All languages are difficult except Persian!
Printed From: History Community ~ All Empires
Category: Scholarly Pursuits
Forum Name: Linguistics
Forum Discription: Discuss linguistics: the study of languages
URL: http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16635
Printed Date: 28-Apr-2024 at 10:49
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Topic: All languages are difficult except Persian!
Posted By: Cyrus Shahmiri
Subject: All languages are difficult except Persian!
Date Posted: 21-Dec-2006 at 17:20
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Maybe because it is my mother language but I think some other languages that I know a little about them, are really more difficult than it, for example this is a complete sentence in the Persian language:
Nadidish? (Didn't you see him/her/it?) Na-=Not What do you think? ------------- 
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Replies:
Posted By: Zagros
Date Posted: 21-Dec-2006 at 17:35
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Nadidamesh. *shrug* ------------- |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 21-Dec-2006 at 19:36
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..This is something i have thought about many times, although i am English, i have mostly been of the opinion that English is a reasonably simple language to learn... ..i have (along with most English people!!) been pretty lazy with learning new languages, mainly because i have found it very difficult indeed...but over the years, i have had a lot of contact with people from other countries who have either lived or studied in the UK... (not to mention a Russian partner)...and all have expressed the view that far from being easy, English is one of the most difficult of languages to pick up (many of these individuals had learnt, or were learning additional languages apart from English)... ...however, my partner told me once that English is not that bad to learn, but actually speaking and expressing the language correctly, or employing its use properly is very difficult indeed....but i cannot argue very strongly this as my use of Russian is abysmal!!!! ------------- |
Posted By: Aelfgifu
Date Posted: 22-Dec-2006 at 04:50
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That is intresting... can you do that with all sentenses in Persian? sticking them into one word I mean... For simple sentences that is? how long can that word get?
I'm not sure it would make Persian easier though. I remember from my Latin class that most people had a lot of trouble with seperating words when they are stuck together, because they are used to full word seperation, so that might actually mean that Persian is extremely hard...
 Personally I found English dead easy, but I seem to have a bit of a knack for it... I have had to learn German an French but I never got very far on that, in spte of hours spend cramming words into my head. English on the other hand I never had to learn for at all, just watching telly without subtitles and a preference for fantasybooks that had not been translated yet was enough... I wish all languages came that easy. But your partner is right, Act of Oblivion, in English expressing something correcly is the most difficult thing. That being polite for example: Dutch, French and German all have a specific verb-form for that, (like thou and thine once existed) but English doesn't, so to stay polite ne has to word everything very specific and subtle. ------------- 
Women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears. |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 22-Dec-2006 at 10:05
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Any language you can think in is easy. ------------- |
Posted By: Decebal
Date Posted: 22-Dec-2006 at 11:39
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I speak five languages (English, French, Romanian, Spanish and Italian), and I have some knowldege of German, Latin, a little bit of Greek, Russian; I have attempted to learn Mandarin Chinese and I currently want to study Hindi. Anyway, my point is that I have found English to be rather difficult compared to many of these languages, the main reason being that it is not phonetic. Aelfgifu, I'm not surprised you had an easy time learning English, since Dutch is the language closest to it. I've had a very easy time learnign Italian for instance (my native tongue is Romanian). I would say that in learning a language, the following factors determine its difficulty: 40% vocabulary - if a person already knows a related language which shares a lot of words with the language one is trying to learn, then the learning process will be much much easier. English has a lot of similarities with Latin and Germanic languages alike in this respect, which makes it moderately hard to learn for a European and probably fairly difficult for a native speaker of a non-Indo-European language. 35% grammar - some languages have a very difficult grammar (Russian), some very easy (Chinese), and some fall somewhere in between, like English. While English grammar is somehwat simple, it is also quite different from that of Romance languages for instance, which makes it somewhat hard. 25% alphabet and spelling. This is actually one of the main problems with English, as it is not phonetic. While the alphabet itself is simple and shared with a lot of other languages, writing and readin in English is not obvious. ------------- What is history but a fable agreed upon? Napoleon Bonaparte Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.- Mohandas Gandhi 
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Posted By: Dan Carkner
Date Posted: 22-Dec-2006 at 13:16
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Cyrus, I think that makes it efficient, not neccessarily simple. ;) |
Posted By: Cyrus Shahmiri
Date Posted: 22-Dec-2006 at 15:00
Of course not, we can just use enclitic nominative and accusative pronouns, instead of "Nadidish?" we can also say the full sentence of "Aya thou ura nadidi?" -------------
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Posted By: Spartakus
Date Posted: 23-Dec-2006 at 14:41
Dude,be serious.Persian are very difficult.
------------- "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. " --- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996) |
Posted By: Leonidas
Date Posted: 23-Dec-2006 at 20:44
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i cant say for Persian just yet (except its sounds a whole better than Arabic) . having parents of non English speaking background (NESBians) , English is hard especially to write. Especially proper English ------------- 
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Posted By: Aelfgifu
Date Posted: 24-Dec-2006 at 06:40
Decebal, Dutch may be closest relaed to English in language-family trees, I can guarantee you that this is no big help in learning it at all. Dutch and English are about as similar as English and French... On the oher hand, Dutch and German are so similar they share about 50% of grammar and vocabulary, and yet, as I said, years of being forced to study and learn in school has not managed to give me more than the mildest of grasps on the language. I can read it and understand most, but I could not write it for the life of me... What is a factor is that in the Netherlands almost all television is subtitled and not lip-synced, which givs us a large exposure to English. Even so, most Ducthmens's English is emberassingly and toecurlingly bad... 
The reason English grammar is so different is because it is a Creole language, in effect the evolved effect of a pidgin which was the result of cultural mixing. Other Creole languages like Maleis have the same. That English is hard to write is because in the run of time, phonetics have changed far more than spelling. Chaucherian English is spelled very similar to modern English, while medieval French, German and Dutch for example have changed considerably. -------------
Women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears. |
Posted By: Ikki
Date Posted: 24-Dec-2006 at 08:20
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Aelgifu, are very differents the flemish and the dutch?
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Posted By: Dan Carkner
Date Posted: 24-Dec-2006 at 14:17
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Dutch and English are about as similar as English and French... not at all my friend.. an english person can read a sentence in dutch and understand most of it once they know what to look for.. French on the other hand is a romance language, it's built differently. |
Posted By: Zagros
Date Posted: 24-Dec-2006 at 14:48
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That's true of Danish to a ;esser extent also. ------------- |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 27-Dec-2006 at 16:39
no, they are the same language. Somebody from the Netherlands can recognize somebody from Flanders by his speech and vice versa, but Dutch and Flemish people have absolutely no difficulty understanding each other. It's as similar as British English and American English. ------------- |
Posted By: xi_tujue
Date Posted: 27-Dec-2006 at 18:40
Jep I have lived most of my life in holland and than moved to flanders not a problem at all not even difficult(some voacublary differences due to well the french) I only got made fun of bec ause my dutch accent who wasn't that different because I live below the river(rijn) ------------- I rather be a nomadic barbarian than a sedentary savage |