Is English the most logical language?

[danlightbulb]

I already gave an example in tenses, you are having to learn 4x the number of words rather than add Tomorrow, Now, Soon or Yesterday to every verb and don't need to change the tense. Go, went, been, going, gone,

So "I drink coffee yesterday" works perfectly in Chinese, you don't need to learn to say "I drank coffee yesterday."

You can't tell me in this example English is more efficient, logical or whatever way you want to rank it?

Hmm but doesn't having drink and drank indicating tense convey more meaning in a more efficient way?

'I drink' means present tense, 'I drank' means past tense. You add an extra word to convey the timeframe if you need to. In Chinese could you say 'I drank water' without specifying when, only that it was in the past?

Another point I was making was that you can learn the word 'I', the word 'drink', and you can then construct the sentence, which is quite a logical approach. In other languages there would be one word for 'I drink', so it's not disaggregated as much.

 

[danlightbulb]

That is very logical. Better than English definitely.

 

[danlightbulb]

No it does not, adding when you do it does the same job and it also tell you when.

"I drank coffee." he says

I say "You drank coffee? what you do you mean you drank coffee? You used to drink coffee but no longer or do you mean you drank coffee this morning?"

You had to say I drank coffee + when to give the full information.

What I meant was, what if you didn't want to specify the timeframe, only that it was in the past. In English you can do that.

'I ate chips'.

It doesn't matter when I ate them, that's not information I wanted to convey so I can just leave it out.

 

[danlightbulb]

I don't understand?
You're saying that English is more efficient than Chinese because you can say "I drank water" and convey what/when using less words.
But you also say that other languages which can convey "I drink" in less words than English are not logical.

Yeah I see your point. I suppose it makes more sense to me to have building blocks 'I', 'my' etc separate from the verb, and to have different verbs to mean past or present tense. Rather than the other approach which combines the pronoun(?) with the verb in one word.

 

[danlightbulb]

You can also say I ate (or rather, had) chips in chinese too.

You still say the word eat…you don't need to learn a new word, just just say another just after it, think of it adding "en" to eat.

In the end, you don't need to learn all these went, going, gone, ate, been, take/took, (plus all the ed in moved, washed) and then a rule where some words don't have a past tense word like read. So not only you have 3 or more words for tenses, you have rules on which words don't need to learn a new word, you add ED to the end, and then you need to learn which you don't need to do anything.

That's English.

Or….you don't do any of that at all in Chinese.

You tell me….which is simpler?

Fair enough yes, it does sound like Chinese is simpler/more logical in that example.

And the numbers rule you posted above for Cantonese was definitely more logical from a construction perspective, albeit longer words than in English.

 

[danlightbulb]

I will save you the trouble though, because actual language experts have already done the work, and, English is one of the hardest languages to learn.

Information seems to be highly mixed on the topic. For example:

Is English Easy To Learn For Chinese Speakers?
Is english easy to learn for chinese speakers? English is an easier language to learn. Languages with alphabets can be ‘exercised’ phonetically by learning how the 26 letters sound. The playground video game of ‘C-A-T’ applies to most of the words in the English language. This is not the case in logogram languages like Chinese, where there is no indicator whatsoever of the noise of the logogram by how it looks – you merely need to memorize the image and match it with the right sound. There are something like 3500 characters in Chinese script, and the user will need to learn them all. There is no logic to it, and you cannot work it out – it’s just a laborious memory game.

https://www.importanceoflanguages.com/easiest-language-for-chinese-speakers/


I have spent the morning trying to find information on the best way to start learning a language for beginners, and its hard to find anything conclusive. There are as many opinions, methods and recommendations as there are languages.

Some people slate the apps, others say they work.

i just don't want to waste time.

 

[danlightbulb]

As I have mentioned several times and also agreed by others who has done the same…just learn the most common words.

Do that in conjunction with what @Raymond Lin and others have been saying in this thread about learning the most common words and you should learn the language pretty quickly.

Do you know of any existing apps or courses that would do that though? Its a minefield out there.

 

[danlightbulb]

https://www.101languages.net/polish/most-common-polish-words/

Thanks. I'm really unsure though on this approach. Drilling words from lists day in day out for weeks and months? Its what we did in school and didn't work very well for me, its relentless monotony. The first 100 words in that list still don't contain any nouns. If I learn them I still won't be able to string a sentence together that means anything.

 

[danlightbulb]

You are STILL fighting it…I mean go sign up a course and trying to learn how to pass exams if learning to speak to communicate isn't what you are after.

It just feels to me like there should be a better way. Kids don't learn English by reciting lists of words do they. I agree with whoever mentioned immersion but you can't immerse yourself in Polish tv or books without knowing the basics first or it will just sound like garble. Are those words on that list the basic words you would teach a toddler?

 

[danlightbulb]

Exactly! And if you are there as a tourist, imagine sitting there mumbling in English, and the barman clearly know you are foreign and going on about in English but don't know what you are saying. If you manage to even say "Pivo", that's good enough for him and he will probably be impressed and glad that you managed it. The fact that you didn't say please is irrelevant at this moment.

If you had known the structure of how to string together a sentence in Polish at a degree level will not help you at all at this point if you didn't know the word for beer.

That's fair enough. I don't know how far down the list of words the word 'beer' is though. So it's like learning thousands of words when in any situation you might only need a handful. Maybe there is no way around it.

