"My language difficult." What does it mean?

I would say English is difficult because the different pronunciations in parts of England. Like bath is said ba-th or bar-th (or ba-f or bar-f depending on how you pronounce 'th'). There's also words like wind, which has totally different meanings depending on pronunciation, one means to wrap around somthing and the other is breeze. Things like that confuse me and im english, so i imagine its worse for people just learning the language.
 
Nah !

English ain't difficult ! I never had no problems wiv it ! Did you ?

Seriously though ....

I don't think English is difficult at all l That's why it is so universally used and so well known.

We do not have to learn a complex process of verb conjugations. Neither do we have to decline our nouns (.... except for, perhaps "thou" and "thee", "us" and "we" and "I" and "me" ... and they're bloody pronouns, anyway !)

Plurals are mostly made with the addition of an "s" .... and the rest is vocabulary !

There are all sorts of stupid "non-rules", of course - like not ending a sentence with a preposition - most of which you can safely ignore. ( Even Winston Churchill once commented on this, facetiously calling it "the sort of English up with which we should not put ....")

The great wonder of a "mongrel" language like English is that you can learn a few words, butcher it, maul it, kick it around, mispronounce it, .... do what you want. And people will still understand you !

Sure - there are a few problems; but different accents and dialects exist in all languages ! Just try speaking Calabrese Italian in, say, Sardinia ! Or Parisienne French in Provence.

No - try Polish, or Czech, or Inuktituk if you want something to really challenge your mind !

Regards,

?W????
 
misa.j said:
For the last decade, more and more people have started to learn Japanese, which a lot of Japanese people are aware of, and they have been hearing that it is a difficult language to learn from people who are studying it.
Being fluent in a language, that is said to be hard to learn, gives a lot of Japanese people superior feelings.

Interesting. I always told Japanese people that it wasn't that difficult, just very foreign, and I still feel that way. I never heard a learner say that it was difficult, aside from some of the more foreign aspects of the language.

As an aside: I think a lot of Westerners who haven't studied the language just assume that it's difficult because of the writing systems, and they never give it a chance beyond that. My family was shocked when I told them that I was learning Japanese because they thought it was impossible, but they don't know anything about it.

misa.j said:
That is my point of view. I am not sure what other Japanese users think of this; I haven't noticed they had made that statement either because I don't usually go to the language forum. :p

I haven't seem them make any comments about the difficulty of the language at all, so I don't know what they think of it either, and I do visit the language forum. As far as I can tell they don't think about it.
 
Sensuikan San said:
No - try Polish, or Czech, or Inuktituk if you want something to really challenge your mind !

Regards,

?W????


Ah, I feel so proud now, that I mastered such a difficult language at a native level :p :cool:
 
Interestingly some languages are difficult for most people at the beginning, but once you know the basics, it gets much easier. These languages usually have a grammar that is complicated or very different from other languages. The best examples are German, Russian (both have declinations), and Japanese (different syntax and particles).
By the way, sorry to sound ignorant about this but what are declinations ? Is it something related to verb changes for person and tense like 'habe,bast,hat,haben,habt,haben' in German ? :?
 
*declination; to decline: nouns, adjectives, articles, nominals alternating the forms to convey gender, number, case

conjugation; to conjugate: verbs, verbals alternating the forms to convey number, person, time, aspect, mood

inflexion; to inflect: *declination and conjugation combined

paradigm: list or table of inflexion

I hope this is right, but I might have missed something. :eek:kashii:
ToMach, Miu, or any other linguists out there ? :relief:

EDIT: "Declination," (sic.) according to Glenn, Maciamo, and Miriam-Webster's Dic. On-line, should be declension.
 
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I really don't think that "declination" is the right term:

Merriam-Webster's said:
Main Entry: dec·li·na·tion
Pronunciation: "de-kl&-'nA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English declinacioun, from Middle French declination, from Latin declination-, declinatio angle of the heavens, turning aside
1 : angular distance north or south from the celestial equator measured along a great circle passing through the celestial poles
2 : a turning aside or swerving
3 : DETERIORATION <moral declination>
4 : a bending downward : INCLINATION
5 : a formal refusal
6 : the angle formed between a magnetic needle and the geographical meridian
 
Elizabeth said:
By the way, sorry to sound ignorant about this but what are declinations ? Is it something related to verb changes for person and tense like 'habe,bast,hat,haben,habt,haben' in German ? :?

Sorry, it should be declension as Glenn mentioned (although the verb is to decline as Lexico said). "Declination" is the Latin word, but as this grammatical aspect doesn't exist in English...

Anyway, the declension indicate the function : nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), dative (indirect object) and genitive (possession).

