Comments on: Korean in Mongolia

by: Alistar

Thu, 15 May 2008 13:04:28 +0000

Japanese, Korean, Mongolian people have identical sentence structure.

by: Ben

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:47:24 +0000

I think that in general, by picking up languages that have certain structural characteristics (such as tone, case, and fixed word orders), it makes learning another language with similar characteristics much easier. While I had an extremely difficult time at first dealing with the SOV word order of Amharic (I kept leaving off the verb at the end of the sentence!) once I had it fairly well, dealing with it in Kurdish and Hindi was much simpler.

-Ben

by: JREL

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:32:26 +0000

@BG: Possibly, but more people are learning English than pursuing the “American Dream”… :-)

And while structural similarity may well have a positive effect on language learning, surely actual structural complexity far outweighs this. Presumably speakers of tone languages have greater facility learning other tone languages than speakers of non-tonal ones. But while speakers of Chinese may do a fair job learning !Xóõ (or even Yi, to take a related language), they would probably do an even better job learning Tok Pisin.

by: Brian

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:29:14 +0000

Japanese was the most commonly studied foreign language after German in my University in Istanbul, Turkey. (The university was in English).
Turks pick up Japanese grammar easily.

by: BG

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:04:48 +0000

If a Japanese person finds Turkish easier, then a Mongolian should find Korean easier, since Korean is more likely than Japanese to be Altaic (at least from what I’ve read) and is probably closer to Mongolian than Japanese is to Turkish in any case.

This reminds me of immigrants seeking the “American dream”. It seems as though more Mongolians pursuing the “Korean dream” are learning Korean than people pursuing the “American Dream” are English.