A part of one of my modules at university was to debate this proposed language family. As well as having talked about it at length with various people… “no supporters” is an understatement!
I like the idea of the Altaic language family, but it definitely doesn’t hold water.
What where the most important arguments against it? I’m curious
It’s 01:00 and English it not my first language… So I’ll be brief (Sorry!)
One of the main characteristic of languages that are in the same family is that over time they grow apart (become less similar). Meaning that the further back you look, the more similar the languages become as you get closer to a proto-language. However, this doesn’t happen at all with the Altaic language family.
Another argument made against it is that the similarity could be down to “Language contact”.
Ok so I finished watching the entire thing. There is literally only one cited study that I could see: (Krashen, 2013). It took a fair bit of digging to find and since it’s a journal for an Indian university that I don’t have access to, I really can’t say anything about it either way. He’s making many claims yet giving next to nothing to back them up. I have doubts.
Oh I see!! That’s really interesting. No worries English is also not my first language so I understand. I also understand being awake at 1 am.
Either way it is really interesting to look at languages like this. Thank you!
I would generally agree with this yeah. The most important thing I think is to remember that there’s no silver bullet to learning just like there’s no magic pill that will make you lose weight. Learning anything worthwhile to a significant degree is a process that takes a lot of time and conscious effort, no matter what anyone may claim. There is no perfect method for acquiring a language, just the method that works for you personally.
I mean he just says that you can do it without any evidence of actually doing it. We don’t even hear his Chinese. I bet his fluency is like all of those youtubers who talk to a bunch of people in languages and don’t say anything that is pass children-like expressions. After living overseas, it is very easy to dicate/direct your conversation in things you can actually talk about. But it is extremely shallow which is in no way fluent.
Put them in a different situation, and they couldn’t even add to the conversation. Also, if you don’t know how to read Japanese, how in the hell do you consider yourself fluent.
Sorry in advance; I guess I’m in a quibbling mood.
I think you need to separate accent and proficiency for a discussion of native-level speech. I’ve conversed with people who speak English with no real (foreign-sounding) accent who miss basic grammar points because they learned at a relatively late period in their lives (~13 years old), and I’ve conversed with people who have a discernible accent, but speak English fluidly, with a wide vocabulary and perfect grammar. I would consider the latter group to have achieved native-level proficiency. Anyway, it’s widely accepted that past the early teens, it’s well nigh impossible to acquire a second language and speak it with no accent, though I’m sure there are outliers.
Since there’s a discussion of language families later down in this thread, I thought I’d point out that Spanish is Latin-derived language, but English isn’t. Fundamentally, English is a Germanic language, though its vocabulary does borrow heavily from French (Latin family) and Latin itself. (Spanish and English are both Indo-European languages.) I do take your point, though, that Spanish is way more similar to English than is Japanese.
Anyway, sorry if I’m being nitpicky or disagreeable. It’s right before lunch here. I’m finding the discussion quite interesting.
I don’t know anything about the Turkish language, but I’m looking forward to this.
Freedom of speech allows you to speak your mind, there’s no reason to be sorry for that, you’re not being offensive just for sharing your point of view.
Agree.
Battle of Hastings is usually pointed to be where the anglo saxon phase of english ended and because french became the royal court language, it blended gradually and so modern english seems to have latin roots.
Read more here
Slightly disagree with this wording. Certainly French became the royal court language, for a period of nearly 400 years, and it did blend with English in the sense that a huge number of loanwords were imported. But don’t forget that apart from the court and nobility, the vast majority of the English population continued speaking Anglo-Saxon, or “English”, which continued evolving and eventually did replace French as the language of court (albeit with a large French-derived vocabulary).
So modern English does have a large vocabulary of words whose origin is from the Latin family, but English structure was never influenced very much by French or Latin (apart from some misguided English scholars of Latin in the 17th and 18th centuries who tried to force Latin grammar rules on English).
Famously, Winston Churchill’s 1940 speech to parliament used in its climax a long string of purely anglo-saxon words, leading up the final word (French origin) possibly not on purpose, but at least because these short old words sound more powerful in English than the alternatives.
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender
But sadly, none of this has to do with the price of eggs in China, or indeed Japan. (Sorry again! – What? I’m Canadian) for getting off track.
I haven’t heard about this, but I heard when there was this movement to try to eliminate every word derived or taken from other languages
Ok, sorry too for derailing threads :c
There are videos of his Ted talk in Chinese. He is quite good. But he’s been learning since 1980, so…
Wow, really?
