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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6556 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 1 of 130 12 October 2007 at 6:37am | IP Logged |
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Before voting, please consider that this is the language that will take the most time for a native english speaker to reach advanced fluency in all 4 skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
This has been discussed many times before. It's one of my favorite discussions, so I thought it would be nice to have a poll on it. I wish there were more selections; sorry if I didn't include your favorite language. Feel free to state your reasons, or post links to the many threads on this subject. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6383 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 130 12 October 2007 at 7:31am | IP Logged |
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Conventional wisdom says that Japanese is the hardest for native English speakers to learn, but I would have to think that learning a non-Mandarin dialect of Chinese would have to be just as hard, if not harder. Why? Because in order to be considered fully proficient in those dialects you would have to learn both the spoken language as well as standard written Chinese which, for non-Mandarin dialects, is essentially a whole other language. (There are ways to write regional dialects using nonstandard characters, but I've never heard of any courses which taught it.)
Take Cantonese for instance. It is virtually unheard of for foreigners to learn both written Chinese and spoken Cantonese concurrently because it would be far too confusing for students. It would be like learning to speak Spanish while learning to write French. For all the difficulties there are in learning Japanese, at least you speak and write in the same language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6278 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 3 of 130 12 October 2007 at 7:40am | IP Logged |
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I hesitated to vote, as all four languages cited are difficult (but all can be learned, with time). It seems to me that Japanese has major pitfalls for a native English speaker in all four areas, the others only in two or three. Some people say Korean is the most difficult, but Korean uses an alphabet, not thousands of ideographs, so its writing system is easier to learn than either Mandarin or Japanese. I think the difficulties of Arabic are somewhat exaggerated, and Mandarin seems to have a rather simple grammar - the big problems it seems to me are whether you can cope with a tonal language and the ideographs. I marvel that the Japanese claim such high literacy levels, as their combination of ideographs and syllabic symbols seems designed to keep Japanese people from learning to read and write, and does few favours to foreigners. An interesting subject, though. I notice that all four are non-Indo-European.
In order of difficulty among the languages cited, I would arrange it as: Japanese Chinese Korean Arabic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6656 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 4 of 130 12 October 2007 at 8:48am | IP Logged |
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I don't know, because I haven't tried them all. Someday I might be able to answer this!
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6278 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 130 12 October 2007 at 9:03am | IP Logged |
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Of the four listed, it so happens that Arabic is the only one I know to any degree. I know the script and know some Egyptian and Iraqi colloquial, though not much Modern Standard Arabic. I don't list it in my profile as these are for languages either native to me, or that I either speak/read well or am studying actively. Arabic is in the "second division", one of several languages of which I know a little and/or might study more seriously in future. Because it is not as mysterious to me as the Far Eastern languages cited, I don't consider it as difficult.
At this point, Arabic is being considered the most difficult. I would be interested to know why people think so. Edited by William Camden on 12 October 2007 at 10:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7187 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 6 of 130 12 October 2007 at 12:03pm | IP Logged |
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I warn you now overall this will surely be another battle between Japanese and Chinese.
