35
votes
What is your pet peeve with language acquisition?
Languages are awesome to learn, but I just hate to deal with prepositions, tiny little words yet imo they are the beast of any language that I have tried to dabble with so far, what's yours?
I can only speak to the languages I've attempted to learn.
Greek: surprise motherfucker, there's two versions of every verb we've covered so far, have fun going back to the beginning!
Japan: I'm sorry my Japanese friends, you cannot have the particle で do literally everything. I can't deal with it.
De the direction or ni the descent into the thing -- that's all you get!
It's all fucking vibes too! Sometimes my wife will say, well, へ just feels better than に in this context, and I'm like, fuck you!
Hahaha. The way string those wa's and ga's!
I think I saw a sentence the other way that went something like 今日は私は etc etc, and I was like you can have two was? That's not a thing in anything else I've read anywhere. I guess because 今日 is always followed by a は and never a に, even though it's referring to a time, but if you're still the topic of the sentence, then watashi has to be followed by one as well.
It's such a confusing language.
Real talk, yes you can have two wa's! You can even have three wa's and beyond! There's no actual rule saying you can't do this!
It's tricky to explain because most people don't delve too deep into the nitty gritty of grammar in general, let alone Japanese grammar. One key thing that tends to get overlooked is that "topic" and "subject" are two distinct grammatical functions in Japanese and have distinct rules. "wa" is just a topic marker. "ga" is what's the actual subject marker (and if the two overlap, which happens extremely often, then "wa" typically takes precedence except in stuff like subordinate clauses).
The concept of "topic" is quite unusual for a lot of learners so that's where confusion often stems from. But there is no rule in Japanese grammar saying you can't introduce more than one topic in the same sentence. What happens in practice when you do this is that you tend to create a contrasting effect with the second topic you've introduced.
In your example 今日は私は you introduce the topic "today" and signal to the listener you're going to talk about today, but then you move to yourself afterward as a main focus which puts extra emphasis on yourself by virtue of topic contrast. And if you introduced a third topic it would be even more contrasting, and so on.
For a more practical example, take the sentence: 太郎はテニスは出来ます.
You might think it's not correct, that there should be a が in that second spot. And yes, you could put a が there and then the topic, the thing you're talking about, is just "Taro." But if you use は instead you put extra emphasis on "tennis," as that now becomes the main topic, and thus the focus of the sentence. Sort of becomes like "Taro, when it comes to TENNIS, oh he can really play." (obviously exaggerated for emphasis)
Thank you so much for the explanation, that's much better than the shrugs I was getting!
Yes, I still find the concept of the topic vs subject confusing. I was thinking of は as the primary subject and が as a secondary one, but it's not that.
So in my example I would be saying something like, today I (and not another person) etc? Like, is the main function of multiple wa's emphasis?
Yes.
In general yes (obviously not blanket rule, exceptions exist, yadda yadda). Whichever topic comes last is the topic of the sentence. So if you list multiple topics you typically end up adding emphasis to whichever topic appears last, often by virtue of it contrasting with the topic(s) that came before.
That's a really cool thing to know! It wasn't covered by the material I was reading, it just suddenly showed up as an example sentence.
One misconception cleared up, 1000 to go 🤣
No kidding. Well, as we hail from a language filled with exceptions, so too do others.
I've (tried to) learn many languages over the years, German, Spanish, Russian, ASL, Dutch, Hungarian, prolly others I'm forgetting.
My top gripe is that -- for me, at least -- it never "sticks". There is some magical rubicon you need to cross before you truly internalize a language, and I've never been able to get there with any language, except kinda-maybe Hungarian. Every other language, no matter how far I get, it always feels "foreign", and I invariably forget the language very quickly after I stop actively practicing it. Very frustrating.
I've found that there are two phases to language learning: "learning to learn" and "actual learning". Textbooks, anki, duolingo, and so on mostly fall into the first category, but you don't really start understanding the language until you begin engaging with native content (the second category). However, it would be highly inefficient to learn a second language by trying to parse native content without any other context.
In that sense, language learning is a bit of an optimization problem: the "learning to learn" resources will help you learn more efficiently, but if you spend too much time on these resources, you will never actually learn the language. I think language learners often fall into the trap of never feeling confident enough to attempt the transition from the first to the second phase. But ironically the first phase of language learning will never get you over that hump; only by attempting to engage with native content can you actually learn to engage with native content.
I would agree with this, with the added note that the ideal learning program is the most efficient possible blending of these two "halves" into a single program ... learning the vocab and the sentence structure via Anki, and then later that same day, using those things in conversation with natives ... trying to hit this rhythmic back and forth pace, word by word.
I would add as a gripe, that you can learn all the grammar, all the sentence structure, have the top 10,000 words memorized ... and you still don't know jack. The languages are all, like, 80% idiomatic; you don't know a word until you fully absorb all of the context and circumstances and situations in which it is used ... and that irritates me.
I'm working harder than I once used to in order to try to get to a point where I can jump into learning from reading books in Japanese (worked great for English after all), but it has been way harder than for a western language. I did not feel like I knew enough yet after Genki I - even kids' books still seemed very impenetrable with vocabulary, kanji and especially verb conjugations and constructs I hadn't learned yet. So I don't think of it as spending "too much" time (even though it is a lot of time), but a necessary evil for bootstrapping one's knowledge such that I don't have to translate word by word from a dictionary and even when I do, I know what to look up.
Tangentially, if anyone here is looking for a Genki II study group we're just getting started, so let me know if you'd like to give it a try; we have at least one spot open. You would have less than 1 lesson to catch up with.
Here are the requirements for applicants
So, from the understanding I've gained on language acquisition through elementary education programs: spoken language acquisition is a completely natural and innate skill of the human brain. If we are immersed in a spoken language, our brains will "just figure it out". This is likely what you're talking about when you say you gain understanding by engaging with native content.