That seems crazy. Too much useful information?
@Saida yeah, i think it’s been around 2 years, give or take a few months. Kind of hard to keep track of all the things that are banned here but i think it was around or after the 2016 coup.
I can’t imagine the suffering of all those students that can no longer copy paste Wikipedia articles for their homework.
turkey has way worse problems than student’s homework.
Just in case anyone is curious how he speaks Chinese now, here’s a video of him doing a presentation about people learning English in six months.
I would find it very hard to believe that he had attained this level even after one year, though. In fact, I think it’s important to qualify language fluency and accuracy in times like these. For example, one can conceptualize the idea of fluency is the ability to be able to communicate with little need to pause to process things; this is regardless of the accuracy or simplicity of the vocabulary or grammar employed in one’s speech. On the other hand, accuracy is conceptualized as being able to produce natural and grammatically correct speech, regardless of how disjointed the flow of production is. Native speakers should be quite competent on both of these fronts, but they probably aren’t going to be perfect in both of these areas 100% of the time. Even native speakers make grammar mistakes due to their language upbringing (i.e., dialect, use of slang, etc.), say things they don’t even mean because they weren’t thinking explicitly about what they wanted to say (i.e., relying on language tics, etc.), or cannot find the correct words to convey something without having to pause mid-sentence.
In any event, despite it being on the side of click-bait, the speaker does bring up good points: trying to make meaning of input, find patterns in the target language, and put yourself in a position apply what you’ve learned despite having questionable accuracy is going to get you a lot further than one who sits on the sideline trying to come up with the perfect sentence.
In my experience it’s definitely possible to be fluent of a language within 6 months. It depends on some parameters. Concerning “fluent” there is indeed no real definition like some here mentioned. There are certainly several points of view.
So let’s say “fluent” means that a non native speaker is able to have a fluent every day’s conversation. This is absolutely possible in most languages within a period of only a few months. It doesn’t mean he or she makes no mistakes. Even native speakers make mistakes depending on education and personal skills. So this is not a primary parameter of fluency.
For reaching a status of fluency in a short time there are a few linguistic tricks like learning frequently used words first, also conjunctions or modal verbs if they exist in the target language. While doing so constantly repeating of easy structured sentences with gradual variations help a lot. This is what children do when learning languages. It’s only an example.
So called hyperpolyglots may have some advantages too because they can use the experience of multiple different grammatical and semantic structures and also of complicated pronunciations to learn a new language probably much faster.
I am learning foreign languages since my childhood. I’m bilingual but there was always a strong interest in languages, the more exotic the better. Later I was studying linguistics for a while beside other subjects of study. Since then I have learned several new languages, some fluent, some more for the pleasure of understanding unusual aspects of grammar or the wonderful variations of human thinking. So you can call me a hyperpolyglot maybe. I started learning Japanese about a year ago for a new art project and (by the way) WaniKani help a lot. 
Reading is much better now. Mostly fluent. In my experience the more languages you have learned the easier it gets for each new one.
By knowing different and unusual concepts of grammar like ergative or incorporating constructions, augmenting particles or extended noun classes, it helps sometimes a lot when I want to learn new languages. For example the comparison of Turkish and Japanese like mentioned above is actually a quite good one. Regarding actual researches they are not related to each other but they coincidentally share some similar concepts which for sure makes it much easier for Turkish natives to learn Japanese. Turkish is a highly agglutinative language with strict rules, Japanese is agglutinative too but not as much. It rather uses chains of recursive alterations like changing a verb to and adverb to add it to a different word. But the way how to build subordinate clauses is very similar to the Turkish way. Subordinate clauses are probably one of the most difficult parts of Japanese language at least for Indo-European native speakers. I minor advantage is maybe also the similarity of the pronunciation of Japanese “u” and Turkish “ı”. They are not the the same but very close.
I learned Turkish about 20 years ago (not fluent anymore😄) and it helped me a lot concerning Japanese language.
So I think all of the comments here are true a little bit. There will always be people who learn easier than others or have advantages because of their native language or being bi- or multilingual. But not to forget: the biggest motor of learning languages is fun, passion and motivation. These qualities will always boost your progress immensely!
Best wishes!
Highly informative and thought provoking posts by pretty much everybody.
Btw @Jholan i believe you are about to break the WK record for reaching level 60 in the shortest amount of time ( unless something changed drastically in the past two months ). I had a lengthy conversation with Cyrus from support when i signed up whom informed me that the current record ( at least since they have been here ) is 364 days.