Difficult tongues
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Johnson, in the Economist (5/7/21), has an enjoyable article: "Some languages are harder to learn than others — but not for the obvious reasons".
Here's the first part of the article:
When considering which foreign languages to study, some people shy away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking squiggles seem to symbolise the impenetrability of the language, the difficulty of the task ahead.
So it can be surprising to hear devotees of Russian say the alphabet is the easiest part of the job. The Cyrillic script, like the Roman one, has its origins in the Greek alphabet. As a result, some letters look the same and are used near identically. Others look the same but have different pronunciations, like the p in Cyrillic, which stands for an r-sound. For Russian, that cuts the task down to only about 20 entirely new characters. These can comfortably be learned in a week, and soon mastered to the point that they present little trouble. An alphabet, in other words, is just an alphabet. A few tricks aside (such as the occasional omission of vowels), other versions do what the Roman one does: represent sounds.
Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.
This is easily illustrated with concrete vocabulary. Sometimes the meanings of foreign words and their English equivalents overlap but don’t match exactly. Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae). Or consider colours, which lie on a spectrum that different languages segment differently. In Japanese, ao traditionally refers to both green and blue. Some green items are covered by a different word, midori, but ao applies to some vegetables and green traffic lights (which, to make matters more confusing, are slightly blueish in Japan). As a result, ao is rather tricky to wield.
Life becomes tougher still when other languages make distinctions that yours ignores. Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii); foreigners can be baffled by what to call, say, a mid-blue pair of jeans. Plenty of other “basic” English words are similarly broken down in their foreign corollaries. “Wall” and “corner” seem like simple concepts, until you learn languages that sensibly distinguish between a city’s walls and a bedroom’s (German Mauer versus Wand), interior corners and street corners (Spanish rincón and esquina), and so on.
These problems are tractable on their own; you don’t often have to refer to a corner in casual conversation. But when other languages make structural distinctions missing from your native tongue—often in the operation of verbs—the mental effort seems never-ending. English has verbs-of-all-work that seem straightforward enough until you try to translate them. In languages like German, “put” is divided into verbs that signify hanging, laying something flat and placing something tall and thin. “Go” in Russian is a nightmare, with a suite of verbs distinguishing walking and travelling by vehicle, one-way and round trips, single and repeated journeys, and other niceties. You can specify all these things in English if you want to; the difference is that in Russian, you must.
In the remainder of the article, the author addresses different types of verb systems (Italian, French, etc.) and "evidential" languages (Turkish, some Amazonian languages, Basque). If you're interested in these subjects, just click on the title of the article at the beginning of this post above.
He concludes:
In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over. It is a bit like a personal trainer putting you through entirely new exercises. You might have thought yourself fit before, but the next day you will wake up sore in muscles you never knew you had.
Mark Metcalf says that he liked the article so much that he sent the following letter to the editor:
A Bug or a Feature
Johnson's column on language learning ("Tongue-twisters", May 8th) did a commendable job of cataloguing the types of foreign language characteristics that can present difficulties for English-speaking language students. However I take exception to the writer's characterization of the precision demanded when using Russian verbs as "a nightmare." Unique verbs that, for example, allow a writer to distinguish between whether an aircraft is flying "to", "from", "over", "into", etc., and also indicate whether the action has been completed or is ongoing. While the 700+ pages of A dictionary of Russian Verbs by Daum and Schenk attest to the scope of the challenge, the joy that one can experience from reading Russian literature in Russian affirm that accepting the challenge can certainly be worth it. Whether Russian verbs should be considered a bug or a feature is a determination best left to the reader.
Selected readings
- "Difficult languages and easy languages" (3/4/17)
- "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19)
- "Is Mandarin easy to learn after all?" (5/28/19)
- "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17) — esp. this comment
- "Why Literary Sinitic is so darn hard" (5/30/19)
- “Which is harder: Western classical languages or Chinese? ” (3/6/16)
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/91)
- (简体字：为什么中文这么TM难？)
- (繁體字：為什麼中文這麼TM難？)
Philip Taylor said,
May 14, 2021 @ 9:30 am
But what did he mean by the sub-title "They slice up the messy reality of life differently from your own" ? That sentence is impenetrable (and therefore meaningless) to me.
Jerry Friedman said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:08 am
Philip Taylor: I think you could translate it as "Other languages categorize the many parts of life, which are not inherently categorized, differently from the the way your own language does."
