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Ranking based on writing and reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5934 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 17 of 40 22 September 2008 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, Vietnamese is as easy as can be, although the North/South dialectal differences can cause problems; one dialect may merge what are considered two distinct letters in the other. IIRC, d and "d with a bar" are two distinct sounds in one dialect but simply "d" in the other (Sorry for the poor example but Wikipedia's down and my books only discuss one usage). But if you can distinguish six tones by ear then you probably will be familiar with both dialects and this shouldn't pose any problems. To clear up South-East Asia, Lao is easier than Thai because it is written entirely on the basic of phonetics rather than etymology, so the problem of many letters for one sound has been removed. The tone rules are quite complex but regular. Digression... Explanation of the Thai writing system. If it is already on this forum please say and I'll delete this paragraph. The reason for all the "multiple choice sounds" in Thai is that Thai spelling is based on etymology, i.e. where the word came from, rather than simply phonetics, how it sounds (similar to the way Urdu and Farsi use the Arabic script). Because Thai script is based in Devanagari and the large number of Sanskrit loans, Thai maintains letters to represent sounds which are distinct in Sanskrit but not Thai. The best examples are "dtor chadtaa" "tor taan" "tor montoh" "dtor dtao" and "nor nen" (ฏ ฐ ฑ ฒ ณ) which are derived from the retroflex equivalents of "dor dek" "tor toong" "tor tahaan" "tor tung" and "nor noo" (ด ถ ท ธ น). Thai, as English, doesn't distinguish between retroflex and dental consonants, but Sanskrit does so these letters are maintained to show the Sanskrit spelling of the word rather than how it is pronounced by the Thais. The killer mark is also present to preserve foreign spellings e.g. jun(dr) comes from the same root as Hindi/Urdu "chand" - moon and "chandri" silver. This mark is also seen over a lot of recent English loans, notably silent "ror reua" after a long vowel. Anyway... I would rank Khmer as slightly easier than Thai although still in the same category. Khmer splits its consonants into two classes which alters the pronunciation of the following vowel, sometimes quite markedly. Also, each letter has a distinct subscript form which is used under another consonant to create a consonant cluster. This causes further problems in pronouncing vowels and the rules get quite complex. However, because Khmer needs two versions of each consonants (i.e. class 1 and class 2 to get all the possible vowel sounds), there's hardly any problem with "multiple choice sounds". Finally, Burmese. Where to start? Burmese has the problems of Thai (spelling based on etymology), English (archaic spelling of native words) and Arabic (diglossia between written and spoken forms). However, my knowledge of Burmese is informal, and as such doesn't touch on the written variants much. Reading materials for my level are mainly transcribed conversations, so it's difficult to gauge just how difficult it is, but it would seem to rank as one of the hardest non-ideographic scripts around. IIRC, Tamil has many of the same features, anyone got any details? One final point, I think the difficulty of the Arabic script is massively overinflated. It does produce a few problems for the beginner but not having to worry about short vowels while writing makes spelling easier. Of course Farsi and Urdu have the same difficulties as Thai when it comes to spelling and have problems representing their vowels, but it is perfectly suited for MSA (except for floating hamzas). IMHO, the reasons the literacy rates tend to be low in areas which use the Arabic script are in general social rather than linguistic. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5934 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 19 of 40 22 September 2008 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, I suppose you're right. I was trying to preempt the claims that literacy rates for Arabic-script languages demonstrated the difficulty of the script, but as you point out the literacy rate is more a reflection of socio- economic development rather than difficulty of the writing system. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5836 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 20 of 40 22 September 2008 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks. I've updated the ranking and added one little feature. The languages are now listed easiest to hardest within each of the categories. So for example, even though Thai and Lao are in the same category Thai comes after Lao as it is harder. Once again thanks for all of your help. Has anyone studied any of the Indian languages? I'm assuming they might be phonetic because I once read that speakers did not want to adopt the Roman alphabet because they thought that it was not phonetic as the only exposure they had had to it was English.