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Most difficult languages to listen to? | ||
Tags: Learning Difficulty | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4752 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 26 08 November 2014 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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most working class accents of Great Britain, including but not limited to Cockney, Bristolese and Geordie...
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4256 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 26 08 November 2014 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stress timed languages in general.
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4337 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 26 08 November 2014 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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French. The first one that came to mind was Russian, but then I remembered that even with my limited knowledge of it, I have much less trouble "tuning in" to it than to French, which I've realized I just don't have the patience to listen to for too long.
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| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4639 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 12 of 26 08 November 2014 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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German is pretty difficult for me. This is mainly due to the cases, sentence structure, and vocab.
I used to think French was difficult to listen to, but then I realized that Spanish can be just as bad at times. I still think French is pretty difficult to sound out new words in speech that you haven't previously encountered however. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4050 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 13 of 26 09 November 2014 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm having quite hard time with Dutch and to be honest in the beginning also English was very
challenging, while other languages like French, Spanish and Persian are very easy to understand, and I find also German fairly easy. I suspect that all the scandinavian languages are from difficult to very difficult to understand, with Danish possibly being the hardest major language to understand, and Icelandic the easiest of the group to understand. Maybe some asian tonal languages are even more difficult, but I find most Germanic languages very difficult to understand because the spellings tend to be very irregular and with a large reportoire of vowels. Edited by tristano on 09 November 2014 at 2:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5927 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 14 of 26 12 November 2014 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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When I first started learning Swedish and Finnish I was surprised that I could hear isolated Finnish words that I knew immediately, but Swedish sounded like an uninterrupted stream of sound and it took time for my ears (and brain) to adjust and hear individual words. Hindi was a challenge to listen to for me because I'm not used to rhythm of the spoken language and I didn't often figure out where one word ended and another began. Thai has five tones according to everything I've read about the language but I only hear two or three tones. Edited by mick33 on 13 November 2014 at 3:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5169 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 15 of 26 12 November 2014 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some languages are easy to depict the phonemes for, even when I still don't understand the meaning. this is the case for German. As for others, I may know all the words that are being said and still miss the sentence, that is, I could have understood the sentence if it weren't written. So is French.
According to this phonetical classification, the easy ones among the ones I'm learning: - German, Papiamento, Estonian (overlong vowels give you some time for thought!), Russian Hard ones - the phonetics are harder, even when I know the words: - French, Norwegian, Mandarin (got much better after I got used to the tones and to tone inflection and topicalization within a sentence). With Georgian standing in between. As for ones I'm not studying yet, Italian and Spanish aren't that hard, only that Spanish is usually much faster and that's the main difficulty, if the speakers pronounced the same word/minute ratio as Brazilian Portuguese it would be much easier, but we haven't reached an agreement on this yet :P In the case of English, I only started to understand it spoken after I did the same training as I did with French: watching the same series with subtitles and then getting rid of them when possible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7159 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 26 13 November 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Russian (all of the vowel reduction, mobile stress and strong palatalization often makes visually transparent Slavonic cognates much less recognizable for me when spoken). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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