#it's good character detail! & it's really not difficult for english speakers to understand. i didn't know any japanese when i first read dr

[catboyebooks]

one other thing i forgot to mention. i'd have to double-check this and i'm lazy right now, but the fanslation i read back in the day kept the honorifics in and if i remember correctly, which i might not because it's been about a decade, mukuro doesn't use honorifics for junko whereas junko uses -nee and -chan and maybe even -neechan for mukuro. i can't remember how junko addresses mukuro in dr3 but i know mukuro in dr3 uses -chan honorifics for junko, so, if my memory is correct, it feels significant that she drops the honorifics in this story. but maybe i'm misremembering. i really wish they'd left the honorifics in, that's one of my primary gripes with the official translation

[olderthannetfic]

reading level anon here. thank you so much for that detailed explanation, i really appreciate it! and if you have a spare moment and willingness in the future, i'd love to hear more about your opinion on whether languages are hard and how they're classified. i didn't consider english as a particularly difficult language either before i've started seeing those posts about reading levels and how english is so quirky and basically three languages in a trenchcoat which always pisses me off, 'cause sure, english is quirky and interesting, but not any more than all the other languages. i would actually love to see people trying to learn and struggle with hungarian (my native language) for a change, i'd be so ready to answer any questions and muse about homonyms and other linguistic features, turkish loanwords, puns, etc, and just help out with learning any way i can, but that obviously will never happen because very very few people want to learn hungarian. i am also an english major because i never think important life decisions through. anyway, sorry for being bitter in your inbox and once again thank you for taking my question seriously and answering it so thoroughly.

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Ooh, Hungarian!

Having known friends who did try, your language actually is a gigantic pain in the ass. Hahaha. Hungarian, Basque, and Navajo would be my picks for languages people I know actually attempt and then go "Oh no!" about.

I'm sure there are plenty of other Native North American languages that would stump people just as badly, but nobody I know attempts any of those.

Obviously, language "difficulty" is inherently relative. Spanish is dead easy if you're a native English speaker with a big vocabulary and good verbal skills. Japanese is tricky. But I wouldn't say Japanese is really that hard in an objective sense. It's simply more distant from English than Spanish is.

(For reference, I'm fluent-ish but out of practice and never very colloquial in Spanish, can read a little Japanese, and have studied but am garbage at Mandarin, Russian, German, and French. Uh, plus some Old English and various other things. Korean, here I come!)

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So are any languages inherently "hard"?

I'd say yes. I'd break it down by aspects of languages, and some things make them hard to learn at the super beginner phase while others are a pain even once you know a lot, but some genuinely are harder than others. It's not just about distance from one's native language.

Languages face pressure to be easy to produce, e.g. easy pronunciations, regular conjugations, limited vocabulary, simple writing systems. They also face pressure to be easy to understand, e.g. words that sound extremely distinct from each other, lots of words with specific meanings, unambiguous written forms.

In certain ways, reading Japanese is actually pretty easy. Characters are a nuisance to learn, but once you know them, they remove a lot of ambiguity from writing. They can also be used for puns, including visual puns. In Japanese specifically, they're often used for shit like all those proper nouns in One Piece that have furigana giving some ambiguous English loan word name as the pronunciation but kanji that make it more obvious what the proper noun is referring to.

ノースブルー with 北の海 for example. Even if you speak English, "North Blue" isn't that clear. 海 makes it clear it's the name of an ocean.

Characters also have a lot of internal logic (radicals, standard stroke directions). They're taught abysmally by most Japanese texts for English speakers that I've seen, but bad teaching isn't the same as the thing itself being hard.

I also think people often focus too much on the writing system, whether it's English's spelling... uh... quirks or Japanese' use of multiple systems together. In a practical sense, you have to know the dominant written form in order to study most languages easily, but the core of a language is speech, so I think classifying them as hard/not hard just based on writing is dumb.

What factors should we evaluate hardness by?

My main criteria are:

complexity

predictability

commonness of a feature compared to other languages

I wouldn't look at something being a language isolate in and of itself, but a language isolate may have features that are pretty uncommon in world languages, and that is something I'd look at.

To pick a really obvious example, the middle voice is uncommon. Most languages have active voice and passive voice. Other voices aren't that common. Though, wow, according to wikipedia:

Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, Classical Mongolian features five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal, and cooperative.