For me, rincón and esquina is easy. The difference is concrete and I have no trouble understanding it even though English uses "corner" for both. A hard distinction is tú and usted. First, it varies according to region and social situation. Second, it's stressful, since if you get it wrong either way, you're likely to offend the person you're talking to. Another hard one is what preposition to use with what word—oler a algo literally "smell to something", soñar con algo "dream with something". This doesn't particularly strike me as slicing up reality. it's just verbal.
Erica said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:09 am
Green traffic lights are increasingly blue-ish across the world. It mitigates red/green color blindness problems.
Look closely next time you see a traffic light – don't just label it "green" because you always have.
Cervantes said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:20 am
I dunno PT, the sentence makes perfect sense to me. You can carve nature at different places. An excellent example from Spanish is translating the verb "to be." There are multiple different Spanish verbs and you need to grasp the distinctions. "Ser" refers to an inherent or stable characteristic of an object. "Soy hombre" means I'm a man. "Estar" refers to current but malleable states, and generally to location, even if it is fixed. "Estoy felíz" means I'm happy, but I might not be tomorrow. But you could say "Es una persona felíz" to refer to a person with a generally happy disposition. "Estoy en la oficina" means I'm in the office, but somewhat contradictorily you would probably say "La oficina está en Providence" although occasionally people will use ser. You can also use the reflexive verb ubicarse for location.To assert existence — "There is a tavern in the town," you use a defective form of the verb "haber." "Hay una taberna en la ciudad."
So as English speakers we don't think about these distinctions as we speak although obviously we must be aware of them on some level. And so in general I don't think these sorts of differences among languages mean that we really perceive reality differently or live in different worlds. We're capable of perceiving differences in colors that have the same name, but we might have to distinguish them with adverbs or even a descriptive phrase. Royal blue, navy blue, sky blue, robin's egg blue. . . .
Philip Taylor said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:25 am
Oh. "… differently from your own [elided]language[/elided]". I see. I read it as "… differently from your own [elided]life[/elided]" …
Scott P. said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:39 am
There are multiple different Spanish verbs and you need to grasp the distinctions. "Ser" refers to an inherent or stable characteristic of an object. "Soy hombre" means I'm a man. "Estar" refers to current but malleable states, and generally to location, even if it is fixed.
But of course, with transgender people becoming more visible and accepted, being a man is not necessarily stable or inherent. Other things, like one's profession, are spoken of using 'ser' even though one could have been in the job for a day, or lose the job tomorrow. Meanwhile, of a task you would say 'es fácil' even though its difficulty could easily depend on one's skills or mood at that particular moment. It's 'logical' in some sense, but Spanish speakers don't figure out what to say by logic, any more than English speakers order their adjectives according to a conscious rule, despite the fact that one can come up for a rule for why adjectives are ordered as they are.
Cervantes said,
May 14, 2021 @ 10:57 am
Well sure Scott, in some instances it can be a matter of degree, but I don't know that those examples are very compelling. Most people who have a profession or an occupation stay in it for a while, and even if you stop working at it you're still a lawyer or a doctor. Once a person has changed gender they normally expect to stay there.That a task might seem easy today but not so much tomorrow seems a quibble. But I do take the point that people don't usually think about this, they just talk or write. BTW you ask "Qúe hora es," although the response obviously will remain true for only an instant. There are rules that we just learn and then don't think about.
Michael said,
May 14, 2021 @ 11:37 am
I suspect that the subtitle was drawn from the sentence in the text: "Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways." This is much less ambiguous, another example of the difference between writing out sentences vs headline-ese.
Batchman said,
May 14, 2021 @ 12:38 pm
The difficulty, insofar as it involves the verbal distinctions, is mainly in speaking or writing the language. If one wishes to learn it only well enough to be able to comprehend the written or spoken language, it's not as big a deal.
GeorgeW said,
May 14, 2021 @ 1:28 pm
I thought the comment about the perceived difficulty of a different writing system was interesting. When I started learning Arabic, that seemed like it would be a huge obstacle (for an English speaker). But, it wasn't. People would ask me, about the difficulty of writing right to left. Surprisingly to me, that was a no problem at all, it just came automatically.
Peter B. Golden said,
May 14, 2021 @ 1:54 pm
Writing systems: the Armenian alphabet with 36 letters, a number of which are nearly identical (e.g.g գ d դ z զ) in certain fonts and some capital letters are quite distinct from their lower case forms (Չ Č' չ č'). But, this becomes familiar with use – and as alphabets go, Armenian reflects actual pronunciation rather well, esp. when compared to English, French and Scotch and Irish Gaelic. The differences between Eastern Armenian (considered the literary standard ) and Western are regular (e.g. Eastern "g" becomes Western "k" etc.).