What is it you are after? Really?

I suppose the ideal situation would be to absorb the language passively over time rather than forcing it.

Or, failing that, word lists need to have some structure to them like basic first followed by more advanced. Or lists of basic foods or lists of basic other groups. Can't seem to find that.

 

[danlightbulb]

In my GCSE French class there was this idiot called Oscar. We had been doing French in the run up to GCSEs for 5 years by that point, and he'd still say "je m'apple Oscar." Typical English thing thing to do in my opinion - not even bother to try and sound French. There are some accents you just can't get away from (Italian, for example), but I don't think a generic English accent is one of them.

When I did language at school the speaking was difficult for me because of confidence. I think to put on a French or whatever accent when trying to sound the words, can make you feel really silly doing it. When Im practicing the Polish words at the moment I think I sound like Borat.

 

[danlightbulb]

When I speak French I say the words how I’m pretty sure is the correct way to say them, I don’t try to imitate how the French person that I’m speaking with says them.
Very often French people ask me if I’m from the South West, as apparently I sound like someone from Bordeaux or Toulouse, although Parisians make me for a rosbif as soon as I open my mouth.
I don’t get the South West bit, as I picked up most of my French as an adult from my family members in Nord and Pas de Calais.

Yeah but like you said, you can't say je m'apple without making the je different from how you would say it in English, and it sounds silly to do it.

In Polish, there are some really strange sounds Im having to make with vowels and it really makes me feel self conscious about it.

I mean, for years into adulthood I didn't know how to properly say 'le mans' or even 'grand prix'. And even now I know how to say it, I would think twice before saying it properly amongst English company for fear of sounding stupid.

It wasn't cool to try hard or try and sound clever in my school.

 

[danlightbulb]

I don’t get what you mean about saying the word je in English, it’s pronounced zhuh in French, are you suggesting that English speakers pronounce it as jee?
I’m also puzzled about why you feared looking stupid for saying Le Mans as le mon, or grand prix as gron pree, are there really those who think that prix rhymes with six, or say Le Mans as Le Manz?
Saying the words properly isn’t trying hard to sound clever in my opinion, surely it’s more cool to get it right.

You didn't go to my school.

His head is still stuck in English and its rules. He needs to drop them all totally and start from a blank slate and say it as he is told, not as he thinks it should sound like in English. Sure you can use some knowledge in English to associate it, when it applies, say for memory purposes but for the most part, I would just drop it and start afresh.

I simply cannot make some of the sounds. Like rolling my R's, or the nasally sounds, or this one is particularly problematic for me at the moment: Cześć.

I also don't like my accent generally (blackcountry) and it feels very silly to be making some of these, well I can only describe them as grunts or noises really, not articulated sounds.

Al Murray had it right

Spot on.

 

[danlightbulb]

This is a bonkers thread... Nobody could ever seriously suggest English is the most logical language... except someone who spoke English as a native and hasnt compared to other languages.

Well, yes and no I think. I started the thread and have come round to some new ideas because of it, which is great.

But at the same time there are still some objectivity factors where English is obviously more logical than other languages.

For example, gendered words. There is no logical explanation why some languages use gendered words, they just do.

Hopefully as I get more experienced in Polish my brain will click and I will be able to speak in the language without thinking as has been described by others. We shall see whether my brain is capable of that, as my whole consciousness, thinking and logic structure seems to revolve around the English structure.

 

[danlightbulb]

Update on the apps.

Only Duolingo has let me progress beyond the first few days of lessons without a subscription so that's the one I am using at the moment.

The others I liked were Rosetta Stone followed by Babbel and Mondly. But those only provide free access to a couple of lessons then it stops.

I tried learning some word lists but it had no structure to it so it didn't suit me.

 

[danlightbulb]

why are you doing apps, you have a native speaker.
ask her how to tell her she has nice eyes, nice lips, nice legs etc.
ask her how to say these things:
I have, I want, I need
ask her what the different foods on your plate are called
now use these things with her instead of the english versions, EVERY TIME
This is how you start, and also how you learn the colloquial language

Yeah doing this too but obviously that approach is quite slow because if we were to talk in Polish the conversation currently wouldnt get past about 10 words.

 

[danlightbulb]

Not good = bad
Not bad = good

I don't know how can you argue these examples aren't logical? NOT is itself a logical operator function.

Speaking in a code form might not be natural but it is implicitly logical.

Out of interest, do foreign language coders code using English based logic?

 

[danlightbulb]

Logical operators (or any other coding logic) are not using "english-based" logic. Logic is independent from language. The concept that something is equal to something else or not equal to something else exists independently from the language used to describe the concept.

Coding is very similar to learning another language, as it happens. The logical operators in most modern coding don't use English words so you need to translate it anyway, an example:
! means NOT
&& means AND
|| means OR
> means greater than

So when I write a line of code like:
if(a != b && b > c)

I translate that in my head into "if value a is not equal to value b and value b is greater than value c". I presume native speakers of other languages would translate the symbols into their own language when they read/write code.

Ive dabbled with learning some modern programming languages like C, python etc and struggled. Whereas basic languages, eg visual basic in Excel, I've been ok with.

In English we would use a lot of operator type words naturally I think and they stand alone, whereas in other languages they are altered depending on meaning.