New CBB

The number of cases, the number of tenses, etc etc isn't a reasonable measurement of difficulty.

Seriously, no matter what measurements we come up with, they'll be so flawed as to be nearly useless, or they won't measure anything that actually has to do with the difficulty the individual learner will have to wrestle with.

What... How... Why...

...

Does not compute.

...

Error.

...

Errorerrorerrorrewtdghhgkfgj.......

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| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

The following are paraphrases of things I have heard people say or have had said to me over the years.

- 'Does anyone speak Hindu?' - Because apparently the Hindu religion is a language now, so I'm curious to see what Hindi has turned into - I'm guessing some sort of fast-food chain or car manufacturer. I'm just waiting for somebody to talk about speaking 'Muslim'.
- 'Do you speak [ethnic slur for 'Pakistani'], Parminder?' - Said to an Indian (Punjabi) friend of mine.
- 'Chinese and Japanese are the same, aren't they?' - Said by a girl who earlier in the same conversation had been amazed to learn that the Japanese people aren't fundamentally different anatomically to the rest of the world in a way that doesn't bear repeating on a civilised forum.
- 'The [ethnic slur for 'Chinese'] just draw pictures instead of writing.' - From the same girl who made the Chinese-Japanese error.
- 'Of course English and French aren't related.' - Although this may have been more motivated by racism (Tristan despised the French) than ignorance, but that only makes it worse.
- 'English is obviously the best language in the world, because so many people speak it.' - The guy who said this was offended when I laughed because I assumed he was joking. Which, apparently, he wasn't.
- 'Why would you want to learn another language?' - So many times.

Sometimes the stupid burns so very hard.

Dan

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Valar morghulis.

Zidhgebzhail Orthography

This one makes me sad

I don't know that that is a myth so much as an opinion.

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Dotjen
Kotanese

Reminds me of the time I got called racist for criticising Islam's creation story... :|
This wouldn't happen to be 'Paki', would it? For a long time I thought that meant 'person from Pakistan' only to discover it was a slur against 'middle-Easterners'. Oddly though, an Indian man who runs a local shop describes himself as such...

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A related one; "English decends from Latin." It even seems that a number of past linguists tried to create/perpetuate this myth.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

"paki" is a slur against all Middle-easterners? I didn't know that, I thought it was only a slur against people from Pakistan and India and thereabouts.. Like Lodhas I originally thought it was just a word for Pakistanian.

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КЕРВЕНСКИЙ

That's the thing about racial slurs, they tend not to be specific. Of course, it might be a Glasgow specific thing.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

We could measure this by the average age at which a child learning the language as their L1 achieves full mastery of all the language's structures. I believe I read on Wikipedia at some point that the language with the honor of being the "most difficult" by this measure being Korean.

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♀♥Ø

No language is more difficult than any other. The average age of mastery for a child is when their brain splits (literally) in two, which means 7-8 years old. Once it's done, the child has totally unconsciously acquired the grammar of its language and can't acquire another one, unless they willingly study it.

Uhhhh citation(s) needed, dude.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Bullshit

Uh, no... That annoying thing parents do with their children ("Is that a ball? Do you have a ball? Yeeees, you have a ball!") is how they teach their kid the language. The child learn what the correct responses to his own statements are and learns when to properly use these responses himself.
I would also like to think that spending 7-8 years with everyone talking at you in some language would enable you to understand it.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Dupa, dupa, dupa.

1. A child usually gains its language abilities when it's 3-4 yo.
2. Brain never splits literally in two (ok, you can still have corpus callotomy). Brain's hemispheres become specialized in specific functions at age of 2-3 though.
3. The best way of learning a language (L1, L2, L3, ...) is being surrounded by it. The only difference is that you acquire your native tongue(s) in early childhood, when your learning abilities are increased. (Of course, you can also have another "native tongue", related to your national identity or personal preferences.)

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(native)
(learning)

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Języki sztuczne i lingwistyka, po polsku.

Source: The Study of Language, Fourth Edition, George Yule, Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2010

The brain doesn't totally split in two (you still have that "corpus callossum" between the two) and c'mon, it's common brain anatomy knowledge. Babies are born with their two brain hemisphere compact together, and the phenomenon appears at the age of 7-8 years, which the scientists also have found that you have to acquire a grammar (that of any language) before that phenomenon or you'll never be able to acquire one at all in your life. Go read about the case of "Genie", a girl in 1970 that was found impotent at speech and tied to a chair in a small room until the age of 13.

