On Gender (Linguistic and Otherwise)

(Here we are with more linguistics stuff, but still flavoured with a bit of the old social justice angle. I'm sure you'll cope, right?)

The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."

This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...


Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]

The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.

A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)

Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.

This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.

Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...

A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").


Rooting About [link]

The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:

Noun	Stem	Gender	Meaning
annus	annō	masculine	"year"
bellum	bellō	neuter	"war"
mēnsa	mēnsā	feminine	"table"
spēs	spē	feminine	"hope"
gradus	gradū	masculine	"step"
genū	genū	neuter	"knee"

You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.

What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.


Typecasting [link]

If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?

If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.

The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:

I	-	Animate objects, men
II	-	Women, water, fire, violence
III	-	Edible fruit and vegetables
IV	-	Everything else

The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?

There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.

It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").

The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.


You Are What You Speak [link]

Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.

Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".

As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".

There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?

We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.

You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.

This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.


In Summary...

What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.

Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...

(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)

On the Hardest Language in the World

(It's a question that I see asked a lot in language learning communities online, so I thought I'd give answering it a go. Ditto the number of languages I "know".)

If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)

My degree is, specifically, in French and Russian, but one of my hobbies is gaining acquaintance with new languages. A few years ago I made a list of all the languages that I'd like to be familiar with; it comes to around thirty. Thirty languages? I hear you exclaim, How the hell are you supposed to learn thirty languages? All things considered, I don't think it's such an unreasonable goal. Here's why.

Dot-to-dot [link]

Languages don't exist in isolation. Well duh, I imagine you'd say (looks like you're in for a lot of ventriloquising - sorry about that). But what I mean is, languages exist in clumps (or rather clades) - a language that exists on its lonesome from its particular line is quite a rare occurrence. Let's take English: English is a Germanic language that has been radically reshaped by its long contact first with the native Welsh-related Brythonic (back when it was Anglo-Saxon, leaving us with such relatively unusual features such as the continuous/progressive aspect, i.e. I am saying vs I say) and then with French and Latin, resulting amongst other things in our staggeringly varied vocabulary (once your language gets a taste for filching other people's words it will usually go out of its way to do so, resulting in today's English speakers using loans from Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian together without a second thought: The admiral's on the bamboo veranda. A few too many glasses of punch, I reckon. He's asking for ketchup? I'll make some coffee...).

As a Germanic language, English is clearly related to German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (don’t forget Scots!) etc, as you can tell from the fact that knowing English you can probably grok Hast du meinen Vater gesehen? Wir waren neben dem Marktplatz even if you haven't studied German. Similarly, Germanic is just one branch of the Indo-European, the language family that most of the languages of India and Europe are descended from (duhoy). If you take a list of the core vocabulary of a language (kinship terms, body parts, pronouns and irregular verbs, common plants and animals and so on) you get a Swadesh list (named for their originator, American linguist and McCarthy victim Morris Swadesh) - if you compare them across the IE languages the common base is clear. Take the number "one". One reconstruction of the original Proto-Indo-European language root is *óynos: this gives rise to the Latin ūnus and derived Romance languages like French un, Italian/Spanish uno (Italic), German eins, Old English ān (Germanic), Lithuanian víenas, Russian odín, Polish jeden (Balto-Slavic), Persian yak, Sanskrit éka, and derived languages like Hindi ek, Punjabi ika (Indo-Iranian).

I don't mean to hit you over the head with sudden tidings of Indo-European reconstruction (even though it's seriously cool, being what the linguistic community was mostly up to in the 19th century, including famous names like The Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure) - my point is that languages are a lot more interconnected than you might expect. Just knowing English gives you a head-start on cognates (shared roots) in German and Romance languages, not to mention that a lot of loan words these days are flooding in from English, despite what self-appointed regulatory bodies like the Académie française have to say about it.

My language list is organised around this idea: for each language branch, I (somewhat arbitrarily) picked two modern languages and one ancient. So for Italic, I had Latin, French and Italian, and for Balto-Slavic Russian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent of Latin). I also inserted Lithuanian into the group there, partly because the Lithuanians of my acquaintance usually take a pretty dim view of being grouped with the Slavs (they're Balts), and partly because Lithuanians (and neighbouring Latvians) are the IE version of the coelacanth. Language change just doesn't seem to have appealed to them from roughly the same era as Sanskrit onwards, making them lots of fun for the philologically-inclined. But I digress (more than usual).

