Hardest language to learn? (217)

33 Name: Anonymous Linguist : 2006-07-01 05:24 ID:DTp+0ILR

Okay, first of all, the difficulty one has learning a language is directly proportional to its relatedness to ones own language.

For example, a person whose native language is limited to essentially consonant-vowel patterns (like Japanese) is going to have a very tough time learning a language with consonant-clusters (like English); whereas English is likely an extrmely easy language to learn for someone whose native language is Georgian, where consonant clusters on the order of seven-wide lurk, and four-consonants in a row are navigated with ease (English only has three consonants in a row at most).

A person whose native langauge has no tones (French) is going to have a very hard time learning a langauge that has tones (Chinese); whereas a Vietnamese, where tones abound, will have little or no trouble.

A person whose native language has a very limited set of vowels and/or consonants (Spanish) will have trouble learning a language with a rich set of consonants and/or vowels (French); whereas someone whose langauge is phonemically rich (Khoisan) will likely not have much trouble learning one that is phonemically limited (Bantu).

A person whose language is prepositional and whose word-order is Subject-Verb-Object (both in English), will have more trouble learning a language which is post-positional and whose order is Subject-Object-Verb (Japanese); whereas the SVO speaker will likely learn another SVO language with ease (English and Spanish), and similarly with two langauges that are SOV.

A person whose language doesn't inflect much (English) will have trouble learning a language that makes use of a lot of conjugation on verbs and declension of nouns (Fula).

So, a speaker of a phonetically limited, SVO, prepositional, toneless language is going to have a hell of a time learning a phonetically rich, SOV, postpositional languge that relies on tones.

This is why it is much harder for Japanese people to learn English than it is for us to learn Japanese: We have a phonetically rich language, Japanese is phonetically limited, we have consonant clusters, they essentially don't. Where we run into trouble is that we're SVO, they're SOV, and whereas Japanese relies on pitch-accent (a form of tones, but the tone changes over more than one syllable, where pitch means the difference between picking something up with a bridge or crossing chopsticks (ha(L)shi(H) vs. ha(H)shi(L));whereas "tones" is limited to changing over one syllable), whereas we are a stress-accent langauge, where stress can mean the difference between a big plastic disk and the act of putting something on that disk (a record vs. to record).

So, is there a hardest language in the world to learn? No. Are there harder languages to learn for certain groups of people than others? Yes.

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