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World’s most difficult language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Maximus Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6538 days ago 417 posts - 427 votes  Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Thai | Message 65 of 130 21 March 2009 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Though the writing system of Japanese does take a lot of effort and dedication, the Joyo Kanji (everyday use characters) can be learned within 2 years. It is possible. And when you get over the first 1000 or so, you realize that their advantages outweigh their difficulties. Namely the acquisition of vocabulary. As for Korean, reading with just Hangul means that you have to learn all vocaulary the hard way! By brute memorization. Sure, korean seams easier at first. But when I start to move on the more advanced vocaulary I always tell myself this kind of memorization would be much easier if Korean hadn't abandoned all of its Hanja. In top of that, Korean verb conjugations feel a little more complicated that those of Japanese. To start with there is vowel harmony and the levels of politeness are more abundant in Korean. Edited by Maximus on 21 March 2009 at 5:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Maximus Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6538 days ago 417 posts - 427 votes Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Thai | Message 66 of 130 21 March 2009 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Nobody has said English! We must not have any English literature teachers here!
I remember having this really ethnocentric English literature teacher in Highschool. She was so against multilingualism, always went off on rants about how she believed that multilingualism worsens one's capacity to express oneself in one's native tongue and also expressed on a regular basic her opinion that English is the most difficult language in the world! What a joke! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6041 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 67 of 130 21 March 2009 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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What would be the most difficult language in the world? It would be a language with phonemes (sounds) that are mostly different from your native language, the grammar would have a million rules and exceptions and the writing system would be a very poor representation of how people speak. There would also be few or no cognates.
Japanese has the benefit of having a pronunciation that is not horribly difficult for our target group: native English speakers. Japanese has borrowed a lot of words from English so that helps as well. These two factors are important because they allow you to use the language, even at a very basic level, and be understood by native speakers. I’ve heard that its vowels have very few irregulars but that its word order is bit of a pain. What makes Japanese truly difficult is its honorifics and Kanji. Romanji will only take you so far and there is little rhyme or reason to what symbols represent which ideas or how they are pronounced. At least Mandarin gives you a one to one syllable-character correspondence with almost all characters. Mandarin’s grammar is almost as simple as grammars get. Its word order is similar to English most of the time. Mandarin is difficult because of its tones. Lots of people have a really hard time wrapping their heads around them and can’t speak in an intelligible way even after months (or sometimes years) of study. That ends up frustrating them early on so they quit. While not quite as bad as Japanese Kanji, Chinese characters are plenty difficult since they give you no idea how to say the word and only an idea of what it might mean. I almost voted for Korean. Korean is deceptively difficult. It has an alphabet and it’s not tonal. The problem is that there are characters in Korean, borrowed from Chinese long ago, that give no rhyme or reason as to what they mean. I 语不 would 我 something like 汉. Even though the sound system seems innocent at first there are lots of little subtle phonemes that sound the same to English speakers, even after hours of listening to them. Of these four languages, I know the least about Korean so I could have voted wrong, but I don’t think I did. My vote went to Arabic. Even though Arabic has an alphabet, it only includes consonants. If you have already learned the word then that’s not so bad, however, that means that you have to learn most words orally/by listening (and know them very well) before you can read them. Oh yeah, and it’s written from right to left and almost every letter has three different forms that you need to memorize. Though not as hard memorizing ideograms, it’s at least as hard as Korean. Arabic is not tonal but it, like Korean, has several of phonemes that sound completely alike to English speakers and many sounds that are very difficult for non-natives to pick up. The grammar is also a pain. For me, what really puts Arabic ahead of the others is that there is no true standard language/dialect. If you want to master Arabic then you need to learn at least three related languages: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Classical Arabic and a spoken dialect that varies a little or a lot from these two written forms. Learning Chinese, Korean or Japanese is difficult, no doubt about it, but once you’ve done so, you’re pretty much set. Most people under the age of 40 in Korea, Japan and (with a couple of exceptions) China prefer the standard dialect to their mutually non-intelligible dialects. Not so with Arabic. People have to go out of their way to speak MSA and, generally, only the educated are proficient in it. But the educated often know decent English and would much prefer to speak to you in English than MSA. If you spend some time in Oman, for example, then your Arabic will be about as useful as Portuguese is in Cuba if you go to Egypt (not very). It’s even worse if you learn Moroccan Arabic and then try to buy groceries in Bagdad (like using Norwegian in Munich). I realize that there are some other languages out there that might very well be more difficult than these four. Navajo, for example, is supposed to be brutal. The thing is, these languages usually have very small numbers of speakers and are only attractive to very select number of English speakers. Personally, I think the debate over Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, is a good one. Edited by portunhol on 22 March 2009 at 4:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English* | Message 68 of 130 22 March 2009 at 3:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
By this logic, languages using Chinese characters are the easiest in the world. I disagree.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| VityaCo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6870 days ago 79 posts - 86 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 69 of 130 22 March 2009 at 8:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
y cn rd ths, bcs y lrndt frst wth vwls nthwrds. Hw wld t b t d t wtht knwng thm t ll nd dffrnt lfbt nd wrttn? Now it is getting much harder. Edited by VityaCo on 22 March 2009 at 8:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| jimbo baby! Senior Member United States Joined 5766 days ago 202 posts - 208 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* | Message 70 of 130 22 March 2009 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Cantonese should be one of the poll options. It has more tones than Mandarin and tones is what makes Chinese languages so hard for many people to learn.
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| Maximus Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6538 days ago 417 posts - 427 votes Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Thai | Message 72 of 130 22 March 2009 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Character using languages are not the easiest in the world. I am not trying to say this. What I want to say is that just because they used characters, they are not necessarily the most difficult. People who are not familiar with character languages tend to overrate their difficulty just because the concept of having to know 2000 plus characters seems unreasonable to them when compared to their language which has 30 or so letters. I still believe that Korean is more difficult than Japanese despite the fact that it doesn't use characters anymore. And this opinion is not one from just speculation. I have experienced it first hand. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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