Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system:

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the grammatical apparatus of noun declensions, verbs of motion, and the perfective/imperfective distinction, all of which are profoundly alien to an English speaker.

So Russian departments end up teaching the material three times through—first years are overwhelmed and try to retain what they can, in second year you are expected to absorb the material, and in third year you're supposed to internalize it. That means you study for three years to reach a level of proficiency other students gain in one.

Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?

Meanwhile, fellow students learning German or French can speak proficiently after one year and start reading literature after two. It's a bitter pill.

> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?

Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.

Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".

Oh wow, that's very interesting, thanks!

As a native speaker of Slovenian and a decent speaker of Serb/Croatian this is not true for these particular Slavic languages. I can say "Grem v trgovino" / "Idem u dučan" (I'm going to the store) and it implies nothing at all about whether I'm taking the bus, going on foot or riding a horse for that matter.

There's a kind of default 'to go' verb in all the Slavic languages I know about, but you can't use it in certain contexts. In Polish, for example, you can similarly say:

Idę do sklepu (I'm going to the store)

With no implication about mode of transit. For that matter, you can even say:

Lecę do sklepu (I'm flying to the store), to imply that you're in a hurry.

But you would never say:

Idę do Moskwy (I'm going to Moscow)

Unless you were actually going there on foot. Sometimes the appropriate verb is required.

It's best to tackle this answer in stages:

1. There are separate categories of "to go" in Russian and other Slavic languages for walking on foot, strolling, climbing, running, crawling, flying, going by vehicle, swimming and probably a few more I'm forgetting. The method of locomotion is baked into the verb. You can read some examples here if the nerdery interests you: http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php

2. Each of these verbs comes in a pair. One is unidirectional, the other is multidirectional. The difference in usage is more subtle than these names suggest, but that's the general idea.

3. You have a ton of prefixes you can stick onto these verbs to indicate action into, through, around, to-and-back, and so on.

4. There's other verbs you use if you carried or conveyed something somewhere. Points 2 and 3 apply to them, too.

5. These verbs also have aspect, but you've suffered enough.

So the choice of verb of motion in a sentence like "I took something there" encodes a lot of meaning, and is as intuitive to native speakers as the proper usage of "the" and "a" is to English speakers—you know exactly how to use it correctly, but good luck trying to articulate the rules to yourself or to people learning the language if you haven't gotten special training.

Hm, yeah, that's a lot of context, thanks for the explanation! I imagine it would be hell to translate from Russian to something like English, because you lose all that effortless nuance and have to make it explicit in a way that sounds more forced.

I've come to believe in conservation of nuance where translation goes, where it's just always hell in either direction. Mad respect for translators.

Proficient French after one year is miraculous (German would be realistic for limited domains), it’s an unforgiving language in a lot of unfathomable ways, just matching gender and number in a phrase can be a nightmare

Native English speaker, conversationally fluent German speaker, learning French now. I agree. It seems German gets the reputation of being quite hard, and french easier, but I just don't see it. Sure German can be complex but it seems at least a bit more consistent and forgiving as a native english speaker. French seems to be deceptively simple at first "here is a simple rule to follow" and then hits you on the back side with "and here are the 20 pages of exceptions! "

Proficient spoken French (not necessarily correct but usable) is perfectly attainable in an academic year for a native speaker of English. I watched students at my alma mater, which has a summer language program, go from nothing to conversational fluency in a nine-week intensive course. They still made lots of mistakes, but they could freely interact with native speakers and make themselves understood on most topics.

I get that gender especially is hard on learners coming to French from English, but you also get about a quarter of the vocabulary for free, which is a treat.

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