Grammatical complexity of German and Romance languages

>>BS, Spanish is easier than English, and all your biased opinions shouldn't count, I've already presented proof of it which you have not<<

That survey does not include English as one of the options. Spanish was voted the asiest out of the five languages listed, of which English as NOT one. It means the easiest from a native English speaker's point of view.

In my opinion all languages are equally difficult to learn. If English has a easy grammar, its phonetics is quite difficult. In all languages there easy aspects of them that compensate the difficult ones. For example: Spanish has a quite phonetic spelling, but its grammar is more difficult. I personally find German to be a very balanced language: it has easier phonetics and its grammar may be more difficult if compared to English but it is easier than slavic languages and on par with the Romance ones. And the verbs are quite easy too, since there are 6 tenses only (yes , in English there are only 3, but this language is incredibly verb-minimalist )

"It takes you seven years to really learn English as for Spanish that only takes you one, or Esperanto that takes you seven months, but the most important thing, how can you say that English is the easiest language when people don't even know how to spell!, and it's not cuz they're stupid but cuz the language was “fucked up” since the beginning, you have to learn twice as much, besides having to learn the written word you also have to learn the pronunciation. "

>> Why didn't anyone answer this part? Spanish is the world's Easiest language deal with it.

SPANISH IS NOT THE EASIEST LANGUAGE!!!
That's just not true!
I haven't met ONE person who became completely fluent in Spanish. They all speak it horribly!

There is not a scientific way to measure the difficulty of learning a language. The survey is about the perception of people about how difficult the different languages are. What you say can be applied also to other languages, many people reported how bad the Anglophones speak their native languages, perhaps because they are less motivated to learn them since English is the global language.

<<"It takes you seven years to really learn English as for Spanish that only takes you one>>

Didn't Winston Churchill once say that students only need a few weeks of diligent study to gain a reasonable command of English. I assume this applies only to Europeans, and most people won't speak like a real native in just a few weeks.

Also, have you ever seen those (Spanish-language) TV commercials where a Spanish-speaking janitor is seen mopping up a spill in the men's room. Then he studies an E2L instructional tape for a month or two in his spare time. Shortly thereafter, the same guy is seen dressed in a business suit in the corporate boardroom giving some kind of presentation in English (still using flip charts, though???). If these results are typical, how tough can English be? :)

>>Didn't Winston Churchill once say that students only need a few weeks of diligent study to gain a reasonable command of English. I assume this applies only to Europeans, and most people won't speak like a real native in just a few weeks<<

I can assure you no one will speak like a native in just a few weeks. If they're lucky some people might speak like a native afte a few YEARS of LIVING in an English speaking country.

>>yes , in English there are only 3, but this language is incredibly verb-minimalist

how?

>>I personally find German to be a very balanced language: it has easier phonetics and its grammar may be more difficult if compared to English but it is easier than slavic languages and on par with the Romance ones. And the verbs are quite easy too, since there are 6 tenses only (yes , in English there are only 3, but this language is incredibly verb-minimalist )<<

Do you mean conjugations? Both English and German, strictly speaking, only have two tenses, but if the word 'tense' is used to mean the combination of tense and aspect, as is often the case, then English has considerably more than German.

English and German (like mos Germanic laguages) don't have any future tense verbs, whereas the Romance languages do. English uses "will+verb" and German uses "werden+infinitve".

But English and German still have future tense.

English and German also don't have conditional tense verbs, whereas the Romance languages do.

I'm not sure about german, but English has 17 verb tenses.

Isn't it true that German has four simple tenses?

I'd like to know how to define a "separate" tense. If each "form" of tenses is a tense, German would have 8 more.

... but is it so important anyway?

<<I'm not sure about german, but English has 17 verb tenses>>

Could you list these 17 tenses?

I've always assumed that English has a rather orthogonal tense system, that could be viewed as a 4-dimensional vector of verb forms (only in some non-metric 'verb-space', of course). The dimensions are present/past/future (tense), plain/perfect, active/passive (voice), and plain/continuous. This leaves out imperative and subjunctive moods (if these really exist in English), as well as the 'do/did' forms, alternative passive constructions with 'get', all combinations using auxilliaries (except 'will'), etc., etc.

