Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication.
Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word.
"Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem.
Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two).
Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement.
You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form.
Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.
It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information:
(I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ...
"she would have played" -> "zagrałaby"
"would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?"
"he would have played" -> "zagrałby"
"she has been playing" -> "grała"
"she played" -> "zagrała"
Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck.
OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in other languages you have to manage both at once.
But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand people over a few generations, I guess that every language is eventually optimised to be learned and used without trouble given the average linguistic ability of human beings.
What little I know of it does suggest a couple of things (but my knowledge might be slightly outdated):
- It's true that no language is fundamentally unlearnable, not even as an adult (although you can of course always debate what "fluency" means exactly - to this date, I'm fairly certain that there are certain kinds of mistakes I make in English which native speakers don't make).
- A lot of the complexity does come from things like vocab and usage patterns, so even for a language where the grammar is "easy" (whatever that means - suppose we have a definition for that) it's not like it would be "easy" to speak properly. English in particular seems to have this "easy to learn, hard to master" problem.
- when we talk about grammar, there are definite differences in complexity, at least when we focus on certain areas (such as complexity of words). English is really just very simple in that regard, so is e.g. Chinese.
- contrary to GP's assumption, there is some evidence to believe that the causality goes in the opposite direction: English is not widely spoken because it's easy, it has become easier as part of being widely spoken as a second language.[1]
- relatedly, it appears that languages with very few non-native speakers (such as indigenous languages spoken only by a couple hundred of people) tend to have rather complicated grammatical features
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I know little about this as well, but there’s been some research done by…… John McWhorter, I think? A quick search through my Big List of Things to Read (3000 articles and counting!) gives https://elementy.ru/downloads/elt/mcwhorter_creole_grammars.... and https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.71, which you may want to have a look at if you’re interested. David Gil is also well-known for his insistence that Riau Indonesian is simpler than most other non-creole languages.
> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Ah yes, this one. I remember carefully reading it a while ago, and I ended up very sceptical about its conclusions. For one thing, I don’t agree with rankings such as ‘Isolating > Concatenating’ and ‘Agent > Agent & Patient’ (though these do admittedly seem to be common assumptions). The ranking as a whole is a bit weird also — I’d love to know how they concluded that Tiwi is less complex than Dyirbal, for example. But I’m more suspicious of the linear fits, which appear extremely bad — I’m not convinced you can conclude anything from a fit of R²=8.9% (for Afro-Asiatic) or R²=14.1% (for Sino–Tibetan). In fact, only one of the graphs has R²>90% at all. And I note that they very carefully avoid giving p-values — except for the overall ‘complexity against population’ graph, a very significant correlation which however disappears when languages are split into groups by family (Simpson’s Paradox again?).
(Though keep in mind that I’m not great at statistics and any of the above could be incorrect.)
Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data. It’s good for other things, but I very regularly find that a good proportion of its data is incorrect. It’s fine if you want to, say, see roughly what proportion of languages use active–stative alignment, but not for much else. (Though I suppose you could argue that the CLT applies and the errors will cancel out. But as I said, I’m bad at statistics and wouldn’t know how correct this is.)
(Personally, I’m sceptical that there’s a link between complexity and population. Witness Swahili, the lingua franca of a good chunk of East Africa. Or Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. The main reason most widely-spoken languages are ‘simpler’ is that they disproportionally come from IE, ST and Austronesian, which aren’t the most morphologically complex families anyway.)
> Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data.
the state of linguistic data is appalling in general. We have over 7000 languages in the world and yet, most of them are barely described, with grammars often being terribly inconsistent. I don't really know how to solve that problem except, in fact, hoping that the errors somehow do cancel out as you suggested.
- conjugating verbs, “hraju” = I play, “hraje” = he/she plays
- past tense of verbs, “hrál jsem” = I was playing, “hrál” = he was playing, “hrála” = she was playing
- that verbs have a “perfective” form, so “zahraju” = I will play, “zahraje” = he/she will play
- naturally the past tense of these follow, “zahrál jsem” = I played, “zahrál” = he played, “zahrála” = she played
- that this can be conditional, “zahrál bych” = I would play, “zahrál by” = he would play, “zahrála by” = she would play
It’s not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you to constructing those little sentence fragments isn’t too bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn’t decline any nouns or adjectives, didn’t cover positions of words in a more complex sentence)
planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak
‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’
Or Wichita:
kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks
‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’
These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)
The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk:
tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne
s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne
And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...
That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
(I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara:
ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka
But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well.
> Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.
Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well.
> I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t.
> (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/
(And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)
The reason English got so popular is purely because of the power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in the recent history.
But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but it's just so difficult to go through the process of constructing words while speaking.
Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint. If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through sentences :)
Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not.
I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language.
AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.
Yeah no kidding.
I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”.
For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone.
The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember.
I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster.
As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite.
I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.
I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off.
One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
Good luck, you will need it :D
You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French.
The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is incredible in English.
Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with temporality while English finds the right balance between having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would have.
I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience, English really is a good language you should be proud of. The pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong thanks to it :D
I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible".
I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.
NSFW language, if you can understand it.
(Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.)
If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.
It's usually based around a combination of factor - mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc. Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
Eh.
It's nothing more than repetition for the most part, along with certain parts of speech being implied. If your trying to overhear someone else's conversation you'll miss key points of context.
Having been to London , and South Central LA , I can't imagine any scenario where people from these places couldn't communicate with each other. A few words are definitely going to be different.
Scots and English are two dialects of the same language.
I think speakers of Cajun, Gullah, or High Tider dialects would seriously beg to differ.
And those are just a few of the "true" dialects of the American South.
Outside of that there are many dialects that mix Spanish and English throughout the southwest.
Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of sayings that aren’t really deductible. “Who knit ya?” is “who are your parents?” It makes sense in retrospect, but I don’t think many people would think that in retrospect.
What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were.
I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.
Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions!
I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.
For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.
And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true.
I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest.
Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
(Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)