complexity of languages

>>1. Very easy: English, perhaps Spanish

2. Easy: French, Italian

3. Difficult: German, other Germanic languages <<

As far as I know the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) are less complex than the Romance languages). I don't think Dutch is very complicated either.

Why some people keep on saying German is difficult? German is not more difficult than Romance languages. Yes, German is noun-inflected, but on the other hand Romance languages are highly verb-inflected, with also pronouns usually attached to them with make those languages quite tricky. French is also a non phonetic language, while German's pronounciation is easier. It is understandable that Romance speakers consider German difficult, but those English speakers who say the same must be drunk .

Josh is correct, imo. I am not a linguist, (just a polyglot), but I feel strongly about this. The only thing I would mention (and furrykef knows this well now), is that it takes children LONGER to learn to read in Japan-about two years longer. It takes them TWO years longer to learn to read their NATIVE language because of the writing systems (yes, systems)...

I've found that most languages have their easy parts. It's important to have a teacher who can actually speak the language, not just teach its grammar.

I'm not a genius (how obvious is that, lol) and I can manage the so-called difficult sounds of French and the writing system of Japanese. I'm not officially even working in a language-related field, so if a lazy person like me can learn "difficult" languages, how much more the much brighter folks who frequent this site?

Stop this nonsense with "difficult languages"...Go watch Debbie Downer videos on YouTube if you want to discourage people. JMO, lol.

I am not sure about that. If you ask to a French, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Russian, a Chinese, an Arabic and a Turkish if is more difficult English or German, the answer will be German.

German has three genders, English one; German has a declension system and English not, etc

The same with Spanish and Korean, for instance (an example obvious) asking people around the world (from all the language families)

Finally, you can ask people with isolated languages as native, because they are neutral: an Albanian, a Greek, an Armenian, a Korean and a Japanese. You can ask them if is more difficult Basque or French. The answer will be Basque.

So, I think that the complexity of languages can be an objective issue.

>>German has three genders, English one; German has a declension system and English not, etc<<

And the usage of tense, aspect, and modality in German is *far* simpler than that in Late New English...

Perhaps you are right if there are not several factors.

But there is an important factor. Almost everybody have an Indoeuropean language as first, second or foreign language (English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Persian, Italian, French, Portuguese, German or Russian).

So, if you ask to a Japanese if is more difficult Spanish or Arabic, the answer will be probably Arabic. That is because they know, at least, a basic English (more related to Spanish than to Arabic).

Another example. If you ask to a Moroccan if is more difficult English or Chinese, the answer will be Chinese. Almost all of them speak, at least, a basic French, a language more similar to English than Chinese.

So, several factor influence on the answer, and this is one of them.

I saw Babel's earlier message and I think I understand it. Culture and distance from the person's home country may influence the perception of how difficult a language is. With distance (before modern times), perhaps the degree of lexical similarity decreased giving rise to the idea that the language was "difficult"...

If this is Babel's point, there is some validity to that. It sure is easy to learn another romance language because of all that shared latin-based vocabulary. I can pick out words occasionally in spoken Korean and Chinese because of the shared words that probably came from Chinese originally. I don't really speak any Asian languages except Japanese, but just these "freebies" make those languages less daunting.

I think Barry Farber was able to guess correctly about a word in a language far from Chinese because he recognized Nürén (女人) "woman" in another language, I think. (I know I'm missing another mark above the "u", but I don't know how to insert that, so no offense to students of Chinese.)

My point is this: The more languages one learns, the easier it is to see connections between them. I wish I knew what the roadmap words are, the words that travel between countries.

Something similar happened to me too. After awhile, the brain makes connections we may not even understand on a conscious level.

<<All languages are equally complex, but they show their complexity in different areas. Some languages, like Russian, German, Hindi, etc. show a lot of in their morphology, or inflections. Others do it with syntax, like English and Chinese.>>

Since the morphology of German (Sanskrit, Greek, or even Spanish), is vastly more complex than English, is German (Sanskrit, Greek, Spanish) syntax really all that much simpler than English Syntax?

I recall someone from China who studied both English and German in school. He claimed that German was much harder, and more unpleasant to learn.

As a ESL student, how important is it really to get your English syntax right, anyway? I still remember once the following sentence that was said to me by an ESL speaker:

"Lab inside have big problem -- please to come Mr Stevie Xxxxxxx."

Although the syntax here is not quite native-like, it still makes perfect sense.