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5934 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 21 of 40 23 September 2008 at 7:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Personally I don't qualified enough to qualify each language individually and will divide the languages by script into three groups: Arabic (Indian), Devanagari and Devanagari Derivatives (Indian- in contrast to Dravidian or South-East Asian varieties). The Indic languages are phonetically quite close so many of the problems are common to all the languages. NB Some languages are discussed under more than one heading, generally Arabic script is used by Pakistanis (whether in Pakistan or the diaspora) and Devanagari elsewhere. Furthermore, those with their own version of Devanagari (e.g. Punjabi and Gujurati) are probably more commonly written in DD (I) rather than Arabic (I). Arabic (Indian) - Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujurati, Sindhi, Pashto, Baluch Same footing as Farsi and, obviously, Urdu, although some of the smaller languages may not be so fussy about Arab spellings. Nastaliq seems to be preferred in the sub-continent and some say it's more difficult than "normal" nashkh Arabic script but it's not a major hurdle. Devanagari - Hindi, Nepali, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Marathi, Sanskrit and others Entirely phonetically for Sanskrit, in fact frustratingly so due to the sandhi rules. Needs a few diacritics to render Arab loans but actually a very clear and precise abugida script. The main drawbacks are: the difficult rules for joining consonants to create clusters, but they don't seem to be needed much nowadays; and the difficulty in showing the most recent sound change which involved dropping many of the inherent short "a" sounds. This leads to a slight difficulty in reading but there are general guidelines which are right 90+% of the time. Overall, easy on both counts, IMHO. Devanagari Derivatives (Indian) - Bengali, Gujurati, Oriya, Punjabi; others? These can be seen, to some extent, as extreme font changes i.e. most of the theory is the same as Devanagari but the shapes vary widely. I'm not really familiar with these languages but personally I find Gujurati easier to read than Devanagari while according to the wiki page Oriya has a reputation for being difficult. I would rank them on a par with Devanagari, but that would definitely be a provisional position. Edited by Fat-tony on 23 September 2008 at 11:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5836 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 22 of 40 24 September 2008 at 6:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Fat-tony if you don't mind could you please post the list of languages you discussed and how difficult you think they are next to them. From what you wrote I think your qualified. If someone disagrees with your ranking I'm sure they will post a reply sooner or later :)
Also, is there something about the Roman alphabet that may make it easier to read? A lot of the languages in the easier categories are written using the Latin alphabet. The harder languages seem to use other scripts. Edited by John Smith on 24 September 2008 at 6:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5934 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 23 of 40 24 September 2008 at 7:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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Pashtu and Urdu: moderately difficult to write and very difficult to read (level with Farsi). I have ranked it as
easier than Farsi to write because, although spelling has been standardized, it's not afforded a high priority and most educated people spend more time reading/writing English than these two languages (in Pakistan at least). The other Arabic script languages (Sindhi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Baluch) are probably a bit easier because there's even less concern for spelling and anything that did require lots of difficult-to-spell Arab loans would probably be written in Urdu or English. Easiest of the moderately difficult to write, as Farsi for reading. Hindi; Nepali - Easy on both counts. Although you can be confident 90-95% of time, which would make it very easy, that final 5% requires learning quite a few additional conjunct forms. Gujurati, Punjabi - very easy on both counts. There're few/none non-phonetic spellings and the conjunct forms are more obvious than the original Devanagari ones. As for Bengali and Oriya, I'm really not sure about. I would hazard a guess that Bengali is more difficult than Hindi/Nepali because the presence of a diglossic situation tends to promote archaic spellings, or at least require learning reams of new vocab to understand written texts. Oriya looks difficult since all the distinguishing features are squeezed into a small portion of the symbol but I don't know how it's used. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6569 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 40 24 September 2008 at 8:51am | IP Logged | |||||
I think Russian is easy to read. Russian is definitely more phonetic than English, for example. I don't think many Russians make that many mistakes when they read or when they write. Maybe they make mistakes in some of the difficult words, but I doubt an average Russian writes worse than people from the countries whose languages are considered to be "easy" as far as writing goes. I would rank Russian "Easy" on John Smith's scale, it is not as easy as a "Very Easy" language like Spanish, but it is definitely not as hard as a "moderately difficult" language such as English. If anything, I think Russian is closer to being "very easy" than to "moderately difficult". I would argue that Ukrainian is to be ranked as "very easy" on John Smith's scales for reading and writing, and the relationship between the difficulty of Russian and Ukrainian is not unlike that of Italian versus Spanish. Edited by Russianbear on 24 September 2008 at 8:55am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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