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Most difficult Indo-European language? | ||
Tags: Indo-European Languages | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4711 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 21 27 June 2012 at 6:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd love to study Persian! I just know of very, very few
English based methods to do so! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| decamillisjacob Newbie Canada Joined 4732 days ago 38 posts - 63 votes | Message 10 of 21 27 June 2012 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Irish and Scottish Gaelic---I took a stab at them once for shits and giggles. They made my native French look like a stroll through the park.
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| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4772 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 11 of 21 27 June 2012 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 12 of 21 27 June 2012 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nobody has mentioned Icelandic yet?
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| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4844 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 13 of 21 27 June 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Icelandic isn't that hard, once you have internalized the vowel changes. But yes, compared to other Scandinavian languages, it is not that easy either. If you say Icelandic is hard, you also have to mention the Slavics like Russian and Polish. I think they are basically on one level, though for me as a native German, Icelandic is a bit easier than Russian. I'd go for Russian or Sanskrit. Edited by Josquin on 27 June 2012 at 1:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Coheed Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 4686 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Romanian, Irish | Message 14 of 21 27 June 2012 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is Greek difficult in any way?
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 21 27 June 2012 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
Of course. It wasn't a super serious post, but rather some related threads on other forums/blogs, hopefully functioning as examples of how the topic has been (and obviously still is being) debated to death. If there's one question that's impossible to answer, it's "What is the most difficult language?" (let alone an Indo-European one). I'm not surprised to see COF as the original poster... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4665 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 16 of 21 27 June 2012 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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This thread does make me wonder, are the two directions of the "difficulty" street always the same? Do native speakers of Mandarin (or Icelandic, or Russian) find English as tough as native speakers of English find Mandarin (or Icelandic, or Russian)?
It seems like you could (in theory anyway) create a massive chart of language pairs, each with two measures of perceived difficulty, e.g. take a survey and find out how hard successful Anglophone learners of Mandarin found their learning task and how hard successful native Mandarin learners of English found theirs -- and do that for all the language pairs for which large enough survey populations can be found. And then for each language pair, you could compare the two "perceived difficulty" numbers and see which came out on top (e.g. perhaps German "beats" English, but English "beats" Spanish). Every time a language "wins" a "difficulty fight," add a point to its total. Then the language with the highest number (the one that came out in top in the most comparisons) would be the "hardest." Of course, this would be thoroughly tainted by the fact that there are all sorts of extrinsic reasons a language might come "easier," the enormous reach of English media being one obvious example. But it still might be interesting to see. I don't know, maybe there wouldn't end up being enough of a difference in perceptions for it to be meaningful. Edited by tastyonions on 27 June 2012 at 8:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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