Grammar: Georgian. The Georgian verb did permanent damage to my brain :).
In Spanish idioms are the problem. Hablar por los codos (lit. to speak through the elbows) = "to prattle on"
Ralph J Hickok said,
May 14, 2021 @ 2:48 pm
When I entered Harvard, I planned to major in engineering and had to take either German or Russian. I chose German because I wouldn't have to learn a new alphabet.
I passed the language requirement in German but, at the beginning of sophomore year, I changed to major to English and had to take either Latin or Greek.
Guess which one I chose?
tsts said,
May 14, 2021 @ 2:52 pm
"Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae)."
Though interestingly, a "træhugger" is not a treehugger but a lumberjack.
Dara Connolly said,
May 14, 2021 @ 4:38 pm
Peter Golden says:
and as alphabets go, Armenian reflects actual pronunciation rather well, esp. when compared to English, French and Scotch and Irish Gaelic.
French and Irish do not belong on that list. Unlike English, the written form of a French or Irish word allows you to know the pronunciation with near certainty. Irish orthography encodes Irish phonology very accurately.
(The other way around is not true, of course – you cannot reliably predict the spelling from the sound.)
Mark Metcalf said,
May 14, 2021 @ 5:25 pm
Peter B. Golden said "The Georgian verb did permanent damage to my brain"
Likewise, our class' daily hour of Russian dictation (in cursive!) at DLI did permanent damage to my already uninspiring English language handwriting. But I still love the Russian language!
Joshua K. said,
May 14, 2021 @ 6:56 pm
@Ralph J. Hickok: So did you take Latin (because you still didn't want to learn a new alphabet), or Greek (because you had decided that taking a language just because it used the same alphabet as English was a mistake)?
Victor Mair said,
May 14, 2021 @ 7:32 pm
"Unlike English, the written form of a French or Irish word allows you to know the pronunciation with near certainty."
maintenant ("now; currently")
/mɛ̃t.nɑ̃/ [mæ̃.təˈnɒ̃ː]
Chas Belov said,
May 15, 2021 @ 12:20 am
Then there's Cantonese with two kinds of thank yous: m goi (for something you've requested) vs. doh jeh (for a gift, patronage, or applause).
And Chinese has two greens which I haven't grokked yet.
Bathrobe said,
May 15, 2021 @ 2:45 am
Concerning Japanese traffic lights: “To make matters more confusing” is nonsense. In fact, the Japanese deliberately changed the colour of their traffic lights to bring them closer to what Japanese now perceive as “ao”. Colour perceptions have changed over time so that the meaning of “ao” has shifted closer to what we think of as blue. The change in traffic light colour was designed to take this into account. The whole idea was to make colours less confusing.
Keith said,
May 15, 2021 @ 3:14 am
When I took ab initio Russian in university I learnt that variant of the Cyrillic alphabet in little more than half a day, because I had already learnt most of the Yugoslavian variant when I was about eleven from a coin I had been fobbed off with in change from a machine (at the time, the 2 dinar coin was identical in size and weight to a British 2 pence coin), and because of the similarity to the Greek letters that everybody in the UK learns through maths and physics classes.
We didn't have anything that you might call penmanship classes as part of the Russian course, but we had photocopies of hand-written cursive Russian, and I figured out how to write quite easily, probably in not more than a week or so.
On the other hand, I have made several attempts as an adult to learn Armenian and still find it incredibly hard (almost impossible) to fix the alphabet in my memory. I have more success with Hebrew letters, without trying to learn the language.
There were some students in my class who were still writing Latin letters above the Cyrillic letters in their textbooks well into the second semester of the first year, so I think that learning a new writing system is made much easier by previous exposure to a similar system.
David Morris said,
May 15, 2021 @ 4:05 am
While I was doing my introductory TESOL course, I researched possible destinations. It was basically a choice of three – China (characters, tones), Korea (alphabet) or Japan (three writing systems). Annyeong!
David Morris said,
May 15, 2021 @ 4:41 am
(There were other reasons, including salary, cost of living and standard on living.)
David Marjanović said,
May 15, 2021 @ 5:21 am
Although it's never applied to city walls, Wand is the cover term, to the extent that the body wall in biology is called Körperwand. Mauer is used when masonry is involved – so it's possible to call a bedroom wall a Mauer in Europe, not so often in the US
For city walls, just learn Stadtmauer as a unit.
