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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5171 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 97 of 130 02 November 2010 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Pronunciation is not complicated (if we disregard the pitch accent conundrum), but that doesn't make the spoken language easier. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5824 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 98 of 130 02 November 2010 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I voted for Arabic because I know it would be the hardest for me. However, I am sure this differs for every person, depending on aptitude and interests.
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| kingofcatss Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4919 days ago 1 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 99 of 130 09 November 2010 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It took me four years to be proficient in Japanese. Having studied both - but, I confess, can only really say I am proficient in Japanese - it annoys me a bit when people say that Chinese is harder. Japanese is more difficult for the following reasons:
1) The kanji system is designed for Chinese. There are lots of hints in the radicals - the component parts of characters - as to how to pronounce the word. This is very helpful when learning Chinese and virtually useless when learning Japanese. Add to this the fact that you will usually have to learn two readings for each character in Japanese and only one in Chinese. 2) Japanese people are perhaps the most introspective in the world. It's really very hard to start up proper conversations with people. It's a very competitive society and people are very keen to show off their - no matter how dreadful - English. Also, many people are actually hostile towards foreigners wanting to learn their language, sometimes very openly. Chinese people are - at present at least - happy to find foreigners making the effort and keen to chat along, making it much easier. This cultural difference is, in fact, the most important I think in making Japanese the hardest to learn. Add to that the almost total lack of encouragement you get when learning Japanese from your friends, family and Japanese people - 'What're you going to do with that!?' 3) Chinese pronunciation is difficult only if you find tones difficult. This really varies from person to person. For me, at least, it's very foreign and strange at first but just something that requires time. Contrary to what many people have written on this forum, Japanese pronunciation is not all that easy. Most people take it a good year or so to pronounce words enough like a Japanese person to get across what they want they want to say beyond basic phrases. 4) Another difficult factor of Japanese is that it has so few sounds. In fact, it is the major world language with the fewest sounds. This means that, to the uninitiated brain, it all sounds the same. This is made even worse when learning Chinese words which are imported into the Japanese phonetic system, stripped of the tones that differentiate them. 5) Since you include 'writing' I'll tell you that no matter how 'logical' Japanese grammar is, it's still every bit as complicated as French and requires just as much attention to nuance and orthodoxy in order to write it well. I've never heard of a foreigner who can write well enough in Japanese to fool people into thinking that it was a Japanese person who wrote it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Remster Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4595 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French | Message 100 of 130 04 October 2011 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Is this thread only limited to the languages shown above?
If not, what do you people think of Basque? I've heard it's atleast really difficult. I've also heard about a language called Tzeltal in Mexico which has a lot of genders. I'm not sure about any details though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeronz Diglot Newbie New Zealand Joined 4648 days ago 37 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Yiddish, Latin, German, Italian | Message 101 of 130 04 October 2011 at 10:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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My vote for Tsez - definitely an order of magnitude harder than what's listed: impossible phonology, completely unstreamlined grammar - irregular verbs more common than regular, noun cases, ergative plus more delights.
Interestingly, language complexity tends to be inversely related to the number of speakers. As a language becomes more widespread and people learn it incompletely as adults the language gets simplified, streamlined and loses the more difficult parts. A good example is English after the Norman Invasion resulting in the loss of gender markers and a few other things. Additionally, Mandarin is apparently the easiest of the Chinese languages as a similar simplification process happened to it when it became the dominant sino-tibetian language (e.g. much fewer of the difficult-to-grasp-as-a-non-native sentence-final particles like la, ba etc and only 4 tones). A quibble with the post if I may: Arabic is not one language. There are at least a dozen different Arabics many of them not mutually intelligible. Edited by jeronz on 04 October 2011 at 10:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6340 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 102 of 130 06 October 2011 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not really. I agree with some of what you said, but you can't say that Mandarin is twice as easy as Spanish because it has twice as many speakers, for example.
Here, as in many language discussions on this forum and elsewhere, "learning Arabic" refers to learning standard + one local "dialect". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LangOfChildren Tetraglot Groupie Germany Joined 5217 days ago 82 posts - 141 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Swedish Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Russian | Message 103 of 130 06 October 2011 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Of the languages I've attempted to learn thus far, Thai has given me the most trouble by far. Chinese and Japanese are both relatively easy to me.
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| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4614 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 104 of 130 06 October 2011 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know much but I can say some aspects of polish are giving me a hard time, of course it's the numerous
different declensions and spellings (there's like 20 different ways to write the word "two"...). Also hard is the NUMEROUS (I insist) words meaning relatively the same thing, but in differing contexts and of the course the fact that virtually every single verb has many different infinitive forms which change it's meaning slightly (for instance, for the verb to go : iść, chodzić, jechać, jeździć, etc.). For every verb you learn, you at least have to learn two and figure out which one to use when you have a perfective situation and when imperfective (which, for me whose first language is french, is completely strange). Some are kind of hard to differenciate (prowadzić, prowadzać : guess which one's which!). Because of the declensions, simple things like telling time or reading a date become a mine field of possible mistakes (depending on how you construct your sentence, the words are written and pronounced very differently). But, on the positive side, and that makes the language much easier in my opinion, everything is phonetical (except some foreign words like jazz) and, at least for me, pronunciation is not very difficult ; one simply has to start a new word slowly, syllable by syllable, and then repeat it faster and faster : done! Of course, some words are kind of intimidating : przyszczypnięcie, przeczyszczający, konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka! But even double consonants are pronounced, contrary to french where this makes no sense at all (for instance Anna is pronunced An-na). What makes a declension heavy (or agglutinous) language difficult is the quasi absence of articles and particles. In french, for instance, words like le, la, les precede nouns and announce the gender and number. In polish, this information comes at the end of each word but when you get there, another word is already starting so you have to be quick! Edit. For fun, the various forms of the simple word for "two" (2) : dwa, dwaj, dwie, dwoje, dwóch, dwóm, dwom, dwu, dwoma, dwiema, dwojga, dwojgu, dwojg?, dwójka, dwójku, dwójki, dwójce, dwójkiem, dwójko, dwójgo dwojgiem, drugi, druga, drugie, drugiemu, drugiej, drugiego, drugim, drugą Edited by Homogenik on 06 October 2011 at 3:57pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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