 400 years. Not sure what's there to doubt.

tokyostyle Wrote:then I would guess a lot of them are from scientific latin terms and all of those words are just as much a part of Japanese as they are English.

What do you mean by "a lot"? 10.000? 50.000? 100.000?

anotherjohn Wrote:But afaik chemical names account for a significant chunk of that million, and the rest are names of plants/animals/food/clothes/etc collected from around the world throughout history.

So in a sense the bulk of those 'English' words are common to all languages in which those topics are discussed, it's just that no-one has so far seen fit to brag about it in the popsci literature

Key point there: "languages in which those topics are discussed". I don't think it's debatable that a lot more topics are discussed in English than any other language.

Have you ever visited a little village in the countryside? Doesn't matter what country, or what language they spoke. If you have, you know that each and every one of them has its own silly names for objects, animals, foods (even if it's the same exact food as in the next village, they call it something else), clothes, etc.

Here's a graph showing how English vocabulary grew over the years:


Those aren't "Latin words". Not unless someone's been coming up with new Latin words lately. Those are the peculiar local words used in every little village English has expanded to over the past 60 years. Those words don't exist in Japanese. Japanese is a local language, and no one speaking Japanese ever heard most of those words. They exist only in English and whatever other language those locals speak. They don't even exist in American English or British English.

Obviously, every language has such words. Japanese villages have words only they use, too. But there are a lot fewer Japanese villages than there are English speaking villages.

Well, if this is the place to vent out, here goes; I never realized how annoying language English is until I started to learn Japanese! XD

I mean no offense to native speakers here obviously. But the language itself is a mess. Although my level in English is perfectly functionable (or fluent if you will), I don't like it. Seriously, I still have no effin' clue how to pronounce words like "queue". Also, having to always stick the person pronouns everywhere is a royal pain in the butt too. What if you don't want to define the gender of a person? You have to use the stiff "one". Blargh.

For me it seems, Japanese makes so much more sense and has so much more flexibility and logic in it. Know enough kanji, and you always know how to pronounce words. No guessing needed. You can easily be as ambigious with your sentences as you want. No need to define who does what. No need to add anything extra unless the situation calls for it (like polite forms).

For me English is just a measuring stick, a long-ago reached goal. I am far from functional in Japanese, but I aim to have the same level in Japanese that I have with English someday

Loviatar Wrote:Seriously, I still have no effin' clue how to pronounce words like "queue".

It's Q. Just Q. Like this:

@tokyostyle

Thanks for that reference, very interesting.

So either I have the vocab of a ~14 year-old, or it is as suspected: the more transparent/structured etymology of Japanese words supports a larger passive vocabulary, as with an English speaker who knows Latin.

@Stansfield123

That does not seem like a useful metric.

Those darn Normans, using all those extra letters just made English even more confusing. Not to mention all the proto-French-origin synonyms that are in English; why have two separate names for an animal and its meat? Because it's the same word, just commonly used in different contexts.
I'm betting that the Enlightenment didn't help much either, considering many of the most prominent philosophes (a french word that has a very different meaning in English than its relative 'philosopher') were French.

The fact that English has so many different influences is probably what makes the spelling so horrible. Even as a (relatively) well read native speaker, I often learn words through reading and assign a reading to the best of my ability only to find out later (sometimes years later) that I've been pronouncing it wrong the whole time.

Then there's the fact that English sounds nothing like it used to, which separates the spelling and the pronunciation even more. If you've ever heard a performance in OP ('original pronunciation'), then you know what I'm talking about; it's much easier to see the Germanic origin of English when hearing an OP performance of Beowulf; and some of Shakespeare's rhyming jokes are only clear when read in an accent that is, to the best of current human knowledge, more accurate to the pronunciation of the time (I'm not a big Shakespeare fan, so I can't think of the examples that were used when I learned about this in English class).

EDIT: Thinking about it, I remember one common pronunciation/spelling inconsistency that used to not be, 'kn'. Apparently (I don't remember the source, so don't quote me), 'knife', 'know', etc. used to be pronounced with the 'k', but the illiterate masses found 'nife' and 'no' to be easier to say, so those pronunciation became the norm and stayed as such once people started becoming literate.
Another good one that's more recent is 'wh' which, is supposed to be pronounced differently that 'h', but rarely is, even though it was still something that was taught when I was in primary school. It's just easier to say 'wale' than 'whale'; amazingly 'who' and 'whom' are usually pronounced correctly (at least, as far as I can tell), even though 'whom' is rarely used as it should be, even in text (which is probably why no one uses it).

