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Language Myth 3 "Chinese is a hard language" |
Article Submitted by: Gordon Rich
Thursday, 24 September 2009
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Whether a language seems ‘hard' or not, is really a matter of perspective; after all, you rarely hear Chinese people complain about Chinese being tricky to learn, but they may well struggle with aspects of English. If languages were intrinsically easier or harder than each other, children would develop language at different rates depending on their mother tongue. This does not happen, which implies that a language is not difficult in and of itself, but appears difficult when learnt as a second language because it has different qualities and characteristics from the student's own language.
Learning a language closely related to your own is always easier than learning a more dissimilar one, as many of the words have common roots and the sounds and grammatical structure are likely to be similar. An Italian speaker would generally find it harder to learn English or German than to learn Spanish or French; for a Norwegian speaker, it would be the reverse. Taking Mandarin Chinese as an example, it certainly has some features which make it difficult to learn for people whose native language is very different, but this is because of the differences between the two languages rather than anything intrinsic to Mandarin. In fact, given that it has few grammatical inflections - no tenses, no voices, no grammatical encoding of singular and plural - the structure of Mandarin could arguably be said to be quite straightforward. To an English speaker, the hardest part of learning Mandarin would generally be the fact that it is tonal. Words can have completely different meanings depending on the tone, e.g. ma could mean ‘mother', ‘horse' or ‘to scold'. As an adult learner, it is hard to learn to distinguish between new sounds; after the age of about seven, your brain's parameters are set to work with the sounds used in your native language and it takes a great deal of effort to use the phonology of a second language competently. The more different it is from your own language, the harder it is to learn. This means that some English speakers who have been learning Mandarin for years still have difficulty with pronunciation; however, native speakers of languages in the same family as Mandarin would find it relatively easier to master (although different languages have different tones which do not necessarily correspond). Discounting factors such as an individual's innate talent for learning foreign languages or the quality of teaching, it varies according to how closely related the second language is to the learner's native language, or to other languages they may speak (e.g. it is easier to learn French having already learned Spanish and vice versa). Language difficulty can also be influenced by social factors. For instance, English's role as a global language means that many people are immersed in English outside the classroom, hearing it in music, films or television. Equally, in countries where many languages are spoken, such as Kenya, it might be easier to learn the official language, Swahili, which is used in education and for official purposes, than for native Swahili speakers to learn other languages. However, these factors are very subjective and fundamentally it is difficult to argue that any language is inherently harder than another. Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com |
About The Author:
Gordon Rich is a self published author and translation expert. He regularly contributes articles on arabic translation and english to arabic translation. To know more visit http://www.global-lingo.com/
Gordon Rich is a self published author and translation expert. He regularly contributes articles on arabic translation and english to arabic translation. To know more visit http://www.global-lingo.com/
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