What is not a natural process for us is learning how to read and write in a language. In order to do this, we have to learn rules, practice them over and over, and begin to tie our natural phonetic language processing to the symbols that we can see and write. On top of this, we can learn rules for how words look, sentences look, punctuation, parts of speech, etc. If we do this enough, the idea is that we begin to interweave our knowledge into the innate language processing of our brains. They don't become one in any sense, but they work in tandem to the point where reading and writing can feel natural. Tools like Duolingo only teach us the rules, they do little to nothing to engage the natural language processing that we have.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, I only speak and read a single language. My experience is in teaching children to read and write in English, and I've only been practicing that for about a year now.
As a word of caution, researchers suspect that there are physiological differences in how children learn languages. Simple immersion works for elementary education, true, but not necessarily for adults.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/cognitive-scientists-define-critical-period-learning-language-0501
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-your-molecules/202210/learning-new-language-differs-between-children-and-adults
Children live fundamentally different lives from adults, and so interact with language in different ways. I'm not aware of research that has shown that, when correcting for these differences, children are better at absorbing languages than adults.
I haven't done a thorough literature survey about this, so I may just be completely unaware that people have looked into it. I just think that this is a detail that such reporting and outreach tends to gloss over.
Right, and just to elaborate a bit:
Adults have much greater autonomy and better access to resources, which allows them to learn more efficiently.
Children start from no language whatsoever (except maybe a language module), whereas adults usually use a known language to bootstrap a second language. As a consequence, the "learning to learn" phase for children is significantly restricted.
Children are forced to use a language out of necessity. The alternative is to massively hinder their ability to communicate at all.
Despite this, it still takes years for children to become proficient in a language, whereas an adult can become proficient (in business situational speech) in a second language in only a couple years with dedicated study.
Although there might be real physiological differences between the way children and adult learn languages, the importance of those differences is (in my opinion) largely washed out by other factors.
The language module thing is almost entirely discredited, for what it's worth.
Are you saying it takes children years to become proficient in their first language or years to become proficient in a new language after they already know a language?
It’s anecdotal, but my kids went from 0 knowledge to age appropriate fluency, as in enough to start elementary school with no additional support recommend or availability thereof mentioned, in 6 months. It’s their fourth language so maybe that made it easier, but years to learn a “second” language for kids seems too long.
Edit: In the same time I’ve gone from minimal knowledge to starting a B2 course in a few weeks, and their German (spoken at least, because they don’t know how to read or write yet in any language) is much, much better than mine.
Oh, those are some good anecdotes! I might be underestimating the ability of kids then.
The critical period hypothesis is indeed only a theory, but researchers are aware that children live different lives. The "experimental and observational studies" section of the above link is pretty good, if you're interested in going through it, and explains the experimental foundations for the various strengths of belief in the theory.
It's me, an Anki drone...!
I have some 6000 mature cards in Anki but spent vanishingly little time actually reading or speaking Japanese. As a result I can stumble through the meaning of a sentence some of the time with the help of a hover dictionary, but I can't formulate an original thought beyond absolute basics.
I really need to just push myself...
I’ve always heard that once you begin dreaming in the target language, you know you’ve begun to properly acquire it. I’ve been studying French in earnest since 2013. I’ll let you know if I ever dream in French.
I know that feeling well. I had pretty good French education in school and was passionate enough about it that I did get to that point where I felt like I could just open my mouth and French would spill out, but I got frustrated later in life when I spent years in German classes and felt like I was still impossibly far away from having a basic flowing conversation. It felt like I had to solve a math equation to determine word order and adjective endings before I could start any sentence. It baffled me that any human brain could juggle so many rules in real time, but obviously native speakers have no problem.
My frustration got high enough with this that I decided to "rage learn" German. I made myself spend a lot of time in German speaking online communities and chat rooms and ultimately decided to move to Germany. I eventually also married a German, and after all that 😅 I can say that I can now indeed open my mouth and have German spill out.
But my German is still far from perfect. Any given sentence I speak will be riddled with adjective ending errors. For me, it was relatively attainable to speak "perfect" French (not pronunciation-wise, but grammar-wise), and I realized I needed to relax that bar if I ever wanted to get a sentence out in German. So I intentionally stopped worrying about adjective endings and I know I sound a bit stupid to native speakers, but I also know that they can understand me completely, and I've come to terms with that being enough.
For others struggling with German adjective endings, this article was a complete turning point for me and I think marked the moment I embraced "good enough" and started being able to speak much quicker: https://yourdailygerman.com/adjective-endings-german/ (His whole blog is excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone learning German).
This is kind of what I was going to comment, I am glad someone else feels this way. I find there is a line between learning and caring what each word and grammatical structure means then letting go and focusing on the context, vibe, and general conversation. Once you are able to enter this stage you can quickly actually learn the language. I've had that happen to me for two languages and it is quite satisfying. I think the trick is being comfortable in uncomfortable situations where you do not understand fully but you get the idea. You probably cannot translate their sentence exactly but you get it enough to respond.
Okay mr. big shot.
I mean, I've semi-learned Spanish three separate times, the last time spent nearly five years on it, with a teacher and classes and regular social practice, etc ... I was solid, at least B2 ... then circumstances conspired against me ... now, a decade later ... "Yo quiero Taco Bell."
I spent 3 years of high school plus 3 semesters of college learning German ... again, to at least B2 (this was ~40-ish years ago) ... since then, I've revisited the language multiple times (I've been living in Germany for 4 years now), and I still have never even gotten back to where I was back in college.
ASL ... I spent 2-3 years learning it aggressively in high school & college, socially involved, multiple hard-of-hearing friends and acquaintances, actually considering becoming an interpreter for awhile. Today, I still know the alphabet forwards and backwards ... and little else.
Hungarian is, technically, my mother tongue, because I was born in the US but both parents were Hungarian and they didn't start to teach me English until 6 months before I started school. I have a more intuitive sense for this language and I'm pretty sure my pronunciation is better than most non-natives ... but even here, if I'm not actively practicing it, my proficiency drops off fast.
