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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6970 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 49 of 130 15 October 2007 at 8:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Italian would be hard for me because I have no interest in it but Chinese is easy because I feel pleasure when I study. However, usually when we talk of easy or hard we think of some sort of 'objective' time needed to learn that language.
What language would be the hardest for a baby to learn? For example how many years would it take to be able to read a newspaper in their native language or write a letter? I bet if you had to read Harry Potter in a foreign language and you had to do it in as little time as possible then you would be best to learn Arabic or Korean. The only two true contenders in this pole are Chinese and Japanese purely because of the time it will take to get up to a good standard in reading and writing. Usually it is reading and writing that are the final skills to be mastered in the natural progression of a child's language raising experience and it's considered harder than listening or speaking as it can't be 'picked up from the air'. Anyone who thinks mastering the Korean or Arabic (vowels or no vowels) writing system could be harder than a character system is ignoring the fundamental facts. is simply 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6061 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 51 of 130 16 October 2007 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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It is noticeable that the list includes no Indo-European languages. Relatively speaking though, these are not as difficult for English speakers, who are taken as the standard of difficulty.
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| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6025 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 52 of 130 02 November 2007 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I studied Arabic for about a year before. I found the language to be quite tough.
However, I do not think Arabic is as difficult as some people have purported it to be. (I have met some rather annoying Arabs who took great pride in claiming Arabic as being "the most difficult language in the world" though. Annoying, it was, because the persons I spoke with had little to no experience of dabbling with other languages to substantiate their claims and give fairness to it.) I wasn't really into Arabic at that point, so I didn't progress that much, but I knew that if I tried a little harder I would have done really well. (I practiced a lot to get that point though -- e.g. I listed down all possible verb conjugations (and there were a lot) in a spreadsheet and worked on them individually with many cross-referencing, and I did similar exercises for the singular/dual/plural and gender-based noun matters.) Now that I'm doing Japanese, I know that it's a lot tougher. Why? For the reading/written aspect only: Firstly, there's the kanji. (And I'm not satisfied with restricting myself to merely the jouyou kanji set.) Secondly, there's one's capacity to recognize and reproduce them. Thirdly, one would have to attach a sound to respective kanji, and these sounds can unfortunately be of quite an array, depending on whether other kanji precedes or follows it or if it is in isolation, which requires all of (trained) instinct, guesswork and some memorization. One would also have to attach meanings to individual kanji, and then a meaning as regards the whole compound. The alif-ba-tas of Arabic (and their cursive alphabet mixtures) and phonetic pronounciation seems rather simple in comparison. (Although Arabic pronunciation is markedly harder; with all the throaty sounds.) There's also Japanese grammar, which is a whole different ballgame altogether. At least Arabic grammar did not seem too different from English grammar for me. (It still followed the subject-verb-object order somewhat -- even when the verb came first before everything else it did not distort my understanding of sentences too badly.) But this whole verb-at-the-end with lots-of-particles-in-between grammar is something different and new for me, which needs some getting used to. And the speed at which native Japanese speakers talk... ho. Good thing that there's much interest and passion to motivate me as regards the Japanese language. Pop culture such as manga and their rich culture and history does account for a lot. Edited by ryuukohito on 02 November 2007 at 6:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6480 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 53 of 130 02 November 2007 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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| 236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 54 of 130 02 November 2007 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
Of the four languages, I only have a good knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, because I speak it and am learning to read/write it. The character system, in my opinion, is perhaps the most difficult to learn out of all languages, like many say. The fact that the characters tell you nothing about their sound makes learning to read and write a long, tedious, and arduous process. I believe that it takes most Chinese students (in China, that is) 5-6 years to achieve a reasonable command over writing the language, ie. the first 2500-3000 most common characters; reading comes faster. The lack of correspondence to sound is complicated by characters that have multiple sounds (sometimes distinguished by tones, other times completely different sound), and change their meaning accordingly. Some sound and tone combinations can have 5-10 common characters corresponding to it. Of course, this is cleared up by context. And each character may have many meanings, which vary in context as usual. Regional dialects may distort the tones/sounds, making comprehension considerably harder. Speaking is not that hard; the grammar is simple although can be confusing in longer sentences. The tones trip any English speaker up, but that is pretty much the only hard part of pronunciation. Because of my knowledge of other languages on the poll list is minimal, I cannot conclude affirmatively which of the languages is the hardest. However, I can, and have offered my thoughts on the difficulties of Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6731 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 55 of 130 02 November 2007 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to the US FSI, Japanese is the most difficult of the listed languages, but I believe there are other languages like Basque, Piraha and some Native American languages which are yet more difficult. Edited by Walshy on 02 November 2007 at 10:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Karakorum Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6358 days ago 201 posts - 232 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French, German | Message 56 of 130 03 November 2007 at 12:27am | IP Logged | ||
I've heard this opinion from many people familiar with both Mandarin and Japanese. I still don't get why though, given that Japanese has a much smaller sound inventory and no tones. The only explanation I heard is that Japanese writing is more ad-hoc, make shift, and mixed up causing a lot more confusion and hardship than Kanji alone. I also heard that Japanese grammar, though not particularly hard, is less intuitive than Mandarin. Politeness registers is another reason often quoted but I thought all three Asian languages had some form of politeness integrated in grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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