Ranking list of languages by difficulty (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Ranking list of languages by difficulty
Tags: Difficulty
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

115 messages over 15 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 4 ... 14 15 Next >>

Deecab
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5960 days ago
106 posts - 108 votes

Speaks: English, Korean*
Studies: Mandarin

Message 25 of 115

01 September 2008 at 3:26pm | IP Logged

Autarkis wrote:

My vote for the most difficult language goes out to Arabic. Deadly pronounciation (Mandarin is a cakewalk compared to it, no offense), Grammar similar to but more complex than French AND Japanese (in my view at least, I've really just looked into it briefly), hundreds of accents, no widespread everyday use of the formal version, a lot of slang, I've got no access to international Arabic TV stations (if they even exist), plus an unusual writing system. Though I will admit that achieving a high competence in Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese might be more difficult since a lot of character have to be mastered and I believe that a certain degree of competence can only be achieved through reading and writing, in terms of everyday fluency, Arabic tops my list.

Can you elaborate on the grammar? I would love to hear it. Among Asian languages, Arabic's grammar is among the ones I'm least knowledgeable about. No one seems to give vivid description of it.

Edited by Deecab on 01 September 2008 at 3:26pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Ikarias
Triglot
Newbie
Spain
multilinguae.wordpreRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6030 days ago
29 posts - 36 votes
Speaks: Spanish*, English^C2, German^B1
Studies: Italian^A2, Dutch^A2, French^A2, Mandarin

Message 26 of 115

02 September 2008 at 2:57am | IP Logged

Well, I will just give my opinion of the language that I know or study.

Italian *
French **
English **
German ***

Regards ^^
1 person has voted this message useful

Hashimi
Senior Member
Oman
Joined 6258 days ago
362 posts - 529 votes

Speaks: Arabic (Written)*
Studies: English, Japanese

Message 27 of 115

02 September 2008 at 1:25pm | IP Logged

Ranking list of the spoken languages from hardest to easiest (from the perspective of an Arabic native speaker):

1- The first is English, no doubt! [you forgot it in your list]
2- Then Arabic itself! [that's why nobody speaks it on an everyday basis]

3- Minnanese（闽南语）
4- Cantonese（粤语）
5- Mandarin（汉语）
6- Vietnamese（越南语）
7- Thai（泰语）

8- Finno-Ugric languages [like Finnish（芬兰语）, Hungarian（匈牙利语）]
9- Slavic languages [like Russian（俄语）]
10- Germanic languages [German（德语）, Swedish（瑞典语）, Norwegian（挪威语）, Danish（丹麦语）, Dutch（荷兰语）, Afrikaans（南非荷兰语）]
11- Romantic languages [French（法语）, Portuguese（葡萄牙语）, Italian（意大利语）, Spanish（西班牙语）]
12- Romanian（罗马尼亚语）
13- Greek（希腊语<现代希腊国语>）

14- Korean（韩语）
15- Japanese（日语）
16- Turkish（土耳其语）

17- Persian（波斯语）
18- Hebrew（希伯来语<以色列国语>）

But what is your relationship with Gustav from Antimoon?

1 person has voted this message useful

Fat-tony
Nonaglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
jiahubooks.co.uk
Joined 6139 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 28 of 115

02 September 2008 at 1:39pm | IP Logged

Deecab wrote:

Can you elaborate on the grammar? I would love to hear it. Among Asian languages, Arabic's
grammar is among the ones I'm least knowledgeable about. No one seems to give vivid description of it.

I've tried to formulate a reply but don't know where to start. The
wiki pages look quite thorough. Enjoy!
1 person has voted this message useful

Karakorum
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6568 days ago
201 posts - 232 votes

Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)*
Studies: French, German

Message 29 of 115

02 September 2008 at 11:52pm | IP Logged

Autarkis wrote:

It heavily depends where your coming from, figuratively.