Additionally, I will note that my brain has an extremely strong "replace instead of add" tendency ... like, I learned Spanish, then went back to German, and almost word-for-word, as I learn new German words, the Spanish words disappear. Early on, trying to answer someone in German, it would often come out in Spanish without my even realizing it ... and now, just the opposite, I try to remember Spanish, and only German comes out.
Addendum: My point being "I have forgotten more languages than you've tried to learn" is a lot less impressive in practice than it sounds like.
What about Russian?
What about it?
Russian was different for me, in that it's the only language that I only studied in written form; never tried to speak or listen to it, just reading and writing.
Never got as far as some of the other languages.
Today, all I remember are a few of the slang-y expressions from A Clockwork Orange (the novel incorporates a street-slang that is basically just corrupted Russian, e.g. "Horrorshow" means something is cool or awesome, derives from the Russian "Horosho" (I may be spelling that wrong) which just means "good").
I no longer even remember the Cyrillic alphabet, but I do remember, anecdotally, that if you simply learn the alphabet -- which odd-looking Cyrillic letters correspond to which Latin letters -- you magically discover that a really surprisingly large amount of Russian is just obvious cognates. It's not like you suddenly understand all Russian, but an amazing number of billboards and ads and street signs are suddenly quite readable.
Edit/Addendum: Two other languages that I've never gotten very far with, but I did study a bit, were Mandarin and Esperanto.
Esperanto in particular continues to interest me as a possible language-learning catalyst. There are studies that document that if, eg, you spend 6 months learning Esperanto, and then 2 years learning French, you will end up learning more French, better, than if you just spend 3 years learning French.
Unfortunately, my understanding is, that catalyst effect is real, but mainly only works for the 2nd language. For 3rd languages and beyond, the "Esperanto effect" is minimal.
How did you fare with the Dutch articles? This is an endless sticking point with anyone trying to learn Dutch. Difficult to teach too as it's often just cause.
De, het, and een? I only learned basic Dutch but they seemed fairly easy (like I was still struggling with de and het, but it didn't seem like that would last beyond the novice phase). What's so hard about them?
Just de and het, the definite articles. Een is an indefinite article, different category. And the issue is that each noun takes either de or het, and it's largely (apparently) random which noun gets which article.
Spanish (and, I believe, French, no doubt many others) have the same issue. In German, why are all dogs masculine, all cats feminine, and all animals are neuter (der Hund, die Katze, das Tier)? Why are doors feminine but windows are neuter? etc.
Spanish and French make it quite easy to guess. Even Dutch has heuristics that get you the clear majority of nouns:
Reliable het patterns:
Reliable de patterns:
These seem kinda random, and I did struggle with it when I was learning Dutch, but they're not that complex and would be internalized as you use the language and actually become competent in the rest of it, just through repetition. And they're certainly better than German heuristics like "most trees are feminine."
Although, to be fair, German suffixes also get you about ⅔. But you need something like 30-40 rules there to get to 90% predictability, and those rules have exceptions.
Because there's no rule defining the correct article. Often it boils down to what sounds right, which a native will never fail unless it's a socially accepted mistake. One common example is salt: the correct article is "het zout" even if most people will say "de zout", this is because it stems from "het tafelzout" but shortened "de" sounds appropriate.
You can always catch a non-native speaker through the inevitable mistake with articles.
At some point the gendered Germanic root got disconnected and while it's a somewhat useful guiding tool for words sounding similar to their German root, it's not definitively related to gender. As such, it's vibes based. Learning a language's vibe is difficult no matter which language you learn.
I don't mean to pretend Dutch is exceedingly difficult, although the "switch to English" expat curse is real, but a few letters and the articles tend to trip up even the most tenacious learners.
So you just mean that gender is difficult and not the articles?
Dutch is not a gendered language. I suppose you could argue that because of the gendered language it came from it's now difficult to say what article is required as you no longer have the gender rule, but that's a bit tenuous.
The articles themselves aren't difficult to understand, but when to use which is something you can't teach.
Dutch is a gendered language. It has common and neuter gender in the standard language, and some dialects have preserved the historical distinction between masculine and feminine gender (which have merged into the common gender in standard Dutch). In fact, even standard Dutch preserves the three way distinction in personal pronouns.
Gender is a broader concept than the distinction between something called masculine and something called feminine.
But Dutch does have gender...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar
Yes, but not in the way it influences articles like Der, Die, and Das do in German. I would even argue those leftover gendered nouns are on their way out.
"De bank" (F) or "de dief" (M) is perfectly fine.
Gender exists but is in many cases no longer applicable. Verpleegster (F) or Verpleger (M), to indicate if a nurse is female or male, is generally no longer used by anyone under 60. Chauffeur and chauffeuse for male and female driver respectively is definitely no longer used and one would refer to a driver as chauffeur regardless.
From your wiki article:
In other words, gender is irrelevant to the conversation at hand about articles. Reading even further only reinforces the point the genders are remnants of yore as the wiki article states gender is rarely used with informal speech and sees use only within literary or formal areas (likely law).
You're getting caught up on masculine vs feminine. Modern Dutch grammar is about common vs neuter grammar, with a few MvF holdouts, particularly in Belgian Dutch.
I had the advantage of German under my belt. It's not perfect, but much (most?) of Dutch articles maps directly to German articles, which are arguably even worse (we have 3 of them and damn but the entire rest of the sentence structure really depends on knowing them by heart).
That said, though, I never got far on Dutch. I actually spoke Dutch better while I still lived in Hungary--pre-learning it before I moved to the Neth--than I ever learned it once I got there ... the whole "Dutch people switch to English at the drop of a hat" syndrome killed my Dutch progress.
Addendum: Learning German, there are quite a large number of clues, categories and rules that mostly work for the articles ... but ultimately, the best advice is to aggressively learn the article + noun combo as a single unit. Your Anki card is not "Katze" but "die Katze" ... and if you didn't know the "die", you didn't know the word.
