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Learning a new [human] language

Started by CoffeeMug Apr 10, 2007 at 10:12 AM 25 replies 6k views

Original Post

Apr 10, 2007 at 10:12 AM

I decided to learn a new language, the kind that humans speak. I'm already fluent in Russian and English but I feel there's room for more [smile] As I'm considering which language to learn, I'm coming to realize it will be a function of the following variables: 1. Ease of learning. Learning to read Mandarin is supposed to be extremely hard for a non-native. I don't want to embark on something that will require *too* much dedication. On the other hand, German and Spanish are considered relatively easy to learn. This also involves learning resources: availability of books and movies, possibly local courses, and speakers on the internet (and in the area). 2. Applicability. Languages that have more speakers (Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic) will be more appropriate than languages very few people speak. 3. Usefulness. Languages entrenched in countries with projected economic boom (Hindi, Chinese) will generally be more useful to me. 4. Cultural value. It would be nice to learn a language that will enable me to read great books and watch excellent movies without the "lost in translation" effect. 5. Pleasure. If the people who speak a language are nice and friendly to foreigners, and the country/countries they live in are nice and pleasant to visit/immigrate to, it's a definite plus. Here are some thoughts about particular languages and how they fit into the list above. Mandarin, Hindi - good languages to learn in terms of applicability and usefulness. Probably good in terms of cultural value and totally terrible in terms of ease of learning. Hebrew - I'd like to learn it because I'm jewish and it would be nice to speak a language of my people. It doesn't seem to play well with most of the items on the above list. Spanish - definetly useful for someone who lives in North America. Good in terms of ease of use and a few other items on the list, but something about it turns me off. German - fits with quite a few items on the above list. Right now it seems to be winning for me. French - a lot of people around the world seem to speak it. France is nice (though Parisians aren't very friendly), and half of Canada speaks French which is useful for someone in the North America. Not sure how easy it is (probably harder than German). It seems to be a close second. What do you guys think? What would you learn and what do you already speak?

Alpha_ProgDes

Apr 10, 2007 at 10:45 AM

I knew French up to Level 3 (HS), know very little Creole (I'm haitian, but born in the US), and I am learning Japanese because it's damn interesting and fun to speak, IMHO.

If you want a job, then Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Cantonese* seem to be your best bet to learn. It seems that's where the world is turning to. First 3 for "security" and the last 3 for economics, trade, and jobs.

* I doubt any of those are easy.

Samsonite

Apr 10, 2007 at 11:10 AM

Not German. German is fine, but very few people(relatively) speak it.
I would go for either French or Spanish. Because French, Spanish and Italian are in some cases mutually intelligible, which gives you an advantage and a stepping stone for further learning.

But being the patriot that I am, I would say you should go for Norwegian............[grin]!

shmoove

Apr 10, 2007 at 11:33 AM

Well, Spanish seems to qualify for every one of your bullet points, so it seems like the obvious choice.

I can also comment about how hard learning Hebrew can be: not as hard as it looks like. It's tough at the beginning because it's so different, but once you get the hang of it it actually a very intuitive language.

I think there is one more thing you should consider when learning a new language: how much practice will I get? A language that you might get to use on day-to-day situations (talking to people in the area, watching TV in that language, etc.) will be a lot easier to learn and remember.

shmoove

mikesc

Apr 10, 2007 at 12:18 PM

I know German (native), English and French (both almost fluent). And I´d recommend German.
- The German-speaking economy is the second largest in the world (after the English-speaking) and more People speak German than French or Hebrew.
- You already know English which is a Germanic language too, so vocabulary should be pretty easy to learn.
- German literature: Leibniz, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Storm, Rilke, Mann, Hesse, Kafka to name only a few

In contrast, anybody who told you German is easy to learn probably didn´t learn it properly. I don´t have a link at hand but you´ll find it with Google. Mark Twain wrote a very funny article about the German language, I think it´s called "The Awful German Language". A lot of the grammar he describes is obsolete now but quite a few things are still true.
French and Spanish are probably a bit easier to learn than German.

Phaz

Apr 10, 2007 at 12:24 PM

I took a little Japanese in College. I think that might match up with many of your factors. Japan isn't as large as India or China, but they do have a very powerful tech sector.

The language itself is fairly simple. You can learn to read/write 2 of the 3 styles of writing in the language in just a few hours. You might not be able to understand it all, but it's a good start. The written to spoken translation is as straight forward as it gets. Also, the sentence structure was very formulaic. Overall, the only tough part was memorization. Also, they "borrow" many words from English, so you even start with a decent vocabulary if you can figure them out. It will still be a challenge, but not an overwhelming one. I didn't get too far, so it might get more complicated as you go on, but it was easy to get started.

