Eldritch
10-22-2010, 08:49 PM
http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/images/2010/oct/172/finnish.jpg
A new survey, World Atlas of Language Structures, challenges some old stereotypes about Finnish being so unique and inherently hard to learn.
As anyone who has ever attended a Finnish class will tell you – Finnish is not easy to learn.
Popular wisdom has it that Finnish is perhaps the most difficult European language to learn, a mantle that it shares with Polish, Icelandic and Finnish’s country cousins Estonian and Hungarian. If that doesn’t sound too taxing, consider the fact that the same site ranks Arabic, Chinese and Russian all as being significantly easier than Finnish.
But while this seems to be true for the majority of European immigrants at least, it is not necessarily true for Finns themselves.
Finnish language trainer Mimmu Takalo explains: “Finnish is actually easier than other languages. There was a study I read recently which said that if Finnish was difficult for the brain, Finnish children would learn to speak and write later than kids in other countries. But actually, the opposite is true – Finnish kids learn Finnish earlier than English children learn English.”
The reasons why foreigners find Finnish difficult are clear enough: the mind-boggling case system, consonant gradation (in which letters like k and v are exchanged in different forms of the same word) and having to conjugate even names and numbers stump most learners.
Patterns and differences
However, research conducted by a team of language specialists, led by Matti Miestamo of the University of Helsinki, recently challenged many of the preconceptions about Finnish being inherently difficult. Working as part of a global World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) project, Miestamo’s team has been able to find patterns in languages that spread right round the world.
The lack of articles in Finnish, for instance, is a huge challenge for learners from France, Germany or Italy, but the map shows that fully 40 per cent of the world’s languages also lack articles – hence Finnish may prove easier for learners of those languages than French or German might.
The lack of gender pronouns reflects the same idea – while Europeans may struggle without “he” or “she”, speakers of 67 per cent of the world’s languages have the same feature in their own languages. WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from a variety of materials and compiled by a team of more than 40 authors.
It includes 141 maps and explanatory text on language features (such as the number of vowels, noun-genitive order, passive constructions), each of which was the responsibility of a single author or team. Each map shows between 120 and 1,370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether, 2,650 languages are shown on the maps and more than 58,000 data points give information about features in particular languages.
While reading through the Finnish pages is quite interesting, analysis of terms like “overlap between situational and epistemic modal marking” is unlikely to help many of us finally master the Partitive case. Ultimately, of course, the purpose of WALS is less to establish which languages are easy and which are difficult, but rather to find patterns and differences between them.
The problem for most native speakers of European languages is likely to be that even WALS agrees that Finnish has far less in common with languages such as Romanian, French or Portuguese than they do with each other.
Link. (http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/lifestyle-and-entertainment/12941-finnish-isnt-really-that-difficult.html)
World Atlas of Language Structures (http://wals.info/index)
A new survey, World Atlas of Language Structures, challenges some old stereotypes about Finnish being so unique and inherently hard to learn.
As anyone who has ever attended a Finnish class will tell you – Finnish is not easy to learn.
Popular wisdom has it that Finnish is perhaps the most difficult European language to learn, a mantle that it shares with Polish, Icelandic and Finnish’s country cousins Estonian and Hungarian. If that doesn’t sound too taxing, consider the fact that the same site ranks Arabic, Chinese and Russian all as being significantly easier than Finnish.
But while this seems to be true for the majority of European immigrants at least, it is not necessarily true for Finns themselves.
Finnish language trainer Mimmu Takalo explains: “Finnish is actually easier than other languages. There was a study I read recently which said that if Finnish was difficult for the brain, Finnish children would learn to speak and write later than kids in other countries. But actually, the opposite is true – Finnish kids learn Finnish earlier than English children learn English.”
The reasons why foreigners find Finnish difficult are clear enough: the mind-boggling case system, consonant gradation (in which letters like k and v are exchanged in different forms of the same word) and having to conjugate even names and numbers stump most learners.
Patterns and differences
However, research conducted by a team of language specialists, led by Matti Miestamo of the University of Helsinki, recently challenged many of the preconceptions about Finnish being inherently difficult. Working as part of a global World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) project, Miestamo’s team has been able to find patterns in languages that spread right round the world.
The lack of articles in Finnish, for instance, is a huge challenge for learners from France, Germany or Italy, but the map shows that fully 40 per cent of the world’s languages also lack articles – hence Finnish may prove easier for learners of those languages than French or German might.
The lack of gender pronouns reflects the same idea – while Europeans may struggle without “he” or “she”, speakers of 67 per cent of the world’s languages have the same feature in their own languages. WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from a variety of materials and compiled by a team of more than 40 authors.
It includes 141 maps and explanatory text on language features (such as the number of vowels, noun-genitive order, passive constructions), each of which was the responsibility of a single author or team. Each map shows between 120 and 1,370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether, 2,650 languages are shown on the maps and more than 58,000 data points give information about features in particular languages.
While reading through the Finnish pages is quite interesting, analysis of terms like “overlap between situational and epistemic modal marking” is unlikely to help many of us finally master the Partitive case. Ultimately, of course, the purpose of WALS is less to establish which languages are easy and which are difficult, but rather to find patterns and differences between them.
The problem for most native speakers of European languages is likely to be that even WALS agrees that Finnish has far less in common with languages such as Romanian, French or Portuguese than they do with each other.
Link. (http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/lifestyle-and-entertainment/12941-finnish-isnt-really-that-difficult.html)
World Atlas of Language Structures (http://wals.info/index)