Not sure if correcting spelling is a productive way to discuss whether English is a “good” language or not… Like @Syphus says, there’s nothing special about English, or any other language, for that matter. What seems “easy to learn” really just depends on your experiences. Vietnamese or Chinese people will have an easier time distinguishing sounds by tone, and speakers of European languages will have a more intuitive sense of where to use articles.
I think it doesn’t help that most of us just don’t have the vocabulary or understanding to articulate these language differences to each other. When I tutor speakers of languages without articles, it’s really tough for me to explain articles, because I don’t have to understand how to use them–it’s just so natural to me. The same goes for all those poor French people who tried to explain the subjunctive to me (which I still don’t understand, by the way.) Which is what I guess @LVNeptune is getting at… (Though, I wouldn’t say English has a lot of inconsistencies… except prepositions lol. good luck with that one)
Maybe difficulty is not the right word, but if you compare for example German and English I would say German is at least more time consuming to learn to get even basic sentences right. Stuff like gender and verb conjugation just adds more load. There are probably even worse languages around, so the time investment vs. sentences you can form correctly is not the same for all languages. This of course also depends from which language you start, but English at least seems to have an acceptable tradeoff.
Out of curiosity, I found myself googling which language is the hardest to learn for Japanese native speakers, and i came across this post (unfortunately in Japanese) referring to the results of some study on which languages (out of 20 candidates) were the most difficult for English and Japanese native speakers respectively.
The results were as follows:
Easiest for Japanese natives: Korean, Turkish, Mali/Indonesian and Swahili.
Hardest for Japanese natives: Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu and English
Easiest for English natives: French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian and Swahili
Hardest for English speakers: Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese
It appears that people found it unexpected that english was considered so difficult, despite being such a frequently encountered language, and also one studied since an early age. Thus the post goes on to explain this by comparing English to Korean (being listed as a very easy language for Japanese learners) from a Japanese speaker’s perspective.
I found it quite an interesting read! Unfortunately. I couldn’t find the actual study (the link seems to be dead), but hopefully this still goes a ways towards problematising the blanket statement that English is a universally easy language to learn.
Swedish wasn’t among the 20 languages studied (English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Urdu, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian/Mali and Swahili).
Also, Japanese has borrowed (parts of) its writing system and a lot of kanji-compound words from Chinese, but they’re very different grammatically, whereas Japanese and Korean have very similar grammar, as well as having similar pronunciations of words once derived from kanji compounds (since Korea used to write using Chinese characters as well).
So it makes sense to me that Chinese would be neither super difficult nor super easy for a Japanese native.
Considering that in Finnish we have 15-27 forms for every substantive and they can still be altered to other forms, I think you’re getting easy with Japanese… It took me a while to get hang of the different readings of kanji but now (on level 7) they start to make more and more sense. I’m sure it’ll get easier for you too
Yep, I heard that about Finnish, Russian has like 7, German has this too…
All in all, there’s a huge amount or redundancies in all languages and it will take another 5000 years and globalization before people would invent a reasonable language, or simply would slide to a few most spoken ones, oops, already have!
I am a bit puzzled by this ‘phenomenon’ too. This is what’s happening here (afaik):
The reading of the kanji nine is on’yomi (original Chinese), and had two variants: く, きゅう
When coupled with hiragana, as in ‘nine things’ it becomes a mix of a Chinese kanji and Japanese hiragana where the reading switches to kun’yomi, which produces ここの as reading for nine.
In my short time at wanikani I already encountered this often (take a look at day one/first day for example). Learning? Yes, by memorizing, I’m afraid.
A lot of people have this conception after they are introduced to kanji like 木, 口, 魚, 日, 目, 林, 森 and so on, that you can learn kanji by making sense of all elements, that they all make logical sense and can be traced back to its original meaning.
But after a while you realize that the language has gone a long way since writing was invented, that several meanings, forms and pronunciations were lost with time and that everyone learns language by mimicking and accepting that the rules are as they are, just like you learned your native language.
The base layer of everything you learn is memorization. You had to memorize every letter of the alphabet to be able to read, and when you started your major at college you had to study a year or two of terminology.
Learning wouldn’t even be possible without memorization.
Spoken Japanese is not derived from Chinese, so the grammar and majority of words used in spoken language are not related to Chinese. The adoption of Chinese written characters means it has a ton of loanwords, but the pronunciation isn’t close to modern Chinese, since they were taken over the course of hundreds of years and had to be simplified to work with Japanese pronunciation anyway.
I mean, yes, the knowledge of kanji gives Japanese a head start in learning Chinese over, say, an English speaker, but it’s misleading to say Japanese is derived from Chinese.
Japanese writing (and much of the formal or literary vocab) is largely derived from ancient Chinese. The rest is essentially not. Go ahead and take a lap for pulling a dictionary out if you want.
The point was that you gave it as an example for a language that should be easy for them to learn. But since the derivation is mostly a superficial one not related to the core of the language, it is misleading. Are you satisfied with that?
EDIT: And yes, I’m aware that my post sounds pissed off, but it’s annoying to not have the point addressed. I’ll just assume you meant to say “Japanese writing” in the first place.
It took me a while to get hang of the different readings of kanji but now (on level 7) they start to make more and more sense. I’m sure it’ll get easier for you too 