Writing Many people say that Japanese is harder than Chinese as it has less characters but with more ways to pronounce them. Seems like reverse logic to me. I mean the English writing system has many ways to pronounce it's letters but no one would say this is more difficult than learning 4000 characters. When you learn pinyin you find that the pronounciation of one word can have hundreds of meanings but no one would argue this is harder than learning the hanzi (Chinese characters). Also of course if you wanted to travel to Taiwan and Hongkong you would have to learn two sets of characters. The fact, that in Japanese there is a phonetic script in widespread use means that you'll be getting some input from walking the streets of Japan from the day you get there (assuming you've mastered this script already). In Chinese you'll not find this so picking up 'free' words from walking around and knowing how to pronounce 'the script' won't be so easy. Even after a year of study there will be mysterious characters everywhere. Grammar As for the grammar yeah I take the point that Japanese has the edge here. Though I do think the argument for Japanese being harder due to the word order being reversed somehow makes it a more difficult language is vastly overemphasised. At the end of the day grammar rules are pretty much logical. Pronunciation For pronunciation Chinese winse hands down. You'll be able to make the right sounds in Japanese and from the outset you'll be able to mutter simple phrases and be understood. Not so in Chinese learning the 4 tones is not intuitive. Some people think they've mastered them because they can somehow produce the four tones in isolation when drilling them. Though in flowing speach few people master them quickly. Even the most highly decorated of foreigners, for example 'Dashan' who is noted for his excellent Mandarin will still be picked out as a foreigner from his voice. For westerners the tones will always be a problem and cause some misunderstanding. Listening Listening comes before speaking in the natural progression of learning at least. Why can't many Westerners pronounce Chinese words/tones? Simply because they can't tell the difference between them. The more understandable input you get from your language the quicker you will learn it. Unfortunately for Chinese the fact that you will have trouble distinuishing the tones of the words let alone the new sounds of words will be a stumbling block from the outset. Also we can't talk about there being 'one' Chinese Mandarin. Sure the Putonghua is the standard accent but you can travel a long way speaking Mandarin in China before you reach areas where they speak an entirely different language (according to Westerner's definitions). Go to Nanjing and see how much harder speaking and listing becomes. Vocabulary Chinese takes the gold for this too. Japanese incorporates a huge amount of English words into it's language. Vocabulary is perhaps one of the biggest stumbling blocks to mastering a language. You'll hear a 6 year old speak with perfect grammar but it will take them a whole lot longer to have a good word base for the varied situations that they will encounter in life. Vocabulary is hard because it takes a lot of time and exposure to really internalise. Chinese takes very few loan words from English and even the ones that they do will not be that recognisable. Of course these load words in Chinese will be represented with an obscure character rather than a phonetic script (i believe the loan words will be in their phonetic script?). Japan has also been open to the West for much longer so it will have more culture in common and so more words that are equivilent to the Western meaning. However, China only opened its door recently. Learning Materials Not sure here. Probably about the same though perhaps with Japan being open to the West for longer and also because it has been a 'commercial' language for a long time will mean it also has richer learning materials. Japanese learning materials for foreigners I here are pretty good. There's also a lot of good stuff for Chinese too. Personal Experiences I know one person who has learned Japanese to a high degree and is now starting to learn Mandarin. They feel that Mandarin is the harder language which surprises me as I would think that after learning Japanese Mandarin would come at a little discount. It would be interesting to know if out of the two languages if you learnt Chinese and then Japanese which one you feel was most difficult and why? And, also of course, if you learnt Japanese and then Chinese, what is your opinion on the difficulty of the two. Honestly I haven't made an attempt to master Japanese so i'll be honest I'm COMPLETELY BIASED. But if I really did consider Japanese to be harder I think I would have chosen Japanese and not Chinese. For me part of learning Chinese is an intellectual attempt to master the hardest langugage in the world which, everyone knows is Chinese so (please) don't tell me i've made a mistake! 13 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6278 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 7 of 130 12 October 2007 at 12:22pm | IP Logged |
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So far it's a battle mainly between Arabic and Japanese. I have touched on the problems of Japanese although I have never studied the latter.
Looking at Arabic: it has an alphabetic system, and though this is not very easy to learn, any alphabetic system is bound to be easier to master than thousands of ideographs like those of Chinese and Japanese. The grammar is fairly difficult, more so for the standard language than the various spoken versions which are sometimes different enough from other colloquials to be incomprehensible. Iraqis and Moroccans will not understand each other's colloquial Arabic, though Iraqis and Egyptians seem to largely understand each other's colloquial. The diglossia of Arabic forces the learner to choose: which Arabic do you learn? Some Arabic sounds are hard to learn for English speakers, but I don't think they are as difficult as mastering Chinese tones. The vocabulary of Arabic is certainly difficult, with relatively few words loaned from Western languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6365 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 130 12 October 2007 at 1:15pm | IP Logged |
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edit: on second thought, i'm staying out of this thread. i'm making a point not to engage in threads with sensationalistic titles anymore. there's so much other stuff to do. Edited by FSI on 12 October 2007 at 10:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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