Dutch is a little more vibes based than German. There is a remnant of gender buried in there somewhere, though that's not a hard and fast rule about deciding when to use De, Het or Een. German helps, but much like how I don't always know the correct German article, they often don't know the Dutch article.
Japanese: the absolute hellscape that is every kanji having multiple different readings. And if anyone ever tells you there are rules for it and you start developing a sense for them as you go, no there are not. It's all vibes-based and the "rules" only work until they inevitably don't which is all the freaking time (yes I know about kanji groups with specific sound radicals that all read the same. There are still exceptions within those, even if it's just the random dakuten in some words. The best "rule" you'll ever get in Japanese kanji readings is "it's probably this one").
Kanji started as Chinese characters that were assigned Japanese readings based on the vibes at the time. They were more or less retrofitted into an already centuries-old language that works very differently from Chinese, and then just left there until present day. Those are all the ingredients for an inconsistent system. Any semblance of rules that may have been attempted has long been broken multiple times. Korean also dealt with this problem, but they ultimately invented an alphabet that works for the language and solved it. Japanese just kinda shrugged it off and continued tacking things on and here we are.
The only "sense" you develop while learning to read Japanese is sheer muscle memory from repeating words in context enough times that they become ingrained. Whatever patterns you find will be broken at some point. It's pure, unadulterated memorization. Even native Japanese people read kanji wrong all the time when they encounter them in a word they're less familiar with. And the only reason it doesn't happen more often is because Japanese text can include the reading of a kanji right above it, which you can bet you're going to see for more irregular words because even people who write in Japanese know a meaningful portion of their audience probably won't know how to read certain words.
Take 土 for example. You spend the majority of the time reading it as "do" or "to" and you think to yourself "wow, this is so easy" and then you run into 土産 and you're like, surely, surely it starts with "do/to." But then, to your dismay, you discover it's "mi" and also that the word means "souvenir" which is very common so you actually need to memorize this ridiculously arbitrary reading because you want to say that in your next trip to Japan you went to a "miyageya" to get some "miyage" for your friends and family. Now multiply that situation by hundreds of kanji, with some kanji having multiple exceptions. [insert joke about 生 having 100 different readings, half of which you have to memorize].
The worst offender is people's names (and Japanese names in general). Attempting to read one is often an exercise in futility. If you're not speaking to someone and only communicating via text, you'll have to ask the person how to read their name half the time if you don't wanna risk mispronouncing it in case you do speak about or to them. Even if the name uses common kanji, usually it's a "it's probably this name, but I should ask in case it's that one." Like how 亜純 has a 50/50 chance of being "Ami" or "Azumi." I'm still not fully convinced that Japanese movie credits are not some secret inside joke/game to see if ordinary people can read them besides the people credited /s.
I want to end by emphasizing that I enjoy reading in Japanese. I have learned the language for years and keep learning every day. I'm the nerd that digs into kanji etymology out of curiosity. There's not a day I don't read at least one book page in Japanese, and as a result the frequency of reading mistakes I make has always gone down over time (because, again, all you ever do to learn Japanese vocabulary is hit your head against the wall enough times until the words stick). I could also write much, much longer rambles about the beauties of the language and its unique systems. But my God, I will never get over this eternal pain point (I think it really hit me when I began learning Chinese too and was flabbergasted that I only needed to memorize one reading per character. Felt like bliss in comparison) And honestly, learning about the history of kanji has sometimes only made me even more upset about it because it's like a series of train wrecks that everybody watched happen without doing anything and now everyone's in too deep to admit we should have turned back several crashes ago. There might be other languages with similar scenarios, but to me, Japanese text is text that actively fights you for daring to try to read it. It's beautifully brutal.
I think I would love to learn spoken Japanese and hate to learn written Japanese.
I never regretted learning how to read Japanese but I always describe it as an uphill battle that never really ends. You have to accept that you will suck for quite a while and even when you know how to read 99% of stuff in your day-to-day life you will still run into things you can't read (which, to reiterate, also applies to natives. The only difference is they've been grinding kanji since they were kids while you're playing catch up). But if you're consistent in your studying you can get to a point where you're reading a considerable amount of Japanese unassisted after a year or two. Then at that point you're also accustomed to adding flashcards for new words and won't even flinch at it (which is how most people study Japanese, and for good reason). If you like reading then you'll be fine, as the best way to learn is to just read and read and read some more.
Knowing Japanese unlocks a vast world of excellent literature, an internet community and culture that is gigantic but still very much insular, and the country itself is also so much more fun to visit when you know how to read the things around you and can fully appreciate them.
As someone who only knows about 150 kanji, I just want you to know that you're scaring the shit out of me.
It's like being on a queue for the roller coaster and seeing everyone leaving it puke their guts out.
French: there are too many silent letters, especially at the end of words. "Eaux" has 3 too many letters, it should just be O. It's a waste of ink. Also too many homophones:
Verre (glass) = Vers (toward) = Vert (green) = Ver (worm) = Vers (worms)
Ton (your) = Ton (tone) = Tons (tones) = Thon (tuna) = Tond (shave) = Tonds (shave)= T'ont (they did to you)
Oh and Sixty Ten, Four Twenty, and Four Twenty Ten???? Writing down phone numbers is a disaster.
Languages in general: If the list of exceptions is longer than the list of words a rule supposedly applies to, it should not be considered a rule!!
Both English and French are said to have defective orthographies, but with French it’s not really that true. Because French is very regular about the unspoken letters, the orthography is actually much more consistent than English, meaning that you can generally guess a reasonable pronunciation of a new French word that you’re learning from spelling alone by following a few rules. In English, it’s a full on crapshoot.
Now imagine trying to teach English reading and writing. It's incredibly difficult to have students understand why, Eg, the gh digraph sometimes says 'f' but other times 'w' or 'g'. Some curriculums are great about teaching explicit examples (UFLI) and others have literally written in the teacher manual "have students sound each phoneme out and decide what sounds right" which seems great until you run into the cold reality of dual language teaching.