…Yes, that's an example of a French spelling from which one and only one pronunciation, the real one, follows completely regularly.
The exceptions in French are found in proper names and in very common short words (like eu being pronounced as if spelled just u).
Irish, on the other hand… when there are two vowel letters next to each other, and neither bears an accent, there's no rule on which one is pronounced and which one is only there to mark the adjacent consonant letter as palatalized or velarized or is merely etymological, right? (With the exception of ao having turned into [e] wholesale.)
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2021 @ 7:10 am
We discussed some of the occasional challenges with French final consonants here:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36698#comment-1546476
Scroll down through the comments for more discussion
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2021 @ 7:28 am
@ Bathrobe,
Wouldn’t the point regarding color blindness be a better explanation for the Japanese traffic lights? Otherwise, what’s next? Using food coloring to make all the “blue” apples green?
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2021 @ 7:30 am
Or rather green apples “blue”, I mean.
Martha said,
May 15, 2021 @ 10:32 am
I'm interested in the example regarding blue/light blue in Russian and how "foreigners can be baffled by what to call, say, a mid-blue pair of jeans." Would Russian speakers not also have this issue? Or at least, if they are certain of which word to use, wouldn't they not necessarily be in agreement with others? To be sure, some English speakers would call a mid-range red/pink "red" and others "pink." I even know someone who insisted on calling the red Uno cards "pink," possibly because they were faded, but not faded to what I would have considered pink.
I work weekends in a clothing store, and conversations like "The red shirt…" "You mean the orange shirt?" or "Would you call this blue or green?" are not uncommon, among native English speakers. (We avoid the confusion with the jeans that Johnson mentions by referring to the blues as "light," "dark," and "mid.")
I've never studied Russian, but it seems like the challenge with light blue/dark blue would be remembering that there are two words, and keeping them straight. Unless the challenge is with the approximate division – because I'm sure it is approximate, as with pink and red – being not where I would consider the middle, but being more firmly in what I consider light or dark.
MattF said,
May 15, 2021 @ 11:05 am
I took a course in Russian one summer— we were given the alphabet on the first day and tested on the second day. After that, it was assumed (correctly) that we knew it.
David Marjanović said,
May 15, 2021 @ 12:45 pm
True, not all the "very common short words" with pronunciations that don't follow from their spellings are actually very common… but the rarer ones are not numerous. English is much worse in that respect, and German is actually worse than French, too: see below for an example.
Incidentally, that does not happen in German anymore, where turquoise (türkis, final stress, long i) is as integrated into the system as purple, pink or orange. (It's even the color of Austria's ruling party since 2017, blue and green being the colors of two other parties.) But of course "would you call this blue or turquoise" and "would you call this green or turquoise" do happen often enough.
As far as I've understood, lǜ is "green"; qīng is not actually a color, but means "deep, dark and saturated" and can apply to greens, blues, blacks and I think browns.
…actually, that's what brown used to mean. It only became a color term quite recently.
Dara Connolly said,
May 15, 2021 @ 3:40 pm
David Marjanović said
Irish, on the other hand… when there are two vowel letters next to each other, and neither bears an accent, there's no rule on which one is pronounced and which one is only there to mark the adjacent consonant letter as palatalized or velarized or is merely etymological, right?
Can you give an example where the pronunciation is ambiguous, or where the same pair of vowels gives rise to different pronunciations in different words? I am not saying you are wrong but I can't think of any such pair of vowels.
Bathrobe said,
May 15, 2021 @ 9:13 pm
@ Chris Button
That may be true, but that’s not how it seems to be understood in Japan.
The following article is one example, although not very clearly expressed. There are other better links that I will follow up later.
https://news.1242.com/article/278325
Bathrobe said,
May 15, 2021 @ 10:41 pm
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515205/why-does-japan-have-blue-traffic-lights-instead-green
This is slightly better (in English). This kind of information used to be much easier to find until Google adopted a “most useful answer for the most people” policy, which means serving up the same”useful” answer to everyone, no matter how you phrase your question.
Chas Belov said,
May 16, 2021 @ 2:18 am
@David Marjanović: Thank you.
Kristian said,
May 16, 2021 @ 2:25 am
I disagree with the article. If the biggest difficulty of language learning was making conceptual distinctions like this ("Spanish distinguishes between street corners and inner corners"), it would be fun, like easy philosophy. Language learning, however, is tedious — one reason is that you have to learn a large number of set phrases or word forms and train yourself to use them reflexively quickly. This is a lot worse when the words are hard to pronounce.