What the shit, Classical Mongolian? What is all of that???

I'm told Basque is full of the ergative and it confuses the shit out of learners.

Mandarin tones scare native English speakers because Tones Scary, but it only has the 5, and they sound decently different. As tonal languages go, that's really not that bad.

Grammatical gender isn't predictable from the nature of the thing (a table or whatever), but in many languages like Spanish, you can guess from what letter the word ends in. A language where you can't guess would be harder.

I don't really count quality of learning materials as part of the language's native difficulty, but that's obviously a factor too. English has a wealth of instructional materials for people coming from basically every language. A lot of Native languages of the Americas have learning materials in English or in Spanish or not at all, so you'd need to know one of those languages and/or travel to where the few native speakers are to learn.

Is English difficult?

English is not three languages in a trench coat, really. People say that because they're thinking about vocab and know fuckall about how languages work. Here's how I'd evaluate English:

Grammar: easy - weaksauce Germanic grammar with all the case-marking stripped out and some word order stuff solidified as a consequence; no grammatical gender; plenty of irregular verbs, but they tend to go in sets that have the same pattern; conjugations aren't that complex; we don't indicate politeness or formality with grammar

Pronunciation: easy to moderate - English has a medium size sound inventory compared to world languages. Many of its sounds are extremely common ones. The few that are less common you can get away with mispronouncing without being totally unintelligible. Still, th (θ and ð), r, ʒ, and possibly our ch and sh sounds are a problem for lots of learners. We have a lot of words that differ only by a similar vowel sound, and our vowels shift around between dialects, so that can be slightly tricky for listening comprehension.

Writing system: moderate - Our spelling isn't random, but chunks of it operate on one set of historical rules while other chunks of it operate on others. There is logic: it just doesn't apply to every word the same way. OTOH, the lack of phonetic spelling is helpful for distinguishing homophones while reading.

Vocabulary: moderate to hard - English has a fuckton of words. Just so many. There's no standard for judging what counts as an individual word, but however you slice it, English has more than our Germanic neighbors or the Romance languages we ripped off much of our vocab from. We also love our acronyms, which all sound the same because they are acronyms. (A thing one of my old language teachers bitched about from her English learning days.) Politeness and formality are often conveyed with word choice in ways that are hard to pin down. It's more of a sum total effect thing than one with precise rules. OTOH, most normal people use a very small inventory of words in speech, so you could get by with a much more basic set of vocab to start with.

Dialects: easy - English has no official standard and a number of countries where it's the official or de facto language, but they're all highly mutually intelligible and grammar works the same. (Well, okay, maybe less so if you're looking at the extremes of Caribbean creoles, but still...) The differences tend to be minor spelling changes and a handful of basic vocabulary items that mean something hilariously different. There is very little gap between written and spoken English compared to many languages with written forms. Writing is just speaking plus some extra vocabulary and a little more formality.

Speed of evolution: bad, v. bad, red alert - Every language has slang and evolves, but English seems to be especially speedy and gung ho about this, probably because we don't have much of a standard and we're so colloquial. We love coining new words, and anything that sounds like an affix gets shoved on all of the things. (And unlike an agglutinating language, this isn't something that's going to be clearly explained in a textbook.) English is neologism hell, especially if you're hanging out with nerds on tumblr.

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Personally, I'd put English at the upper end of easy, edging into moderate. The hard bit is memorizing our eighty bajillion words, and that's easier than if the hard part is the basic grammar. Our spelling sucks, but most native speakers can't spell worth a damn either, so even moderate gains in that area make a learner able to get by with spellcheck.

And procedurally, we're pretty easy because we produce the full range of media, so you can easily find a book for 5-year-olds or 10-year-olds or 15-year-olds to practice on. Avoiding English on the internet would be a lot harder than finding some, and there are zillions of resources out there for learners.

For hard, I'd pick languages with shittons of case-marking or with way more than three grammatical genders. Procedurally, I'd pick languages from the Americas because genocide and forcible suppression of native languages have led to many of them having few native speakers, few closely related living languages, and not much media in them. Some don't have any written standard at all.

I don't know a ton about Hungarian, but from what I do know, I'd put it at the upper end of moderate or the lower end of hard for your pain-in-the-ass case system. Ugh, case. My nemesis!