Which foreign language do you find easy to read & write but difficult to pronounce when trying to speak it?
For me, it has to be Korean (Hangul is easy to grasp) but the pronounciation, my god: it's like I can't understand a word being said when they speak (while that part is manageable in listening to spoken Japanese). Maybe it's just me not having the "trained" ear on listening to Korean phonology in real time whilst learning the language.
11 replies
I am not sure, only speaking 4 languages at least to some minimal degree.
French pronunciation sometimes drives me crazy.
Some of the sibilant sounds in Slavic languages are also really hard for me to get. But then again, I am a native German speaker and still have difficulty discerning between "ch" and "sch" in my own language, so perhaps not that much of a good measure...
All of them I bet, provided the writing system is close to English.
Spanish orthography is very close to English, and I understand a good bit of it when reading/writing/speaking, but trying to decode anything audio at full speed is super difficult. I've had some exposure to German and French, and feel similarly (tho I don't have the experience to say I can really read and write those).
Having learned enough Japanese to read easy material, I feel like listening is still the big hurdle. Wouldn't say the written part is easy by any means, but it feels much more approachable when you can go at your own pace.
A great deal of it just comes down to how you practice. Since writing doesn't have the built in speed component, I think that tends to feel easier and people (at least me) gravitate toward it. The real strat would be to learn mainly by listening, but it's just tough to prioritize it.
Spoken Danish is an entirely different beast to written Danish...
Spanish. Being a native ptbr speaker, a significant portion of Spanish can be more or less inferred, which is infinitely easier when reading rather than listening to. I don't know if it's me, but it feels like the only way to "properly speak" makes your voice sound "wrong", whenever I hear someone who's a native Spanish speaker, it sounds like they're doing something weird with their voice.
I also hate how it is the only fucking language where J makes a throaty R sound
I wouldn't call Spanish j an r, it's more similar to German ch and Dutch g.
Heh-sus, Huh-an, Heh-remias, Hoh-achim
in Portuguese it's the sound of rr, hence "throaty r"
TIL. Kinda sounds like Portuguese is the odd one out ... but I guess that doesn't help when you're a native Portuguese speaker.
Spanish. I prefer to speak slowly, but reading and writing is rather easy for me. Having impaired hearing makes it quite difficult to understand native speakers, though. But since I had to study Latin in school, it helped me a lot learning Spanish.
Yeah, the difference between what you learn in school and how natives speak is often huge in Spanish. I feel like in French (which I never learned, but I've seen/heard quite a few radio and tv broadcasts), the speech is much more formalized and separated - yeah the orthography is bonkers, but the rules are clear and it's relatively clearly separated words instead of Spanish's syllable stream.
I assume this applies to most of the east-/southeast-asian tonal languages (is Korean tonal, too? not sure). It's just completely alien from the perspective of European languages. Though some writing systems are probably easier than others, Korean seems well-thought out compared to the ones based on latin script but covered top to bottom in diacritics and whatnot, and Chinese and Japanese reading/writing suffer from the existence of kanji.
For me, written French is what it sounded like centuries ago, instructional (vocal) French being an approximation of what it sounded like some years back, and modern, spoken French somewhat different yet again, particularly by region.
It's like learning three languages in one, and I haven't even gotten to the third one, yet.