That "personal-centric view" qwertyytrewq talked about is appropriate here.
If familiar with a sound based writing system, the sound-based writing system is easier.
If familiar with a logographic based writing system, this system is easier.

In hindsight, I kind of vitiated the comparison.

True story:

A kid memorizes 2000 kanji and becomes familiar with the Japanese writing system. He learns pronunciations and develops morphological awareness through reading.

The kid eventually learns English. He thinks, "Damn, no kanji!?".*

darkjapanese Wrote:"Phonological and orthographic (written) routes during reading operate interactively with one another, augmenting one another in a kind of synthesis. Your phonological skills heighten your mental graphemic representations (and vice versa)."

Quote:Reading skills are a multidimensional continuum involving orthographic, morphological, and phonological awareness operating dynamically depending on the properties of the text, and the reader, who makes adjustments to reading rate and subvocalizing, to eye movement, etc., based on their proficiency and their aims.

Quote:"Keep in mind that Japanese has more reliance on the visuospatial in relation to the aural, due to the morphographic kanji which are processed differently from phonograms such as kana and alphabetic letters. As I previously mentioned, it’s skimming-friendly and opens up the trajectory of literacy development. But this doesn’t change the importance of the phonological, for the written and the spoken language. It just evens things out, different from the much more sound-based writing system of English.

Subvocalization and handwriting in the SRS

/relevant. I promise

***
The anecdote was mostly parenthetic.
Japanese has orthographic and logographic aspects.
*prefixes, suffixes, and Latin conjugations
"comparing apples and oranges"

Stansfield123 Wrote:

Loviatar Wrote:Seriously, I still have no effin' clue how to pronounce words like "queue".

It's Q. Just Q. Like this:

It's not the Q that is the problem you know. It's the weird-ass stuff after it

The entire word is pronounced like the name of the letter Q: /kjuː/

dizmox Wrote:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:I wonder what the Japanese equivalent of a Spelling Bee would be? Long strings of Kanji that have non-standard/rare readings?

Kanken

Do they have televisionally televised spelling bee competitions though? Kanken is just a boring standard test. Or is that just an American culture thing.

Aspiring Wrote:That "personal-centric view" qwertyytrewq talked about is appropriate here.
If familiar with a sound based writing system, the sound-based writing system is easier.
If familiar with a logographic based writing system, this system is easier.

In hindsight, I kind of vitiated the comparison.

True story:

A kid memorizes 2000 kanji and becomes familiar with the Japanese writing system. He learns pronunciations and develops morphological awareness through reading.

The kid eventually learns English. He thinks, "Damn, no kanji!?".*

I guess in this situation, to this guy, English is one of the hardest languages in the world and no amount of peer reviewed studies can change his mind.

If the Japanese imperial army won WW2 we'd probably all be saying English is the hardest language in the world.

I think in comparison to other languages, English is rather hard. For starters, it has if I'm not mistaken around 14 or 15 vowels: u as in "wonder", u as in "foot", a as in "man", o as in "pot", a as in "father", e as in "brother", i as in "pit", e as in "red", ur as in "world", er as in "where", ee as in "feet", long aw as in "board", short aw as in "saw"... and then about then thousand diphtongs. To make matters worse, whether the ortography matches the pronunciation or not is a gamble (colour is pronounced culler; broad is pronounced brawd; father is pronounced farther; were is pronounced wur; even such a basic word as "to" is pronounced "too"!)

As for grammar, it isn't difficult but it is both rigid in that shifting things around will break sentences AND unsystematic in that there are rules that apply only to certain cases.

It also has a lot of prepositions the use of which isn't always clearly explainable (in the street? on the street?; in my house? at my house?)

These prepositions are used to make phrasal verbs which to some extent can be improvised on the spot, but knowing the nuances isn't easy at all for a non-native (finish it up, finish it off).

