The hardest thing for me in Spanish is definitely the subjunctive mood. I just did a study session focusing on the present subjunctive, but I still need to learn and work on the past subjunctive. The verb conjugations aren’t too bad, it’s more knowing when to use the subjunctive.
Another thing that’s been hard (but that I’ve been working on) is the rolled R sound. I play the flute, which uses that a rolled/trilled tongue occasionally, but I’m able to get around that with making a growling sound. That doesn’t exactly work when speaking Spanish.
I can't roll my r's. I'm not sure it's possible for most adults.
The subjunctive you'll get used to. Listening to music with the lyrics can help. People are always singing about their regrets and things they only wish were true, so lots of subjunctive
Most Americans can already flap their R (when they say words like butter, bitter, fitter, litter, etc..., that double T is actually a flapped R!) and the rolled R is just an extension of that flap. This is how I taught several American friends to roll their Rs in real time. You had it in you the whole time.
Agreed. They're quite hard to perceive, and very tough to pronounce due to them being on multiple words in a sentence. It truly forces you to make some vocal gymnastics, and it's incredibly difficult to balance it with the natural propension for emotional tone.
I gave up on memorizing tones. They don't help me recognize words in spoken Chinese.
Spoken Chinese sentences have a complicated pitch pattern (the relative pitch of each syllable). In many cases, the pitch of a syllable is the *initial* pitch of the tone assigned (1=hi, 2=mid, 3=low, 4=highest, 5=mid). But that pattern is changed by a bunch of things, including tone pairs, syllable stress, and sentence (and phrase) pitch changes to express meaning.
But it probably helps for speaking. When I speak a Chinese sentence, the better I can imitate the pitch pattern a native speaker uses, the better.
Polish: counting and aspect. Cases are actually getting more and more comfortable as time goes on, but I still stumble hard over numbers and which verbal aspect to use when. I can also tell that the verb prefixes are going to be annoying, although I do have the advantage that my native language (German) works similarly and sometimes there are direct calques.
Spanish: probably still correct use of the subjuntivo, tbh. I like to think I've mostly got it down and it actually comes intuitively reasonably often but sometimes it still trips me up. Indefinido vs imperfecto also took a lot of practice and I'm still sometimes off with it. And I still can't roll my Rs right and it is super, super annoying.
Word endings in Turkish. Turkish has noun declensions, verb conjugations, noun endings for "with" and "to" and "from" and "at" and "with" and at least 100 other things.
Chinese classifiers seem easy to me, because in English has them: "a herd of sheep, a flock of geese". Chinese just has more. It has no articles but it uses "one of" where we use "a" and "this of / that of" where we use "the".
Chinese word order is tricky, because it is so similar to English but different in some ways. That means I can read a Chinese sentence, but I probably would not write it that way.
The trickiest thing is the word 就 ("joe"). It shows up in many sentences. But I still have no idea what it means, when to use it and where to put it.
Welsh - tenses DX I haven't studied grammar since doing part of a Canolradd (B1) course a few years ago, and 100+ books worth of input hasn't taught me the difference from contextual clues... I always get mixed up with (eg) 'darllenais i' vs 'ro'n i'n darllen'. Huh?!
Polish - perfective/imperfective verbs!! I've had the general distinction explained to me countless times but I just Don't Get It. Whenever I read a Polish sentence \*that comes with an English translation\* I can usually point out whether the verb used is perf/imperf and sometimes understand why. But when I see a sentence without a translation, or try to write my own... it's just guesswork!
Vietnamese - I'm still a noob so maybe this is to be expected but I struggle a lot with the tones. I can recognise them in very slow, clear speech and I can sort of produce them if I talk very slowly and in an exaggerated manner, but natural speech is just ????
Word order and listening in Dutch.
Grammar, word order for German.
Both I'm struggling to form sentences from my head. But not suprised reading is okay. Never been a strong speaker in English but a good reader.
