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Ranking list of languages by difficulty | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6142 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 9 of 115 31 August 2008 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Sennin's classification and would like to add that I would rate Vietnamese as slightly easier than Thai.
The languages are quite similar, but in my experience Vietnamese speakers are more sympathetic to un-idiomatic sentences and the borrowed Chinese vocab is more recognizable than in Thai. I am aware of the claim that 60% of Thai vocab is Sanskrit, but it must be really well hidden because I can't find it! Transparency in Thai is negligible beyond some "trendy" recent English borrowings, and even these get lost in pronunciation e.g. football becomes shortened to "ball", which is pronounced "born". I don't think the Thai script should count for much, you need to invest extra hours at the beginning but it's not an on-going battle like the Hanzi/Kanji. Oh, and Persian should go just above Greek. Although the vocab is quite different, the grammatical concepts are familiar to Indo-European speakers and shouldn't cause too many problems. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TKK Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5950 days ago 55 posts - 58 votes | Message 10 of 115 31 August 2008 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||
That's mainly because you haven't acquainted yourself with beautiful Chinese characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ' Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5942 days ago 120 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian* | Message 11 of 115 31 August 2008 at 8:00am | IP Logged | ||
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no, it's because they take up a lot of space in the reply box. And thye look crap in this font. But yes, I could always learn them.
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| autodidactic Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States tinyurl.com/cunningl Joined 6625 days ago 100 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Japanese, Kazakh | Message 12 of 115 31 August 2008 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a bilingual native(english and Spanish) so I might skew the results.
Toughest: cantonese and mandarin. Scandinavian languages. The middle: Russian Arabic German Japanese. Since japanese is at the top of most lists I thought I'd demystify it a little. Spoken Japanese is relatively simple. The bulk of Japanese intimidation is the script. For one there are no verb conjugations(I eat, you eat, we eat, they eat, she eats, you eat are all the same word, "tabemas", pronouns are hardly used(in the tabemas example, it's implied by the context of the sentence), no need for articles or gender for that matter, and the whole "saying sentences backwards" thing is hardly as much trouble as it seems. There's a logic to it. The sentence leads you to the verb, and ends with the verb. There are some things that make it difficult, like the honorifics, but all in all you can start expressing yourself accurately in japanese faster than in russian. I will concede that kanjii is no joke, but heisig speeds up the process drastically. Easiest: by far Portuguese, then Italian, a little farther on is French, then Dutch. Edited by autodidactic on 31 August 2008 at 8:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6923 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 13 of 115 31 August 2008 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
This is easily explained because French was the main language in England for nobility and the court for about 300 years, starting in 1066. While the common people continued to speak English, they came to view French as a prestige language and came to adopt many terms that way. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language if you want to know more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6923 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 14 of 115 31 August 2008 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd rate the languages something like this:
Hardest to Easiest by Family Romance - Romanian, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish Germanic - German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Afrikaans Asian - Korean, Japanese, Thai, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Minnanese, Mandarin Others - Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6449 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 115 31 August 2008 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Bollocks. Scandinavian languages are actually considered "easy" for English speakers. Russian is about twice as hard as Swedish and Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin are about twice as hard as Russian. Japanese is considered as "hard" as Mandarin and perhaps even harder. Your perceived easiness comes perhaps from pronunciation and what you think is "simple" grammar. Chinese is also considered to have a "simple" grammar. Simple does not mean easy. You have to relearn how to express complex relationships. http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectation s.html http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001824.php Edited by reineke on 31 August 2008 at 7:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GBarr Newbie Uruguay Joined 5979 days ago 29 posts - 30 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Spanish* | Message 16 of 115 31 August 2008 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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How would you rate Icelandic within the Germanic Family, harder than German?
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