The Chaos! (Read out loud.)
Likely due to a lot of the inconsistencies/incongruencies that the Normans introduced to it, while it still retained a lot of its Angle/Saxon/Scandinavian history. AKA it's the French's fault. :)
I found it absolutely interesting that the Germans opted for the Roman word for window (Fenster) when English kept the old German version of Windauge (lit. wind-eye). The Germans apparently changed around the time of Roman advancement because a wind-eye was just a hole in a castle tower or room that let you look out but didn't stop the wind or rain, but the fenestra was often in smaller, more "refined" buildings that had glass to allow you to see, but not experience the elements. Etymology is awesome, especially when it helps you understand your own language better, and the one you're learning.
English is 3 or 4 languages in a trenchcoat.
Just pretend you learned French from a Belgian or Swiss person.
French: I can read 75-80% of what’s in front of me without reaching for a dictionary. I can write 60% of my sentences confident that I’m getting my point across but knowing I’m not really all that grammatically correct. I can understand about 30% of any French I’m listening to. I can say “bonjour” in an accent that probably won’t get me kicked out of the boulangerie immediately.
French & Spanish & Swedish & German: getting a handle on the gender of stuff. I’ve found it tedious to memorize the gender of every noun, and I find absolutely nothing useful about having at least two different systems in place for addressing nouns (German… go sit down), but if you’ve got convincing evidence to the contrary please share it. Japanese is easier for not having this foible.
Japanese: the script. I know that Japanese people will tell you that it’s traditional and that there are many good reasons for keeping it around but honestly Hangul directly counters almost every argument I’ve ever heard about Kana.
English: (yes, I still study my native language) it’s more of a vibe than a proper language. It’s a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary and script bolted on by lazy developer’s, and the American Spelling expansion pack has done nobody any favors. We keep abandoning attempts to reform the spelling or choose a more suitable script, largely because nobody wants to accidentally capture regional dialects and make them official in a dictionary, in my opinion. We might accidentally legitimize them and thus make it tough to look down on people that don’t speak “proper” English, whatever the fugg that means.
As a native Spanish speaker (and therefore biased), is it that hard? Masculine words tend to end with o, and feminine with a. There's exceptions to that, but it'll probably get you 90% of the way.
Of course there's words like pared (feminine) where you'll stumble. And día and noche and sol. Actually now that I think about it, good luck.
We fight because in English there's what we call prestige accents, and other accents that are considered lesser/incorrect. To give you an idea, my mother would've had what we call a Southern accent if she'd kept her childhood accent, but in college she received so much ridicule for it that she forced herself to take on the prestige accent of the era, and to this day speaks with only that and becomes embarrassed when her original accent comes out. Her way of saying a few choice words wouldn't be considered "correct" or "proper" and if she wrote them the way she actually says them she would be corrected regularly. That's the main complaint people have against making English spelling phonetic; they might accidentally give her accent legitimacy.
EDIT Sorry I was thinking I was replying to someone else about making words spelled regularly. My apologies.
To answer YOU directly, my language used to do that as well, but we decided it was a chore we didn't need to complete and went with just the neutral. Your language, for whatever reason, has decided that some things are la and other things are el and being corrected on them is annoying to someone from a language that wouldn't think to say "tha chair" vs "the tree" for example. To be sure, we do have some gendering in the language, but we don't change the words around the gender to fit the gendered word, usually. It's still THE actor and THE actress, not THE actor and THA actress, etc. It just seems unnecessary to have la/las el/los etc. Why gender that?
Well, to be fair, my language didn't really decide it, Latin did. Latin had three genders, neuter (-um), masculine (-us) and feminine (-a). In Spanish (and many other romance languages), neuter and masculine were merged into one (-o), which is partly why masculine is default, as its taken the place of the neuter.
Even if you removed the articles, you would still struggle because what are you going to do with adjectives? Say you invent a gender neutral article that stands for the. Ok, now say the red wall. The pared... what, rojo or roja? You still need the gender there. And what of you need to say the red wall is hard? The red what is... duro or dura?
The entire language is gendered top to bottom, because the language is just Latin with one less gender. And if you know pared is feminine, then it's not an issue; it's la.
I dunno, it feels entirely normal to me!
Don't get me wrong, I love Spanish and I've been studying it for years, it's just tedious as an adult to memorize when "la" or "el" is appropriate when that's not a feature of my language. Spanish makes great use of discarding needless things, though, like I don't have to say "yo quiero" to say I want something, I can just say "quiero" which is a fantastic feature of the language. I think in order for your language to have the same feature, you'd just have to abandon la/las for things and agree that the ending of the word doesn't matter for the article in front of it.
Is there really a significant reason for not saying "Tengo un hija, dos hijos, y el señorita allí es el hermana de mí esposa" as opposed to "Tengo una hija, dos hijos, y la señorita allí es la hermana de mí esposa"?
Oh, no worries, I'm just going through my logic on my end!
I dunno! In your example, it's because the verb already carries the person. Quiero already has the first person baked into it, so the yo is only necessary for emphasis. Funnily enough, identical to Greek. You would say θέλω αυτό to say I want this (quiero esto), but you can emphasise the first person by saying εγώ θέλω αυτό as well. In that case, you can drop the gender pronoun. You could say quiere esto as opposed to ella quiere esto.
But I don't think you can drop the articles like that. Quiero manzana. Ok, do you want an apple or the apple, or maybe that apple over there, or maybe a specific apple in your hand? La, una, esa and esta give you all those meanings. I feel that you've lost a feature of the language, but I don't really see what you've gained in return.
In your last example, there's nothing inherently wrong with a language doing that, but since you already know what the gender for those words is, is it really a burden to use la for the feminine nouns? I get that not knowing the gender puts you in a bind (e.g. el agua), but if you know the gender of the words hermana, hija and esposa, there's not a big issue, right? The same way you wouldn't write "hte sister", you wouldn't write "el hermana". Both get the meaning across, but they're not grammatically correct.
