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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6443 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 129 of 130 28 January 2012 at 4:27am | IP Logged |
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The hardest languages in the world are probably Ithkuil and
Ithkuil looks a bit like Klingon. Here is an example sentence: 
That means: "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point." It is pronounced: Romanization: Oumpeá äx’ääļuktëx. Pronunciation: [oumpɛ.a æˈkxʼæɬʊktɤx Click this to hear someone pronounce that sentence: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e5/Ithkuil_senten ce.ogg But of the languages in the poll, I only have experience with Japanese and Korean. Japanese: - Easy pronunciation. You can get it completely wrong and still be understood - No spaces between written words (with the exception of kids books) makes reading hard - Kanji is hard - Even the kana must be memorized as individual syllables which makes reading harder in the beginning. For example, "ta" looks nothing like "te" even though they are both "t" sounds. Similarly, "sa" looks nothing like "ta" even though they are both "a" sounds. - Lack of gender and plural is easy - Multiple number systems is difficult - "counters" are annoying, but Korean has them, too Korean: - Very difficult pronunciation. You think you are saying it correctly but you're not. Make even a slight mistake and you won't be understood - Very difficult to understand words you don't know. As pointed out in this thread, if you hear a word and want to look it up, chances are you won't know how to write it. Yes, Korean is phonetic, but that doesn't really help in this case. You may have to try 10 or 20 different things that sound similar to what you think you heard and you may find out one of them was actually correct. Or not. - Spaces between written words makes reading easy - Hangul can be learned in a few days (it takes a few hours to learn it, and then a few more hours to become comfortable with it) - Hangul is an alphabet, so "ka" is similar to "ta" because they both have an "a." "Ta" is similar to "te" because they both have a "t." - Sometimes it feels like half the language is homonyms. And one and two syllable homonyms, at that. - When I see a word written in Korean and I know the word, I can read it pretty quickly. Not so much in Japanese. - Korean grammar is like a more complicated version of Japanese grammar. Or put another way, Japanese grammar is like a simplified version of Korean grammar. - Lack of gender and plural is easy - Multiple number systems is difficult - "counters" are annoying, but Japanese has them, too Both languages: - In some languages if you're reading something and you see a word you don't know, you can look it up in a dictionary. This isn't really the case in Korean or Japanese, because chances are it's some word that has been changed somehow from its dictionary form. And if it's Japanese, it's probably at least partially kanji, but it's not like you're necessarily going to know where the previous word ends and that word begins because there aren't any spaces between the words. Overall, I would say Korean is harder. You can probably learn all the kanji faster than you can learn to pronounce and understand spoken Korean. Edited by IronFist on 28 January 2012 at 4:30am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4698 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 130 of 130 02 February 2012 at 10:11pm | IP Logged |
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I admire your determination to learn two of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, IronFist.
As I see it, if you are interested in getting off the ground quickly with speaking a foreign language, Japanese is much easier than Korean. And most people in general do try and learn to speak and pronounce some words of the language as one of the first things they do when they learn a foreign language. And some people concentrate on speaking skills exclusively, that is, they don't care much about reading and writing in the target language (or will learn those things much much later). With a hundred phrases and sentences under one's belt, one can carry a simple conversation with a stranger and be "fluent" even with the limited amount of vocabulary one has. This is much easier and quicker to achieve with Japanese than with Korean. Even though I have never studied Japanese (except maybe going to one class to see if I wanted to study it or not), I have picked up a few Japanese words and have found them easy to pronounce especially when I see the Romanization. "Watashi wa", "sayonara", "arigato gozaimas(u)", "kawai" (cute, cool) are easy words to say (sorry about the spelling). It is because of the consonant-vowel pattern of the syllables. (And conversely this is the reason why many Japanese have difficulties pronouncing languages that do not have this consonant-vowel pattern - they often add a vowel to the last consonant of an English word; Koreans do this too but a little less). So it would be quicker to get to the stage where you are able to say a few sentences in Japanese and be understood by native speakers, even if you didn't understand the grammar of the sentences you were saying, than it would be if you were learning Korean. However, things change when it comes to reading. I would say reading in Japanese is harder for the reasons that you outline above, IronFist, the Kanji and the other two writing systems. You really have to learn some Kanji in order to be able to look up Kanji words in a dictionary (as well as learn Katakana and Hiragana). With Korean, you learn the Hangeul alphabet and you can start looking up the dictionary after that. And there are no spaces between Japanese words either. One thing better about Japanese writing is that the letters are written linearly in one direction I believe. So it's similar to reading Latin characters. Your eye moves horizontally. With Korean, the letters are most of the time grouped together to make one unit. It takes longer to decipher the unit than it does to read the same letters horizontally on a page. Lastly, Korean grammar is much more complex than Japanese grammar though they are similar. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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