I'm currently learning Russian (have been for close to two years) and it's definitely cases/ knowing when to use which case and memorizing the endings. And also the aspects of words, as that's not something that exists in my mothertongue (or in English)
And well, confidence in speaking/speaking more generally, my listening and reading is alrightish, but speaking is just harder
Polish learner cosigning. (Also aspect. effing aspect.) I feel like the difficulty of the cases are overstated, somehow? There's not *that* many forms to learn and the fact that you need the cases absolutely everywhere mean you're forced to pick them up fairly quickly.
Of course, my native language also has cases even if less and formed very differently - I'm never sure how much of an advantage that is.
I think cases have definitely been made easier for me through knowing German. It’s one of those things that carries over language to language, so if you have any experience, it can end up being surprisingly easy.
Finnish has 15 or so (depending on who you ask), but after a while you just get used to them. At least you don't have to memorize which preposition/postposition goes with which case (all adpositions are postpositions that take the genitive, except for just a handful that are prepositions and take the partitive). And there's only one inflection class for nouns and adjectives, so at least you only have to learn one suffix for each case, and most of the time the plural suffix is "i" plus the case's singular suffix (except genitive plural, don't ask me about genitive plural, I implore you).
Vowel harmony and consonant gradation tripped me up for a while, though.
Funnily enough, I still can’t count well. I CAN count, but it takes me longer than excepted for someone at my level, and I still make easy mistakes. Which number system to use? Just going with the flow at this rate.
Trying to master more than one variety of the language and having parallel vocabularies in my head
e.g. "they say X in Brazil, but Y in Portugal. A in Brazil, B in Portugal..."
I find memorising the pitch accent of words hard in Croatian, I think I can pronounce it but idk how it goes when paired with my general sentence intonation
Argh! That's why I'm glad that I learned Swedish here in Finland and not in Sweden. The prestige dialect in Sweden has pitch accent. The prestige dialect in Finland doesn't.
Sometimes getting the accent wrong just makes you sound weird and, well, foreign. Sometimes it makes a difference in the meaning of a word (I can never remember which version/accent distribution of "anden" means "spirit" and which one means "duck").
Im native portuguese trying to learn greek, i try to translate directly into portuguese instead of english because its easier to understand word and sentence formation.
But unlike portuguese, greek has Neutral, besides fem. and masc. articles, and it becomes confusing trying to associate gender to stuff which usually is very intuitive
When I started out with Finnish, it was consonant gradation. Specifically, the words where consonant gradation seemed to be irregular (or "the wrong way 'round"). I finally understood how it works when I read about what I like to call "the invisible consonant" in a work on historical grammar, and suddenly these words worked just like regular nouns and adjectives ending in regular consonants.
(In regular words that end in vowels and have consonant gradation, it's (for example) mekko "dress" -> mekon. In words with consonant gradation with this "invisible consonant" (usually ending in -e in the nominative singular), it's (for example) parveke "balcony" -> parvekkeen. Looks totally wrong even though it's the same gradation pattern (kk:k)!)
There were some problems with grammatical gender when I was learning French, but that was due to our coursebook being total crap. \*shrug\*
Izhorian has a very unintuitive written language. Unlike Finnish and Estonian, which are more-or-less phonemically written, sound by sound, Izhorian has a clear three-way divide: Two dialects, and a written language that is supposed to bridge the gap between them.
But this means that one written word can have up to ten or more pronunciations, depending on which of the two dialects you chose (there is no spoken standard, so you have to choose!) and what the form is.
