Comment on Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 21 hours agoI can’t speak to Spanish, but in English and French anyway, there are many ways to say almost the same thing, but they all have slight variations and nuances and meaning. That’s why poetry is so fun.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Yes, that’s the same with most languages. My point is that being proficient in several languages I find English text a lot more repetitive, whereas Spanish text has multiple turns of phrases used to avoid repetition, which also makes it a lot harder to learn (although I don’t think we expect kids to know many synonyms for stuff, and children books tend to stick to simpler construction of phrases).
The things I’ve seen people point to English to claim it’s hard are not really needed to be fluent in speaking the language (which is what kids do).
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
The main difficulty I guess is more for reading and writing than speaking I guess… when you are encountering a new word, you don’t know how it is going to be spelled or pronounced, and it can be difficult to predict what it will mean sometimes because of all the different roots and pre-postfixes. You just have to learn it and remember it. There is no overarching system lie in Spanish, there are many competing systems.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Yes, I agree, learning to write English is harder than to write Spanish, in fact Spanish has the most phonetic writing of all the languages I know. But your question was about babies learning, which is solely spoken language, you only learn writing after you’re already a fluent speaker.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
Yes the original question was about how long it would take to be able to speak, and you’re right I don’t really know which would take longer, English or Spanish.
I learned that Danish takes a long time though lol.