The thing is, adding the other two corners to the each language group is nowhere near as much work as the first one was. You find that instead of starting from scratch with each new language, you can flick switches on what you already know and slot it into the new one. Learning the grammar of Italian, for instance, if you've got French, is largely working out how to turn your French into Italian forms. So avoir (have) goes j'ai, tu as, il a in French, and in Italian avere goes io ho, tu hai, lui ha. (Actually, you don't need the personal pronouns in Italian - this linguistic switch is called being pro-drop). I also get the feeling that the fact that English has branched so far away from the other Germanic languages makes us overestimate the distance between members of the same branch in general. (Might also explain our reticence to class Scots as a separate language, if we're going on English vs German as our benchmark!) 

School's Out Forever [link]

Another thing that I think puts people off is their memories of enforced languages at school. I've already pontificated on the difference between child- and adult-level learning, but in case you missed it or don't have the strength to look at it again, my idea is that learning stuff voluntarily as an adult is in a different league to learning as a child. Your increased attention span, enthusiasm and access to materials (if you grew up before the Internet was properly a thing, which I'm hoping for the sake of my self-image is the case) mean your bored, school-age self being force-fed verb tables doesn't stand a chance.

Do you have an interest? Look at your language's Wikipedia pages on the subject. Browse news articles and blogs. Hook up with some native speakers, online or in person via stuff like Couchsurfing or Facebook. Do language exchanges - if you have native or near native-level English (which I imagine you must do to persevere through this lot), you're made for life as far as languages to teach people go. Everyone wants to improve their English: talk in English for an hour, and in return talk in your native's language for an hour afterwards. That way, you're both getting roughly the same out of the experience. Also, having an agreed-upon time when you do your Talking In Each Other's Native Languages means that you won't need to bug each other with language questions at other times - which, should you have any kind of interaction with your exchange partner at all outside of your sessions, should be a weight off the nerves of everyone involved.

Depending on how niche your language is, you can probably find a fair amount of free stuff online just devoted to teaching people your language. Why? People love sharing. A thing my mum told me as an awkward preteen about making conversation was this: People love talking about themselves. Sharing the intricacies of your own language and culture to a wider audience is wonderful - I love telling people about the North and my relation to it, just as Harmut clearly loves telling people about German and Germany on his ace language pages. (This and others are on my list of useful online language resources, by the way, so if you know any good ones please let me know - I plan to write some introductory stuff myself.)

A Hero with a Thousand Faces [link]

I'm sure you’re happy that speaking a particular language is a perfectible skill. You can get better at it. But you know what? So is learning a new language, full stop. As I've gone through the motions of acquainting myself with each new language, I've noticed that the same steps keep appearing:

New Language Checklist

1. Work out what sounds are present in the language, and how they interact.
2. Work out how the sounds are written down.
3. Become familiar with the most common forms - greetings, a general idea of how words are used, common irregular words, common vocabulary (the last two overlap).
4. Gradually widen the core to include more vocabulary and more nuance, the more specific nuts and bolts of grammar and usage.

(Compare it to learning new instruments - there's only so many chords and scales that people use, you just need to learn how to produce them. And if it's an instrument in the same family as one you already know, it's all the easier. Not instantaneous mastery, but a good leg up.)

The concept that Chomsky and co. put forward is that people are fundamentally all saying the same sorts of things - they just express them differently. We are united by our humanity - like many great theoretical conclusions, you could have asked anyone in the street and they'd probably have told you exactly the same thing. People on the opposite side of the world from you are interested in having enough to eat and a place to sleep, in looking after their families and making something of their lives. They have the same size and shape brain, a similar pair of eyes and lungs and kidneys. Their larynges contract and vibrate columns of air just like yours, and their ears receive airborne packets of information as yours do. Their voices and brains and minds make different use of the same raw materials, but it would be a poorer world if we required everyone to talk, think and dream in exactly the same way as we do. And with modern technology, they are no longer even a single world away from you. We live in exciting times - here's hoping we don't screw it up.

The Twain Meet [link]

Let's take English and Mandarin as examples of languages that are traditionally thought to be distant and difficult to learn for each other's native speakers. Like most Chinese languages and others nearby, Mandarin has lexical tone - this means that when you learn a word, you have to learn which of four tones it has (five if you include the unmarked neutral tone). English speakers also make use of tone, but to express intonation.

The intonation on the word Well in each of the following phrases (in my UK English, at least) roughly approximates each of the four tones:

1.	Weeeeell, I dunno, it's a fairly big favour...	("high level" mā)
2.	Well? What did she say?	("rising" má)
3.	Well?! Are you going to open it, then?	("dipping" mǎ)
4.	Well! If that's how it is, then I quit!	("high-falling" mà)

(Also like music, tone contours are mapped out on a five-point scale - this coincides with the musical idea that the pentatonic scale is the natural range of the human voice, used as it is in most folk songs and guitar solos.)