Zipster

Apr 10, 2007 at 1:39 PM

Greek, Italian, Finnish, and Dutch have always been at the top of my list of languages to learn. Russian as well, but you already know that one :) Spanish and French never really appealed to me, simply because that's what everyone takes in school and I wanted something different (even though I admit I took required Spanish and Hebrew classes). To me, learning new languages is a leisure activity (unless you're in school or work for the CIA), so I wouldn't get caught up on how many people speak the language of how often you'll use it, as long as you pick something you find interesting and will enjoy learning and knowing. For instance, I don't expect to use Russian or Greek a lot but that's not going to stop me from learning them if I want! Who knows, one day I could visit those countries and it could come in handy.

LessBread

Apr 10, 2007 at 2:50 PM

Quote:
Original post by mikesc
- The German-speaking economy is the second largest in the world (after the English-speaking) and more People speak German than French or Hebrew.

Second largest? Really? Can you back that up with a reference?

Quote:
Original post by mikesc
- German literature: Leibniz, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Storm, Rilke, Mann, Hesse, Kafka to name only a few

Great reasons all.

@CoffeeMug, I think it depends on what you want to learn the new language for. If you want to be able to speak with more people near you, then Spanish or French. If you want to better understand your heritage, then Hebrew. If you want to improve your business opportunities, then Mandarin (moreso than Hindi as it seems that Indian business people speak English).

For me it would be Spanish or Russian. Spanish because I would have plenty of opportunity to practice it. Russian because I took a few courses in school and would have a leg up. After that probably Japanese or Mandarin. Or maybe Hmong or Lao, as there are a lot of Hmong and Lao where I live and from what I understand there are less than 10,000 words in Hmong.

Does anybody know if knowing Hebrew makes it easier to learn Arabic? What do you say shmoove?

Brien Shrimp

Apr 10, 2007 at 2:57 PM

I am always suspicious of people who say they are fluent in a language they have only studied for a few of their recent adult years. I wonder if they have ever tried to function exclusively in that language.

Recently I met with an American college student who had studied Spanish for 5 or 6 years. She claimed to be fluent and even said that she thought she could speak better than I (maybe she didn't know I was native speaker? Or maybe she only said something so tactless because that was the limit of her expression in Spanish). She and I had a conversation in Spanish and she could not understand me because my accent was from Spain, not Latin America. Some level of fluency.

Granted, she could more or less follow a conversation. She could respond in grammatically correct sentences, but always it seemed that she was saying what she was capable of, not what she actually wanted to.

Anyway, just a word of warning, unless you can function in your second language as well as you do in first, refrain from saying you are "fluent" unless you want to make a fool of yourself.

Alpha_ProgDes

Apr 10, 2007 at 3:27 PM

Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Does anybody know if knowing Hebrew makes it easier to learn Arabic? What do you say shmoove?

Most likely in the same way knowing Japanese makes learning Chinese easier. I don't even think the character set is the same. Oh well... so shmoove what do you say?

LessBread

Apr 10, 2007 at 3:45 PM

Quote:
Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Does anybody know if knowing Hebrew makes it easier to learn Arabic? What do you say shmoove?

Most likely in the same way knowing Japanese makes learning Chinese easier. I don't even think the character set is the same. Oh well... so shmoove what do you say?

The character set is not the same.

@Brien Shrimp she could not understand me because my accent was from Spain

I don't think a lot of people realize that there are all sorts of accents on Spanish. My teacher in high school was Cuban and spoke it with a different accent than what we could hear on the streets which would be Mexican. Even so it didn't hit home with me until I was in college and heard a couple of girls from Argentina conversing in what sounded to me like Spanish/Italian/German.

... always it seemed that she was saying what she was capable of, not what she actually wanted to.

That's why Penelope Cruz is a better actress in Spanish than in English.

ukdeveloper

Apr 10, 2007 at 4:03 PM

About Japanese:

Japanese has three alphabets:

Hiragana: used to form Japanese words using syllables, each character is a syllable.

Katakana: used for spelling onomatopaeic words, as well as foreign words into Japanese.

Kanji: a load of hideously complicated characters, stolen from Chinese but with the tonalities removed, so many different looking Kanji can have the same sound. Sometimes used to spell names and other weird things that I can't remember offhand.

Japanese and Chinese have one thing in common: your average Joe Japanese/Chinese person is not fluent due to the sheer number of characters in use. Chinese is rumoured to have 30k characters, and only some University professors and dusty old scholars know all of them.

Same goes for Japanese: I'm told that even native Japanese speakers can make catastrophic mistakes on a daily basis with regards to things such as honorifics, the same problem exists within Korean. Japanese and Chinese people growing up abroad will struggle with some of the more advanced characters, as these are taught specifically within the high school programs of China and Japan which they wouldn't otherwise be receiving. My friend's from Hong Kong, native speaker of Cantonese and also knows Mandarin (he's Chinese, not a Westerner who simply lives there), yet even he couldn't read a Chinese website I found once.