If you grew up in Hongkong, you might have been exposed to more English than the
average central Chinese person. Thus, German will be easier to you than for them,
because English and German share some similarities.

If you grew up a conservative catholic and have had some close encounters with Latin,
Spanish, Portuguese and Italian might be simpler to you.

I suggest you take a look at language.com/e/languages/index.html">this List, where a lot of smart people on
these forum have made their insights public.

My vote for the most difficult language goes out to Arabic. Deadly pronounciation
(Mandarin is a cakewalk compared to it, no offense), Grammar similar to but more
complex than French AND Japanese (in my view at least, I've really just looked into it
briefly), hundreds of accents, no widespread everyday use of the formal version, a lot
of slang, I've got no access to international Arabic TV stations (if they even exist),
plus an unusual writing system. Though I will admit that achieving a high competence
in Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese might be more difficult since a lot of character
have to be mastered and I believe that a certain degree of competence can only be
achieved through reading and writing, in terms of everyday fluency, Arabic tops my
list.

Concerning Arabic news channels, umm yeah there's a truckload of them. In the US
satellite carriers offer a handful of Arabic channels, and cable offers one (ART
America which really sucks). In Switzerland and most of Europe you should be able to
receive both Arabsat and Nilesat which give you hundreds of Arabic channels (many of
which are designed to fry your neurons by blasting horribly made game shows all day).
Online you can find a nice bunch on Jump TV, and I think both Aljazeera and Alarabiya
offer free streaming. Here's a link I posted a whiles back with some resources I found
online:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?
TID=4681&KW=karakorum+arabic
This is by no means exhaustive and you can find loads more if you just look for them.

But really? You think Arabic is really the hardest language ever? I think I can't make
a fair judgment here, but I did have to learn classical Arabic on my own and at a
rather late age, so maybe I can make a borderline fair comment. So like in Arabic you
need to learn five new sounds of which only 3 are really "new" to the English speaker,
and then you need to learn to pay attention to vowel length, and voila you can speak
Arabic and Arabs will compliment you on the miracle you just achieved. On the other
hand, many people can't even hear Chinese tones, let alone reproduce them. Arabic
grammar is also not that hard, do you really think it's harder than Russian or Latin?
I think the problem is that Arabic grammar is presented to a lot of people as a
"logical" and "regular" system, when it's just as f'ed up as French. If you just
embrace this fact it should be as doable as French. And then diglossia, NO you don't
need to learn thousands of dialects, you need to learn only MSA and one major dialect
and you will be FULLY functional. I really don't think Arabic is that hard, it's just
that a lot of people who have had an understandable hard time getting started with it
understandably voice their frustration at an understandably higher frequency since
9/11 and the Iraq war. But it does get easier with time. I am not saying you are
wrong, I mean it's your own opinion out of your own experience, but it just doesn't
make sense to me that Arabic would be harder than e.g. Korean to an English speaker
(in any category).

1 person has voted this message useful

Deecab
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5960 days ago
106 posts - 108 votes

Speaks: English, Korean*
Studies: Mandarin

Message 30 of 115

03 September 2008 at 2:00am | IP Logged

Karakorum wrote:

But really? You think Arabic is really the hardest language ever? I think I can't make
a fair judgment here, but I did have to learn classical Arabic on my own and at a
rather late age, so maybe I can make a borderline fair comment. So like in Arabic you
need to learn five new sounds of which only 3 are really "new" to the English speaker,
and then you need to learn to pay attention to vowel length, and voila you can speak
Arabic and Arabs will compliment you on the miracle you just achieved.

It's not a miracle that someone achieves Arabic fluency. People just have no idea what your abilities can unleash if you were to make a serious effort. Difficulty is just an excuse.

Karakorum wrote:

On the other hand, many people can't even hear Chinese tones, let alone reproduce them. Arabic grammar is also not that hard, do you really think it's harder than Russian or Latin?But it does get easier with time. I am not saying you are
wrong, I mean it's your own opinion out of your own experience, but it just doesn't
make sense to me that Arabic would be harder than e.g. Korean to an English speaker
(in any category).

