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?
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.
Learning 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.
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 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.
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.
Yes we make fun and talk about how bad it is, but in reality this got me curious, what is it with Nordic languages that is so off putting to you?
Well… I mean… what later become “English” branched off from its West-Germanic roots, long ago, and never did become “High German.” So theoretically, as an English-speaker, I have great familiarity with modern French, and we share the same basic sentence-structure as with modern German. Some of that is actually true. In practice, I could not be more of a complete dumbass upon those languages.
TBC, I can speak Castellano and Français like someone with heat-stroke, and I can vaguely understand Dutch and German.