I don't think there's ever such thing as 100% fluency: if there was, you'd never ever need a dictionary or thesaurus, but bet you've used them on a daily basis before, right?

Colin Jeanne

Apr 10, 2007 at 4:05 PM

Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Does anybody know if knowing Hebrew makes it easier to learn Arabic? What do you say shmoove?

Speaking just from a linguistics perspective, Hebrew and Arabic are related languages and so you should notice many similarities between the two. However, they dont seem to be as closely related as say, the Romance languages.

CoffeeMug - if you're looking for something that is relatively easy to learn then you should be looking for a language similar to English. You closest bet will most likely be German. If you're looking for applicability then that depends on what is applicable to you. This same goes for usefulness. According to the Ethnologue the languages with the most speakers are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Bengali, in that order. Given that, you might be more likely to encounter a speaker of Mandarin or Spanish in your life than most other languages.

Alpha_ProgDes

Apr 10, 2007 at 4:11 PM

Quote:
Original post by ukdeveloper
About Japanese:

Japanese has three alphabets:

Hiragana: used to form Japanese words using syllables, each character is a syllable.

Katakana: used for spelling onomatopaeic words, as well as foreign words into Japanese.

Kanji: a load of hideously complicated characters, stolen from Chinese but with the tonalities removed, so many different looking Kanji can have the same sound. Sometimes used to spell names and other weird things that I can't remember offhand.

Japanese and Chinese have one thing in common: your average Joe Japanese/Chinese person is not fluent due to the sheer number of characters in use. Chinese is rumoured to have 30k characters, and only some University professors and dusty old scholars know all of them.

Same goes for Japanese: I'm told that even native Japanese speakers can make catastrophic mistakes on a daily basis with regards to things such as honorifics, the same problem exists within Korean. Japanese and Chinese people growing up abroad will struggle with some of the more advanced characters, as these are taught specifically within the high school programs of China and Japan which they wouldn't otherwise be receiving. My friend's from Hong Kong, native speaker of Cantonese and also knows Mandarin (he's Chinese, not a Westerner who simply lives there), yet even he couldn't read a Chinese website I found once.

I don't think there's ever such thing as 100% fluency: if there was, you'd never ever need a dictionary or thesaurus, but bet you've used them on a daily basis before, right?

Supposedly fluent Japanese speakers and readers need to only 1945 Kanji characters to be able to comfortably get around Japan.

Zipster

Apr 10, 2007 at 7:46 PM

Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Does anybody know if knowing Hebrew makes it easier to learn Arabic? What do you say shmoove?

I live with a bunch of people who are learning Arabic, and I already know Hebrew, so I can probably quiz them on the language and get back with what I find out.

Qitsune

Apr 10, 2007 at 8:16 PM

I'm a native french speaker, I'm fluent in english and I speak few bits of spanish and japanese.

My advise is to take a new language that has the same alphabet as the ones you already know. Learning the vocabulary and syntax is enough work without learning varioius additiaonl alphabets. German Spanish and French fit this description, you would only need to add some accents (É ç û, etc) but the language is understandable even without accents.

The problem with spanish and french is that words have a gender (a chair is female but the floor is male, go figure) and that is unusual for english speakers. Also the verbs are more complicated than in english. Many words are the same in english, spanish, german or french or have the same roots du to being germanic/latin based languages and that gives you a headstart.

Zeraan

Apr 10, 2007 at 8:17 PM

How about American Sign Language?

I'm deaf, and I promise you that if you learn this language, you will benefit from it because it helps you communicate with deaf people :)

It also challenges you to think in space and concept, instead of just words. There is no actual written version of ASL for obivious reason, but it'd be cool to have another person who knows ASL.

Oberon_Command

Apr 10, 2007 at 8:33 PM

I'm learning Mandarin at the moment for school, and I can tell you that while the characters certainly are difficult, the language itself really isn't. The grammar is rather easy for the most part. Actually, you don't conjugate verbs, at least not for present tense (I haven't learned anything about a past/future tense yet, if there is one).

Nathan Baum

Apr 10, 2007 at 8:49 PM

Quote:
Original post by mikesc
Mark Twain wrote a very funny article about the German language, I think it´s called "The Awful German Language". A lot of the grammar he describes is obsolete now but quite a few things are still true.
French and Spanish are probably a bit easier to learn than German.

The Awful German Language

BradDaBug

Apr 10, 2007 at 9:00 PM

What's the best way to go about learning a new language, other than spending lots of money taking classes or throwing yourself in the middle of the language's home country?

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