Mandarin and the other Chinese languages are also united in their use of Han characters. I grant you, they are tough. You apparently need between 3, and 4,000 characters to be able to get by; but this is ignoring the fact that most characters are made up of a combination of other, simpler characters. There are 214 basic radicals, and a character is usually made up of a radical and a suffix that indicates how it was pronounced in Middle Chinese (unfortunately rarely any indication of how it's pronounced now). So the simplified character 妈 (pinyin mā) means "mother" - it uses the woman radical (on the left) 女 (nǚ) and used to rhyme with 马 (mǎ, horse). In this case we're lucky and the rhyme still works - though the tone is different. You can see how the woman radical is a simplified drawing of a woman - on Memrise they use animations and mnemonics ("The Chinese mother is expected to work like a horse for her family") along with spaced repetition to great success.

But wait a second - isn't English spelling largely based on conventions from Middle English? Doesn't the root in reading and they had read a book come out, even though it doesn't sound the same? I think it's a fair comparison. Basically, when you learn a Mandarin word, just as when you were first learning to write English words, you have to learn the spelling and pronunciation separately. There's also the matter that where Mandarin has lexical tone, English has lexical stress: They import an import has a rare English stress-based minimal pair (pair of items that differ only in one feature, showing that there is a conscious contrast based on the feature) - the Mandarin examples I cited give a tone-based one (mā vs mǎ), which are as about as common as voicing-based minimal pairs in English (like bet vs pet). If you don't know a word's tone in Mandarin, you don't know the word. As English speakers we have to get used to paying attention to diacritics in words (which English seems to be allergic to), but once we know the rules of the game in that regard we're golden. (Mandarin nouns also have associated measure words - a bit like knowing that it's a parliament of rooks, but used all the time, and with a limited number of about 150. A bit like learning a word's gender in other IE languages, but with logic still attached!) There's also the bonus that Mandarin's grammar almost entirely analytic - no learning of irregular verbs required, for instance. It's almost like only having so much room for grammar in their heads people in this case can't be bothered!

That's basically it, really: learning languages is a lot easier if you force yourself to be flexible and open. There will be sounds that you don't normally make (so I recommend getting to grips with IPA shenanigans so you don't get stuck with pasty approximations), and some that you do make, but are said slightly further in or out of your mouth, or with stronger or weaker aspiration, or with a different emphasis style. You need to make yourself listen, and listen carefully. If you've got a tame native speaker to really work over your pronunciation it'll do you no end of good. You have, too, to be humble enough to let yourself be corrected if you make mistakes, which you will do, because that's how you learn a second language. For my money, starting your acquaintance with a new language is like meeting someone new: you should be doing at least as much listening as talking, if not more.

"So How Many Languages Do You Know?" [link]

Christ, I hate that question. When I was living in France and going to a lot of Couchsurfing meet-ups, I found the best answer was, Not enough. I quite like the analogy of languages as people: what would you say if someone said, So how many people do you know? (I warned you you'd be being ventriloquised some more, reader, I'm sorry about that. It's dreadfully rude of me.) I imagine you'd probably ask what kind of "knowing" the person asking you meant. Know enough to have a conversation with? Know enough that you would acknowledge each other in the street? Know enough that you could turn up on their doorstep in the middle of the night utterly distraught, and they would let you in, make you a cup of tea and not ask more questions than you wanted to answer? Know enough to sleep with? Know enough to share your body with? Know enough to fall out and argue with because you both know the other could be better than you're being? Know enough that their heartbeat answers yours, that your lives are intertwined? Know enough that your children will know them as they know you? Know enough that you will be remembered together with them and could wish for nothing more?

I have a casual acquaintance with around fifteen or sixteen languages. I have native English and fluent French and Russian, although not at anything like the level I really should have by this point. About two thirds of the rest I can read more or less with a dictionary and have stilted conversations in; I've found that fluency (in the sense of not needing to translate your thoughts into the language consciously) is a transferable skill - I've had conversations in Ancient Greek, though my reconstructed pitch accent is often met with slight bewilderment.

I've found another useful image is that of planting trees. When you're still getting to grips with the first three steps outlined above, you're digging; when you're onto the fourth step, it's planted, and you're watering; when you achieve fluency (which is nothing like an end point, just as getting to know someone well isn't) your tree is in bloom. If you neglect it, it can wilt, but with more watering and care it should come back into flower. I don't think that you can aim to get to a native or near-native level in much more than one language beyond your own: I find that each new language that I meet makes me appreciate the beauty of my own all the more, the rich soil that I've spent my life with and know as I know myself.

In Summary...

Sorry, did you still want to know which language is objectively the hardest to learn in the world? It's your second language, the one that you slave over in school for hours and hours to what feels like no progress. After that it's more or less plain sailing - so long as you've got the spare afternoons and know how to pitch your mast. Individual languages are only subjectively hard if you’re coming at them from far away and don’t know the ropes.

(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)