Well, just curious, I wonder if you tried learning Korean before? Since I'm a Korean native, I try to convince people that it's not hard.

If I were to break it down briefly

Korean pronunciation - Pretty easy.
Grammar - Different but not that difficult
Writing - Very easy with effective writing system
Reading - Pretty easy too
Listening - I'm not a foreigner so I can't speak much about here. It can be hard when people speak fast. Even I ask for repeat plenty of times.
Politeness is a bit of challenge but it's not that bad once you get the hang of it.

Of course, I may have oversimplified it but I doubt Korean is harder to English speaker than Arabic is. For most aspects, I say Arabic takes it. If you were to include Hanja, that's a different story.

Edited by Deecab on 03 September 2008 at 2:02am
1 person has voted this message useful

zerothinking
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 6371 days ago
528 posts - 772 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 31 of 115

03 September 2008 at 3:37am | IP Logged

All languages are easy. :)
1 person has voted this message useful

Autarkis
Triglot
Groupie
Switzerland
twitter.com/Autarkis
Joined 5951 days ago
95 posts - 106 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: German*, English, French
Studies: Italian

Message 32 of 115

03 September 2008 at 9:18am | IP Logged

Karakorum wrote:

Thanks, these streams will help a lot. I don't have a TV, let alone a sat dish, since I'm living in a dorm. :)

Karakorum wrote:

I'm a native speaker of German. I've also had some practice sessions with a friend of mine, a bilingual German / Arabic speaker. She constantly and rightfully so corrected my pronunciation of Arabic, which in English is "very good" according to a recent London visitor, and "trés bien" in French. These sounds in the back of the throat are really difficult for me.

Karakorum wrote:

and then you need to learn to pay attention to vowel length, and voila you can speak Arabic and Arabs will compliment you on the miracle you just achieved.

Especially when you are not fluent yet, all things that have timing involved are difficult, don't you think?

Karakorum wrote:

On the other hand, many people can't even hear Chinese tones, let alone reproduce them. Arabic grammar is also not that hard, do you really think it's harder than Russian or Latin?

I think it's as hard as French, with the accordance of times, genders and cases. Only it's got a singular, plural and a dual. ;) Thus my extrapolation that the grammar has to be more difficult, although I haven't even progressed to sentences of a complexity in which it would matter.

Karakorum wrote:

I think the problem is that Arabic grammar is presented to a lot of people as a "logical" and "regular" system, when it's just as f'ed up as French.

I really don't mean to contradict you on every turn, but French grammar is logical to me. (Now, after years of study.) I don't expect Arabic to be really much different in that regard: Cryptic at the beginning, simple once "mastered", whatever that means.

Karakorum wrote:

If you just embrace this fact it should be as doable as French. And then diglossia, NO you don't need to learn thousands of dialects, you need to learn only MSA and one major dialect and you will be FULLY functional.

Okay, I can see that. Which one would you suggest?

Karakorum wrote:

I really don't think Arabic is that hard, it's just that a lot of people who have had an understandable hard time getting started with it understandably voice their frustration at an understandably higher frequency since 9/11 and the Iraq war.

I don't see what this has to do with 9/11. I'm from Switzerland. We are not involved in any war, in fact, my and many other peoples sympathies are neither with the terrorists nor with Mr. Bush.

Karakorum wrote:

But it does get easier with time. I am not saying you are
wrong, I mean it's your own opinion out of your own experience, but it just doesn't
make sense to me that Arabic would be harder than e.g. Korean to an English speaker
(in any category).

I'm not saying I'm right. To me, this thread is like asking "Which ice cream is best?" - there will never be definitive answers. I just wanted to point out what makes Arabic particularly difficult for me.

1 person has voted this message useful

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