Depending on how many of these dimensions you want to consider as part of 'tense', the number of "tenses" or verb forms could be 3, or 3x2, or 3x2x2, or 3x2x2x2. How do you get 17?

Note that all 24 verb forms can be written down, but some are too cumbersome to use. Example:

By 2010, this car will have been being driven for 5 years. (in vector notation, this would be [2,1,1,1], the most complex form possible -- plain 'drive' would be [0,0,0,0])

Beasides the learner's native language I believe an important factor in the difficulties of learning a language is one's skills. A person who is good at rote learning will speak English fairly easily, but a person who is better at learning rules, no matter how complicated, will learn Spanish very easily. The V-B, Z-S, G-J, and H-Vowel problems have a very, very long set of rules depending on the sounds following, the sounds preceding, the origin of the word.

<< I am a native English speaker who has learnt German. I have learnt a bit of Spanish and French, and although I don't know much, it seems that the verb conjugations in these languages are a nightmare in comparison to German. >>

The verb conjugation tables present no major difficulty. Regular verbs follow simple patterns that have few exceptions. Irregular verbs are usually easy as well, typically being the same as the regular verbs but with an additional change (such as turning a vowel into a diphthong in a stressed position). I memorized the standard conjugations by rote over a few days, and I didn't spend a lot of time on each day. Of course, I did practice what I learned by actually using these conjugations.

<< At least for the Chinese, many of which don't even know what "grammar" is and believe Chinese has no grammar (and, really, no tenses) >>

The next time somebody claims that Chinese has no grammar, think of a sentence to write in Chinese and write the words (not the individual characters, but complete words) in a completely random order, and ask them if the sentence makes sense. ;)

- Kef

The matter is that such an orthogonal treatment of English verbs really does not match how English verbs are actually used, which is what really separates English verbs from those of other Germanic languages aside from Scots. English have three moods, imperative, indicative, and subjunctive, but many dialects outside of North America have largely lost of the subjunctive mood. It has two morphological tenses, present and past, having no true "built-in" future tense. It superfically has an orthogonal system of non-perfect non-progressive aspect, perfect non-progressive aspect, non-perfect progressive aspect, and perfect progressive aspect which is expressed partly analytically and partly morphologically.

The thing is that the above is purely morphological/syntactic, and does not really match the semantics of English in general. For starters, English can express the general idea of future tense, but there is no fixed grammaticalized way to do it. Rather, it can be expressed with the present tense combined time phrases which refer to the future, modals such as "will" and "shall", and quasimodals such as "be going to". However, all these different methods of expressing it have their own semantic differences. Note that such, though, is shared with all other Germanic languages, none of which truly have a built-in future tense as much as some may say that, for example, "werden" is used to form the future in German.

The other thing is that the present and the present progressive really do not operate as one would expect from their names. For starters, they actually make a differentiation between active verbs and static verbs. For static verbs, the present is generally used, even though younger people may use the present progressive instead of the present with them. However, the situation with active verbs is much more complex. The most important difference is that to express the true semantic present one uses the present progressive and not the simple present with active verbs. Also, the use of the present with active verbs is generally used to actually express things other than the semantic present. If used alone, it generally expresses some kind of habitual or potential aspect semantically. If used with some adverbial form expressing time, though, the actual semantic tense is determined by that adverbial form.

Another matter is that the present perfect and the past are not actually equivalent as they often are in, say, present-day German. However, just how they differ and how they are specifically is generally rather dialect-specific. The most general pattern, though, is that the past is used to express the simple fact of pastness whereas the present perfect is used to emphasize some sort of connection with the present and also express actual completion. (Of course, a similar sort of pattern is shown in more conservative German.)

And all of this is ignoring other details such as what can be more ad hoc-ly expressed with auxiliary, modal, and quasimodal forms and things like verbs that use frequentative aspect...