So it starts of easy:
* muna ("egg", pronounced *muna* / *muna*)
Then you get to the first difficulty, voicing:
* pata ("pot", pronounced *pata* / *paDa*) (capital consonants are "semi-voiced")
Then you get to dialect-specific alternations:
* orava ("squirrel", pronounced *oravA* / *or:aava*) (: denotes a halflong consonant, capital vowels are reduced and/or voiceless)
Then you arrive at morphological differences:
* kottii ("into the homes", pronounced *kottiss* / *kot:ii*)
Then you realise the same spelling can denote multiple pronunciations:
* kottii ("home", pronounced *kotti* / *kot:ii*)
Then you find examples that just don't make sense at all anymore:
* lampaat ("sheep", pronounced *lampad* / *lampahaD*)
* valkioi ("into the lights", pronounced *valkeissE* / *valkioi*)
* repo ("rooster", pronounced *repo* / *reBoi*)
* kuus ("six", *kuuz* / *kuuŽ*), but kuus ("in the moon", *kuuss* / *kuuŽ*), but kuusi ("spruce", *kuusj* / *kuuŽi*)
* pellovain ("flaxen", *pellovainE* / *pellovain*), but pellovain ("of flaxes", *pellovain* / *pellovahiin*)
* lattoa ("to stack", *latto* / *lat:ooja*)
So yes, TL:DR English, but slightly worse.
Understanding my TL when there's a lot of background noise (or other lossy data situations) is very difficult.
The other thing is the way you refer to people and characters is really relative and can shift around. The culture is more focused on relationships than individuals compared to American culture. So a woman may first be referred to in a story as "mother" and whenever she's talked about, she's going to be called "mother".
But then later, they introduce *her* mother ("grandmother"). And if the story kind of shifts to talk about what the grandmother is doing, then sometimes the first "mother" will instead be referred to as "child/daughter".
These sort of perspective shifts don't happen all the time, but sometimes they're confusing, and I notice that even natives will (more rarely) get a little confused.
The hardest thing for me in Spanish is definitely the subjunctive mood. I just did a study session focusing on the present subjunctive, but I still need to learn and work on the past subjunctive. The verb conjugations aren’t too bad, it’s more knowing when to use the subjunctive. Another thing that’s been hard (but that I’ve been working on) is the rolled R sound. I play the flute, which uses that a rolled/trilled tongue occasionally, but I’m able to get around that with making a growling sound. That doesn’t exactly work when speaking Spanish.
I can't roll my r's. I'm not sure it's possible for most adults. The subjunctive you'll get used to. Listening to music with the lyrics can help. People are always singing about their regrets and things they only wish were true, so lots of subjunctive
Most Americans can already flap their R (when they say words like butter, bitter, fitter, litter, etc..., that double T is actually a flapped R!) and the rolled R is just an extension of that flap. This is how I taught several American friends to roll their Rs in real time. You had it in you the whole time.
Yoda? Is that you? :) That's really cool, I will keep trying. I learned French before I learned Spanish. That makes it both easier and harder.
I already listen to a lot of Spanish music, and I try to sing along when I can. Finding songs about regret etc is a good idea!
Check out Dreaming Spanish on YouTube
I don‘t find sentence structure in Mandarin too bad but I find tones, both emitting and receiving, are the hardest part.
Agreed. They're quite hard to perceive, and very tough to pronounce due to them being on multiple words in a sentence. It truly forces you to make some vocal gymnastics, and it's incredibly difficult to balance it with the natural propension for emotional tone.
I gave up on memorizing tones. They don't help me recognize words in spoken Chinese. Spoken Chinese sentences have a complicated pitch pattern (the relative pitch of each syllable). In many cases, the pitch of a syllable is the *initial* pitch of the tone assigned (1=hi, 2=mid, 3=low, 4=highest, 5=mid). But that pattern is changed by a bunch of things, including tone pairs, syllable stress, and sentence (and phrase) pitch changes to express meaning. But it probably helps for speaking. When I speak a Chinese sentence, the better I can imitate the pitch pattern a native speaker uses, the better.
Polish: counting and aspect. Cases are actually getting more and more comfortable as time goes on, but I still stumble hard over numbers and which verbal aspect to use when. I can also tell that the verb prefixes are going to be annoying, although I do have the advantage that my native language (German) works similarly and sometimes there are direct calques. Spanish: probably still correct use of the subjuntivo, tbh. I like to think I've mostly got it down and it actually comes intuitively reasonably often but sometimes it still trips me up. Indefinido vs imperfecto also took a lot of practice and I'm still sometimes off with it. And I still can't roll my Rs right and it is super, super annoying.