I wasn't speaking of the age of acquaintance of a language, but the critical moment when a child must have learned a language.

What are your sources, guys? -_^

More sources: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/famsci/fs609w.htm (it even goes as far as saying 10 years old here)

Visinoid

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♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

Alrighty then. *cracks knuckles*

The Critical Period Hypothesis is not at all resolved. There are some deep problems with it such that it "cannot plausibly be regarded as a scientific hypothesis either in the strict Popperian sense of something which can be falsified or indeed in the rather looser logical positivist sense of something that can be clearly confirmed or supported" (Singleton, "The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours").

Even if we admit it as a tenable hypothesis, "the evidence from second-language acquisition research has not provided unequivocal evidence for the critical period hypothesis. The best we can say is that young children generally learn L2 better than older children and adults, at least in the long run. Moreover, the advantage that younger learners display in some studies may be due to biological changes (as assumed in the critical period hypothesis), environmental factors, cognitive changes, or some combination of factors" (Carroll, Psychology of Language, p 331).

Genie is certainly not a useful case that you can draw reliable conclusions from. Funding for research on Genie was revoked once it occurred to people that the study was inherently anecdotal—there was no possibility for any kind of control, and so there was no way to scientifically draw any strong conclusions. Specifically, we have no way of knowing whether in infancy Genie was healthy/comparable to typical babies, or if she was handicapped from birth; or whether her difficulty with language acquisition resulted merely from a lack of exposure to language, or from trauma arising from other aspects of her abuse. (As a side note, that whole situation raised a bucketful of troubling ethical issues—see Advanced subsidiary psychology: approaches and methods, p. 74-75.)

In a study of "naturalistic acquisition" of Dutch by families of English speakers who moved to Holland, adolescent and adult learners far outpaced prepubescent learners over the first year (Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle, "The critical period for language acquisition"). The advantage of young learners is more of a tortoise-and-hare effect that does not become apparent until much later (Carroll, 331).

If there is a significant biological event that results in decreased ability to acquire language, then we would expect there to be a sharp cut-off in acquisition ability. Johnson and Newport (1989, PDF) found, in a study of Chinese and Korean immigrants to the US, that such a cutoff did occur at puberty, but subsequent analyses of their data found otherwise. Bialystok & Hakuta (1994) found that the cutoff was an artifact of the way Newport and Johnson had grouped their data, while Elman et al. (Rethinking innateness: a connectionist perspective on development, p 187) found that a single curvilinear function could be drawn over the entire dataset. Other studies (such as Hakuta, Bialystok, & Wiley, "Critical Evidence: A Test of the Critical-Period Hypothesis for Second-Language Acquisition", 2003) have also found a gradual decline without any sharp cutoffs.

But once again, all of this operates under the assumption that the hypothesis can be usefully confirmed or falsified in the first place. The hypothesis can be reframed and twisted around the data in so many ways as to be scarcely useful at all.

For a synthesis of important issues and research concerning the critical period hypothesis, see Bialystok, Bilingualism in Development (2001, PDF), particularly pages 71-88. She specifically discusses work by Penfield and Roberts (which concluded that there are two types of language acquisition, "direct" and "indirect," where direct acquisition is highly preferable but only possible before puberty—note the resemblance to your claim about unconscious acquisition vs. willing study) and why it was basically wrong and entirely unfounded.

So for any evidence you find in support of a critical period, there is plenty of evidence against it as well. Feral-child cases like Genie are hardly admissible since they cannot be controlled for the myriad other factors that could affect acquisition capacity.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Why are you talking of second language acquisition? You're out of topic. Also, your first link (which seems to be the most reliable source) doesn't work.

If you didn't want to discuss claims about second language acquisition, then you shouldn't have made any:




Thanks for the catch—this has been fixed. The article is available here. (Although I'm somewhat perplexed as to how you were determining reliability of sources you couldn't access...?)

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

And I didn't. I'm not supporting any idea, just repeating what other people said. This isn't my work, fortunately. Anyway, I'm that much into the "you've got biased thinking, I'm best" stuff, so I'll just get along the topic we had before that.