Топик: Which languages are the hardest to learn?
Топик: Which languages are the hardest to learn?
It depends on whether we're talking about a first or second
language. Children acquire their native language effortlessly, regardless of
the language. Learning another language later on, however, is a different
matter. Some languages do have far more complicated word-building rules than
others, and others have far more complex sound patterns or sentence structures.
But despite differences in individual areas of a language, researchers have not
found any one language or group of languages to be clearly more difficult or
complicated in all areas.
To some extent, how difficult it is to learn a language depends on
how much it has in common with the language (or languages) that you already
speak. Learning a language that is closely related to your native language can
be easier than learning one that is very different. French, Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese are all descended from Latin, so they are closely related, and a
speaker of one can learn any of the others fairly easily. Likewise, English,
Dutch, and German are closely related, having all descended from an earlier
language called Germanic, so it would be relatively easy for an English speaker
to learn Dutch or German. But learning a language that's closely related to
your native language can also bring problems, because their similarity can
result in interference from your native language that would cause you to make
mistakes.
A very different language such as Chinese, Turkish, or Mohawk,
however, brings additional difficulties. In Chinese, for example, a 'word' is
made up not just of consonants and vowels, but also the 'tone', or pitch, with
which it is uttered. This means that the syllable ma uttered with a high tone
('mother' in Mandarin Chinese) is a completely different word from ma uttered
with a low rising tone ('hemp'), which in turn is a completely different word from
ma uttered with a high falling tone ('scold'). The words of such a language are
likely to be very difficult for a native English speaker to master.
In short, no one language or group of languages can be said to be
harder than the rest. All languages are easy for infants to learn; it's only
those of us who grew up speaking something else that find them difficult.
Список литературы
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