A word like "the" in English has 3 gender in German (Der, Die, Das), and each vary depending on the function of the noun it precedes (so the nominative "Der" changes to "Den, Dem, Des", etc.). Of course the nouns and adjectives also change, not just the articles.
 
OK, thanks to both of you, Glenn and Lexico ! That clearly explains why my references also came up in astronomical terms.

I found a few instances showing roughly how this might work with gender in German nouns (One class of Masculine and neuter nouns ends in -el, -en or -er....feminine nouns take no endings...), so if someone could explain adjectives and pronouns and how they fit together with certain verb forms that would be great. I have a friend brushing up on his German who wanted to talk a little about these differences with English grammar.

My only point of departure is Japanese, which I'd always considered a highly inflected language, although its verbs conjugate without regard to gender or number (or case, if that would be syntax through word order in non-inflected languages ?)....
 
I think Japanese is highly inflected. Its adjectives, verbs, and copula all inflect for a variety of functions. You can think of the case particles in Japanese as being like inflections for the purpose of understaning declensions. For example, watashi ga has a different grammatical funtion than watashi ni, just like in English "I" shows nominative case, "me" shows objective case, and "my" shows genetive case (although these distinctions seem to be disappearing). That's basically how the inflections work, although there are different classes of declension just like there are different classes of verbs (like -ir, -ar, and -er in Spanish).
 
about "declination" - word like this do exist in Polish for example. :D And it's related to noun - it's a declension of noun (singular/plural, genre etc.) .

I like such mistakes :D
 
Elizabeth said:
verb changes for person and tense like 'habe,bast,hat,haben,habt,haben' in German ? :?
Although grammarians use the term "inflection," "declension," and "conjugation" in descriptive Japanese grammar, isn't Japanese considered an agglutinative language like Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Korean, Ainu, Nivx, Finnish, Hungarian, and Samoyed ?

Whereas a truly inflected language often changes the radical/stem of the nouns and verbs (strong verbs, especially), an agglutinative language usually keeps the radical/stem constant, and only affixates affixes in a chain.

Whereas the true inflectional paradigms are fixed, closed sets of forms, the affixes to be attached to the radical/stem in an agglutinative language constitute a combinatorial, open set of a rather huge number of possibilities.
While the traditional grammar of Japanese considers the variation in form discussed here as inflection, or katuyoo, most of the forms are straightforwardly segmentable....

the notion of inflection should be separated clearly from that of inflectional (of fusional) morphology. Morphologically, Japanese inflection assumes the form of agglutination of the Turkish type rather than the inflectional morphology of the Latin-type....

Inflectional endings are fairly clearly segmentable, and the segmented endings (of suffixes) are correlated with inflectional categories in a one-to-one fashion, rather than in the one-to-many correlation characteristic of inflectional morphology.

The major issues in Japanese inflection are: 1) the problem of segmentation; 2) the number and kinds of categories to ge recognized; and 3) the distinction between inflectional endings and auxiliary verbs (as well as particles).(p.221)

11.4 The Syntax of Agglutinative Morphology
Due to the lack of agreement between the head and the dependent constituent, Japanese is not as highly agglutinative as Turkish, especially in the domain of nominal constituents.

However, in the relm of verbal constituents, Japanese shows a high degree of agglutination involving a fair number of suffixes in a row. As in many other languages, the order of these verbal affixes is generally fixed, though alternate orders are frequently observed. In Japanese the following is the typical order.

(95) Vstem-causative-passive-aspect-desiderative-NEG-tense

Not all the possiblities, of course, are exploited in each expression. (pp.306-307)

Masayoshi Shibatani, The Languages of Japan, Cambridge University Press, 1991
Futhermore with an inflected language like German, the number and person must be in agreement as in the example;
Lina Inverse's Grammar 1 said:
(Declension of) the personal pronouns:

1st person singular: ich (I)
2nd person singular: du (you)
3rd person singular: er (he), sie (she), es (it)
when adressing someone formally: Sie (you) - note the capital S

1st person plural: wir (we)
2nd person plural: ihr (you)
3rd person plural: sie (they)


Conjugation of the auxiliary verbs "sein" (to be) and "haben" (to have)

1. sein (to be)
ich bin (I am)
du bist (you are)
er, sie, es ist (he, she it is)
(formal address) Sie sind you are

wir sind (we are)
ihr seid (you are)
sie sind (they are)

2. haben (to have)
ich habe (I have)
du hast (you have)
er, sie, es hat (he, she, it has)
(formal address) Sie haben

wir haben (we have)
ihr habt (you have)
sie haben (they have)
But such agreement of number and person does not exist in Japanese grammar. (?) In this sense, the "inflection" system of Japanese is just an approximating expression, which is in reality an agglutinating system rather than a true inflectional one.
 
