There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute.
For example, comparing English and German:
- English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken.
- English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines.
- English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five.
- English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)
Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.
Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.
I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:
*Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*
*No, I ain't hungry.*
Though American culture tends to be deliberately sloppy about who speaks formally to whom, especially compared to what I know of German culture.
This is so far my favorite feature of the English language. Formal forms in the grammar are a relict of feudal type of thinking and in modern times they are not only redundant but also harmful. Need to choose between formal 'you' and informal 'you' leads to lots of awkward social situations. If you apply informal 'you' to someone older and who you don't know well it is usually a conversation breaker. If you use formal 'you' when speaking with a coeval it may look like you're patronizing him. Women sometimes get offended because they think you consider them older than they really are, and so on.
Also, when you start addressing someone using formal forms it is very hard to switch to informal 'you'. Using these forms affect human thinking and after you have already addressed someone formally (because it was in a professional situation for instance) you are not likely to become friends. In some cultures there is a special complex social protocol for switching from formal 'you' to informal one. This ceremony is sometimes called using a German word 'Bruderschaft' and for some peculiar reason it often involves kissing and drinking alcohol. This, rather unfortunate, photo captures such situation: http://imgur.com/pmf57.jpg
As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries (and esp. the even less formal US).
> As I find it significantly easier to develop social
relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack
of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity
of the English-speaking countries
But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.
It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.
Do you know of any language where there are not formal and informal vocabularies? I don't.
The point is that in English the additional semantics do not require additional syntax. To make a programming analogy, this is like the difference between C++ having overloadable operators and Java using methods to achieve the same. C++'s grammar is more complicated than Java's, because C++ uses additional syntax to achieve the same semantic ends.
The dual French / Germanic roots to English vocabulary does however hint at one of its distinctively complicated features: English pronunciation and spelling is bewildering because of that lineage.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.
The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.
and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
I've heard it argued that all Chinese dialects are in fact creoles, an artifact of the expanding and shrinking Chinese empire. ie, indigenous language + language of the court + several generations -> new dialect.
And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.
let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run
There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.
These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.
(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)
German's use of modal verbs is almost identical to English's, in fact most of its verb usage is, with the notable exception that English prominently features a romance-language-like gerund: "I am running."
The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:
Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.
Literally:
I should to home run.
This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.
From what I understand peoples problem learning English relates to it lacking fixed rules for most issues. Spelling being the most obvious example. A Spelling Bee would be a far more trivial exercise in Spanish or German. Granted the 988,968 words in English http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/ have something to do with that. Although the total number of words in German is larger (In the modern scientific German vocabulary data base in Leipzig (since 1.7.2003) there are 9 million words) the core vocabulary is fairly small and consistent by comparison. EX: "glove" as "hand-shoe (Handschuh)
Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
For example, comparing English and German:
- English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken.
- English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines.
- English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five.
- English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.