I don't advocate for dropping the article before a noun, although that's something that can be done but relies heavily on context to make sense. In English you could say "I want apple" to mean that you want apple-flavored or apple-scented items, but the context would need to be present that there's an option there. Just starting a conversation with "I want apple" has too little context to narrow it down to a specific apple, but it will be assumed that you want something apple-flavored or featuring apple heavily as the primary ingredient, so a natural response would be "What kind of apple?"
You'd need the article, "I want AN apple" or "I want THAT apple" or "I want THE apple" etc. if you wanted to talk about a particular apple, otherwise an assumption is made. I suppose in Spanish it would be more akin to "Quiero el sabor a manzana" but I'm not sure that's a sensible sentence.
I'm not saying Spanish doesn't need those articles, what I'm saying is that having to learn a special version of "THE" or "THAT" dependent on a feature of the noun seems superfluous. "El manzana" and "La manzana" both essentially mean "the apple" but one is correct and for some reason the other isn't for no other reason than... it isn't correct.
Here's a question that I'm just curious about, not using it as as argument I just want to know: what do you do if a word is introduced to two different regions without a definitive article and both regional variants arrive at different conclusions about the article?
Say that the word "bume" (which I made up just now) were to arrive in Spanish, meaning "a small fruit from the bume tree", and it arrives in both Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish at roughly the same time. In Mexico, they decide it's "el bume", but in Spain they feel "la bume" is more appropriate. Who wins? Which version do you adopt? Does a foreign language speaker just have to learn that it's "el bume" in Tijuana but "la bume" in Madrid?
But then I have the same question as above, what would be the point of having a gender neutral article but no other changes? You still have to say manzana roja, so you still need to know the gender of any noun you're playing with. At that point, is there any difficulty in saying la once you already know the gender of the noun? If the difficulty is knowing what noun an águila is, I get it. But removing gender from just articles and leaving it for adjectives and everything else seems... I don't know, odd to me. You've already done the difficult part of identifying the gender, it feels like picking between el and la is the simple part at that point, no? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding!
In regards to your example, yup, you're exactly right, depends on the region. Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish (my own) aren't identical. It's just one of those things that would make those countries unique. Well, partly. We do have a Real Academia Española which will eventually wade in, and we do listen to it when we write in proper castellano. But languages are living things.
As a Puerto Rican, we probably have more English loanwords than most other Latin countries. So we have palquin (parking), and that's masculine (el palquin). El friser (freezer). El jambelger (hamburger).
I'm actually having trouble writing these because we never write these words, we would actually write parking, freezer and hamburger. But they're part of our regular Spanish parlance and that's how we would say them. There are Spanish words for these, estacionamiento, congelador, hamburguesa. But they're not as commonly used, and for the last example, never used at all.
The vast majority of loanwords default to masculine, I'm looking at a loan word list right now because I couldn't think of a feminine one too of my head. Ganga (gang) is feminine. Membresía (membership) is feminine. They both end with -a, and I'm not 100% these aren't just real Spanish words that started as English. Essentially, the rule probably is that if ends with -a it's feminine, and everything else is masculine, as the neuter in Spanish is masculine.
I think the assumption here is that you drop all gender features, except in cases where it's important to describe what you mean. Like, take your example of "manzana roja" where if you just agree that the words always pair with the masculine as the neuter, you end up with "el manzana rojo" because "el" and "rojo" no longer carry the connotation of "the definite (masc) article" and "red (masc) color" they just carry the connotation of "definite article" and "red color" regardless of the noun they're attached to.
I'm just genuinely not sure what important information that gender agreement is carrying here. Take a longer descriptive, where all the genders must apply: una pequiña manzana roja. None of that tells me anything important about the smallness of the apple, the appleness of the apple, the redness of the apple, or even the oneness of the apple. I learn the gender rules in the languages I speak, but it doesn't mean I have to like them.
Anyway, let's agree to disagree at this point, I think I'm going in circles.
I suppose. I guess to me, that's a bit like asking why doesn't English drop the Celtic do. Instead of asking "do you like it", why not ask "you like it". That do is a remnant that doesn't really add anything. Or insisting that English standarise its plurarisation rules. No more oxen or geese, only oxes and gooses. And no more silly terms like murder of crows, only flock of crows. And so on. But to what end? It feels to me that this sort of top-down standardisation only serves to make a language poorer, don't you think? Legitimately I'm asking you, would the language be better for it?
Grammatical gender has been part of Spanish since before Spanish existed as a language and harkens back to the misty days before Romulus. You're asking to change a feature that's been there for millennia, but I don't really understand why.
I understand bring frustrated by it. I'm frustrated that the Japanese haven't standarised their phonetic language. But I think that's different from wanting them to change it.
I should probably point out that I construct languages as a hobby, so my answer to "would it improve the language" is an emphatic "yes" because... well, it's the unfortunate delusion of my hobby.
That does make a lot more sense to me! In that context, I might same that removing grammatical gender would make a language simpler. I would still argue that you risk making it poorer and unmooring it from itself. But I don't think I would add grammatical gender to a new language, no. And I did, I'd probably add 3, not 2.
I think the problem is that it feels like an extra bit of work to make sure that gender agrees across the sentence, but it ultimately has no useful payout in almost all situations. It's extra work often for no reward, but if you get it wrong you sound like an uneducated speaker, at least from the perspective of an outsider learner. It's all drawbacks, but again just from a non-native speaker's perspective. If there was something other than "it makes it sound nice" that it was doing to make the sentence more clear and more understandable I wouldn't ever think twice about it. "Of course it's -ita for everything here, you must know that this is a very cute table. Lita lindita mesita."