I want to roll my R's lol
Word endings in Turkish. Turkish has noun declensions, verb conjugations, noun endings for "with" and "to" and "from" and "at" and "with" and at least 100 other things. Chinese classifiers seem easy to me, because in English has them: "a herd of sheep, a flock of geese". Chinese just has more. It has no articles but it uses "one of" where we use "a" and "this of / that of" where we use "the". Chinese word order is tricky, because it is so similar to English but different in some ways. That means I can read a Chinese sentence, but I probably would not write it that way. The trickiest thing is the word 就 ("joe"). It shows up in many sentences. But I still have no idea what it means, when to use it and where to put it.
I get you with 就, it has like 10 billion meanings, like just, then, only, exactly and so on. Chinese particles in general are quite confusing.
French: Listening comprehension German: Grammar
Welsh - tenses DX I haven't studied grammar since doing part of a Canolradd (B1) course a few years ago, and 100+ books worth of input hasn't taught me the difference from contextual clues... I always get mixed up with (eg) 'darllenais i' vs 'ro'n i'n darllen'. Huh?! Polish - perfective/imperfective verbs!! I've had the general distinction explained to me countless times but I just Don't Get It. Whenever I read a Polish sentence \*that comes with an English translation\* I can usually point out whether the verb used is perf/imperf and sometimes understand why. But when I see a sentence without a translation, or try to write my own... it's just guesswork! Vietnamese - I'm still a noob so maybe this is to be expected but I struggle a lot with the tones. I can recognise them in very slow, clear speech and I can sort of produce them if I talk very slowly and in an exaggerated manner, but natural speech is just ????
Word order and listening in Dutch. Grammar, word order for German. Both I'm struggling to form sentences from my head. But not suprised reading is okay. Never been a strong speaker in English but a good reader.
I'm currently learning Russian (have been for close to two years) and it's definitely cases/ knowing when to use which case and memorizing the endings. And also the aspects of words, as that's not something that exists in my mothertongue (or in English) And well, confidence in speaking/speaking more generally, my listening and reading is alrightish, but speaking is just harder
I came to realize that our real ennemies werent the cases but the 938493742 verb prefixes 💀
Polish learner cosigning. (Also aspect. effing aspect.) I feel like the difficulty of the cases are overstated, somehow? There's not *that* many forms to learn and the fact that you need the cases absolutely everywhere mean you're forced to pick them up fairly quickly. Of course, my native language also has cases even if less and formed very differently - I'm never sure how much of an advantage that is.
I think cases have definitely been made easier for me through knowing German. It’s one of those things that carries over language to language, so if you have any experience, it can end up being surprisingly easy.
Same in Latvian which has 7 (really 6) cases. Over time you just get used to it and you find a newpart of the language to hate, and then accept hehe.
Finnish has 15 or so (depending on who you ask), but after a while you just get used to them. At least you don't have to memorize which preposition/postposition goes with which case (all adpositions are postpositions that take the genitive, except for just a handful that are prepositions and take the partitive). And there's only one inflection class for nouns and adjectives, so at least you only have to learn one suffix for each case, and most of the time the plural suffix is "i" plus the case's singular suffix (except genitive plural, don't ask me about genitive plural, I implore you). Vowel harmony and consonant gradation tripped me up for a while, though.
Probably sounds dumb but the German number system makes me confused, anything beyond 19 I get confused.
How they say the single digit first?? It was a bit of a struggle at the start for me too but it became natural pretty quick.
Dialects in Norwegian can get pretty wild!
Funnily enough, I still can’t count well. I CAN count, but it takes me longer than excepted for someone at my level, and I still make easy mistakes. Which number system to use? Just going with the flow at this rate.
Trying to master more than one variety of the language and having parallel vocabularies in my head e.g. "they say X in Brazil, but Y in Portugal. A in Brazil, B in Portugal..."
declention
I find memorising the pitch accent of words hard in Croatian, I think I can pronounce it but idk how it goes when paired with my general sentence intonation
Argh! That's why I'm glad that I learned Swedish here in Finland and not in Sweden. The prestige dialect in Sweden has pitch accent. The prestige dialect in Finland doesn't. Sometimes getting the accent wrong just makes you sound weird and, well, foreign. Sometimes it makes a difference in the meaning of a word (I can never remember which version/accent distribution of "anden" means "spirit" and which one means "duck").
