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Most difficult alphabet | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Joe.Hill Newbie United States Joined 5392 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Kannada | Message 9 of 42 30 July 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually Hindi is one of the easiest because everything is spelled exactly as it is
pronounced. It is just a different system than English, etc. With dedication, one can learn it in a week or maybe two. Arabic and Hebrew don't indicate all vowels. I know that in Hebrew they only use it for children's books, foreign names, etc. I have heard Malayalam script is hard to learn at first. Edited by Joe.Hill on 30 July 2009 at 4:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Park-Spirit Bilingual Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5517 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Turkish* Studies: Hindi | Message 10 of 42 30 July 2009 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find the Arabic script to be very hard, as the letters change forms depending if the letter is written at the beginning, middle or ending of the word. And as stated before Arabic is generally written with unmarked vowels, it requires you to know the words to be able to read them the proper way.
The Devanagari script for the Hindi language (which I'm currently studying as I learn the language) is very easy, I have not encountered any difficulty as I went through the whole alphabet. There is not much rules to learn, and there is no such uppercase or lowercase letters they are all written in one version as seen. And I must say the letters are like peices of a beautiful art, they look amazing to me. Edited by Park-Spirit on 30 July 2009 at 10:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 5934 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 11 of 42 30 July 2009 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Arabic and Devanagari (and its Indian derivatives i.e. Gurumukhi, Bengali, Gujurati,
Oriya, even Sinhala and Tamil) are not unduly difficult, the forms can take some getting used to but the ideas are quite straight forward i.e. "say what you see". When you get to Burmese, Thai, Lao and Khmer, there are many more rules governing tones (here's the Thai tone rules, Lao's are similarly complex), vowel pronouciation (search for "Khmer writing" on youtube, go the "Khmer lessons" playlist), consonant classes etc which just make them far more complex. Burmese is probably the most regular of the four. Khmer is regular but has loads of seldom used diacritics and symbols so you're always picking up more and more rules. Personally I think Thai is the hardest since Lao simplified it's spelling, Thai still uses many letters (there are 5 "t"s) to represent Sanskrit/Pali pronouciation in loan words (Urdu and Farsi use the same system of maintaining Arabic spelling even though speakers don't differentiate between, say, swad and sin or qaf and kaf). After 7 years of Thai and being able to speak quite fluently and read a newspaper, I still don't know the tone rules, I just know how to pronounce words and learn their spelling separately. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Minlawc Newbie United States Joined 6326 days ago 24 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 12 of 42 30 July 2009 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I may get yelled at for this, but... The International Phonetic Alphabet? It may not be that hard to write, but try pronouncing each of them distinctly! Edited by Minlawc on 30 July 2009 at 11:44pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5402 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 14 of 42 31 July 2009 at 7:23am | IP Logged | |||||
This sounds a little horrible, and it throws cold water on my enthusiasm for learning Thai, though it belongs to tonal languages just as Chinese does, and becomes quite popular in southern China. Edited by Z.J.J on 31 July 2009 at 7:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5655 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 42 01 August 2009 at 2:18am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, and English is Germanic. I'm sure these are technically correct, but I disagree with them in principle.
Me too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Britomartis Groupie United States Joined 5603 days ago 67 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 16 of 42 02 August 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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The Arabic alphabet is easy to learn. It's not that hard to learn to associate the various forms of a letter with each other. It took me only a couple weeks to learn it, though had I practiced every day, I could have learned it in a week or so- it took me less than a week to learn both Hebrew alphabets. . .
Arabic does have vowel markings, but those are often left out. That is not an issue with the alphabet though, but with vocabulary. If you know the word, then you will easily recognize it written and know its pronunciation. My guess is that most alphabets are easy to learn. I haven't tried learning a character-based writing system, but I'm awfully sure that those are much more difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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