Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

For you I am guessing it would go from
Japanese (easiest), then Mandarin, then Vietnamese and Thai, lastly Khmer and Burmese.
Assuming you know some Korean it should go in that order, but also because the first two have the most resources for learning by far, as well as economic motivation. My Estonian for example has been at a low-mid level for quite some time now but considering its population of 1.4 million there are precious few places to hear it, pretty much just Eest Raadio online, a few newspapers and so on. Whereas you could easily pick up Japanese or Chinese in most countries.
Vietnamese and Thai have the next largest population and Vietnamese uses roman letters...Khmer and Burmese come last for obvious reasons.

um...I'll check the book tonight though to see if I'm correct.

[fondasoape]

French and Thai were as easy for me to learn as Mandarin was... and they all were fairly easy. Stop persuading yourselves (and worse, your students) that one language is harder to learn than another, and you might make better progress.

(By the way, many thanks to Tomato for his/her notes on famous acquisitions theorists, even if he/she mixed first and second language theorists. )

You all might want to check out:
Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species begins with a question posed by a 7-year-old child: Why can't animals talk? Or, as Deacon puts it, if animals have simpler brains, why can't they develop a simpler form of language to go with them? Thus begins the basic line of inquiry for this breathtakingly ambitious work, which attempts to describe the origins of human language and consciousness.
What separates humans from animals, Deacon writes, is our capacity for symbolic representation. Animals can easily learn to link a sound with an object or an effect with a cause. But symbolic thinking assumes the ability to associate things that might only rarely have a physical correlation; think of the word "unicorn," for instance, or the idea of the future. Language is only the outward expression of this symbolic ability, which lays the foundation for everything from human laughter to our compulsive search for meaning.

The final section of The Symbolic Species posits that human brains and human language have coevolved over millions of years, leading Deacon to the remarkable conclusion that many modern human traits were actually caused by ideas. Deacon's background in biological anthropology and neuroscience makes him a reliable companion through this complicated multidisciplinary turf. Rigorously researched and argued in dense but lively prose, The Symbolic Species is that rare animal, a book of serious science that's accessible to layman and scientist alike.

Product Description:
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

[mithridates]

I tend to persuade myself that one language is easier to learn than another. Not the other word.

[mithridates]

I'll go into a bit more detail.

The good thing about your approach is that you know that all languages can be mastered regardless of background. You have shown that through your own experiences and that proves to be a benefit for your students as well, assuming you're a teacher.

Where you are wrong is where you assume that all languages are independant entities that don't affect or touch on each other, and that all should take roughly the same time to learn (I'm assuming that's what you mean). The problem with that is that it's hard to define what a language actually is, especially when it comes to languages vs. dialects. It's often said that a language is a dialect plus an army and a navy...Norwegian used to be thought of as a dialect of Danish. I've studied Norwegian and for some reason I can read most Danish too. I know a Korean guy in Sweden; I write in Norwegian on his home page, he writes back in Swedish, and we communicate fine. If you want to make the case that all languages are on the same level of difficulty you'd have to show why you think that Danish should be as hard to learn for a Norwegian as Amharic, and that's just not true.

[fondasoape]

[the_beaver]

[Sliver]

[fondasoape]

The_beaver: please tell us more about Ringbom, ok?

The only work of his I've heard about about has to do with cross-linguistic L2-L3 transfer. as far as I know, Ringbom compared 2 groups of English learners: L1 Finns who know L2 Swedish versus L1 Swedish Finns who have L2 Finnish. I was under the impression that many of both groups' L3 (English) errors could be traced to Swedish, rather than to each group's L1. Both groups (incorrectly) seemed to think that Swedish would help them in English more than Finnish would.

If there are Ringbom studies which suggest the L1 Swedish Finns had an easier time learning L3 English than the L1 Finnish Finns did or were able to do so more quickly than the L1 Finnish Finns, please provide bibliographic info, ok? Thanks.

[the_beaver]

[fondasoape]

'nuff said. Check mate.

(...although the Ringbom article I know sort of flies in the face of Corder.)

[bucheon bum]