"My language difficult." What does it mean?

Elizabeth said:
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.
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From ToMach's definition of clearly segmented particles which carry the grammatical function, your examples of Finnish and Turkish clearly look like agglutination. If the particles show more agreement than Japanese, then the over all degree of agglutination could be considered "more" agglutinative. But I don't know if that is the standard nomenclature.

I wonder if the number of agglutinative parts of speech combined with the number of segmented particles and the number of ways to affixate them should also be considered when deciding upon the degree of agglutination.

I know that Korean nouns, adjective-verbs, and verbs can take a huge number of suffixes to express what corresponds to the English prespositons, suffixes, pluraliztion, gerund, pluperfect, conjunctions, adverbials, adverbs, tense, participials, etc. These are all clearly segmented and compose the productive rules of morphology (save a few fossilized archaisms). I don't know how Korean compares to Japanese or other languages in this respect.
 
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Glenn said:
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.
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For what I know, German is generally considered SVO, with SOV in subordinate clauses. Hence it is a bit of a mixture.
 
I just have to admit - I've never seen the word agglutinative before !!

- and I still can't find it in any of my dictionaries !

The things I'm learning on this forum ............

:homer: :clueless:
 
Wikipedia on Agglutiative Languages has so many interesting links! :clap:
Wikipedia on Japanese
Wikipedia on Turkish
Wikipedia on Finnish
Wikipedia on Korean
Wikipedia on German

I find the word "to agglutinate" interesting because it reminds me of gluing two things together.
Or even the sticky, gluey, sweet tasting amino acid glutamine in MSG comes to mind.
Bread, pasta, and ramen noodles are also held together by glutamine's binding power I hear.
Let me construct an artificial sentence just for fun.
"The ramen maker agglutinates his noodles, and the ramen eater analyses the particles." :silly:
 
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Let's see..

Japanese is difficult to me because of the sentence particles and the writing system. I even have Kanji nightmares.

English is tough because of its bizzare phonetics. Words like "quite", "quiet", and "tale", "tail".. etc. just drive me insane.

Russian (my first language) is easy to read, once you learn the alphabet, however the grammar is deadly. Beware of the verb stems and endings on this one.

French... well what can I say? The pronunciation alone is impossible to me.
 
French pronunciation, not much of a problem for me, but it is one of the first languages that they teach you in school in Britain. Tried Russian once, but the alphabet andpronunciation foxed me, and I'm sorry to say I gave up. I can still remember a few russian words though
 
Personally I think it's pretty hard to master English because the pronounciation is such a pain. You HAVE to hang around with native speakers for a while to get it right, as the proper pronounciations of words like "circuit", "buoy" or "cleanliness" are impossible to guess. If you're learning Chinese, you can get software that has audio examples for pretty much any character/syllable, which makes the four tones easier to tackle. This would be pointless in English as English isn't really syllable-based.
 
John Lemon said:
Personally I think it's pretty hard to master English because the pronounciation is such a pain. You HAVE to hang around with native speakers for a while to get it right, as the proper pronounciations of words like "circuit", "buoy" or "cleanliness" are impossible to guess. If you're learning Chinese, you can get software that has audio examples for pretty much any character/syllable, which makes the four tones easier to tackle. This would be pointless in English as English isn't really syllable-based.
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There is a standard way of English pronunciation. If you listen to a native speaker you could end up with a regional accent, and there are a lot of accents in English. I've heard people in China who have learnt English from an American and thay have an American twang to their voice. Bjork has picked up a London accent, because she spends a lot of time in London. You used Buoy as an example. Which way would you say it? In England it is said as 'boy' and in some areas of America it is pronounced as 'Booee'. Hanging aound native speakers might help you with the language , but with some words avoid local pronunciation.
 
Mycernius said:
There is a standard way of English pronunciation.
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That's the first I've heard of it. What is the standard English pronunciation?
 
There's an interesting idea that was presented somewhere (sorry can't remember.)

