Asian Languages, what can make them EASIER to learn?

the advice you will most commonly
receive on what makes a language easy or difficult to learn will resort to an analytical comparison of how much or how little the target language has in common with your first language so if you're a native speaker of English they'll talk about how much or how little German has in common with English how much are a little French Spanish Portuguese this whole way of thinking about difficulty in language learning very quickly becomes surreal absurd and pointless when we're talking about Asian languages and when I say Asia I don't just mean East Asia so it is true for example that the languages of India without exception have powerful links etymologically historically to the languages of Europe you have a word like dental in English dental dentistry sanskrit and pali both have dontoh da n ta and this same word or same root of a word then appears with very slight phonetic differences in all the modern languages of india including even say tamil you know Dravidian languages they will still have these as loan words or what have you this kind of vocabulary will have been incorporated into all the languages of India one way or another that word danta that we have as dental it left across the ocean all the way to Cambodia where it became Thea right here's the problem this is interesting and intellectually stimulating in a sense that in in even Cambodian and Lotion you have some words with some sort of common ancestry linking them to Europe you know linking them to Latin and Latin related languages but it doesn't make learning the language easier if you are the kind of person who finds that fascinating and motivating then it may make it more into but more interesting is not easier what we're talking about this video is what is it that would make learning a language easier when we're looking at some of the most difficult languages to learn in the world right so there are two lines of approach I want to briefly describe in this video and they both have nothing to do with the resemblance to English or you know if you're watching this if your first language is Russian this has nothing to do with the resemblance to Russian okay the first thing to really think about is phonetic distinctiveness in the language so what I mean by this is how many phonetic distinctions there are within that language within the target language that lets you discern discrete words that lets you identify unique words as unique when you are listening to the language okay um and this also relates to how the language is actually spoken in practice not the theory of how the language is written so Cambodian has a tremendous variety of consonant sounds vowel sounds and combined consonant sounds and combined vowel sounds all right Chinese has none of this right Chinese you have very few vowel sounds very few consonant sounds and then the the consonants don't combine to make more complex consonants the vowels don't combine to make more complex vowels maybe there's one exception in Chinese to that generally speaking Chinese is very phonetically limited it's very phonetically poor but if you listen to Chinese in practice as it really is spoken in language parole in practice it's even worse because the Chinese themselves do not make use of the phonetic distinctions of the language that exists on paper so you know I was making a video recently and I had my own voice at the computer voice and then I had a clip from a Chinese movie and even though they were speaking Chinese in the movie so that the word question was ca xu e so i'm here over pronouncing that yeah like you know if if the word were snow you could you know you know pronounce it the way the people in the movie actually pronounced that word sounded more like si uses she she like that's all this they didn't even pronounce the X in Chinese X is different from s they were really just that's all you got right so for your listening comprehension you have to pick up on that one syllable and it's not just that the syllable itself is brief right it's that it lacks phonetic distinctions from many other words that it possibly could be that your mind has to fill in okay Japanese has a related but different problem Japanese structurally and aesthetically very much resembles Kree in a jib way First Nations languages in Canada so crea jib way and Japanese they all have a pattern consonant vowel consonant vowel constant available so you almost never get a complex consonant multiple continents combining complex vowels multiple vowels combining just a few vowel sounds just a few constant sounds and then the words are long strings of these consonant vowel combinations so again mentally you have to hear the whole word you have to distinguish what is the ending of one word and what's the beginning of the next word and that is purely in your imagination that's purely or disturbing right in these types of languages nobody tells you when one word ends the next begins so when you're listening to English right now if you heard a hear a word like running you you're just familiar enough with the structuring that okay the inga sound will not be the beginning of the next word that must be the ending of one word and now on listening for the beginning of the next word very difficult to develop that with languages like Chinese Cree in a giblet right very different challenge different from Chinese but again we're fundamentally dealing with the problem with phonetic distinctiveness all right what you have to pick up on and again with Japanese the difference between textbook japanese clearly pronounced japanese for textbooks and the way people actually mumble that language it's mind-blowing and and they do mumble they do under pronounce under enunciate and one of the that