Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yes, to an extent, but I don’t think it has to do with grammar as much as pronunciation. Norwegian (bokmål) and danish are almost indistinguishable when written down, but spoken Danish is pronounced very weirdly (a lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants that causes it to sound like the speaker has gotten drunk on their way back from getting a root canal and is currently struggling to eat a hot potato). Despite Norwegian having a massive range of regional dialects, Norwegian kids learn to speak a lot quicker than danish kids. Largely because danish kids just don’t understand what they’re hearing for longer. The Danes have to subtitle their own TV programmes because they don’t really understand each other. It’s a fucking mess. Norwegian kids understand Swedish before danish kids understand danish.
a lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants
This has been my experience learning French. The written language and the spoken one are pretty wildly out of tune, with up to ~5 letters at the ends of some words either not pronounced at all, or heavily swallowed.
The pronunciation of Castellano (i.e. a sister language) was vastly easier for me.
Maybe I have a little bias as a Spaniard, but I swear languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.
I could give you any Spanish word you don’t know and you wouldn’t miss pronounce it.
languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.
Yeah, I don’t know enough about French grammar and pronunciation rules, but I think part of the problem comes from them trying to maintain a written language that got left in the dust by the spoken language ages ago. So instead of updating the written one, they chose to ‘preserve history’ and add a landslide of little rules explaining separate cases, not just for pronunciation, but in a hugely systemic way. Native French-speakers have actually complained to me about that occasionally.
I could give you any Spanish word you don’t know and you wouldn’t miss pronounce it.
I love that about Castellano, just that some regions speed it up so much that I can barely catch it.
Oh, dialects not only sped it up, they skip parts of words too. Funnily enough, I’m from the region where our dialect is to over pronounce consonants, and thus the easiest to understand haha.
Like learning Norwegian (bokmål) while living on the west coast. French vocal r, secondary Norwegian language, one hour travel north or south can be regarded as a completely new language. Nice fjords, though.
Like learning Norwegian (bokmål) while living on the west coast.
In all honesty, I’d be absolutely terrified of trying to learn a Nordic language, which is absolutely NOT due to the lovely Nordic people I’ve met across the years.
It’s a “me” problem, and case-closed, please.
This got me curious, what is it with Nordic languages that is so off putting to you?
bonenode@piefed.social 4 days ago
It sounds like what you said is a joke, but just wanted to underline that this has even been subject to scientific study, e.g. mentioned here: https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
This answers exactly what I was asking, thanks!
Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Also I remember reading a newspaper account of a danish supermarket that actually ordered 1000 litres of milk by mistake. And everyone in Norway found it hilarious, because it happened after the sketch was aired.
Griffus@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
No one mention the Norwegian butter crisis!
Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That was rough. It happened right before Christmas too. People were scalping butter on finn.no and supermarkets had to import butter from France.