Hardest language to learn? (217)

116 Name: !!xIb4rnRy : 2007-11-14 11:11 ID:B1IKKh1R

Gahhh... I'm reading this thread, and well-informed and well-thought-out replies amount to about 5% (>>33, >>65, >>69, >>75, >>76, >>110... and >>39 for explaining well why Japanese is hard for him). But I can't not comment, so...

  • "Difficulty" is indeed subjective and depends on the person's background.
  • Nobody mentioned Native American languages. If you think Hungarian is difficult, try some polysynthetic goodness, like Inuktitut (or old Ainu, for that matter).
  • Writing is not language. Discussion on Kanji / Hanzi / Hanja is largely irrelevant. Speech always preceded script. 10000 years ago people were already chattering away in all corners of the world, but couldn't write worth a damn. Were they dumb? And even if we were to take it into account, just to make it explicit, >>54, Japanese has many more than 2000 characters, but you're "literate" with 1945 (IIRC). Comparable amount for Chinese is about 5000, as I've heard told. Even the most educated Chinese scholars don't personally know more than about 20000. The rest are obscure or obsolete or both.
  • While culture is not language, it certainly has a large impact on its pragmatics and semantics. This is the primary reason Japanese is hard (besides its grammar being rather different, albeit almost completely regular)
  • Chinese grammar is English in disguise, except for couple of strange concepts (prenominal relative phrases, verb complements, counters). If you get past pronunciation, and manage to learn the completely cognateless vocabulary, it's easy for English speakers.
  • Polish does not have 16 cases. No indoeuropean language has over 8. Finnish has 16, Hungarian even a couple more, but their formation is easier than in Slavic languages. I don't know about Russian... but I would not even wish my mother tongue (Croatian) upon an enemy - it would be a curse worse than death. Irregularities abound, and descriptions are scarce. Accents are quite unpredictable. Many Europeans struggle with our consonants, and they're not even particularly challenging (compared to Arabic, Georgian, Xhosa...). Verbs change in almost regular ways, but there's always a catch around the corner.
  • Japanese, as well as my language, has pitch accent. In both, you are understandable regardless of accent. As a matter of fact, I understand that some Japanese dialects have exactly opposite accents on similar words: in one dialect haNA is flower and HAna nose, in another it is vice versa.
  • English has a huge vocabulary. Huge. Humonguous. Nuff said. (A case in point: "nuff" has its entry in the OED.)
  • African languages differ considerably among themselves. They are not one group. Swahili is quite easy for us Europeans - familiar phonology (at least in some dialects), rather logical word order... while Jul'hoan pronunciation alone gives me the creeps, even if its basic grammar is similar to English (~30 vowels, a bunch of consonants of which 48 are clicks... are you freaking kidding me?!?)
  • Hardest by US Military is only among those languages US Military believes to be worth teaching, and its data is only relevant to other English-native learners.

Finally, any language is equally easy as one's first language. Kids will learn whatever you throw at them with equal ease. Does it not then prove beyond any doubt that this is a wrong question to ask?

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