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At breakfast, A. brought up something she read somewhere about Dutch being difficult to learn from Afrikaans unlike the reverse. I was like, where’d you get that (somewhere on wikipedia). I was like, doubt it, went searching, found this paragraph, source on quora removed because I don’t need to pick on anyone specific here.
“ I am a native Dutch speaker who has tried to learn to write Afrikaans. I found out that understanding and reading Afrikaans (passive skills) are pretty easy but speaking or writing (active skills) are not obvious at all. I’d guess that for Afrikaans speakers the reverse is true when learning Dutch. It may actually be a little worse for them because Dutch grammar has retained a lot more inherited complexity from Proto-Germanic or even Proto-Indoeuropean such as strong verbs or neutral gender and different inflections of the adjective.
Nevertheless, Dutch would still be the easiest language to learn for Afrikaans speakers.”
I found this paragraph really startling and disturbing.
First, passive is always easier than active. Period. Active requires passive; passive does not require active. So this should not have been any kind of “discovery” for this writer. They should have known it already. If they are expressing an opinion, well, not a controversial one for sure, but then they should not be using “I found out”, but rather “I found”. (I found out = discovery; I found = I think / in my opinion / etc.). But then the next sentence is jawdropping: somehow, Afrikaans-language users would find it easier to speak or write Dutch than to read or understand it. How. That’s just not possible. Has to be an opinion. Parallelism suggests the first sentence was as well. What is even going on here.
Finally, the reason given for Afrikaans language users finding it easier to speak and write in Dutch (vs reading or understanding Dutch) is that Dutch is more complicated. I mean, obviously, it’s easier to produce speech in a more complicated language than it is to read or understand speech in an more complicated language. That makes so much sense, right? Wrong.
Honestly, I feel like this had better have been produced by an AI, because if an actual Dutch person produced this, there is something really wrong with them.
“ I am a native Dutch speaker who has tried to learn to write Afrikaans. I found out that understanding and reading Afrikaans (passive skills) are pretty easy but speaking or writing (active skills) are not obvious at all. I’d guess that for Afrikaans speakers the reverse is true when learning Dutch. It may actually be a little worse for them because Dutch grammar has retained a lot more inherited complexity from Proto-Germanic or even Proto-Indoeuropean such as strong verbs or neutral gender and different inflections of the adjective.
Nevertheless, Dutch would still be the easiest language to learn for Afrikaans speakers.”
I found this paragraph really startling and disturbing.
First, passive is always easier than active. Period. Active requires passive; passive does not require active. So this should not have been any kind of “discovery” for this writer. They should have known it already. If they are expressing an opinion, well, not a controversial one for sure, but then they should not be using “I found out”, but rather “I found”. (I found out = discovery; I found = I think / in my opinion / etc.). But then the next sentence is jawdropping: somehow, Afrikaans-language users would find it easier to speak or write Dutch than to read or understand it. How. That’s just not possible. Has to be an opinion. Parallelism suggests the first sentence was as well. What is even going on here.
Finally, the reason given for Afrikaans language users finding it easier to speak and write in Dutch (vs reading or understanding Dutch) is that Dutch is more complicated. I mean, obviously, it’s easier to produce speech in a more complicated language than it is to read or understand speech in an more complicated language. That makes so much sense, right? Wrong.
Honestly, I feel like this had better have been produced by an AI, because if an actual Dutch person produced this, there is something really wrong with them.