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flexibeastEarlier today i read a fascinating essay entitled "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". The author of the essay is a long-time student of Chinese himself, and laments not only the fact that there are a hideously large number of symbols to memorise in order to become functionally literate, but that even Chinese people, studying at a tertiary level, can't necessarily remember the ideograms for common concepts such as "to sneeze", and that merely being able to look up words in a Chinese dictionary is considered quite a skill in itself.
Being a language slut, i studied German and Spanish at university - three years of German, two years of Spanish. Sadly, though, German basically wasn't spoken in the circles i moved in. Spanish, though, often was. So the end result was that nowadays, my German doesn't really exceed the basics-of-daily-life level, whereas my rusty Spanish could be brought up to a conversational level with a relatively small amount of time and effort.
In recent times, my linguistic efforts have been directed towards Hindi (due to my ongoing interest in the subcontinent) and Hebrew (due to my interest in Qabalah). A while back i started teaching myself the Devanagari script - that is, the script used to write Hindi - which i found relatively easy and rewarding (although *slaps self on wrist* i've let my daily practice slip). And in learning Hebrew - both biblical and modern, the latter in the form of Ivrit - i've found memorising new words not too difficult, despite the fact that i've not yet encountered many (any?) cognates with Germanic and/or Romance languages.
Interestingly, though,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sacred_harlot has (at my request) been trying to teach me some Armenian (which she learnt due to her former husband being Armenian). For some reason, i've found that words in that language don't really 'stick'. Despite much practice, i'm still struggling to learn the numbers 1 to 10 - i can remember most of the words, but not necessarily which number they correspond to.
So i'm intrigued - why should some cognate-less languages be 'stickier' for me than others?
Being a language slut, i studied German and Spanish at university - three years of German, two years of Spanish. Sadly, though, German basically wasn't spoken in the circles i moved in. Spanish, though, often was. So the end result was that nowadays, my German doesn't really exceed the basics-of-daily-life level, whereas my rusty Spanish could be brought up to a conversational level with a relatively small amount of time and effort.
In recent times, my linguistic efforts have been directed towards Hindi (due to my ongoing interest in the subcontinent) and Hebrew (due to my interest in Qabalah). A while back i started teaching myself the Devanagari script - that is, the script used to write Hindi - which i found relatively easy and rewarding (although *slaps self on wrist* i've let my daily practice slip). And in learning Hebrew - both biblical and modern, the latter in the form of Ivrit - i've found memorising new words not too difficult, despite the fact that i've not yet encountered many (any?) cognates with Germanic and/or Romance languages.
Interestingly, though,
sacred_harlot has (at my request) been trying to teach me some Armenian (which she learnt due to her former husband being Armenian). For some reason, i've found that words in that language don't really 'stick'. Despite much practice, i'm still struggling to learn the numbers 1 to 10 - i can remember most of the words, but not necessarily which number they correspond to.So i'm intrigued - why should some cognate-less languages be 'stickier' for me than others?