is they don't want to sound imposing or arrogance for them it's polite for them to sort of under under pronounce their own language very very difficult for for listening operation now by contrast I've mentioned Cambodian so many distinct sort of harsh unique sounds there are so many words where if you've learned it once and then you hear it from someone in any context you'll immediately be able to recognize it to my knowledge I would say a language like a language like Turkish the Turkic languages I like this a fair bit too if you want to know what makes language acquisition easier within the category the hardest languages to learn in the world this quality of being phonetically distinctive and phonetically mnemonic with a moment you hear a word you can identify it you can remember it because it's so phonetically unique that's a quality that you could have in a language where the words are generally quite short Cambodian most words are short not as not as brief as Chinese but it's rare to get long words in Cambodian in Japanese the words are very long so on Turkish the Turkic languages sort of intermediaries many words are short but some are medium length they're long I would say this is the one most fundamental thing that will that will help you as a foreigner develop listening comprehension and listening comprehension is the one thing that the books the hard work and isolation can't help you with it's really the biggest struggle outside of the classroom when you're away from from the the textbooks from it's the part of language acquisition you have the least control over and that your efforts you know your self-discipline your your brilliance even your intelligence can help you with the least so really keep that in mind I think tonight and then the second category of what will make a language easier to learn or more difficult to learn is sociolinguistic so based on what I've just told you you would be able to guess that Cambodian is an easier language to learn that loschen if we're talking about the spoken language I would say yes Cambodian - not including the aspect of the the complexity of the writing system I would say okay Cambodian has these advantages and is easier to learn than lotion however the sociolinguistic attitude of the Cambodians is terrible their attitude towards their own language and how foreigners speak their language and differences of accent and intonation how helpful they are or how punitive they are is a huge issue I new skate I didn't know this person personally I was within six degrees of separation of a Korean girl who grew up in Canada but she grew up speaking Korean with her own parents and grandparents and when she went to Korea people there insulted her and reviled her and called her they look because she spoke Korean but she didn't have the intonation quite correct she didn't have the pronunciation but you know she grew up in Canada with kind of limited exposure to language she didn't have it really accurate and in one case she went into a shop thing was a grocery store to buy some food and the owner of the grocery store beat her with the broom and chased her out of the shop saying we don't want people like you in here we don't want mentally disabled people in whatever harsh term agreeing okay so these sociolinguistic attitudes towards an outsider learning the language this is really negative okay the arrogance and the punitive quality of Cambodian culture and their negative attitudes towards book-learning their negative attitudes towards talking to outsiders at all I mean there are many many different ways in which learning the Cambodian language is made much worse because of sociolinguistic attitudes in Cambodian their total unwillingness as a culture to listen to you if you say a word just slightly incorrectly and again it's not even incorrectly you say a word in a manner slightly different from the way their own family would say it because like Cambodia there's some phonetic flexibility here it's mind-blowing how awful it is learning Cambodian dealing with other Cambodian people face to face there we'll be helpful to you and they won't think ok you're saying that so oh oh oh you must mean this and they won't help you and correct you now for me as a native speaker of English I'm real and I grew up in Toronto which is full of immigrants from around the world I have to be prepared to hear the way English is mispronounced not just by new immigrants because there's unbelievable phonetic diversity just within England within the British Isles really just within England I was listening to a podcast the other day that a guy from northern England mind-blowing to me how he how he print even simple words like don't was mind-blowing to me that we did I don't want to don't know you know we he didn't know his pronunciation of the phonetic sequence don't know I was just like wow you know anyone can understand this guy out of his small town in England wherever he grew up you know with this with this accident we have to be prepared for tremendous flexibility and listening comprehension with English if you're a native English speaker some of these cultures like Cambodia the Cambodian they don't have that at all and those sociolinguistic factors make it much much much more difficult to learn the language Laos Laos is next door to Cambodia these are adjacent countries in Southeast Asia ok but in Laos they have something like 48 official ethnic minority languages maybe they've increased it to 52 they are extremely practiced at coping with hearing their own language spoken poorly spoken with an accent spoken across language and cultural barriers even within their country and they're really used to dialect difference in accent difference from people who speak loshon from different backgrounds in that immediate area