{"id":62,"date":"2006-05-17T17:31:48","date_gmt":"2006-05-17T16:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/17\/relative-difficulty\/"},"modified":"2006-05-17T17:31:48","modified_gmt":"2006-05-17T16:31:48","slug":"relative-difficulty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=62","title":{"rendered":"Relative difficulty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On a typical day, I listen to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rte.ie\/rnag\/\">Raidi\u00f3 na Gaeltachta<\/a> in the morning, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/scotland\/alba\/\">Radio nan Gaidheal<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/cymru\/\">Radio Cymru<\/a> in the afternoon. Of the languages spoken on these radio stations &#8211; Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh respectively, I understand Welsh the best, and the other two quite well, though my Irish is stronger than my Scottish Gaelic. I find that after struggling to understand the two Gaelics, Welsh seems much easier.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly if I listen to Cantonese or Taiwanese, and then Mandarin, the Mandarin seems so much easier. My strongest Sinitic language is Mandarin, followed by Taiwanese then Cantonese. Although I don&#8217;t understand much Taiwanese, I&#8217;m much more familiar with it than with Cantonese as I&#8217;ve spent a lot longer in Taiwan than in Hong Kong or other Cantonese-speaking areas.<\/p>\n<p>Among my Romance languages, French is my strongest, followed by Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Spanish becomes much easier to follow if I&#8217;ve been listening to Portuguese or Italian first.<\/p>\n<p>This phenomenon applies not just to languages &#8211; after trying to juggle six or seven balls, juggling five or fewer seems like a piece of cake in comparison, and relatively simple skating moves seem much easier after attempting more complex ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On a typical day, I listen to Raidi\u00f3 na Gaeltachta in the morning, and Radio nan Gaidheal and Radio Cymru in the afternoon. Of the languages spoken on these radio stations &#8211; Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh respectively, I understand Welsh the best, and the other two quite well, though my Irish is stronger than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}