Multiple Poll: Are you harsh on your own language ?

Why are some people more harsh on their own/best languages ?

  • Because I used to teach the language.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    18
lexico said:
Notwithstanding your wise remarks, it has also come to my attention that it was the firm believers of absolute knowlege and certainty that laid the foundations of our singular civilization on earth. Considering the fact that all these ideas of relativilty were indeed based on comparisons only made possible within the vast empires that brought together under one roof all concrete, local systems of absolute knowledge within the barriers, and the fact that the destruction of local varieties of certainty has been detrimental to the youths of the republic, it is now time to execute Socrates the philosopher king and bring back the muses to announce once again thru the singing mouths of the poets the obvious historical truths in broad daylight, of the battles and heroes on the hills of Ilion.

far too complicated for machine translation.
 
Let's Chit-chat in Trans-bot Talk !

alexriversan said:
far too complicated for machine translation.
The technical predicament of the trans-bot of your creation is computed reasonable understandably. :D
However, the intelligence of your trans-bot seems to exceed that of J-bot's that order-of-magnitudinally.
Here's to your techincal achievemnt present-tense, futuristically, & whole-heartedly, cheers ! :bravo: :beer:
 
I wouldn't say that German is any more difficult than English. While it has a little more grammar (like verb conjugations), it has a nice and regular spelling, unlike English, where the spelling is often quite arbitrary :relief:
Italian is somewhat more complicated than the two. While the spelling is generally nice and regular like German, the grammar is clearly more complex (e.g. having more tenses like Historical Past).
French, then, is still a good bit more difficult - not only the grammar is also complex, but the spelling is a real pain :mad:
Japanese still topples them all - while the grammar is not very complex, the kanji are a huge pain in the a$$ :auch:
 
I've heard many scolars make the claim that English is a hard language and when I was young it seemed that it was. As I have gotten older and had more exposure to various foreign languages I have come to realise that English, Despite its irregularities seem to be a fairly easy language for non-speakers to learn. Its spelling and various rules that can be bent or just plain broken do drive me crazy on occasion and I am often amazed by the fact that they are non-native speakers that can sometimes speak it much better than native speakers. What galls me even more is obvious mistake made by native speakers that should have been taught to them at school. My real bugbears are getting learn, learnt and taught the wrong way round as in, 'He learnt me to drive' (arrrrrrrrg) and lend and borrow the wrong way round, 'Can I lend your pen?' What? These are basic. They are remote tribes in Africa who don't get this mixed up. Another is double negatives such as, 'I ain't got none'. This has led my brother to use this statement, 'They're ain't no P in pretention' :D
If anything I've got a tendency to be harsh on people who are native speakers and cannot use the language correctly. I probably do make mistakes myself. If I do I don't mind being corrected.
Just as a side note. I have just bought a book called 'Spoken Here' by Mark Abley. It is a book looking a minority languages throughout the world and how some of them are at risk of going extinct and how others are staging a comeback. I've only read a couple of chapters so far, but it is a very interesting book. :)
 
Regarding the auto logout ...

Maciamo said:
I have never had this problem. Have you tried clearing your cookies ?

I have ... just the other day ! (Hi folks ! Been tied up recently !)

I find the answer is to review your post frequently, whilst composing ...

Anyhow - some observations :

Maciamo said:
- Contrarily to the popular belief, some European languages also have tones. Although not to distinguish different words like in Chinese, the use of tones in French is very important to understand the emotional meaning of the sentence. Like in other Romance languages (but not Germanic ones), a rising intonation indicates a question, without grammatical change necessary. I found this to be often misunderstood by the Japanese, although it is supposed to exist in Japanese too (eg. "iku!" vs "iku?"). When I didn't hear well what somebody said, I may repeat a word with a rising intonation. For French speakers, this means "Is it the word you just said?" or even "Do you really mean that?".

Absolutely true ... although I don't believe the Germanic languages should be excluded either ! Personally I feel that all languages are tonal to at least some degree, particularly so when body language is taken into account. This is especially problematic when one is using a telephone - or using a communication form .... like this one ....

Maciamo - discussing French said:
- Silent letters in about half of the words, and silent grammatical changes in most of the words, makes it quite unique among the major world languages (I don''t know any other language like that to be frank).

I don't think French is unique at all in this. As pointed out elsewhere, English has its fair share of unpronounced consonants too - not to mention different pronunciation of similiar groups (e.g. "plough and "cough" ...). And try Irish/Gaelic ! There, you will find complete words unpronounced in a phrase or sentence ! The simplest example I can recall immediately is the original Irish name of Dublin : "Baille atha Cliathe" - it seems to be pronounced something like "Blachlee" !

