Why are Korean and Arabic considered hard (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Why are Korean and Arabic considered hard
Tags: Korean \| Difficulty \| Arabic
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

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leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6389 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog

Message 9 of 57

03 January 2011 at 3:04am | IP Logged

sjheiss wrote:

the only language I so far speak fluently is English

This is a pretty good reason not to believe you, imo.

sjheiss wrote:

any language is easy if you are determined enough to learn it

No language is easy. All languages are possible to learn. Some languages are harder than others for a given person.

sjheiss wrote:

Tons of people say Basque is super hard and impossible to learn, but they've never even tried learning it, like you have never tried learning Korean. Don't knock
it till you've tried learning it yourself, instead of just listening to people that learn languages differently than you.

My judgement is based on thousands of hours in Japanese and Mandarin studies. And sorry to repeat myself, but I'll take the word of other seasoned language learners over
yours.

sjheiss wrote:

And it's complete bullcrap that people think it's the most difficult language in the world. If there was such a thing, it wouldn't even be close

If there is no most difficult language, why are you saying Korean wouldn't even be close? I don't follow your logic.

sjheiss wrote:

"The most difficult language" doesn't even make sense

True, but the FSI ratings, which the first post references, are meant for native English speakers with a level playing field.

Here are some references for you. Enjoy.

World's most difficult Language
Lessons learned from 50 years (FSI)
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apparition
Octoglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6489 days ago
600 posts - 667 votes

Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish
Studies: Pashto

Message 10 of 57

03 January 2011 at 3:23am | IP Logged

Looking at
thi
s Wikibooks link, it looks like Arabic is now in the Category II list, but with
an asterisk denoting it's a bit harder than others in Cat II.

I have yet to learn one of the Cat III languages to any degree of proficiency, but they
do, so far, seem more difficult than Arabic was for me.

As for Arabic's difficulty, I believe the writing system can be a challenge for people
to get a hang of. Quite a few of the people I know who have tried and quit Arabic said
that reading the language was too challenging. I happen to think they just didn't wait
long enough to see good results, but that's just my impression. It took a while for
reading to click for me, so that's why I say that.
1 person has voted this message useful

leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6389 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog

Message 11 of 57

03 January 2011 at 3:44am | IP Logged

To answer the OP's question:
Korean because of it's grammar & politeness levels
Arabic because you need to learn Standard & a dialect

Edited by leosmith on 03 January 2011 at 4:09am
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carlonove
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5825 days ago
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian

Message 12 of 57

03 January 2011 at 3:51am | IP Logged

sjheiss wrote:

"The most difficult language" doesn't even make sense, as a speaker of Japanese or Turkish or any Altaic language (because of the similar grammar and being linguistically related), would find learning Korean much easier than a speaker of English or Finnish or Basque or Hebrew would.

I would love for a speaker of both Japanese (or Korean) and Turkish to demonstrate how the knowledge of one greatly facilitated the learning of the other in the sense that learning one member of a "verified" language family typically facilitates learning of another. Although I'm not completely ruling out the idea that there's a genetic relationship between the Turkic and East Asian branches of the "Altaic" family, the vocabulary analysis usually put forth as evidence is pretty unconvincing.

Edited by carlonove on 03 January 2011 at 3:52am
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Bao
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5
Joined 5605 days ago
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Speaks: German*, English
Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin

Message 13 of 57

03 January 2011 at 6:06am | IP Logged

sjheiss wrote:

Don't hate me just because I disagreed with you on the language learning advice thread. And just because I'm new to the forum doesn't mean I know nothing about languages, nor that the only language I so far speak fluently is English.

Really, any language is easy if you are determined enough to learn it. Tons of people say Basque is super hard and impossible to learn, but they've never even tried learning it, like you have never tried learning Korean. Don't knock it till you've tried learning it yourself, instead of just listening to people that learn languages differently than you.

I'm a native German speaker, can get along in English, am intermediate in Spanish, Japanese and Latin, studied Mandarin for a couple of months, picked up Korean a year ago and French half a year ago. And I have to say: Korean is difficult for me. Its phonology and especially the sandhi rules are very different from what I am used to, so it takes a lot of time and repetition to learn them. I can't imagine how the grammar would be without Japanese, but I guess it'd be an additional hurdle. Moreover, I recently had to realize that I still understand most of the Mandarin I learnt two years ago (production is a lot worse, of course), whereas every single break sets my Korean back noticeably. And I'm not even at the point where I would worry about getting the register right.
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sjheiss
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5523 days ago
100 posts - 174 votes

Speaks: English*, Basque

Message 14 of 57

03 January 2011 at 6:36am | IP Logged

carlonove wrote:

The reason I say that a speaker of an Altaic language would find Korean easier, is not because of the similarity between words (you're right, there isn't much, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't related), but because that they are all agglutinating languages, so the grammar would be easier for them to grasp, being similar to their mother language.

Bao wrote:

I have a very good visual memory, so it was easy for me to remember how to spell words (like flower, "kkoch", although because of sandhi like you said, it's pronounced "kkot" unless followed by a vowel), and the rest of the phonology was very easy, not even the tense consonants were a problem. The different honorific levels are also easy for me, it's not hard to tell when to use the different verb endings, or in some cases different words.

