The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages

Re:The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages by compay on Monday December 21, 2009 @09:48PM (#1009269)

Sure you can deny it. You picked the classic example of something that seems hard to you because of your native speaker bias. What some languages resolve with conjugations and declensions, others resolve with combinations of prepositions and word order. English verb-preposition combinations are so brutally hard for foreign speakers to master that they publish "collocation dictionaries" to help. Latin's case system is much more predictable and regular, in some ways it's easier to learn.

Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.

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Re:The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages by alex_c on Monday December 21, 2009 @10:05PM (#1009303)

My native speaker bias for which language? :) I'm not a native English speaker, although I did learn it young, which I'm sure helped.

Still, my native language is Romanian, and I found English verbs easier to learn than French conjugation, even though French is very similar to Romanian in the first place.

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Re:The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages by compay on Monday December 21, 2009 @10:19PM (#1009328)

Ha, I would have thought you were a native speaker, your English is excellent. :-) I think you make the same generalizations about Latin that native English speakers often do, though, in assuming rich nominal case = complexity. The issue is much more complex than that.

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