ARE THERE DIFFICULT LANGUAGES? (feat. Luca Lampariello, Gabriel Gelman) | part 1
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- During the Poliglot Gathering 2022 in Poland, Lucas and Fabricio had great conversations with some of the most incredible polyglots in the world.
In this video, you'll see the first part of a fascinating conversation we had with the famous Luca Lampariello and Gabriel Gelman (Sprachheld) on the topic: "Are there languages which are objectively more difficult than others?"
Enjoy ;)
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Luca looking like an absolute CHAD
Parabéns pela entrevista. Acredito que é um tema muito complexo para decidir, qual idioma é mais fácil ou mais difícil. Alguns tem a facilidade por exemplo nos verbos, já outros complicam mais, com as declinações. Como também foi explicado, ai, dependendo do idioma se a frase não for bem formulada, não será compreendido mesmo falando o idioma.
Amazing please have more
Hi to all the polyglots in the video, you are all great!
Nice video guys!!!
Nice to see you guys all together! And LUCA we want you back on your channel. I disagree on English as hard as Hungarian...as someone said, there should be a way to calculate all the various aspects of language. Yes some things are easier in English some maybe easier in Hungarian-BUT OVERALL there must be harder languages.
Haha, similar reaction with me speaking Russian in Ukraine. Russian’s a bit more popular than polish though, and has a large pool of foreign speakers from FSU, but nonetheless, very few westerners speak this language well.
About English, verb conjugations are so much simpler than pretty much every other European language. So if we do a like-for-like comparison, then yes it’s easier to master English verbs than Spanish or German.
It seems like one should be able to objectively test whether a language is more difficult or not. See how long it takes a bunch of Danish kids, Chinese kids and Turkish kids to learn their language. Maybe it takes, on average, Danish kids a month longer to learn their phonetics but if that’s the case we can say all three groups roughly learn at the same rate. I do think maybe this could be different for adults. I’ve heard for example (but don’t know whether it’s true) that adults have a harder time learning case endings as opposed to more analytical languages based on word order. Still, it seems like that’s something that could be measured to see whether it’s true or not and whether adults struggle with different types of languages more than children regardless of their native language.
노란 햇살 푸른 바다와 너
Languages are different not necessarily difficult or easy. I guess that's what you're trying to tell us.
Besides the criteria mentioned in the video, there are couple of other factors which make a language easier or more difficult for me. One is the number of (seemingly) irregular words. I say seemingly because there's usually a pattern underneath which the learner discovers eventually. Spanish has a lot of seemingly-irregular verb endings; Russian case-endings; etc. On the other hand, in most grammatical constructions (that is, any that don't include -ta or -te verb roots), Japanese has only three irregular verbs (da, suru, and kuru) and the post-positions/case endings are the same for all Japanese nouns.
Another criterion is how often I'm corrected by tutors during conversation practice. Russian tutors (I tried out a lot of them on italki) corrected me so often that I lost confidence in my ability to learn Russian.
Although it was mentioned briefly, I'll mention one more which makes a big difference for me: pronunciation. Although Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian both have grammars that are easy on beginners, Mandarin's pronunciation (not just tones) makes it the more difficult of the two, for me and for many other learners. Korean and Japanese grammars are similar in form and complexity, but Korean pronunciation is the more complex of the two.
Which did you find easier to progress in Russian or Chinese ?
@@RovexHD Russian because at first I loved the sound of Russian (poetic to my ears) but didn't like the sound of Chinese, so I didn't want to do the necessary listening practice to get comfortable with the language. Also, Mandarin sound system made words like chair (yǐzi) sound like they weren't real words to my subconscious mind, so I had a hard time remembering vocabulary.
@@andymounthood
How long have you been learning Russian ?
Verbs of motion, cases, verb aspects, is there anything in particular you found difficult ?
@@RovexHD Having to change the ending of almost every word (article, adjective, number, noun, and verb) made speaking slow and mentally exhausting. Having to look up so many words to see if their endings were regular or irregular made progress slow. Learning when to use which case after which verb or preposition has also been tricky. For example, I might expect a verb to be followed by the accusative case, but actually it might require one of the other cases instead.
However, I enjoyed the process of learning Russian in spite of these difficulties. Even though I gave up, I still miss learning it. I might get back to it eventually.
Another reason I no longer learn Russian is because there appears to be a lot of effort required just to get a 3-week tourist visa, while I can go to Czechia or Germany or many other countries without a visa (on a US passport) for 3 months.
It's hard for me to say how long I've been learning a particular language because I study languages on a kind of rotation schedule every few months, but if you total up all the days and months I've been learning Russian, I think it adds up to a couple of years at least (including one term in a university class). Also, the concept of cases was already familiar to me from a semester-long (Attic) Ancient Greek course, which made memorizing case tables easier. However, while I was learning Russian, I didn't know as much as I do today about how I personally learn languages efficiently and effectively. Had I learned Russian the way I'm now learning Chinese and Indonesian, my progress might have been faster.
Hungarian is not that difficult, it's just a cliché, it is just different from the other European languages. I find it to be pretty logical after all. No language is tougher than another if you want to speak it fluently and at an advanced level. However, Polish and Russian, for instance, may be harder than Hungarian at a basic or intermediate level.