You can not say that one language is universally hard or easy, it varies from person to person because of their knowledge of languages and linguistics, their learning style, and their determination to learn the language (and other factors too). Like you said leosmith, there is no universally "easy" language, just like there is no universally "hard" language, the learner can make it as hard or as easy for themselves as they want. For example, if they are very determined to learn the language then it will be easy, but if they are being forced to learn it, it will most likely be difficult, because they won't have as much motivation to learn it.

leosmith wrote:

This is a pretty good reason not to believe you, imo.

No it is not. You don't have to be fluent in a language to have knowledge about languages. The opposite is true too, just because you are fluent in more than one language doesn't mean you know a lot about languages. For example, being fluent in French and English doesn't give you knowledge about polysynthetic or agglutinative languages. Nor does it give you any knowledge at all about the synthetic auxiliary verbs of Basque for instance, whereas learning the language, or just reading a grammar for it, would.

Edited by sjheiss on 03 January 2011 at 6:44am
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Merv
Bilingual Diglot
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 15 of 57

03 January 2011 at 6:49am | IP Logged

sjheiss wrote:

carlonove wrote:

I would love for a speaker of both Japanese (or Korean) and Turkish to
demonstrate how the knowledge of one greatly facilitated the learning of the other in the sense that learning one
member of a "verified" language family typically facilitates learning of another. Although I'm not completely ruling
out the idea that there's a genetic relationship between the Turkic and East Asian branches of the "Altaic" family,
the vocabulary analysis usually put forth as evidence is pretty unconvincing.

The reason I say that a speaker of an Altaic language would find Korean easier, is not because of the similarity
between words (you're right, there isn't much, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't related), but because
that they are all agglutinating languages, so the grammar would be easier for them to grasp, being similar to
their mother language.

Bao wrote:

I'm a native German speaker, can get along in English, am intermediate in Spanish, Japanese and Latin, studied
Mandarin for a couple of months, picked up Korean a year ago and French half a year ago. And I have to say:
Korean is difficult for me. Its phonology and especially the sandhi rules are very different from what I am used to,
so it takes a lot of time and repetition to learn them. I can't imagine how the grammar would be without
Japanese, but I guess it'd be an additional hurdle. Moreover, I recently had to realize that I still understand most
of the Mandarin I learnt two years ago (production is a lot worse, of course), whereas every single break sets my
Korean back noticeably. And I'm not even at the point where I would worry about getting the register
right.

I have a very good visual memory, so it was easy for me to remember how to spell words (like flower, "kkoch",
although because of sandhi like you said, it's pronounced "kkot" unless followed by a vowel), and the rest of the
phonology was very easy, not even the tense consonants were a problem. The different honorific levels are also
easy for me, it's not hard to tell when to use the different verb endings, or in some cases different words.

You can not say that one language is universally hard or easy, it varies from person to person because of their
knowledge of languages and linguistics, their learning style, and their determination to learn the language (and
other factors too). Like you said leosmith, there is no universally "easy" language, just like there is no universally
"hard" language, the learner can make it as hard or as easy for themselves as they want. For example, if they are
very determined to learn the language then it will be easy, but if they are being forced to learn it, it will most
likely be difficult, because they won't have as much motivation to learn it.

Although I agree with you that people are too quick to label something easy or difficult, particularly when it
comes to languages, I think most people would agree that there are objective differences in difficulty, which also
of course depend on one's background.

This is an English-speaking forum and presumably everyone posting on this subforum can put together
somewhat reasonably English sentences. Consequently, most notions of language difficulty are seen through the
lens of English. Objectively, given the same level of effort, interest, motivation, and aptitude, learning a language
like French is much easier for a native English-speaker than learning a language like Korean. Now, is it possible
that it would be easier for a native Japanese-speaker to learn Korean (assuming all things are equal) than
Icelandic? Certainly, but again this forum has an Anglocentric and Indo-European-centric bias; consequently,
many natural languages that are not Western European and, especially, not Indo-European, are seen by very
many on this forum, and not without reason, as belonging to a class we might call "more difficult."
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sjheiss
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5523 days ago
100 posts - 174 votes

Speaks: English*, Basque

Message 16 of 57

03 January 2011 at 7:11am | IP Logged

Merv wrote:

Certainly, but again this forum has an Anglocentric and Indo-European-centric bias; consequently, many natural languages that are not Western European and, especially, not Indo-European, are seen by very many on this forum, and not without reason, as belonging to a class we might call "more difficult."

Well, I have a knowledge about many languages besides IE languages, so I do not have an English- or Indo-European-centric bias. In fact, a language which many people think is easy for an English speaker, French, I think is pretty difficult, because of all the idiomatic stuff in it, it sounds so mumbled and hard to understand while spoken, and also because I really don't like it and do not want to learn it. Although, most languages have lots of idiomatic constructions, or things that are constructed different from English, but some more than others, and Basque has them too, but Basque I find easier to learn because I am very determined to learn it, and I have a lot of motivation to learn it, so things some people might perceive as difficult do not bother me, I just learn them and look over it.

If you meant that my English is not very good, I am sorry, I have a hard time keeping thoughts straight, and I have other problems speaking correctly.

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