this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
128 points (96.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

45624 readers
1217 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Like, English is a famously difficult language, and Spanish is supposed to be easier. But babies learn English or any language instinctually.

So do babies learn faster if the native language is easier, or do they acquire language at a constant rate depending on their brain development or whatever?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Since the main question here has already been answered by the Danish/Norwegian post, I would like to address something different. My native language is Spanish, and I completely disagree with you.

English is a lot easier to learn to speak than Spanish. Spanish has everything English has, plus:

  • Conjugations (corro, corres, corre, corremos, corréis, corren, corrés, corría, corrías, corríamos, corríais, corrían, corrí, corriste, corrió, corrimos, etc, etc, etc vs run, runs, ran, running)
  • Gendered words (La Tienda, Las Tiendas, El Pape, Los Papeles l vs The shop, The shops, The Paper, The Papers)
  • Purposefully misgendered words in certain contexts (i.e. Feminine words that use the masculine article in some occasions: El alarma, Los alarmas)
  • Particles that change because of sound (Ostras o mejillones/mejillones u ostras : oysters or / mussels/mussels or ousters; insectos y arañas/arañas e insectos : insects and spiders/spiders and insects)
  • Extra sounds (hard R as in "Raton")
  • Temporary being verb (Ella es rubia/ella está rubia VS she is blonde/she is currently blonde)

The complications in English are later, after you know how to speak and have to learn how to write it, but we're talking babies learning here. Spanish writing is much easier than English because it's very phonetic, but just the conjugations are enough to drive English speakers insane trying to learn them because in English you use constructions to achieve the same effect, e.g. I run: yo corro; I ran: yo corrí; I would run: yo correría; I will run: yo correré; I used to run: yo corría; so that I would run; para que yo corra; so that I could run: para que yo corriera; run!: corre!; don't run!: no corras!. Different verbs would use the same construction in English but may be different sounds for different verbs in Spanish: e.g. I ran, I walked, I had vs Yo corrí, yo caminé yo tuve (and yes, I get that using run is a bad example here since it's irregular, but it's only one of a handful, whereas Spanish has different conjugations for different verbs plus some irregular ones)

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think this stuff is tricky for an older language learner, but for a baby I think they would just learn it without thinking about it.

In English you have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things and in Spanish you don't have that as much.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, we don't know the rules to conjugations, we just know them. But you know what's faster than that? Not having that to begin with.

In Spanish we also have lots of words that sound the same but mean different things, for example Punto means dot, point, spot, stitch, stop (in the meantime of bus stop). Plus, I would argue that's not a problem when you're learning the language, in fact the opposite is true, having many words to mean the same thing makes it hard to learn since the same thing can be said in a multitude of ways, and it might be because English is not my first language, but I find Spanish to have lots more synonyms or entirety different ways of saying the same thing.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can't speak to Spanish, but in English and French anyway, there are many ways to say almost the same thing, but they all have slight variations and nuances and meaning. That's why poetry is so fun.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, that's the same with most languages. My point is that being proficient in several languages I find English text a lot more repetitive, whereas Spanish text has multiple turns of phrases used to avoid repetition, which also makes it a lot harder to learn (although I don't think we expect kids to know many synonyms for stuff, and children books tend to stick to simpler construction of phrases).

The things I've seen people point to English to claim it's hard are not really needed to be fluent in speaking the language (which is what kids do).

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

The main difficulty I guess is more for reading and writing than speaking I guess... when you are encountering a new word, you don't know how it is going to be spelled or pronounced, and it can be difficult to predict what it will mean sometimes because of all the different roots and pre-postfixes. You just have to learn it and remember it. There is no overarching system like in Spanish, there are many competing systems.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, I agree, learning to write English is harder than to write Spanish, in fact Spanish has the most phonetic writing of all the languages I know. But your question was about babies learning, which is solely spoken language, you only learn writing after you're already a fluent speaker.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 23 hours ago

Yes the original question was about how long it would take to be able to speak, and you're right I don't really know which would take longer, English or Spanish.

I learned that Danish takes a long time though lol.

[–] Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 122 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yes, to an extent, but I don't think it has to do with grammar as much as pronunciation. Norwegian (bokmål) and danish are almost indistinguishable when written down, but spoken Danish is pronounced very weirdly (a lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants that causes it to sound like the speaker has gotten drunk on their way back from getting a root canal and is currently struggling to eat a hot potato). Despite Norwegian having a massive range of regional dialects, Norwegian kids learn to speak a lot quicker than danish kids. Largely because danish kids just don't understand what they're hearing for longer. The Danes have to subtitle their own TV programmes because they don't really understand each other. It's a fucking mess. Norwegian kids understand Swedish before danish kids understand danish.