I think if you're purposefully building a language (for fiction, perhaps) I suppose the use would be in determining an in-group and an out-group. I really do think the best example is the Celtic do in English. Asking "do you want some cake?" and "you want some cake?" conveys the same meaning, and indeed, is a mistake people attempting to learn English on the ground without formal education make, and not using that do makes them sound uneducated. And if you were constructing a language, you probably wouldn't use it that way, right?
I think every labguage I'm familiar with has things like that. The kana は in Japanese makes the sound 'ha', except if being used as the topic particle, in which case it sounds like 'wa'. Even though Japanese does have a kana that makes the 'wa' sound, わ, this is not the one used for that particle. It's something you just have to know.
Similarly in Greek, you have eight vowels, α, ε, η, ι, ο, υ and ω. η, ι and υ make the same exact sound, 'ee'. Additionally, the combination ει also makes the 'ee' sound. So you will hear a word in Greek with the 'ee' sound and it can be any these symbols. The word for 'is' is είναι , which is pronounced 'eeneh'. You could in theory spell it as ινε, that would make the same exact sound. But you don't, and if you spell it like that, you look like you don't know Greek.
That's just languages, right? Evolution over millennia and millennia. They're all weird and clunky!
I think you and @Narry already discussed the matter to death, so no need to repeat yourself, but maybe it's worth considering a more concrete example.
Take German. In German there are three genders and four cases, so (for a language learner) determining which article to use requires mentally loading a 3x4 matrix into your head. Except German also differentiates between weak and strong endings, so there are actually two of these 3x4 matrices you have to memorize -- unless you insert an adjective between the article and noun, in which case there are additional rules at play.
In contrast, in English we can just say "a/the cute cat". Japanese takes it even further by doing away with articles altogether.
I think we need to differentiate between constructing a new language without gender, and removing gender from a language. Obviously this is all hypothetical and noone can affect a change of this scale on a language used by hundreds of millions of people,. but I can't overemphasise how impossible removing gender from Spanish would be. Every noun, article and adjective is gendered. I'm not sure what removing gender even means in this context.
Chair will always be silla. Unless you're removing the very idea of gender in its entirety, that will always be a feminine word because it ends with -a, like the female names María, Ana, Gabriela, Elena, etc. Similarly, a piso ends with -o, like Roberto, Fernando, Benedicto.
Obviously it's not as simple as the above and there are names that follow different structures, I'm just trying to clarify what we're saying it should look like. The suggestion I saw was just using the -o ending. But that's not removing gender, that's making masculine the only gender, which leads you into awkward phrases like el silla rojo. You had a nice little rhythm when saying la silla roja and it sounded pretty, but if you force articles and adjectives that don't belong, you've lost the alliteration you had going. As I said above, I feel this makes the language poorer, but I'm not sure what it's accomplishing.
There are things that are hard about Spanish, but there are things that Spanish is better at than both English and Japanese by far. For example. There is only a single way to read and say la silla roja. On the other hand, English has words like through, tough and though with three entirely different sounds represent the gh. It also has words like the and think where again the th represents two different sounds, which in Greek are separate syllables (δ and θ), but in English are represented by the same combination of letters. And God, Japanese was created to torture foreigners! You can't just wrote 私はすしを食べます and expect anyone to read that without learning two separate syllabic alphabets, and then a huge registers of thousands of symbols. In my biased opinion, grammatical gender (which you can gauge 90% of the time by seeing if a word ends with a or o) sounds like baby mode! You honestly can get by the vast vast majority of the time by seeing which vowel the words ends on, and if it's neither a or o, assume masculine. You'll be wrong a tiny minority of the time.
What would you say if Spanish dropped all gendered declension, leaving only one version of each article and adjective? You could keep only those of one gender, or mix and match whichever versions sounded nicest to your ear, but there would only be either "alto/altos" or "alta/altas", and you wouldn't have to be concerned with the gender of the noun. I think that's what Narry meant, unless they specified a desire to keep gendered adjectives for some reason.
I just feel that that would remove a lot of pretty words from the language, but I don't see what it would accomplish.
Say you remove feminine completely. Now instead of saying las manzanas ricas and have that nice -as ending in every word, a bit like rhyme, you have los manzanas ricos. That sounds really ugly to my ears, you've lost the repetition. What would we be trying to do by doing this? You're not making simpler, since manzana already carries the gender (feminine, since it's a standard -a ending).
I think this is where I'm getting stuck in this conversation. What does are we trying to accomplish by removing grammatical gender?
How does not formalizing English keep dialects down? Having a formal body telling everyone how to properly use the language is the definition of disenfranchising dialects.
There may be some confusion here. I'm not calling to formalize English, I'm talking more about spelling reform which is a lightning rod issue at all times. Personally, I advocate for completely changing to another script, even if it's not perfect. RobWords on YouTube did an episode about Shavian, among others.
Even if we kept the Latin script and modified it the way other languages that use the script do, we'd do better to capture the way the words are spoken. For example:
Tough, though, thought -> tuff, tho, thaut
I'm by no means the first to propose this. The problem is that any time we try to impose either spelling reform or script reform, there are inevitably those that complain that doing so will introduce regional variant spellings that will cause the same level of confusion.
For example, take the word pecan. I know of at least two ways I myself say it:
peekaen
pkawn
Same thing with words like aunt (aent, awnt), route (root, rowt), or recording place names that are pronounced differently by the locals, such as Nevada, which is more like "Nevada" where the "vad" rhymes with "bad", versus outsiders who often say it closer "vod" like "bod" instead. Which is correct, the local variant or the regional or the national?
As an aside, President Teddy Roosevelt once tried to reform our spelling... it went... poorly.
Too many exceptions to the rules that you have to memorize (looking at you German)
I took German in high school, and now that I’m trying Hungarian I really appreciate how logical it is. Sometimes it almost seems like it was designed before it was spoken, otherwise how could it end up being so orderly! Unfortunately word order is really important and requires a bit of intuition because the choices are entirely semantic.
Hungarian speaker here, actually in Germany now, learning German.