(I'm sure that my Irish friends can correct me on that one !)

Zauriel said:
I am pretty harsh on my first language: English because it has many clumsy flaws. For example, too many irregular verbs in English.

... I didn't know we had any regular verbs !

Mycernius said:
I've heard many scolars make the claim that English is a hard language and when I was young it seemed that it was. As I have gotten older and had more exposure to various foreign languages I have come to realise that English, Despite its irregularities seem to be a fairly easy language for non-speakers to learn. Its spelling and various rules that can be bent or just plain broken do drive me crazy on occasion and I am often amazed by the fact that they are non-native speakers that can sometimes speak it much better than native speakers. What galls me even more is obvious mistake made by native speakers that should have been taught to them at school. My real bugbears are getting learn, learnt and taught the wrong way round as in, 'He learnt me to drive' (arrrrrrrrg) and lend and borrow the wrong way round, 'Can I lend your pen?' What? These are basic. They are remote tribes in Africa who don't get this mixed up. Another is double negatives such as, 'I ain't got none'. This has led my brother to use this statement, 'They're ain't no P in pretention'

I couldn't agree more !

Regards,

?W????
 
Mycernius said:
My real bugbears are getting learn, learnt and taught the wrong way round as in, 'He learnt me to drive' (arrrrrrrrg) and lend and borrow the wrong way round, 'Can I lend your pen?' What? These are basic.

I understand. There are native French speakers who also confuse lend and borrow in French (preter vs emprunter), and the "learn" (apprendre) is commonly used instead of "teach" (enseigner) in French. In this last case it's not even a mistake as the verb "teach" is only used for formal teaching (by a teacher), but if you just tell someone how to do something then "learn" is used. The same could be happening in some regions of England, although it has become wrong when English was standardised on one variety of English.

Another is double negatives such as, 'I ain't got none'. This has led my brother to use this statement, 'They're ain't no P in pretention'

This is also regional English (apparently Birmingham too). In some regions of England it is not wrong to say things like "she don't care". Grammar used to be different is the North, Middle and South of England a few centuries ago, and some of these remain in local dialects. For example, at Shakespeare's time, "doth" was standard in the Southern half of England, while "does" was standard in the North. Eventually "does" prevailed. The same happened for pronuciation in such words as "bury", which can be pronounced as "bery", "bury" or "bary" depending on the region, and the differences are still heard in place names. Same for the "r". In the South-West of England both "r's" are pronouced in "farmer", but none in northern ot eastern England, and only the first one in the area in between.

As for the double negative, it is used in many languages (e.g. Italian, Japanese...) and speakers of these languages often mistake when they speak English. It's a common feature of "Black English" for instance.
 
Sensuikan San said:
I don't think French is unique at all in this. As pointed out elsewhere, English has its fair share of unpronounced consonants too - not to mention different pronunciation of similiar groups (e.g. "plough and "cough" ...). And try Irish/Gaelic ! There, you will find complete words unpronounced in a phrase or sentence ! The simplest example I can recall immediately is the original Irish name of Dublin : "Baille atha Cliathe" - it seems to be pronounced something like "Blachlee" !

I didn't say French was unique, but it doesn't happen (much) in other languages I know (English, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese...). Irish/Welsh/Scottish Gaelic are extremely difficult languages. I'd say it's the most difficult family of European languages, although I haven't really studied it (just overviewed the spelling, pronuciation, grammar and a few expressions). It's probably why it's almost extinct ! :D

... I didn't know we had any regular verbs !

Most of the verbs in English are regular. Just add "ed" at the end to make the past simple or perfect tenses. The future and conditional tenses are regular for all verbs thanks to the auxiliary "will", "going to" or "would" (except future perfect, but it's the same inflection as for past and present perfect).

Irregular verbs in English only have 2 forms to remember : past and perfect (eg. write => wrote, written). In Romance languages, there are about 8 inflected tenses (counting only one for all the composed tenses) multiplied by 6 persons, so about 48 inflections to remember. That's a lot more than in English. And in French even the regular are divided in a dozen categories (e.g. verbs in -re, -er, -oir, -ir, special -ir, semi-regular, composed on irregular, etc.). In that respect too French is more complicated and irregular than Italian or Spanish.
 
Sensuikan San said:
The simplest example I can recall immediately is the original Irish name of Dublin : "Baille atha Cliathe" - it seems to be pronounced something like "Blachlee" !

well try athliath/dunlaori- (however i failed to learn irish because of...)
dunlaori is well understood/frequent used in spoken language.
dublin is refered to as dublin most of the times, or something like ATH LIATH.

it is rather the case letters are not fully pronounced, but they change the flow of speech, otherwise they would be unnecessary.
 