Here is a short documentary on the danish language

[–] bonenode@piefed.social 81 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It sounds like what you said is a joke, but just wanted to underline that this has even been subject to scientific study, e.g. mentioned here: https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 27 points 2 days ago

This answers exactly what I was asking, thanks!

[–] Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Also I remember reading a newspaper account of a danish supermarket that actually ordered 1000 litres of milk by mistake. And everyone in Norway found it hilarious, because it happened after the sketch was aired.

Apparently it's happened a couple of times

[–] Griffus@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No one mention the Norwegian butter crisis!

[–] Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That was rough. It happened right before Christmas too. People were scalping butter on finn.no and supermarkets had to import butter from France.

[–] Kjell@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Didn't people smuggled butter from Sweden to Norway? Imaging having that on your criminal record.

Probably. I was living in Bergen at the time, so it wouldn't have been practical for me. I make British Christmas food anyway, which is a lot more heavily spiced than Norwegian Christmas food. So it works to just use baking margarine.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

a lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants

This has been my experience learning French. The written language and the spoken one are pretty wildly out of tune, with up to ~5 letters at the ends of some words either not pronounced at all, or heavily swallowed.

Learning the pronunciation of Castellano (i.e. a sister language) was vastly easier for me.

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe I have a little bias as a Spaniard, but I swear languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.

I could give you any Spanish word you don't know and you wouldn't miss pronounce it.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 0 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.

Yeah, I don't know enough about French grammar and pronunciation rules, but I think part of the problem comes from them trying to maintain a written language that got left in the dust by the spoken language ages ago. So instead of updating the written one, they chose to 'preserve history' and add a landslide of little rules explaining separate cases, not just for pronunciation, but in a hugely systemic way. Native French-speakers have actually complained to me about that occasionally.

I could give you any Spanish word you don’t know and you wouldn’t miss pronounce it.

I love that about Castellano, just that some regions speed it up so much that I can barely catch it.

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 13 hours ago

Oh, dialects not only sped it up, they skip parts of words too. Funnily enough, I'm from the region where our dialect is to over pronounce consonants, and thus the easiest to understand haha.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] False@lemmy.world 32 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ataturk famously switched Turkey to a modified Latin alphabet instead of an Arabic-based one in order to boost literacy rates. Combined with a huge push to educate people on the alphabet it seemed to be successful.

[–] FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Based. Many are saying polish would make more sense in a Cyrillic alphabet. I couldn't say

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I'm of the view that a bunch of digraphs would be reduced to single letters if Polish used the Cyrillic script. But some commenters noted that other letters don't map that nicely. However, then again, variations of Cyrillic across Eastern Europe and Central Asia include a range of letters that aren't in Russian, for example, so idk why Polish couldn't use those or add a few of its own.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

IIRC (and heavily paraphrasing here as this isn't my specialty to say the least) most languages end up having about the same information density because most humans process language at the same speed. Some languages are spoken faster, but have less density in information, where others are slower but have higher information density. In The end it evens out, more or less

From that, without looking at other facts, I'd guess that babies learn it pretty much at the same speed, no?

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

you into linguistics?

[–] Duckytoast@sh.itjust.works 28 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I remember reading somewhere that Danish children on average learn to speak slower than others.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] HumbleBragger@piefed.social 8 points 2 days ago

English is an easy language, easier than Spanish IMO. If the child lives in a context where the language is spoken all the time doesn't matter when you talk about a first language. 

[–] Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 days ago (10 children)

Why would Spanish be easier than English?
I would judge it to be slightly harder because of gendered words.

[–] ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 17 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Spanish is easier in the sense it's more regular. Genders don't had that much complexity if they are applied consistently, especially when you stack them against all the irregularities in English. That being said, and without claiming to be an expert, I think the consensus is that language acquisition time is similar across languages, but the time to master the language is related to how predictable/regular it's grammar and vocabulary formation is.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] Witchfire@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Spanish is phonetic, what you see is what you get. There's a few rules around the pronunciation of the letter c and (q)u/h not being pronounced, but it's otherwise pretty standard. Gender in Spanish isn't that difficult.

English is a complete mess of a bastard language with more exceptions than rules.

[–] DonAntonioMagino@feddit.nl 4 points 2 days ago

This doesn’t have anything to do with language acquisition by babies, though. Spelling is a completely different subject than natural, spoken, language, and obviously not something babies will come into contact with.

[–] Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

l am German and have learned French as my second foreign language.
French's two genders are slightly nightmarish and German's three genders are no better.
Similar for the slavish languages with genders I had a peak into. I expected this to also be similar for Spanish, at least compared to English that I perceived to be quite easy to learn.
Interesting to hear otherwise.
So I now wish that Spanish had been an option at my schools. :-)

[–] Witchfire@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Je connais aussi le français :) C'est un peu plus difficile que l'espagnol à cause des lettres qu'on ne prononce jamais, mais pas beaucoup en fait

* Spanish and English are my native tongues, French is extra

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›