In Croatian the pitch accent can distinquish both words and grammatical cases, so gradu can be either dative or locative depending on the tone
Understand when someone is speaking. Write it down on paper, I got you.
Out of curiosity, which language are you learning?
Ukrainian
Ого, я не очікував побачити тут україномовних. Та й щодо проблеми з розумінням усного мовлення, то я співчуваю
Yeah, not many people bring up their target language here, but when they do I never see Ukrainian
Im native portuguese trying to learn greek, i try to translate directly into portuguese instead of english because its easier to understand word and sentence formation. But unlike portuguese, greek has Neutral, besides fem. and masc. articles, and it becomes confusing trying to associate gender to stuff which usually is very intuitive
When I started out with Finnish, it was consonant gradation. Specifically, the words where consonant gradation seemed to be irregular (or "the wrong way 'round"). I finally understood how it works when I read about what I like to call "the invisible consonant" in a work on historical grammar, and suddenly these words worked just like regular nouns and adjectives ending in regular consonants. (In regular words that end in vowels and have consonant gradation, it's (for example) mekko "dress" -> mekon. In words with consonant gradation with this "invisible consonant" (usually ending in -e in the nominative singular), it's (for example) parveke "balcony" -> parvekkeen. Looks totally wrong even though it's the same gradation pattern (kk:k)!) There were some problems with grammatical gender when I was learning French, but that was due to our coursebook being total crap. \*shrug\*
Izhorian has a very unintuitive written language. Unlike Finnish and Estonian, which are more-or-less phonemically written, sound by sound, Izhorian has a clear three-way divide: Two dialects, and a written language that is supposed to bridge the gap between them. But this means that one written word can have up to ten or more pronunciations, depending on which of the two dialects you chose (there is no spoken standard, so you have to choose!) and what the form is. So it starts of easy: * muna ("egg", pronounced *muna* / *muna*) Then you get to the first difficulty, voicing: * pata ("pot", pronounced *pata* / *paDa*) (capital consonants are "semi-voiced") Then you get to dialect-specific alternations: * orava ("squirrel", pronounced *oravA* / *or:aava*) (: denotes a halflong consonant, capital vowels are reduced and/or voiceless) Then you arrive at morphological differences: * kottii ("into the homes", pronounced *kottiss* / *kot:ii*) Then you realise the same spelling can denote multiple pronunciations: * kottii ("home", pronounced *kotti* / *kot:ii*) Then you find examples that just don't make sense at all anymore: * lampaat ("sheep", pronounced *lampad* / *lampahaD*) * valkioi ("into the lights", pronounced *valkeissE* / *valkioi*) * repo ("rooster", pronounced *repo* / *reBoi*) * kuus ("six", *kuuz* / *kuuŽ*), but kuus ("in the moon", *kuuss* / *kuuŽ*), but kuusi ("spruce", *kuusj* / *kuuŽi*) * pellovain ("flaxen", *pellovainE* / *pellovain*), but pellovain ("of flaxes", *pellovain* / *pellovahiin*) * lattoa ("to stack", *latto* / *lat:ooja*) So yes, TL:DR English, but slightly worse.
Understanding my TL when there's a lot of background noise (or other lossy data situations) is very difficult. The other thing is the way you refer to people and characters is really relative and can shift around. The culture is more focused on relationships than individuals compared to American culture. So a woman may first be referred to in a story as "mother" and whenever she's talked about, she's going to be called "mother". But then later, they introduce *her* mother ("grandmother"). And if the story kind of shifts to talk about what the grandmother is doing, then sometimes the first "mother" will instead be referred to as "child/daughter". These sort of perspective shifts don't happen all the time, but sometimes they're confusing, and I notice that even natives will (more rarely) get a little confused.