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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 73 of 130 23 August 2009 at 9:46pm | IP Logged |
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The answer is Japanese.
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| Noir Bilingual Hexaglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5546 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Portuguese, Belarusian*, Russian*, English, Spanish, Norwegian Studies: Japanese, Korean, Armenian, Kazakh | Message 74 of 130 24 August 2009 at 1:06am | IP Logged |
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In my opinion Japanese is, not to say easy, not as difficult as Korean is. So my answer is Korean.
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| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 75 of 130 24 August 2009 at 1:51am | IP Logged |
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Interesting. I wonder how long it would take to learn to read and write Korean.
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| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5398 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 76 of 130 24 August 2009 at 4:36am | IP Logged |
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I voted for Arabic, because none of the listed is very difficult for me to learn, except Arabic, and as for a language not listed here, perhaps I would vote for Finnish or Hebrew.
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| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 77 of 130 25 August 2009 at 1:32am | IP Logged |
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I just read the first post again. Sure enough, it says for an English speaker.
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| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5840 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 78 of 130 25 August 2009 at 8:21am | IP Logged |
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I think FSI already solved this problem for us, because like people have mentioned, Japanese is the hardest on their list, as determined by difficulty for native English speakers.
I think it also depends on how FAR you want to go into the language. Of course, learning any of these languages into the highest levels of fluency would be an incredible achievement, but I think that Chinese should stand out here. At the beginning, it doesn't seem that Chinese is that difficult, due to the simple grammar. Most learners start with pinyin, etc, so the reading isn't an issue, let alone writing. I think that any of the others would be much more intimidating to the learner at the beginner's stage. Things start warming up later on. If you have an idea to move to the highest levels of fluency in Chinese, you'll find that the more you go along, the harder it becomes, the less and less logical it is, and I see no limit as of yet. You realize that although Chinese has fewer grammar rules, it just has tons of sentence forms and vocab that you must use to convey the idea, that a rule would have conveyed in another language, so the lack of rules is actually a difficulty. Spanish, with more "grammar" is kindergarten compared to Chinese which has "simple grammar". It is true that the some of the vocab is somewhat easy to deduce based on other words you already know IN context. However, the usages and quirks of Chinese words, sometimes with multiple unrelated grammar functions, often defy all logic, and simply must be memorized by brute force. From the production point of view,( at high level) this is bad news. I haven't even gotten to the characters. People mention that you have to learn 2000 characters. I know more than 2000 characters and must rely on a dictionary as I plod along in a romance novel. Forget anything technical. If you are thinking fluent in all 4 skills, you are looking at 4000+ characters to begin to read fluently, IMO. Oh, and writing the 4000+ characters...fluenty? How about reading peoples' handwriting, which is nothing like how the characters look in your textbook. Finally, the dialects and accents of China will require you to understand very strange accents, yes, Mandarin accents that you have never studied in class before, if you want to really be fluent in listening. To tone deaf people, this is going to be even more of a nightmare. I can't speak for the other languages, but although I am sure they are all very difficult to get to high levels of fluency, Chinese to me, must surpass the others if we are talking about high fluency, all 4 skills. Just my opinion that is subject to change :) Edited by irrationale on 25 August 2009 at 8:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paramecium Tetraglot Groupie Germany Joined 5502 days ago 46 posts - 59 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Russian Studies: Japanese | Message 79 of 130 25 August 2009 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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Whats about the languages from the caucasus? Some like Tsez language have 64 cases.
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| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6655 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 80 of 130 25 August 2009 at 6:32pm | IP Logged |
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I have heard that Navajo is extraordinarily difficult for non-speakers to learn. It was/is so difficult, the US Army used it for codes.
You can hear a Navajo tongue-twister http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZN_KXMyPeI&feature=related 1 person has voted this message useful |
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