this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Really? Tell me more.
Too many fucking languages going around and they're very hard to learn.
Swahili's pretty easy though thankfully and that gets you a long way.
Very hard to learn, not just because they're so different from each other and the languages one might be used to, but also because they often lack many resources for learners, right? It feels like oftentimes African languages with like 10 million speakers are about as easy to find resources for as European languages with only 10,000.
Do you believe Swahili is on an upwards trajectory, that as that part of Africa becomes more integrated and influential that Swahili will become more widespread too? It's something I've been wondering.
That's a good point and definitely true..... buuuut liberals can sometimes get too eager to say that all languages are essentially equal, and the only issues are to do with systemic imbalance or whatever. Some languages are just hard, some are easier. It's easier to learn some obscure creole than Japanese.
Haha I hope so. Educated people, businesspeople etc., in East Africa speak English. I fear it's a winner-takes-all game.
What do you consider to be objectively easy or difficult, regardless of one's own background or interests?
So you're saying you're one who hopes, esperanto?
Japanese is an example of hard. Any creole is an example of easy. Then things with big phonemic inventories are gonna pose challenges for anyone. Large numbers of irregular verbs make a language hard. There's different ways to be hard: phonology, grammar, etc., and some have all of them.
I would say that the difficulty of most any language has a lot to do with one's own background and interests, or one's goals and expectations and motivation and learning style, because if you were to ask me if Japanese was hard I would say "not really". I generally say that learning a language involves two main categories of skills โ comprehension and production โ and there are a lot of discrete skills within these categories which will be of different relevance or different difficulty for different people.