19
votes
Accepted
Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language?
Yes. According to Wikipedia, Esperanto has 350 native speakers (data 1996). There is also a story about a linguist only speaking to his son in Klingon, but even though the child picked it up somewhat, ...
- 1,705
9
votes
Accepted
Which features make a language easier to learn?
Difficult question. I think regularity would speed up learning, as children during language learning overgeneralise (see experiments with English past tense endings). Thus instead of learning the ...
- 3,331
8
votes
Accepted
Features of unlearnable languages
If you search for the researchers mentioned in the article, you can find some of their research papers. In those, they describe their methodology. In one paper that I looked at briefly, for example, ...
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7
votes
Features of unlearnable languages
Original Fith is a stack-based conlang (LIFO, reverse polish notation) and considered to be unspeakable in real-time since in order to speak good Fith you need to be able to remember more parts and ...
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7
votes
Features of unlearnable languages
I've seen a paper that children have a lot of trouble learning nonconservative determiners.
For instance, "every" is a conservative determiner because every dog is brown is equivalent to every dog is ...
- 351
7
votes
Accepted
Are there convincing examples that auxiliary constructed languages are in fact easier to learn?
Some auxiliary languages are easier to learn than natural languages. There have been many experiments that show that Esperanto is both easier to learn than other languages, and also makes learning ...
- 1,384
7
votes
Is there anyone that has a conlang as their first/only language?
I’m going to try to avoid any kind of argument about politics, religion or what does or does not count as a “conlang,” and just give this as a historical case that I think is relevant to the spirit of ...
- 281
5
votes
Which features make a language easier to learn?
Children learning an L1 have most of the same challenges as people in general learning an L2. Children learning a conlang, will have all of the problems of children learning a non-community language ...
- 1,661
5
votes
What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
It depends very much who your target audience is.
It is easier to learn languages that are similar to your own; as a German speaker, learning English is not that hard, apart from the grammatical ...
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5
votes
What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
Measuring Easiness
I agree with Oliver that we measure language difficulty based on how hard it is to learn from a given native language. However, I still believe that we can come up with language ...
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3
votes
What features make a language easier to learn for people learning it as a second language?
I agree with everything Oliver Mason said.
EDIT: After some more thought...for easiness that is only easy when in the presence of a first language, the question has the answer, which is: languages ...
- 1,661
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