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Most difficult IE Language? | ||
Tags: Indo-European Languages | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6016 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 69 24 June 2010 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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".....Of the ones I have attempted to study, It's a tie between Albanian and Georgian! I think Georgian might
come out ahead by a nose because of its alphabet. Albanian is difficult because it is heavily inflected, not many cognates with other IE languages and speakers seem so swallow-up sounds when they speak it. It is really, really hard. Georgian is pretty much the same but not quite as inflected - but then there's that tricky alphabet. :-) ".....
Whoops! You are correct. So, there you have it... Albanian it is....... :-) In addition to the difficulties I noted above, I find the difficulties of Albanian as follows (adapted from Wikipedia's Albanian Language entry) 1) 3 different dialects 2) 5 noun declensions with 6 cases 3) Confusing definite articles can be in the form of noun suffixes. These vary with gender and case. 4) With regards to pronunciation, there is a merging of the two series of voiced stops (e.g. both *d and *dh became d). In addition the voiced stops tend to disappear when between vowels. There is almost complete loss of final syllables and very widespread loss of other unstressed syllables making Albanian quite difficult to understand! 5) Verbs with a complex system of moods 6 types and tenses 3 simple and 5 complex constructions! 6) It is difficult to find Albanian speakers outside of Albania and it is difficult to find quality instructional material (relative to, say, French, German, Italian etc...) Edited by liddytime on 24 June 2010 at 1:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6489 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 10 of 69 24 June 2010 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I always assume that the question means from the point of view of the language the question is written in. So we have Albanian, Lithuanian and Icelandic as contenders, and maybe Sanskrit if it's really a living language, but only one vote for each. Any other opinions? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5060 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 69 24 June 2010 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Slovenian: 6 cases, pitch accent, not entirely phonetic, and dual number.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5240 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 12 of 69 24 June 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Icelandic? Only four cases. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5095 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 69 24 June 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Polish: 7 cases, 5 genders. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| trance0 Pentaglot Groupie Slovenia Joined 5537 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: Slovenian*, English, German, Croatian, Serbian | Message 14 of 69 24 June 2010 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wouldn`t call Slovene the most difficult in the IE branch. I would say Russian is probably more difficult than Slovene because of the very difficult pronunciation and because it is less phonetic. Mobile stress, a-kanje etc. make it difficult for most Slavic speakers as well, at least complete mastery of this language is quite hard to achieve. Edited by trance0 on 24 June 2010 at 7:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Izual Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 5712 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 69 24 June 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
I wouldn't agree. Being a Polish speaker and studying Russian, I can say that except mobile stress, all other phonetic processes are quite easy to master for a Slavic speaker. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6489 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 16 of 69 24 June 2010 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, I remember from other discussions that many people think Polish and perhaps Czech are the hardest Slavic languages because of the number of cases. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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