So many things to love about Hungarian -- spelling and pronunciation is dog-simple, very simple verb tenses -- but did we really need not one but two separate forms of formal "you"?
Mandarin
Sometimes I’m too tired to sound the tones correctly
“Did you mà when you should’ve mă? You may be entitled to a settlement!” The regrettable thing about tonal languages is that I imagine that you have to be a sassy little binch in a way other than saying something that’s technically inoffensive but in a super offensive tone. At least I presume. Does Mandarin have an equivalent of aLtErNaTiNg SaRcAsTiC speak in spoken form?
I mean the tone of your voice is separate from the tone of the characters you're speaking, so there's almost certainly a sarcastic tone of voice in Mandarin (though I'd probably butcher the character tones even more than I already do if I tried it)
As a semi-native mandarin speaker, tones are overrated in importance. Saying the correct vowel is more important, and a lot of beginners think that they can't be understood because their tone is wrong when it's more about the vowel. There's a lot of subtle vowel differences, e.g the difference between shi, chi, zhi, and zi.
For the vast majority of sentences, if you just said everything with tone 1, people would understand you. Are you saying it correctly? No, but in context there's only one word that makes sense.
Furthermore, in practice you mainly need two tones, a rising one and a falling one, many native speakers merge 1, 2 + 3, 4 when speaking quickly.
I’m actually also semi-native, so I have pretty decent pronunciation most of the time. I agree that running everything in tone 1 works (though you might get asked to repeat yourself in my experience). My issue tends to be when I’m tired or stressed my speaking slips more towards my native English accent where I have a harder time controlling which tones I’m using, even if it’s just trying to maintain tone 1
That's called not speaking the language, frankly. Wrong tone is the wrong word...
I'm not sure if this really counts as a pet peeve anymore, since it's really just the primary difficulty of language learning in the long run but... languages are just too big. Did we really need tens of thousands of words, often with extremely similar semantics? We have adjectives and adverbs for that!
To make just one example from my native language (to keep it nice and neutral), why would a language need a verb that means "(for a cat) to paw at sth"? It doesn't apply to any other context. We could have used an existing word like one meaning "slap" and it would be perfectly understandable. Or "play" if that's the right connotation. But no. Needed a separate word. I must admit it's a little bit whimsical. Until you have to wade through hundreds of words like these and somehow remember them.
For German I tried to master the grammar quite early on and focus on vocabulary afterwards.
One aspect of grammar I've not really internalised is some adjective endings.
I know how to end adjectives after the definite articles, indefinite articles, and no article. But, when it comes to less-common types of determiners like 'etliche', 'manche', 'einige' etc. I just haven't learnt it as I don't use it enough.
I'm sure a grammar study session would probably internalise it but the tradeoff isn't massively worth it imo.
German: declension rules for definite articles are weirdly inconsistent. Why should der denote the nominative case for masculine nouns but also the dative case for feminine nouns? Better to drop the genders and decline everything as if it were masculine, the gender that distinguishes the most between cases. Maybe have separate declension rules for plural nouns, but die/die/den/der ain't gonna cut it.
Japanese: kanji are cool and all, but given that most languages are primarily spoken, kanji are not as dense as they ought to be -- usually the furigana has fewer strokes than the kanji. Moreover, if the purpose of mixing kanji and kana is to improve readability, then why not just drop kanji altogether and simply use spaces, as in Korean and Japanese children's books?
For me I struggle with the numerous possible readings of any kanji or even symbols like 々 in 日々 : repeat the previous mysteriously read kanji but also "don't forget to accent it if necessary. Is it? I'll never tell"
It has the opposite problem of Chinese written language where text is crazy dense, and one would sometimes be able to understand an unknown character without understanding how it's read out loud at all.
And both languages have too many counter words (like murder of crows and pods of whales)
Wow, I was going to write about the counters but you already did. That is my pet peeve. Stupid counters and weird readings for ordinals. I can't seem to get them down and I've been at it for years.
While I haven’t progressed too much, one thing that annoys me with Korean is they LOVE to make an acronym of everything. I’ll try reading or listening to phrases and come across a nonsensical word and eventually realize it’s an acronym that I have to learn. A funny one is 아아 (ah-ah) which is their acronym for Iced Americano.
For English: I'm particularly mad at phrasal verbs. I guess the preposition thing mentioned by OP is part of the problem in this one. Some of them are fine: "look up" to someone, sure. You get the image. But what about "give up"?. Who are you giving it to and why are they above you? You can grab any common verb like get or go and any preposition and find the phrasal verb has 5 definitions. It's exhausting.
We tried teaching Japanese students some phrasal verbs that at least conformed to some kind of pattern, but they are maddeningly random and we use them a LOT.
I'm still learning Norwegian. It's my first real attempt (I don't count the bs at school).
I hit all the usual suspects, like writing/reading is easier than listening and speaking.
But learning a language for me is extra stressful because it's just so not logical. And Norwegian is a language that doesn't have loads of exceptions or weird rules.
It just drives me nuts there's so much "you have to remember this" or "it just sounds wrong".
I get that exposure and practice drills it out of you, and I'm getting there, but I feel like all this would be easier to learn if languages didn't live the way they do. Which is unfortunate, because that's what they are!
Kanji and ideograms are just straight up BS. Alphabets for the win! Yes, I am studying Japanese :/
The other thing, of course, is that metaphors usually dont translate and English language comprises of metaphor and simile to an almost ludicrous degree, so trying to translate across just doesn’t work.
That is knowing “the language” (the grammar, the words etc) is just one small part as you struggle with how things are expressed, from a cultural perspective. That’s why if I had a super power, it wouldn’t be just “to be fluent in Japanese”, it would be to “culturally fluent” as well.
That it gets more difficult as you get older, and there's a steep drop off in you teenage years but it really falls off a cliff in your twenties. Wish I'd cared more when I was younger, now that I want to learn a new one, it's way harder than it would've been. Not that this is any reason for me to stop, that is. Spanish, one day I will learn you.