I spent most of my vacation in California with my extended family. One day, my little cousins came over. One of them, who is six years old, had a regular conversation with my grandparents in Vietnamese. I can barely speak Vietnamese; I just know basic things like how to say my age and grade, foods, and greetings. This made me wonder if there are languages that are harder to learn than others. I think the language people consider the easiest to learn is the one they grow up with. That is the language a person is most familiar with. When I'm speaking English, I don't have to think a lot about pronouncing words the right way and using correct grammar, because it's instilled in me.
Vietnamese seems really hard to me, but to my cousin, it's easy because he grew up speaking both languages. Pronouncing words in Vietnamese is hard for me because there are a bunch of accent marks. A three letter word can have 4 pronunciations and meanings depending on what accent marks there are. However, there are little kids who know the little differences. While some languages just seem difficult to learn, there definitely are some that are more difficult than others. Spanish is easier for me because there are a lot of cognates. Mandarin, however, would be a lot harder because there are many complex characters, and Chinese words generally don't sound like English ones.
I understand the idea of different languages being more difficult than others, especially with tonal languages like those of Eastern Asia. There's lots of studies that show the easiest time to learn a language is as a young child, which is probably why it is so easy for young children to become bilingual instead of older people. I think the alphabet of the language is also a big indicator for the level of difficulty in learning a language. It's easier to recognize things if the alphabet is similar or almost the same, like Italian and English, rather than Greek and Chinese.
ReplyDeleteI think that some languages are more difficult to learn and understand then others. For example Spainish would be easier to learn then Chinese, because words and sounds are similar. Chinese has more complicated characters and sounds. If you grew up learning a language it's comes natural to learner though. I'm sure though for Chinese speakers other languages similar to their own is easier to learn then English .
ReplyDeleteI definitely understand the difficulty of learning a language that's not my own first language. although for some people, especially myself, understanding the dynamics and mechanics of sentence formation is very difficult. even with english which I consider my first language, I kind of shut down every time I hear the word "grammar," forget about other languages such as spanish,chinese or greek which have their own rules for sentence structure.
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