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Easiest "difficult" language? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6375 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 9 of 35 05 February 2015 at 7:26am | IP Logged | |||||
pffffft no language is a waste of time 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4222 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 10 of 35 05 February 2015 at 7:32am | IP Logged | |||||
The question is rather subjective and based on personal opinion. People who speak European languages tend to consider any language with an alphabet to be easy to learn including Arabic, Hindi, and Korean. Those who are English speakers tend to think Mandarin is difficult. On the flip side of the coin there are Chinese who think English is difficult. What makes Chinese easy? According to Steve Kaufmann the polyglot Mandarin has straightforward grammar with no subject-verb conjugations of any kind. The number system is straightforward. You have your symbols for 1 to 10 (一二三四五六七八九十). Elven is just the character for 10 & 1 combined (十一), twelve would be 10 & 2, etc. Nothing fancy. In English we have words like "eleven", "twelve", "thirteen" which does not contain the root 10 or anything that resemble one, two or three. What makes Chinese difficult? The characters. There are over 2000 symbols. The shape of the symbols often do not indicate the pronunciation. And the 4 tones to a foreigner can be a pain in the neck. A lot of second generation Chinese expats would learn to speak Chinese at home with their parents & grandparents but tend to be illiterate writing characters. There are regional dialects of Chinese. Cantonese tend to be more challenging because it has 9 tones instead of 4.A lot of foreigners tend to master master Mandarin pronunciation like a native but tend to speak with a heavier accent with Cantonese. The last time I was in Shanghai, I came across several Chinese expats asking for directions. And the lady who showed them the way was a White woman who spoke practically flawless Mandarin... believe it or not. Another Caucasian who became an actor and a Beijing native is Mark Rowswell from Canada who goes by the Chinese nickname 大山 (Big Mountain). He started studying Chinese in 1984 at the age of 19 at the University of Toronto before furthering his studies at Beijing U. What is considered a more difficult language than Chinese? Japanese. Again it would be a subjective opinion. Japanese does use an alphabet but they also use many Chinese characters. In order to read & write properly, you need to learn both the alphabets and the Chinese characters. There are many Chinese characters that can have more than 1 pronunciations in Japanese. In Chinese, usually 1 character has 1 sound. The person who mastered the Japanese language and became a successful singer in Japan is Jerome White. As an African American with a Japanese grandmother, he was surrounded by Japanese music early in life and love to sing Karaoke. He adopted the name Jero after moving to Japan. Does Jero think Japanese is the hardest language to learn? Probably not. Edited by shk00design on 07 February 2015 at 5:27am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4550 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 11 of 35 05 February 2015 at 7:37am | IP Logged | |||||
these two languages, due to short vowels normally being omitted in writing. A lot of the Arabic-based writing systems either work the same, or spell native words with all the vowels, but retain the original spellings of Arabic and Persian loanwords. The only complete exceptions I'm aware of are the official Arabic scripts used in China's Xinjiang for Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz. The Hebrew alphabet used for Yiddish spells non-Semitic words phonetically while Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords retain original spellings. However, the standardized Yiddish that was used for some time in the Soviet Union was simplified to spell all words according to pronunciation. Not sure about the other Jewish vernaculars. Funny thing, before I started learning Japanese I was actually trying to learn as many scripts as possible. Naturally I thought the Chinese characters would be impossible, but since I was also getting into anime at the time I saw no reason to exclude hiragana and katakana. I was planning to start Devanagari right after them, but by the time I was done I became so fascinated with the Japanese language I just thought "okay, bring on the kanji!" The only entirely new script (i.e. not counting modified versions of others scripts, like Abkhaz or Vietnamese) I've added since then is Armenian, which I've found surprisingly tricky for a fully alphabetic script. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6360 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 35 05 February 2015 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Mandarin is probably the most difficult of the common difficult languages, due to the writing system that even natives have trouble with. Cantonese is arguably more difficult, due to more tones, more characters and lack of materials, especially written. I recall Prof. Arguelles arguing that Korean is the most difficult language he ever learned, though AFAIK he never learned Mandarin. Japanese has a lot fewer characters to learn (1000? 2000? I'm not sure, but I know 5100 Chinese characters and I'm still encountering unknown ones every few pages in my readings), but is complicated by the variety of readings of each individual character.
That said, learning conversational Mandarin probably isn't as hard as it's percieved to be. Getting to a point where one can chitchat, ask for directions and be showered with praise from native speakers isn't too difficult. As has been pointed out, Mandarin grammar is dead simple, and I don't think the tones are as hard as they're cracked up to be. But the mountain gets steeper the higher you climb. Edited by Ari on 05 February 2015 at 2:40pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4485 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 13 of 35 05 February 2015 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The professor has tried Mandarin but didn't really like it.
As for me the most difficult language will always be French so I don't get this question Edited by tarvos on 05 February 2015 at 1:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fiyero Newbie United States Joined 3380 days ago 14 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 14 of 35 06 February 2015 at 2:42am | IP Logged | |||||
hardest language on Earth, so I don't think it's going to be high on most people's languages to learn list compared to other ones. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6360 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 35 06 February 2015 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||
That's a very bold statement, considering the number of languages on Earth. Navajo is surely difficult – I understand there's no such thing as a regular verb in Navajo – but there are thousands upon thousands of languages on Earth, and most have hardly even been studied by linguists. Compared to the "average" language on Earth, Navajo is a very popular language to study. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3810 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 16 of 35 06 February 2015 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
It still, aside from the heavy distance, wouldn't fry one's brain at all in the way that something like Russian or Ancient Greek would. Edited by Stolan on 06 February 2015 at 9:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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