Strings of Natural Languages : 9783836656276 : 01 Apr 2008 : Learning a second language is often difficult. One major reason for this is the way we learn: We try to translate the words and concepts of the other language into those of our own language. As long as the languages are fairly similar, this works quite well. However, when the languages differ to a great degree, problems are bound to appear. For example, to someone whose first language is French, English is not difficult to learn. In fact, he can pick up any English book and at the very least recognize words and sentences. But if he is tasked with reading a Japanese text, he will be completely lost: No familiar letters, no whitespace, and only occasionally a glyph that looks similar to a punctuation mark appears. Nevertheless, anyone can learn any language. Correct pronunciation and understanding alien utterances may be hard for the individual, but as soon as the words are transcribed to some kind of script, they can be studie