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Ranking list of languages by difficulty | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Nocturne Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 6148 days ago 67 posts - 70 votes  Speaks: Italian*, EnglishB2 Studies: Korean, Swedish | Message 65 of 115 04 September 2008 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||
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No, it's OK, actually I'm the one who needs to apologize for not making my point clear enough.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Deecab Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 106 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English, Korean* Studies: Mandarin | Message 66 of 115 04 September 2008 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I still don't think Korean has any particular standout that really makes it difficult than Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. Arabic has probably the toughest grammar out of the 4, and Japanese/Chinese have Kanji/Hanzi respectively, but Korean really doesn't have a feature that stands out to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LuckyNomad Groupie Korea, South Joined 6347 days ago 79 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 67 of 115 04 September 2008 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
It would be useful for foreigners who are studying the Korean language and linguists if we could always see the Hanja, but your average Korean doesn't actually need to see any Hanja to know what their words mean. Afterall, we speak words before we can read or write them. How many English speakers conciously think about the latin and greek routes of English words that they use? When someone says, "December," I'm sure they don't think to themselves, "ahh, Dec = 10 because the Romans used to follow a lunar calendar and December was the 10th month in it" December is just December and it is understood even if you don't know the background information about the word. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Autarkis Triglot Groupie Switzerland twitter.com/Autarkis Joined 5952 days ago 95 posts - 106 votes 4 sounds Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 68 of 115 05 September 2008 at 3:49am | IP Logged | ||
Dude, I feel so caught with my hand in the cookie jar now ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rasputin Triglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5967 days ago 21 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: German, Italian, Zulu | Message 69 of 115 05 September 2008 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Spanish is fairly easy to learn. It is remarkably consistent in pronunciations and quite intuitive-- to English speakers-- to form nouns and verb structures. Many cognates exist-- witness the hoary old joke of simply putting an "-o" on the end of an English word to yield a quasi-Spanish one! few "false friends" exist... though once I told a Mexican family, "Ay, estoy muy embarazado." this does NOT, in fact, convey the meaning "Oh, I am so embarrassed." 9-:
Afrikaans is not difficult at all grammatically, though some of the gutteral and singsonged phonemes may cause newbies a challenge. Those who already know German or Swedish will find it easy, and for Dutch speakers, of course, it's a shoo-in. (It sounds, to Dutch ears, like a curious antiquated form of Old Dutch, but both groups perfectly understand one another.). Afrikaans has the curious rule of using the same verb conjugation per each of the pronouns: Ek is, Jy is, Ons is, Jou is, Haar is, Hy is, Dit is, Hulle is, Julle is. If one knows Spanish, then Italian and Portuguese are quite easy to figure out. But French! Because French is so exquisitely polite and elliptical and regal and politic in mood, it enjoys so many special locutions and idiomatic phrases that simply have to be learned by rote. Not to mention the fact that there is a sizeable gulf between "good" bookish French... and what people speak on the streets and in informal conversation. There are so many un-enunciated letters and elided structures, that, often, spoken French-- especially spoken quickly as by many a Parisian-- can be unintelligible to even the seasoned intermediate student of the language... even if he can read the printed version with no problem. English and Chinese may be famous for their homonyms... but French takes the cake here, I feel. But plop me in the countryside of France, and have an old farmer engage me, and I can understand him fine. Counterintuitive, perhaps, inasmuch as the opposite might be true for a foreigner in extreme rural Britain or the United States. Edited by rasputin on 06 September 2008 at 2:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6775 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 70 of 115 15 September 2008 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
I think Russian is by far the easiest language (out of the choices given) for the native speaker of Bulgarian, Sennin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rasputin Triglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5967 days ago 21 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: German, Italian, Zulu | Message 71 of 115 16 September 2008 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a Japanese native friend who decided to learn Spanish... She said that, surprisingly, she felt right at home in Spanish, since both languages have that
ta-te-ti-to-tu ka-ke-ki-ko-ku ma-me-mi-mo-mu ra-re-ri-ro-ru....etc. thang goin' on.  Though, of course, they couldn't be more different syntactically and gramatically.Edited by rasputin on 16 September 2008 at 12:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lemanensis Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland hebrew.ecott.ch Joined 5924 days ago 73 posts - 77 votes Speaks: French*, English*, German, Spanish, Swedish Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 72 of 115 16 September 2008 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
The Scandinavian languages are extremely easy for English speakers. The grammar differs little from simplified English. This is the major reason why many Scandinavians speak relatively good English. A few sounds take practice but that is all - the rest are practically like English. A lot of words are very similar to English or English/Scottish dialect words (barn > bairn; mycket > muckle) German appears complicated at first but gets easier the further you go. Native speakers talk comparatively slowly (compared to speakers of Latin languages). Latin languages appear easier at first but get more complicated the further you go. Native speakers tend to talk fast, though often using more words than necessary to convey their meaning. French has a complicated spelling system because many letters are written that aren't pronounced - but not nasty phonetics and simpler verb structures than Spanish and Italian. However, English spelling and pronunciation (by which I mean working out pronunciation from the written word) are a nightmare for those not brought up on it and English has more verb tenses... Russian cases are not complicated per say but just need to be learnt. The Russian verb system is far worse - in particular the verbs of movement. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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