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Easiest "difficult" language?

  Tags: Difficulty
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
35 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5  Next >>
Dtmon
Newbie
United States
Joined 3344 days ago

6 posts - 9 votes
Studies: Georgian, English*

 
 Message 1 of 35
04 February 2015 at 5:07am | IP Logged 
Out of all the languages considered "Hard" which one isn't really isn't as scary as it is made out to be? I guess it depends but I would love to hear peoples opinions. I am talking from the viewpoint of English speakers for context.
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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 2 of 35
04 February 2015 at 4:43pm | IP Logged 
Esperanto.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 3 of 35
04 February 2015 at 7:07pm | IP Logged 
Nobody says Esperanto is hard though, apart from those who expected to learn it in a week and didn't.

I don't think creole languages actually have a reputation of being hard either, but they are generally considered exotic. Same about Indonesian.

However, no language is easy enough that one can learn it just because it would be an impressive claim. I'm not addressing the OP specifically but anyone who happens to read this thread. If you want to have a cool but useless skill, just learn a new writing system. The Greek alphabet is very easy (and useful in some professions), the Cyrillic one a bit harder but still easy enough that plenty of people lose the motivation to learn Russian when it no longer looks exotic. I'm not familiar enough with other alphabets like those of Sanskrit/Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, but they seem manageable as well. The Chinese characters are of course a different matter altogether. And then there are fictional alphabets like for example those created by Tolkien.
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Gomorritis
Tetraglot
Groupie
Netherlands
Joined 4038 days ago

91 posts - 157 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French
Studies: Greek, German, Dutch

 
 Message 4 of 35
04 February 2015 at 8:05pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
If you want to have a cool but useless skill, just learn a new writing system.


Any language with a different alphabet tends to be considered difficult by many people even when it's not (but obviously not in a forum as specialized as this one).

I don't know how many times someone has told me how hard learning Greek must be because the writing is different and I have to explain them that the effort I have put into learning the alphabet is not even 1% of the effort I have put in learning Greek. And the weirdest thing it's that it's often Greeks who learned English who tell me this.
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Stolan
Senior Member
United States
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274 posts - 368 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots
Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese

 
 Message 5 of 35
04 February 2015 at 8:20pm | IP Logged 
Arabic,many native American languages,korean, Hungarian, etc. almost all are manageable and fall into place like stepping into a hot bath and adjusting to the temperature, they aren't actually lava.
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Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
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Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

 
 Message 6 of 35
04 February 2015 at 8:51pm | IP Logged 
Mandarin
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alang
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6981 days ago

563 posts - 757 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 7 of 35
05 February 2015 at 12:59am | IP Logged 
luke wrote:
Esperanto.


You are obviously joking.

If it did come to difficult for perceived easy languages, then I would agree. There
are people who have tried to learn Esperanto and failed. I personally talked to one
woman who admittedly attempted for five years and did not succeed. She just never
tried to learn another language after that. The strange thing was she went to N.A.S.K.
more than once and was not able to make much progress from what I was told by her.

Now back on topic. Mandarin Chinese is easier, than thought of, due to the easier
grammar and vocabulary size. The tones and characters is what scare a lot of people
off.
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Fiyero
Newbie
United States
Joined 3362 days ago

14 posts - 21 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Russian, French

 
 Message 8 of 35
05 February 2015 at 6:18am | IP Logged 
Medulin wrote:
Mandarin


How is Mandarin considered the easiest hard language? It's in many
people's opinion the hardest language an English speaker might ever attempt to tackle (obviously something
like Navajo is harder, but hardly anyone will waste their time on that).

Edited by Fiyero on 05 February 2015 at 6:18am



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