>>On the other hand, I would expect that German would be fairly easy to understand without the case affixes (though it would still sound wrong), since the word order is pretty fixed anyway. (Does that sound right, for those of you who know German? Try taking the case affixes off of a sentence and see if it makes sense.)<<

This is definitely true; there are only a few sorts of places where case is really distinctive in Standard German, and aside from those few sorts of places Standard German can be largely understood without taking case into account. However, at the same time, nouns in Standard German do not really mark case much anyways, as such is primarily marked by determiners and adjectives today. Consequently, while Standard German does nominally preserve a four-case system it is really much closer grammatically to English, modern Dutch, and the continental North Germanic standard languages than might be immediately apparent.

Josh: >>On the other hand, I would expect that German would be fairly easy to understand without the case affixes (though it would still sound wrong), since the word order is pretty fixed anyway. (Does that sound right, for those of you who know German? Try taking the case affixes off of a sentence and see if it makes sense.)<<

Simplify German, e.g. take the case affixes off from a German sentence, replace "d" by "th", "ch" by "gh", "-ig" by "-y" etc. and it will become more and more English-like.

<< Yes, German is noun-inflected, but on the other hand Romance languages are highly verb-inflected, with also pronouns usually attached to them with make those languages quite tricky. >>

I've never found the inflections of Spanish to be a significant problem. I haven't tried learning German, so I can't comment on that.

- Kef

Ayer percatéme de que el alfabeto latino es más complicado que el cirílico.

El alfabeto cirílico contiene más letras, por eso resulta más fácil representar todos los sonidos. No hay que combinar las letras de manera tosca e ineficaz.

Por cierto, mi perro está muy cachondo ultimamente. "Little Freud" necesita dos sesiones de sexo completas, sino no duerme (y yo tampoco). Luego, bebemos bastante vino, a veces también esnifamos pegamento. Por último, unos porros ayudan mucho a dormir.

Estas y otras tecnicas, las recomiendo en mis sesiones con mis pacientes. El que quiera una terapia completa, que me lo diga.

Un saludo a todos, menos a los Frogs.

<<<Think about these different uses of 'to put': put on, put off, put up with, put through, put up, put out, put away etc. All have idiomatic meanings (not predictable from their components) and using the wrong one will completely change the meaning of the sentence, possibly with disastrous consequences. Likewise for 'to give': give up, give in, give away, give out. That's just one area of syntactic complexity in English.
>>>

These examples with combinations of to put + X and to give + Y demonstrate that English is still (at least partly) a synthetic archaic Germanic language. Combinations in German with "to put" and "to give" with totally different meanings are for example

to put = stellen

abbestellen
abstellen
anheimstellen
anstellen
aufstellen
ausstellen
bereitstellen
bestellen
bewerkstellen
bloßstellen
darstellen
dazwischenstellen
durchstellen
einstellen
entgegenstellen
entstellen
erstellen
fernbestellen
fertigstellen
feststellen
freistellen
gegenüberstellen
gestellen
glattstellen
gleichstellen
herausstellen
herbestellen
herstellen
hinstellen
hochstellen
infragestellen
inrechnungstellen
kaltstellen
klarstellen
mitbestellen
nachbestellen
nachstellen
nebeneinanderstellen
nebenstellen
neueinstellen
niederstellen
querstellen
richtigstellen
ruhigstellen
scharfstellen
schiefstellen
schlafstellen
sicherstellen
totstellen
umstellen
unfallstellen
unterstellen
verbindungsstellen
verstellen
voranstellen
vorausbestellen
vorbestellen
voreinstellen
vorneanstellen
vorstellen
wegstellen
wiederanstellen
wiedereinstellen
wiedererstellen
wiederherstellen
zufriedenstellen
zurechtstellen
zurückstellen
zusammenstellen
zustellen
überstellen

to give = geben

abgeben
achtgeben
angeben
aufgeben
ausgeben
begeben
beigeben
bekanntgeben
dazugeben
dreingeben
durchgeben
eingeben
ergeben
freigeben
geben
gegeben
halbaufgegeben
herausgeben
hergeben
herumgeben
herübergeben
hingeben
hinzugeben
kundgeben
mitgeben
nachgeben
nachzugeben
naturgegeben
preisgeben
stattgeben
taktgeben
umgeben
untergeben
vergeben
vorgeben
vorgegeben
weggeben
weiterbegeben
weitergeben
wiederausgeben
wiederausgegeben
wiedergeben
zufriedengeben
zugeben
zurückbegeben
zurückgeben
übergeben

<< Combinations in German with "to put" and "to give" with totally different meanings are for example

to put = stellen

abbestellen
abstellen
...>>

To the untrained eye, it sure looks like once again German is a lot more complex than English in this regard. Comparing "nebeneinanderstellen" with something like "put on", sure seems to illustrate the relative simplicity of English. (I have no idea if these two mean the same -- the odds are they don't.)