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How looks the typical Espantisto bookshelve looks like?

by qwertz, March 14, 2010

Messages: 23

Language: English

jawq81 (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 1:53:32 PM

Interesting. I also have a bookshelf full of language books plus some storage boxes full of them. My interest in languages probably began with cryptography. So my interest leans more towards learning languages with a non-Latin alphabet. I just enjoyed learning the strange alphabets and learning a little about the languages themselves. So I have books on Russian, Hebrew, Icelandic and Koine (1st century Greek). I also spent some time on Irish and Welsh and several years of college Spanish (which I still cannot speak). I do not have much interest in Arabic or the oriental languages though. They all look pretty formidable.

ceigered (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 2:11:38 PM

jawq81:They all look pretty formidable.
Same here - I like the sound of Hebrew and Arabic, but the grammar systems etc look very complex. Japanese and Korean, though are quite simple, fortunately.

Abras (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 2:57:28 PM

I have under a foot of shelf space devoted to language books: Esperanto and some Latin. I have read or plan to read all of them.

On a similar note, did can you believe that books in Latin are much easier to come by at the library than those in Esperanto? Pffft...

erinja (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 3:03:17 PM

ceigered:Same here - I like the sound of Hebrew and Arabic, but the grammar systems etc look very complex. Japanese and Korean, though are quite simple, fortunately.
Hebrew grammar is not that bad, in my opinion. At least, modern Hebrew grammar is easier than Biblical Hebrew.

Arabic is considerably more complex.

jawq81 (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 3:30:59 PM

Erinja, you said earlier that you like the Italian language. I recently reread the novel Magnificent Obsession, by Lloyd C. Douglas. In it, Mr. Douglas composed the following sentence: “(She) dutifully relayed the request in a swift Italian sentence composed of one word of two hundred syllables -- mostly vowels.” I couldn’t help but get a chuckle out of that description. rideto.gif

andogigi (User's profile) March 16, 2010, 6:01:50 PM

jawq81: I do not have much interest in Arabic or the oriental languages though. They all look pretty formidable.
Languages that use Chinese characters are a challenge, but they are not as bad as you initially might think. Most characters are made up of radicals which are simpler characters incorporated into more complex ones. For example, "tree" is a simple character made up of four strokes which you would easily remember if you saw it. Two tree radicals make up the character for "woods". Three tree radicals make up the character for forest. （木、林、森　if your browser can read them) It is usually not that simple, but the tree radical is used in many, many characters. Once you learn the radicals (easily done in a couple weeks), the characters become second nature. Check out the Japanese or Chinese forums here on lernu and just look for the characters with the "tree" radical in them. You'll see many.
If you had a character dictionary, you could look under the section for the "tree" radical and quickly find their meanings.

The hard part is remembering the word for each character. In Japanese, the ones above are ki, hayashi, and mori respectively. I completely forget what they are in Chinese.

ceigered (User's profile) March 17, 2010, 9:12:28 AM

erinja:Hebrew grammar is not that bad, in my opinion. At least, modern Hebrew grammar is easier than Biblical Hebrew.

Arabic is considerably more complex.
For sure - I haven't learnt much of Hebrew, and can barely remember even that, but I do remember seeing the effects of language revival, especially in the grammar.

Still harder than the Asian languages or Classical Indo-European ones though. But probably much more rewarding intellectually due to the unique grammar structures of the Afro-Asiatic langauges.

erinja (User's profile) March 17, 2010, 2:13:09 PM

(Hebrew)
ceigered:Still harder than the Asian languages or Classical Indo-European ones though. But probably much more rewarding intellectually due to the unique grammar structures of the Afro-Asiatic langauges.
Hard to say. What is "easy"? Maybe it is easy to form a basic sentence in Chinese or Japanese. But you need to memorize the correct counting words to use, and you need to memorize the complexities of when to use various forms of politeness. So maybe the mechanics are not too hard, but there are additional complexities that make things difficult.

It is analogous to learning the subjunctive verb forms. The verb forms themselves are fairly trivial to memorize. The hard part is to figure out when you need the subjunctive, and when you don't!

I would personally say that it's easier for me to memorize more grammatical forms, which have extremely straightforward rules for when to use the forms - than to memorize only a couple of grammatical forms, and have to figure out an extremely complex system for when to use which one.

ceigered (User's profile) March 17, 2010, 10:36:55 PM

@ Erinja - there's also the question of "Do you want to speak the language perfectly? Or do you want to just be understood" and all in between ridulo.gif - For example my friend who studied Mandarin said that you can get away pretty much using "ge" as the counter word for just about anything - but it's colloquial (where ever he went in the Asia-Pacific area) and not 100% right.

On the flip side, in Hebrew, particles etc are for the most part easy and there is no declension system per se (right or wrong? It's been a while since I've stuck my head into a book about it).

And I guess we could add another thing to the table on what's easy or not - what kind of languages are you used to? For me, mostly Indo-European (e.g. Russian was my first real attempt at learning anything followed by Swedish and a slack attempt at Irish later on), with a few synthetic and analytical languages that act similarly (Finnish, Chinese/Japanese) grammatically.

This probably also reflects peoples' bookshelves, as no doubt many choose a cool looking language and then branch off of it? (Well, that's what I do at least)

erinja (User's profile) March 18, 2010, 12:41:32 AM

ceigered:On the flip side, in Hebrew, particles etc are for the most part easy and there is no declension system per se (right or wrong? It's been a while since I've stuck my head into a book about it).
No declension, particles extremely straightforward. It's my humble opinion that Hebrew words are easier to memorize than Chinese ones. The English loan words are easier to recognize as such. But maybe I just developed more of an ear for Hebrew, through sitting through hours and hours of Hebrew prayers ridulo.gif
And I guess we could add another thing to the table on what's easy or not - what kind of languages are you used to?
I would be most used to Indo-European by far, but I have found that the way Hebrew works (though it is Semitic and not I-E) is less foreign than the way that Chinese works.
This probably also reflects peoples' bookshelves, as no doubt many choose a cool looking language and then branch off of it? (Well, that's what I do at least)
I would disagree with the cool-looking language thing. Some people do choose languages for that reason. But some people choose languages because they love the people or the culture or the country. Or simply because they like the sound of the language.

Or, not to be discounted, learning for purely practical purposes. That's what got me started on French, though I have continued with it to a limited degree, even after my practical need for it evaporated. I feel like it's useful to get a couple of "colonial" languages under your belt, because they are useful as second languages in various parts of the world. German would be another good choice in that realm.

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