Morphology is probably the easiest part. Unlike for example German, how to form plurals is almost always obvious, and gender only applies to pronouns. Verbs are easy too, and the use of modal verbs is not too complex. There are a few nuances that might need some explaining ("I used to go there all the time and I would do the craziest stuff" vs "I was having a hard time and I did what I could"), but it's all pretty reasonable.

The vocabulary depends on where you're from. I don't think it's hard for Western Europeans and people from Latin America in general, but it must be very alien to anyone else.

What irked me as a high school student (many moons ago) was the overwhelming amount of tenses, like future/past perfect progressive and when to use them. Though I've been studying Latin for 5 years (see? I'm still not sure if ppp is appropriate here), I still think that English tenses are stupid. (maybe because I've never had to write essays in Latin )
Now I don't really care about these things, since I don't actively use English in my day to day life.
I also mix up British vs American English pronunciations when I have to speak English. Though I admire and adore the Oxford English pronunciation I always speak on the American English side.

Draught, Drought, Lapel, Albeit, Awry, Recipe.

These words can go seriously f*ck themselves.

I still get the pronunciation wrong half the time...

And don't get me started on loan words like "entrepreneur".

[RawToast]

Stansfield123 Wrote:Have you ever visited a little village in the countryside? Doesn't matter what country, or what language they spoke. If you have, you know that each and every one of them has its own silly names for objects, animals, foods (even if it's the same exact food as in the next village, they call it something else), clothes, etc.

Things like food can be silly in the UK. All these words in different areas just for a type of bread and they aren't commonly known...

Bread Roll
Bread Cake (No sugar! It's just a bread roll...)
Barm Cake
Stottie
Bap
Bun
Cob
Oven Bottom
Bin Lid (No joke!)

Quote:I think in comparison to other languages, English is rather hard. For starters, it has if I'm not mistaken around 14 or 15 vowels: u as in "wonder", u as in "foot", a as in "man", o as in "pot", a as in "father", e as in "brother", i as in "pit", e as in "red", ur as in "world", er as in "where", ee as in "feet", long aw as in "board", short aw as in "saw"

'A' can be differ in many words depending on where you live. In the south it is often pronounced like 'ar' e.g. bath and ba®th.

poblequadrat Wrote:I think in comparison to other languages, English is rather hard.

It would be hard, if both languages were studied in a context-less vacuum. But, fact is, people don't study languages in a vacuum. Most people are exposed to English and/or speak related languages for years before they begin to learn it.

And that's far more important than the minor differences in complexity between various languages. So, for the vast majority of people, English is not hard.

To be fair every natural language is hard, because it is full of idiosyncrasies.

Now, comparing English to Finnish, I think you can make an objective case that English is easier, because it has no cases, English words have no gender, and are generally shorter than Finnish words.

Comparing English to Spanish, I would say that learning how to pronounce English correctly is much harder than learning to pronounce Spanish, because the writing system of English is full of historical irregularities, as many pointed out. However, the verb system of Spanish, inherited from Latin, is extremely hard to master.

And as others pointed out, English permeates modern life so much (taking just the Internet or the movies), that it is hard to find any human being on earth who has not been exposed to a little bit of English already.

Japanese is super-hard because of the kanji and of its outlandish grammar, but its phonetics are quite simple, compared to those of English, for instance. Another hardness factor of Japanese is how to master the politeness levels. I am not thinking only of keigo, but generally of acquiring the feel of the nuances of what can be said and what cannot be said in a given social situation, which can be acquired only through a long experience.

Your Japanese can be very good grammar-wise, but without a long experience with the culture, a lack of doigté with politeness levels might irritate your Japanese interlocutors to a degree that may be hard to imagine, as nothing of the kind exists in English.

Korean has the same problem, but the politeness levels of Korean are even more complicated than that of Japanese.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

poblequadrat Wrote:I think in comparison to other languages, English is rather hard.

It would be hard, if both languages were studied in a context-less vacuum. But, fact is, people don't study languages in a vacuum. Most people are exposed to English and/or speak related languages for years before they begin to learn it.

And that's far more important than the minor differences in complexity between various languages. So, for the vast majority of people, English is not hard.

