Re:Accents, Dialects, and Discrimination
by inglor_cz on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:02AM
(#26488273)
I am a native Czech speaker. We have lots of declension classes that mostly feel natural for us (about twenty or so), but for learners whose native language is Germanic or Romanic, they are a nightmare. This is one of the things that makes Czech genuinely hard for Westerners.
It is not as hard for other Slavic speakers, because they are at least used to such a thing, even though their classes are not necessarily the same.
Of course, such a situation is difficult for anyone to learn! That’s what I was trying to get at with that Isiwara example above, which shows a language with even less regularity than Czech. The point I was trying to make was that mere ‘declension’ isn’t enough to make a language difficult to learn… you need to actually have some kind of irregularity to ensure that.
(Unless you’re talking about declension classes, as in Latin or Russian… but from what I can tell, those are actually surprisingly rare outside IE.)