SVO versus SOV: Speaking a language with a word order that differs from that which
is burned into your brain presents a challenge to the learner of a "significantly" foreign language. Both English and
French have roughly similar word orders, and make similar use of verb conjugation. Ok, sometimes the French put the
adjective after the modified noun (un feu rouge, a red light) and the object before the verb (je t'aime, I love you) but
both English and French mostly stick to a Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure. That helps in learning.
Although French pronunciation is difficult for the monotone-challenged like me, face it, French is relatively easy for English speakers
to learn to read and to write.
Now Japanese and Cherokee use a Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure ("He it did" instead of "He
did it"). As you learn these languages you may find yourself translating sentences into English in parts,
and then rearranging the parts. They say you eventually get past this.
Inflection: Then there is inflection. This is where a word changes meaning
by changing form. English is only slightly inflected, with inflection limited to verb conjugation for number and person.
In French, nouns have gender and adjectives and nouns must agree. Though gender neutral, Japanese is very inflected,
where even the adjectives are conjugated with time tenses and negation. Cherokee is extremely inflected where a single
word can include the subject, object and verb. Iroquoian languages such as Cherokee are so inflected that in WW2
the US military used Navajo as a secret code, impossible to crack without learning Navajo.
So do you think Japanese and Chinese are closely related languages? Think again. Chinese is
one of the least inflected languages in common use. This makes written Japanese interesting. Perhaps you know
that Japanese borrowed the Chinese writing. These non-phonetic symbols serve just fine in Chinese. But how do
you depict conjugation with these pictures? To handle this, Japanese developed a syllabic alphabet to tack
sounds onto the end of the pictures. Written Japanese then is a mixture of pictures and alphabet.
In the Japanese sentence above perhaps you can see that some characters look like Chinese characters, and some less detailed
characters look like letters.
Now, the Japanese sentence above says "I understand why spoken English is difficult for the Japanese" or
more exactly "Why the Japanese for spoken English difficult understand." So, when you are speaking with a Japanese
person who is laboring to speak English, I hope you can have a sense of their struggle to speak your language.