right to a wonderful scent and they have very positive very supportive attitudes towards you know the small but so difficult to negotiate differences in pronunciation do you need to deal with face to face I remember I was I was eating food once and I refused to eat any more food saying Paul L K and Lao so Paul Paul they'll and a guy at the table he wasn't mean but he pointed out he said the way you're pronouncing that it doesn't sound like you're saying I have enough already it sounds like you're saying I am a father already this is like the phonetic difference between like paw and my paw there's some incredibly small phonetic difference but they were being helpful they understood what I meant they were able to guess what kind they were willing to make that effort to listen to you and figure out what you meant to say even if you weren't quite saying it correctly specifically with Taiwan and Hong Kong sociolinguistic attitudes towards learning Chinese are terrible I don't want this video to be too long it's not going to get into it this the the sociolinguistic attitudes of Chinese people towards learning towards foreigners learning Chinese are abominable they're awful and and frankly you should resent it and the attitudes of people who are bilingual people who speak both English and Chinese here on the internet are absolutely terrible they're 0 out of 10 in fact that one issue alone the difference in sociolinguistic attitudes that could be a reason to learn Japanese instead of Chinese if you were picking between two of them just as as I said before it certainly would be a powerful reason to learn lotion rather than Cambodian now China is a huge country I'm not going to generalize too much about that because you know I don't think sociolinguistic attitudes would be the same in Beijing as they are in Kunming or in the Donbas as they are in Tibet you know huge diversity of places you could be living and working in China however I've got to tell you all of the all of the cases I'm familiar with within China culture by culture province by province there are different degrees of bad and awful some are a little bit better have a little bit more positive attitudes towards I'm shining if you guys are having trouble visualize what I'm talking about here think about the famous attitude of the French the French are changing now the French are becoming less awful about their own language but you know that the French in France such bastards such so so punitive and cruel towards people who are making a sincere effort to learn their language and speak their language well of course this partly comes out of colonialism it's partly the way they treat North African immigrants you know but it's the way they treat someone from Germany from Canada from America anyone who's really trying to communicate in French and they're just punitive and not helpful it's like oh well if you don't already speak French absolutely perfectly they're gonna treat you like garbage and in general Germans are not like that Germans Germans have basically okay attitudes towards learning their language I think if you were learning a language like Danish or Czech or Norwegian I think in those countries probably people would have very positive social English dekai to do is partly they'd be happy that a foreigner is making the effort to learn their language you'd have to see I don't I don't have that much experience with those other languages have been to the Czech Republic you know again Greek we were just in Greece recently struggling to study and speak a little bit of Greek this question of how supportive how understanding social linguistic attitudes are it's very very very important and it also entails choices you can make as a language learner you may not have the option to choose between learning Chinese versus Japanese or to choose between learning Greek versus learning French right but you may be able to make a strategic decision of where you learn the language so to give an example if you choose to learn French in Quebec Quebec is within Canada totally different attitude towards learning French like the the sociolinguistic attitudes completely different from learning French in Paris or in the South of France or within continental France or what have you and again you could look at it depart mo buy depart mo you could look at all the overseas French territories and former colonies quite possibly you could have a really positive experience learning French in Africa all right that's a totally different game so likewise with learning Chinese if you're really aware of these factors both the phonetic Factor of how Chinese is really spoken and the social linguistic attitude you could look carefully at all the different options of where to learn Chinese around the world you know there are a lot of people who speak Chinese in California I don't recommend I don't recommend learning Chinese in Los Angeles but maybe whether you're looking at Singapore Hong Kong Taiwan you know Dom Bay within mainland China you know the far north the far south the far theses forwards when you look at it province by province and dialect by dialect maybe you can make a more informed choice for how to make learning any of these extraordinarily difficult languages the easiest for you back when I was learning Japanese I did that research and I decided to learn Japanese in in quite a small town in the far south of Japan where I knew there wouldn't be foreigners and I knew there wouldn't be hostile attitudes towards foreigners where I thought I would encounter better sociolinguistic attitudes even though the accent spoken there was very fundamentally different from the accent spoken in Tokyo on television on the radio do the research reap the rewards make the decisions live with the consequences it is all up to you