Hi, Lexico, how are you? Haven't seen you on MSN for a very long time, and you are still so active here. Glad to see you here again.

Can I say "objection" to this question? Because I don't think we can say one language is more difficult than the other.

Why? Every language has its own depth, depending on what kind of level you want to achieve. If you want to be an expert in the English language, then you have really a lot of thing to learn about the language, and I can guarantee, a normal native English speaker don't know a lot of things, because, all these things are just useless in daily conversation, who will bother to learn it? This apply to other languages as well, say French, if one want to become an expert in this language, then one will have a lot of things to learn too. And learning is a never ending process, how do you know that you know everything? Hence all languages are difficult.

Moreover, why some people find it easier to learn one language, but the other find it a hell time. That depends on various factors, such as the enviroment, the native language that this person speak, the interest of this person, the amount of aid given to him/her etc.

A French will find it easier to learn Spanish than a Chinese, that is because French and Spanish have a lot of similarities. A Chinese will pick up Japanese faster because of the similarities in kanji and certain words. A French will probably has more hard time to learn kanji than a Chinese.

A psychological reason that one must take into account is, quite a number of people will normally think that their own language is most difficult, that is because they are more "proficient" or more "expert" in their own languages than other languages they acquired, but at the same time may know very little about their own language, because they know very little about their own language, the find that they have so much more to learn about their own language, hence find it difficult. On the other hand, these people who acquired other languages find these languages "easier" is because they are not bothered to become an expert in this language, lacking the knowledge of all these languages, hence, giving them an illusion that these languages are easier. When one try to learn another language from a language that one is most used to, this person will inadventently relearn or rediscover his own language, thus, giving him an illusion that he don't know so much thing.

Of course, some may not think this way, some may think that one language is more difficult than other after he/she learnt it. But there is psychological reason to this also. Thinking that one language is more difficult than the other just because he/she find it difficult to understand or always tend to make mistake in this language doesn't make this language instrinsically difficult. It is this person ability of understanding. Again, one will argue that, what if a lot of native speakers make the same mistakes too. But one has to rethink on what is the purpose of a language? The main purpose of language is to facilitate communication, we don't decide how a grammar supposed to be, rather, the structure of the grammar will follow the trend of the speakers, if everyone has been speaking in a certain gramatically wrong way, because everyone has been speaking like this, hence this gramatically wrong way is the correct way, and the gramatically correct way is not really correct, since the majority people do not want to use it. Why we want to force ourself into accepting certain theories that we may not use in daily life, just because people previously using this language say that this is the rule? Why can't people who are using the language currently decide the rules?

Some people say that French is more difficult than English, one reason is because of the conjugation of verbs. If you have been conjugating verb everyday, will you find it difficult? You may not be able to conjugate every words, because no one can learn every single word in his own language, those exception in conjugation don't make the language difficult, it all depends on how used you are at it. Therefore saying that French is harder than English is not true, English does have exceptional grammars too!!! English has more vocabulary to learn than French. So how are we going to compare which is more difficult? Both languages just have its own uniqueness.

Then again, some will say English is relatively easier than Chinese. Is this true? To a lot of Chinese people, English is a hell to them and Chinese language is a breeze to them. To an Englishman, chinese language will then be a hell to them, first they are not used to the tonal pronunciation, second, they will have to spent a lot of time memorizing 2000-3000 kanji, and this is definitely not an easy task. Even tough, English may not have those kanji or tonal thing, English has more vocabulary than Chinese. Which may make it more difficult? How are you going to judge? If you want to be an expert in English, then you have to study old English, so a lot of people will say that old English is extremely difficult. Other the other hand, if you want to be an expert in Chinese langauge, then you have to study archaic chinese too. That is very difficult too. Hence, how are we going to compare the difficultness of these two languages?

All in all, I really don't think we can compare languages. Just like we can't say physics is harder than economy or vice versa. The more proficient you want to be at a language, the more difficult you find it. Because if you really want to know more things, you may go into a situation that make you feel you don't know so much.

Food for thought:
A person can command 100 languages, but do not produce any good work. A person who know only 1 language, and this person produces works that set the general trend for the language. What do you think?
 
English is a boring language, I don't enjoy speaking it. Most of the time, I am just quiet at partys. Although, I am taking german at school. It is very fun, and respect the language. I cannot say that for english. Mainly due to some of the people who speak it.. :eek:kashii:
 

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