Nah, English is an oddity. It has a much larger vowel inventory than most European languages, its vocabulary is a bizarre mishmash and its grammar is also kind of odd in some ways. It's irregular as far as languages go. Most of all, pronouncing English correctly is almost impossible for non-natives. Understanding spoken English isn't easy either - I can definitely imagine many otherwise fluent non-natives watching a British film and not understanding anything. Or trying to have a conversation with someone from the Caribbean. Or, I don't know, watching Limmy's Show. This doesn't happen with languages I'd call relatively easy in comparison (such as German or Italian, though things that are simple in English are fiendishly hard in these languages.)

English is hard, and the truth is, even in Europe hearing appallingly bad English isn't that uncommon. Do we get more exposure to English? Maybe (I don't agree - we get more exposure to American artifacts, but not to English itself - at least in Europe, which seems to be where you are); that doesn't make it easier, it just means you don't have to do anything to spend more time studying it.

I concede, though, that context makes getting by easier. Poor English will get you further than poor Japanese, but in terms of actual fluency, both the guy with the poor English and the guy with the poor Japanese would be at the same level of mastery.

RawToast Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:Have you ever visited a little village in the countryside? Doesn't matter what country, or what language they spoke. If you have, you know that each and every one of them has its own silly names for objects, animals, foods (even if it's the same exact food as in the next village, they call it something else), clothes, etc.

Things like food can be silly in the UK. All these words in different areas just for a type of bread and they aren't commonly known...

Bread Roll
Bread Cake (No sugar! It's just a bread roll...)
Barm Cake
Stottie
Bap
Bun
Cob
Oven Bottom
Bin Lid (No joke!)

Quote:I think in comparison to other languages, English is rather hard. For starters, it has if I'm not mistaken around 14 or 15 vowels: u as in "wonder", u as in "foot", a as in "man", o as in "pot", a as in "father", e as in "brother", i as in "pit", e as in "red", ur as in "world", er as in "where", ee as in "feet", long aw as in "board", short aw as in "saw"

'A' can be differ in many words depending on where you live. In the south it is often pronounced like 'ar' e.g. bath and ba®th.

True! And it's not even regular, either - it's working clarss but plastic bottle; Marster's Tournament but blood transfusion; carn't sleep but land tax.

I think for most European people getting good at English is easy because

-all the Latin languages share lots of vocabulary with each other
-they are taught English for ~8 years in school in most countries

Now there are still lots of people whose English is horrible even after 8 years of studying it, but those who are really interested can get proficient really fast anytime they invest a bit on their own. While I remember that my English was still really bad when I finished school, it took maybe a year of reading and watching stuff in English until I was very comfortable with the language.

1. Pronunciation is a tiny part of language learning. No matter how "irregular", it requires a fraction of the time and attention the rest of the process does. So I can't accept the argument that "English is harder mainly because it's harder to pronounce correctly". Even if it's twice as hard compared to let's say French, it's still a couple of weeks of extra work, at most, and you only have to do the work after you've learned the language. That's nothing, compared to for instance the many months of extra work you have to put in to learn the Japanese or Chinese writing system, just to be able to get started.

2. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is scratching your chin, 9 is climbing Mount Everest and 10 is curing cancer, I'd say learning correct English pronunciation is about 2.

The reason why so many people pronounce English badly is because there isn't a huge incentive to getting out of your comfort zone and putting in the effort to learn it (because in most English speaking countries, you don't have to hide the fact that you're a foreigner - the vast majority of the native population will treat you no differently over your accent). Not because it's nearly impossible.

If it was important enough to them, anyone could fix their accents in a fraction of the time it takes to learn a language.

[Zgarbas]

I have been studying English for the past 21 years.

I still find random words that I have been pronouncing wrong all my life (recently: iambic. I've always pronounced it yam-bic in 2 syllables)

also, the accent thing sucks. I stabilized on this awesome Schropshire accent, but whenever I talk to an American I feel way too posh speaking British so I switch to this weird default not-exactly Midwest accent which not only sounds unnatural, but I keep pronouncing things in a British manner and keep correcting myself and sound like a noob.

and I keep mixing jargon which confuses people (so this bloke was wicked cute right?)

I didn't even "study" English after school. I just used the internet and somehow picked it up. Sure, there are words I pronounce incorrectly, like "comb", but who cares? I only use the language in its written form normally (even tho I think my pronunciation ain't that bad really) or listen to stuff or watch stuff. I understand most accents you get to hear on the internet, too. My ear has to tune in sometimes, though.

