Submitted 2 hours ago by sem@piefed.blahaj.zone to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Like, English is a famously difficult language, and Spanish is supposed to be easier. But babies learn English or any language instinctually.
So do babies learn faster if the native language is easier, or do they acquire language at a constant rate depending on their brain development or whatever?
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.
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
This answers exactly what I was asking, thanks!
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.
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.
I remember reading somewhere that Danish children on average learn to speak slower than others.
I saw a video the other day that repeated that claim, but I can't remember which video it was, nor can I find a specific scientific paper on it (caveat: there may be a search skill issue on my part).
Interestingly, I did find a paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28430531/) that apparently seeks to investigate the claim, but doesn't mention, in their abstract anyway, any specific papers making the claim. That's something I'd expect they'd do if they found such a paper themselves, but I can also think of a few reasons that such information might be omitted from it.
Why would Spanish be easier than English?
I would judge it to be slightly harder because of gendered words.
Spanish is easier in the sense it’s more regular. Genders don’t had that much complexity if they are applied consistently, especially when you stack them against all the irregularities in English. That being said, and without claiming to be an expert, I think the consensus is that language acquisition time is similar across languages, but the time to master the language is related to how predictable/regular it’s grammar and vocabulary formation is.
English is incredibly easy to learn. Why do you think it’s basically the world’s lingua franca? The spelling is just a matter of learning to spell and the grammar is dead easy. I was virtually fluent by the time I hit 11 because I’d been watching English language TV with subtitles.
yeah right? never met an english speaker that got past the most basic levels of spanish
No, I suspect hearing issues have the biggest impact on how fast they “learn” the language and then social factors, such as increased exposure to people talking , parental attention etc.
I’m no specialist, but I’d say it is all about exposure.
How often and meaningfully they interact with people speaking different languages makes it easier for them to absorb that information. Is grandma the only person that speaks spanish with them when they visit once a year, while everyone else only speak in english? Yeah, it is going to be harder for them to learn spanish
My question is if you took the average for all babies learning only one language, would you see them acquiring that language and speaking at different times based on the difficulty of the language, or around the same time, based on natural development.
Not research, personal experience:
Even after many years of school/high-school in basque, I learnt it at a way slower rate than English, which was just 1 subject.
I didn’t speak neither basque nor English outside school. At most, the difference might be that I consumed a little bit of media in English while none in basque. But all subjects except spanish and English were in basque, so that should make up for the difference.
And I don’t think it’s just a me thing. Since the curriculum has mostly been the same for all those years of school:
Learn how to say a verb.
That’s it. Many years of school just to say verbs correctly.
The exams where mostly just fill in the blank exercises, where the blank was a verb.
I still don’t know how to say verbs that aren’t the simplest ones.
So to your question I’d say yes. Even though neither are my native tongue, I learnt both since I entered school, but learned them at wildly different rates.
you’ve said it yourself, you didn’t use basque outside of school
the education system acknowledges this and makes you repeat the curriculum year after year, so you can get your B2 certificate upon finishing high school
It didn’t make me repeat the curriculum. The curriculum is the same for everyone.
I didn’t use basque outside school, but I barely used English. Inside school, it was ~7 hours every day of basque. And ~3h per week of english.
False@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
Ataturk famously switched Turkey to a modified Latin alphabet instead of an Arabic-based one in order to boost literacy rates. Convinced with a huge push to educate people on the alphabet it seemed to be successful.