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lexico said:
Although grammarians use the term "inflection," "declension," and "conjugation" in descriptive Japanese grammar, isn't Japanese considered an agglutinative language like Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Korean, Ainu, Nivx, Finnish, Hungarian, and Samoyed ?
That is the nomenclature. Does it then follow that languages, such as Turkish or Finnish, can be more highly or strongly aggluntinative than Japanese if they attach a greater number of affixes (showing agreement in person, tense, case, etc or would that make them inflected ? ).
Certainly there are full sentences in those two languages able to be expressed with a single agglutinative word, whereas with Japanese it is only the predicate.
 
Elizabeth said:
That is the nomenclature. Does it then follow that languages, such as Turkish or Finnish, can be more highly or strongly aggluntinative than Japanese if they attach a greater number of affixes (showing agreement in person, tense, case, etc or would that make them inflected ? ).
Certainly there are full sentences in those two languages able to be expressed with a single agglutinative word, whereas with Japanese it is only the predicate.
With the exception of the underlined, what you say is in line with Masayoshi Shibatani's reasoning. As for Finnish being more agglutinative, and whether showing agreement in person, tense, case would make a language inflected, I do not know. But not sharing these features with truly inflected languages seemed to be useful to your discussion comparing German and Japanese.
 
Thanks for that discrimination, Lexico. I'll need some time to consider the German case, but these were two previously posted examples from the language fora that triggered my comparison of Finnish and Turkish agglutination.

Finnish:

The old and much used example:
Taloissammeko? (Do you mean in our houses?)
--> talo - i - ssa - mme - ko

talo - house
i - plural suffix
ssa - inside something
mme - our something
ko - turns the sentence into a question


Turkish:

Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdan misiniz?

Cekoslavakya = Checkoslavakia
li = from
las = reflexive suffix
tir = causative suffix
a = ability
ma = negation
di = past tense
k = first person plural
lar = plural
i = harmony suffix
miz = first person plural
dan = from
mi = question suffix
siniz = second person plural

meaning: "Are you one of those that we could not have possibly turned into a Checkoslavakian?"
 
Glenn said:
For a comparison between Japanese, German, English, and Mandarin, see Re: German and Japanese.
Interesting, but I wouldn't completely trust their judgement of German.

Eg.
"Once you admit the German word order is SOV, not SVO like English"
That's not true for the most simple sentences which are just SVO, but generally word order in German is not as fixed as in English (& surely not fixed on SOV).
 
That one threw me as well, especially since the first German example is SVO. I'm guessing that overall German is considered to be SOV, but I'm not really sure.
 
The correct terminology is indeed declension, which refers to the variant inflectional realizations of a word. In most cases, like Latin, declension means the set of alternative forms a word can take depending on its grammatical function (subject, object, etc), or the class of words that show the same alternations (1st declension, 2nd declension, etc).

Glenn said:
I think Japanese is highly inflected. Its adjectives, verbs, and copula all inflect for a variety of functions. You can think of the case particles in Japanese as being like inflections for the purpose of understaning declensions. For example, watashi ga has a different grammatical funtion than watashi ni, just like in English "I" shows nominative case, "me" shows objective case, and "my" shows genetive case (although these distinctions seem to be disappearing). That's basically how the inflections work, although there are different classes of declension just like there are different classes of verbs (like -ir, -ar, and -er in Spanish).
In Japanese, the variations of verbs and adjectives could be called "inflection", and the system of case markers "declension" in the broad sense, but, as lexico said, this is rather agglutination, which is a bit different from inflection.
For example, nouns in inflecting languages can only appear in an inflected form, the stem of the word cannot be used alone. But in Japanese watashi is a correct form, and you just add a particle. But in Latin the stem ros- of rosa, rosae, rosis, etc is not a correct form. In agglutination, you can draw a clear limit between an independant noun and the case marker.
Also, in agglutinative formations, each word is made of a string of morphemes which are clearly divisible, and each morpheme correspond to one meaning/function, while this is not the case with inflection.
For example, the English word "their" cannot be divided while it bears the meanings 3rd person pronoun+plural+possesive : all these elements are fused into the word. In Japanese, the equivalent "karerano" can be divided : kare 3rd person pronoun + ra plural + no possesive. This is the same thing with verbs : in Latin the indivisible form "amo" is simultaneously first person+singular+indicative+active+present. In Japanese forms like tabesaserareta are always segmentable : tabe + sase causative + rare passive + ta accomplished.
 

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