Japanese is a whole different thing for me, but that's because my mother tongue is German. Not all, but most of the facts that make Japanese tough for English natives, apply for Germans, too. We have a different sound set tho, none of the annoying "chewing gum" sounds, but all Japanese sounds are in the German language, while this doesn't apply for English, so I guess that made me lucky.

Stansfield123 Wrote:1. Pronunciation is a tiny part of language learning. No matter how "irregular", it requires a fraction of the time and attention the rest of the process does. So I can't accept the argument that "English is harder mainly because it's harder to pronounce correctly". Even if it's twice as hard compared to let's say French, it's still a couple of weeks of extra work, at most, and you only have to do the work after you've learned the language. That's nothing, compared to for instance the many months of extra work you have to put in to learn the Japanese or Chinese writing system, just to be able to get started.

2. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is scratching your chin, 9 is climbing Mount Everest and 10 is curing cancer, I'd say learning correct English pronunciation is about 2.

The reason why so many people pronounce English badly is because there isn't a huge incentive to getting out of your comfort zone and putting in the effort to learn it (because in most English speaking countries, you don't have to hide the fact that you're a foreigner - the vast majority of the native population will treat you no differently over your accent). Not because it's nearly impossible.

If it was important enough to them, anyone could fix their accents in a fraction of the time it takes to learn a language.

No, that is not true at all. First because English has got a staggering amount of vowels and that takes a long time to master. Plus knowing how to pronounce correctly has to be done on a by-word basis, which takes a very long time. But it's not too important to pronounce it right as long as you can make yourself understood. No, what actually matters is the fact that a non-native who has been studying English for years and can express himself fluently, with a perfect accent even, will have lots of trouble talking to someone from Glasgow, will miss much of a film set in London, and won't be able to transcribe a reggae song worth beans. This is something that happens with English and to some extent French, but not with Italian, or German, or Spanish.

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is one of those languages with three vowels and 10 is those African languages with lots of click consonants, English is maybe 6 or 7 - and any other Latin or West Germanic language is 3 or 4, except French.

I see you're bent on making comparisons to Japanese. Japanese is probably harder than English, but my point is not that English is harder than Japanese, my point is that linguistically, English is on the complex end of things, whereas Europe has many languages that are simpler on many fronts. If you're restricting the argument to language learning, it's all relative. But amongst West Germanic and Latin languages, English is amongst the hardest, as is French.

You also seem to ignore that I mention other points where English is harder or easier than other languages. My point is not that English is hard because of its pronunciation. I was just listing hard and easy points of English - fiendishly hard: pronunciation; kind of baffling: syntax; random and difficult to master: prepositions; extremely easy: morphology. And on the whole, I'm absolutely convinced that one year of studying Italian will get you farther than one year of English.

Also, speaking nuanced English is not as easy as you'd think. I've had my experiences with exchange students and tourists that came across as extremely rude without intending to. Again, Japanese is harder on this point, but that's not what I'm talking about.

louischa Wrote:To be fair every natural language is hard, because it is full of idiosyncrasies.

Now, comparing English to Finnish, I think you can make an objective case that English is easier, because it has no cases, English words have no gender, and are generally shorter than Finnish words.

Actually there's no gender in Finnish words either. Finnish doesn't even separate between she and he.

Quote:Japanese is super-hard because of the kanji and of its outlandish grammar, but its phonetics are quite simple, compared to those of English, for instance. Another hardness factor of Japanese is how to master the politeness levels. I am not thinking only of keigo, but generally of acquiring the feel of the nuances of what can be said and what cannot be said in a given social situation, which can be acquired only through a long experience.

Your Japanese can be very good grammar-wise, but without a long experience with the culture, a lack of doigté with politeness levels might irritate your Japanese interlocutors to a degree that may be hard to imagine, as nothing of the kind exists in English.

This is an often repeated point when it comes to Japanese but in all honesty Japanese politeness levels are simply more pronounced than in other languages. Every language can be quite nuanced when it comes to politeness.

Other languages tend to be attributed with certain "special" characteristics too. During my Italian courses it was always said that the language is not so uniform but that different regions have their own vocabularies and quirks. That's true for every language.