"The variety and range of different speech habits of the British Isles far exceeds those of all the varieties of English spoken as a native language outside the area."

I'm not sure exactly how that can be qualified, but assuming that it is a vald statement, I could probably hypothesise that the British must put in a great deal of effort to enforce a standardised English to be spoken on its territories. Given the greater variations in speech, the standardisation effort must be greater than that of a linguistically more uniform country regarding English; s.a. South Africa, Liberia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Hence the intensity of the British idea of speech propriety must be that much stronger in comparison.

Could it be that Mycernius' mentioning of standard pronunciation is referring to this internal language policy in the UK ?
 
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One language is difficult if it's really different from your native one, concerning every field, pronunciation, grammar, declensions, just the way to say things, to express something by words....
 
callisto said:
One language is difficult if it's really different from your native one, concerning every field, pronunciation, grammar, declensions, just the way to say things, to express something by words....
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I agree with you.
And in portuguese I find it a hard language to learn. Whether you're a native speaker or not. When it comes to vocabulary, It's the "longest", and the "most complex" because there are, in average, close to 3 synonims for each word.
For example: for the verb "want" there are almost 7 words that mean the same (with little variants). :S
 
Glenn said:
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.
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Depends on the quality of the sentence. SVO are for main clauses, SOV mainly for prepositional or relative clauses, roughly, with of course many variations, exceptions and depending on a million other factors. Well thought, there's no strict rule, but for a basic sentence as Der Kind spielt im Garten, SVO is the rule.
 
Honestly, I think the perception of the difficulty of your native language depends on your level of education. Conjugation is for me much easier today than it was when I was 13 sitting at my schooldesk trying to fill the exam sheet. Since then, I have learned and assimilated concepts that were not too clear back then. I have taught French abroad as a private teacher, and I realized many things were so natural for me that I didn't have to dig any further to understand the reasons such a tense was used in such and such conditions. Looking for the rules (and the exceptions...) in order to be able to pass on the information allowed me to look into the complexity of the grammatical system. One thing that one must realize are the limits to one's knowlege. I have never been afraid to tell my students "I don't know", but kept notes and investigated further in order to bring an answer to their doubts or questions. I always kept learning in the process. But to this day, I still don't know why there is a s in souris...
 
Cimmerianbloke said:
But to this day, I still don't know why there is a s in souris...
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I think I can help with that. The final s in souris used to be pronounced in Old French (and the sound survives in souriceau, "young mouse"). The word derives from Vulgar Latin sōrīcem, itself from Classical Latin sorex. Interestingly, the Latin sorex does not refer to mice (mus in Latin, identical to the Proto-Germanic and Old English words) but to shrews. From a biological point of view, shrews belong to the order of the Soricomorpha, the family of the Soricidae, the subfamily of the Soricinae, and the tribe of the Soricini.
 
Thanks for the explanation, Maciamo. most foreign students are also puzzled as the normal silent ending in French is a mute -e. Souriceau and souricière are good examples of orthographic nonsense...
 
Cimmerianbloke said:
Thanks for the explanation, Maciamo. most foreign students are also puzzled as the normal silent ending in French is a mute -e. Souriceau and souricière are good examples of orthographic nonsense...
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And the irony is all this is that French dropped the Latin word mus because it would have sounded like the word mousse (foam, moss), which itself is a Germanic word, from the Frankish mosa. So English is considered a Germanic language, but the word mouse is directly related to the Latin mus, while French is a Romance language but drop a Latin word in favour of a similar-sounding Germanic one !
 
Well, I'd say greek is difficult for non-native speakers because:

We use a different alphabet
We use 3 different letters and 2 combinations to express the sound "i"
We use 2 different letters to express the sound "o"
Lots of irregular verbs
3 genders that don't correlate with the genders in other languages
Not a fixed structure regarding the syntax (we can use SVO, VSO, OVS, SOV depending on what we want to emphasize)
Lots of idioms
Very big vocabulary
Lots of different forms of plural

Should I go on?
 
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