redhotswami said:
^ ya know, I actually had an easier time learning Japanese than I did Spanish. I don't know why. You would think Spanish would be easier b/c English and Spanish are romance languages. But noooooooo not me. And I'm mexican-american
It's funny though, many of my relatives also took spanish courses, and didn't get more than a B. Maybe learning the grammar is different than speaking it all the time.
Well, a lot of native English speakers have trouble with formal (English) grammar lessons in grade school and junior high school, so that's probably not surprising. I remember being embarrassed when my eighth grade teacher asked me to tutor some fellow students who were struggling with their grammar tests, which I always did well on--I had to shamefacedly admit at that point that I didn't really understand any of that dangling participle stuff and so forth either; it was just that because I read so much, I somehow had an intuitive feel for what "sounded" right, even though I was at a loss to articulate what rules I was applying. Personally, I've found the same thing to be true with pretty much every foreign language I've studied--I'm often bewildered by the technical explanations of various grammar points when I read them, but once I get a look at sentences which apply them, it all just makes sense and I understand what to do, even though I couldn't really tell you why.
I've never studied Japanese, but I did the Berlitz phrasebook thing when I was there and was surprised by how easy the pronunciation was. I've heard their grammar is pretty tough, though? The Indian languages I've studied were probably the hardest for me, but there too I found that just because a language is more closely related to English doesn't necessarily make it easier--for the most part I actually found Tamil, which is completely unrelated, easier than Hindi, which is a distant relative but nonetheless still an Indo-European language, like English is. So much of what makes language learning easy or difficult seems to be peculiar to individuals; I know lots of linguists, most of whom speak and/or read several unrelated languages, and they have no consensus whatsoever on what the toughest ones to learn are.
And yeah, like Lies said, English isn't a Romance language--it's a Germanic language that happens to have been heavily influenced by a Romance language (French, thanks to the Norman Conquest). I remember taking a Brit Lit survey in college where we read
Canterbury Tales (late 14th century) in the original Middle English, followed by
Richard III (early Modern English), which was written just two centuries later--it was amazing to see how much the language changed in that short period (even more so if you listen to recordings of each being read more or less as they would've sounded at the time). At first glance, when you look at Chaucer in the original, you think "WTF?!? Right, like I'm ever gonna understand
this" and you do need annotations of course, but I found that after a couple long reading sessions, my ear got the feel of it and I could read at close to normal speed. In fact, I actually found Chaucer's grammar easier to follow than Shakespeare's--I often get confused about what, e.g., the subject of a clause is supposed to be when I read Shakespeare, a problem I never had with Chaucer--although to be fair, Chaucer wrote more colloquially than Shakespeare did, which may have something to do with it. I've always been curious how difficult authors like these are for people who didn't learn English until adolescence or later, since they're often quite difficult even for native speakers. Neither of my parents (both non-native speakers) ever read them, but my mother had major difficulty following the dialogue when we took her to a performance of
Hamlet here awhile back.
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