"Hard" languages?

Question

Why is it that people automatically dismiss Spanish as an easy language as compared to German or Chinese? What makes these languages superior? That is the attitude i encounter anyway, and feel supremely offended, after having read some great Spanish works of literature. Please, I am not ranting, I'm not spanish myself.

So.. difficulty to learn a different language is based on an individual's culture's similarity with that language? (Hope anyone got that, could'nt really put it into words)

Answer 1

"Hard" language does NOT mean "superior" language. You are quite right, there are great works of literature in Spanish and there is no reason to be ashamed for learning Spanish. German and Latin and Mandarin are no better as languages just because they are harder for English speakers to learn.

Answer 2

Why have you interpreted 'hard' to mean 'superior'? Why are they superior just because they are harder?

You are only looking at one side of the story. Spanish is easier to learn than German or Japanese (for an English native speaker) because Spanish works in a similar way to English. First it works with the Roman alphabet, second it has a similar tense system and third it has no case system.

In contrast, a Russian for example would regard German as a far easier language to learn than Spanish because the grammar system in German is more similar to their own.

Answer 3

As a linguist the answer is simple.

1) Spanish is easier for people that speak English because they are closer related than, let's say, English and Chinese. Someone from China might as Spanish is hard versus Japanese (or some lanuage that is related to Chinese).

2) Culture - eventhough I don't speak Spanish I have been picking up Spanish because of the influence of Mexico on our culture and thus making it easier for me to learn it.

3) Easy does not equal superior.

Answer 4

Not superior, so much as more difficult for English-speakers to learn.

If you listen carefully to someone speaking Spanish slowly, you can make out about 1/4 - 1/3 of the words. With German, it's about 1/5th of the words. With Chinese, it's zero.

Answer 5

Well spanish is easier to pronounce for one thing. German although should be as easy as spanish since alot of our words are similar to german words and come from german words(Mutter-mother, Mein-mine, etc)

Chinese however I think is a whole different ballpark since you have to learn not only the language but all those little symbols for writing.

Answer 6

i think german is really easy to learn, after all english is not latin based like french, or spanish or the other romance languages. english is a germanic language, which means that alot of the words that are use in german sound and mean the exact same thing and spell almost identically except for a few letters diffrence that are usally spell phonetically, like an "f" instead of "ph"

Answer 7

I don't automatically think that a 'hard' language as superior. I do think that some aspects of some languages make them more difficult for native English speakers to master. Chinese, which is tonal, is not as easy to learn for native English speakers because spoken English does not depend on tonal differences to give meaning to words. We just don't have that skill--so, we have to learn tonality it in addition to the vocabulary stuff. So, it's hard. It doesn't make Chinese a superior language.

Answer 8

Well!!! A classical language, is a language with a literature that's classical— i.e., it must be old, it must be an impartial culture that arose in general on its possess, now not as an offshoot of an extra culture, and it ought to have a big and enormously wealthy frame of old literature. How Tamil is classical? Claims concerning the "Primary Classicality of Tamil": a million. Lemurian beginning two. Phonological simplicity three. Catholicity . four. Tamulic substratum of the Aryan household of languages. five. Morphological purity and primitiveness . 6. The presence of the phrases ‘amma’ and ‘appa’ in virtually all first-rate languages in a few variety or different. 7. Absence of Nominative case-termination . eight. Separability and importance of all affixes . nine. Absence of morphological gender 10. Absence of arbitrary phrases eleven. Traceability of Tamil to its very beginning. 12. Logical and usual order of phrases . thirteen. Absence of twin quantity . 14. Originality and usual growth . 15. Highest order of the classicality . Classical Languages in India: a million. Tamil two. Sanskrit three. Kannada four . Telugu Classical Languages on this planet (as opposed to Indian): a million. Sumerian two. Egyptian three. Babylonian four. Hebrew five. Chinese 6. Greek 7. Latin * Though the primary 3 languages exitsed in conjunction with all 7, handiest the latter four in conjunction with Tamil and Sanskrit are known as as Worlds Classical languages

Answer 9

No language is any more difficult to learn than any other, and the proof of that is that children in all countries begin speaking at around the same age. Certain languages are more closely related to each other, and speakers of one would find it easier to learn the others than they would unrelated languages. Basically, the more similar a language is to the learner's native tongue, the easier it is to pick up.

Answer 10

The sentence structure and grammar are similar to English, thus easier to mentally transelate.

Chinese and German to a lesser extent have different structures and grammar that is less recognizable