Also, languages that are written in writing systems that are not alphabets are harder to learn because reading them is more difficult.
Kimball Kramer said,
May 16, 2021 @ 9:25 am
@Cervantes. The Russian division of blue into two words should not be surprizing. In English we have a special word for dark orange: "brown". [Use a color analyzer in your computer to make orange darker and darker. At some point you will realize it has become brown.]
Kristian said,
May 16, 2021 @ 12:59 pm
Making orange darker does make it brown but light brown is not orange.
Dara Connolly said,
May 16, 2021 @ 4:12 pm
I asked David Marjanović:
Can you give an example where the pronunciation is ambiguous, or where the same pair of vowels gives rise to different pronunciations in different words? I am not saying you are wrong but I can't think of any such pair of vowels.
To answer my own question, I have thought of an example: the sequence "ai" is pronounced differently in (for example) "caith" kɑh, "bain" bɪn and (irregularly) in "raibh" ɾɛv
Owen said,
May 16, 2021 @ 11:17 pm
I took some Arabic classes in college, where care was taken to review the script at the beginning of the intoductory class, and I never had a problem with it. I also, more or less randomly, took entry level Hebrew (I needed to fill a slot in my coursework) and was one of two gentiles in the class – there was a very brief lesson on the script but it became clear to me that the professor proceeded on the assumption that everyone already had had a lot of exposure to the alphabet, due to the demographics of who typically took the class, and proceeded accordingly. If I proceeded at my own pace, I probably would have solidly learned the Hebrew script but in practice, I learned it by getting a good ear for what people were saying, and guessing the letters I didn't know from context whenever I was asked to read aloud in class. I had it down by the end of the semester but have now long since forgotten all but three or four characters.
cliff arroyo said,
May 17, 2021 @ 7:50 am
In my very subjective experience regarding scripts
alphabets:
greek – despite the nature of greek spelling learning the alphabet was quick and painless (all caps are a little harder than mixed)
cyrillic – not hard to learn but harder to read for a non-native due to the relative lack of ascenders and descenders blocks like
I've looked at georgian and armenian without trying to learn either… georgian looks a lot easier in the abstract
non-alphabets (syllabaries, abjads and agubidas):
easy:
kana – katakana is a bit harder of the two since several elements look pretty similar
devanagari – for some reason super easy for me
arabic – learned in a day or so and still remember
medium:
kannada – not many ascenders and descenders but not that hard
korean – easy to learn but takes time to see whole syllables as opposed to components to assemble into syllables)
hard:
thai – tricky spelling rules for Thai words but mostly easy but not separating words made it more difficult to pick out things I knew
hebrew – gave me fits so many letters just bled into each other and I couldn't work out consistent mnemonics for distinguishing them
burmese – yikes! so. many. little circles. so….. many…..
David Marjanović said,
May 17, 2021 @ 12:12 pm
…actually, türkis seems to be regular, in that any other pronunciation would be spelled differently, I think. But for words in -it it's impossible to tell from the spelling if the i is /iː/ or /ɪ/.
Martha said,
May 17, 2021 @ 12:32 pm
David Marjanović – "Would you call this blue or green" might not happen in German, but that just means that the question is then "Would you call this green or turquoise?"
And for what it's worth, in my experience, questions like "Would you call this blue or green" (in English) are often met with answers like "turquoise."
Mark Metcalf said,
May 17, 2021 @ 3:28 pm
Although Victor has provided a link to the article under Selected Readings, I wanted to give a shout-out to David Moser’s “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” because it does such an incredibly good job of summarizing the difficulties of learning Chinese.
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
John Swindle said,
May 18, 2021 @ 5:46 pm
In Oklaohma as a toddler and Kansas as an older child I couldn't see why brown wasn't a primary color. Have you seen those places in winter?
ktschwarz said,
May 20, 2021 @ 4:24 pm
Making orange darker does make it brown but light brown is not orange.
"Brown" covers a large region of color space: everywhere that's warm in hue, and either dark or unsaturated or both. Light brown differs from orange in the dimension of saturation, which means it lies between orange and gray.
In many languages (e.g. Hausa), light browns are included with red and yellow in one color term, while dark browns are included with black in another. Some languages (e.g. Turkish) have a color term that covers brown and gray.
John Swindle said,
May 21, 2021 @ 7:58 am
ktschwarz, thank you.