The hardest language to learn

[EvilSmurf]

Vulcan

 

[newlyfound]

I can talk about the easy ones I know of, german if you speak french and english, there is common ground between english and german as well as german and french vocabulary wise, as far as the pronounciation I would say that german is closer to french than it is to english, the only thing is german grammar is one of kind (I am currently studying german, I am not yet fluent). I studied spanish for a while, it's also another easy one for a french speaker. Also english is easy for a french speaker, and I would imagine it should work the other way around as well. Is it illegal to admit one speaks arabic around here (you know with some tending to think every arabic speaker must be a terrorist)? That one I would openly admit it is a difficult SOB, yes, as a native language, I never got used to the.... maybe I am arabically retarted or something. The one I am in love with is english and I have the hots for german too, french is tending to be part of the past.

 

[Modified]

No chance with mandarin with all the 5 tones. Very difficult to get the vocal chords round the rising and falling tones to the letters.

That you can learn. The problem I find is in remembering tones, as it seems my brain just isn't wired for it. I can learn and remember hundreds of words a day in any non-tonal language that uses mostly familiar sounds, but only a few dozen or so in a tonal language. It would take a long time to build up a useful vocabulary at that rate.

 

[Wolfman]

That you can learn. The problem I find is in remembering tones, as it seems my brain just isn't wired for it. I can learn and remember hundreds of words a day in any non-tonal language that uses mostly familiar sounds, but only a few dozen or so in a tonal language. It would take a long time to build up a useful vocabulary at that rate.

From my own experience, for those learning Chinese as adults, those who have stronger music backgrounds tend to do better at learning to speak Chinese. And those who are tone deaf musically also tend to be tone deaf when it comes to Chinese.

I have a Chinese friend here who is doing research on this; thus far, she's found that from a sample group of 32 westerners who classify themselves as 'tone deaf', over 80% have limited or no ability to differentiate between the different tones in Chinese language. But here's the interesting aspect -- among Chinese who are musically tone deaf, but who learned Chinese from birth, there is no difficulty at all in learning and differentiating between the different tones in the spoken language.

She still has to do a fair bit more research in this area, particularly comparing musically talented individuals with tone deaf individuals (which she has not done yet), to determine relative ability to learn Chinese. But I think it does raise some interesting points in studying how we acquire language as infants, compared to how we acquire language as adults.

 

[-Fran-]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

Apparently, according to a TV-program I once saw, of all the Scandinavian languages (except for Finnish who isn't related to the rest of them) Danish is the hardest to learn to speak. It seems Danish kids are the ones who are the latest to learn to speak their own language when they start to talk.

Swedes are notoriously bad at understanding spoken Danish, I think. When a Dane realizes you are Swedish they just sigh and starts to talk English while a Norwegian happily continues speaking Norwegian when encountering a Swede

Personally though I think that Icelandic and Färöiska is bit more difficult to understand than Danish, but that could be becuase you so seldom hear it.

 

[TriangleMan]

As an English speaker I find Arabic difficult as the writing uses different lettering and there are a few letters that have no English equivalent. That said I have heard that Mandarin is even more difficult due to all the different tones, as mentioned by Wolfman and other posters.

 

[-Fran-]

I lived in an area of the US settled by the Basques. Their language is Euskara. One told me that Euskara, Finnish and ancient Sanskrit have many things in common, and it's possible they are the closest surving offshoots of the original language spoken across Europe and Eurasia before the Indo-European languages developed/arrived.

No evidence, of course. But some interesting conjecture, certainly.

Finnish has more in common with Hungarian and Estonian, I think, they form a group of their own; Finnish-Ugrian languages.

ETA
Isn't ancient Sanskrit an Indo-European language? I might be wrong, it was such a long time ago I studied language history, I have forgotten half of it and mixes the rest of it up

ETA again!
I had to go check it up; Sanskrit IS an Indo-European language.

 

[andyandy]

From my own experience, for those learning Chinese as adults, those who have stronger music backgrounds tend to do better at learning to speak Chinese. And those who are tone deaf musically also tend to be tone deaf when it comes to Chinese.

I have a Chinese friend here who is doing research on this; thus far, she's found that from a sample group of 32 westerners who classify themselves as 'tone deaf', over 80% have limited or no ability to differentiate between the different tones in Chinese language. But here's the interesting aspect -- among Chinese who are musically tone deaf, but who learned Chinese from birth, there is no difficulty at all in learning and differentiating between the different tones in the spoken language.

She still has to do a fair bit more research in this area, particularly comparing musically talented individuals with tone deaf individuals (which she has not done yet), to determine relative ability to learn Chinese. But I think it does raise some interesting points in studying how we acquire language as infants, compared to how we acquire language as adults.

There's been a lot of interesting research on this with babies and their exposure to sounds - babies up to the age of 1~2 have the ability to distinguish between the whole gamult of human sounds upon exposure to human interaction (but not apparently technological interaction), but it seems that as neural pathways harden, this ability is lost and once lost can not be truly regained.

University of Washington neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl reported today that 9-month-old American infants who were exposed to Mandarin Chinese for less than five hours in a laboratory setting were able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language. It is the first experimental demonstration of phonetic learning from natural exposure to language under controlled
laboratory conditions, she said.

In a companion study headed by Kuhl, another group of American infants was exposed to the same Mandarin material using a professionally produced DVD or audiotape but showed no ability to distinguish phonetic units of that language.
"The findings indicate that infants can extract phonetic information from first-time foreign-language exposure in a relatively short period of time at 9 months of age, but only if the language is produced by a human, suggesting that social interaction is an important component of language learning," said Kuhl.


snip

sometime in the second six months of life infants begin to concentrate on learning the sounds of their native language and lose their ability to distinguish the sounds important to foreign languages. This same inability is why many adults have difficulty learning a foreign language and tend only to discriminate the sounds of their native language.

In the two studies, infants were tested to see if they could distinguish between two Mandarin sounds that do not occur in English. Americans often hear both sounds as “chee” or “she.” These sounds are difficult for adult Americans to distinguish between but present no problem for native Mandarin speakers.

In the first study, normally developing 9-month-olds were exposed to Mandarin during a dozen 25-minutes sessions spaced out over four weeks. During these sessions, native Mandarin speakers read from children's books and played with toys while speaking Mandarin. Four different speakers, two men and two women, conducted the sessions, so the babies were exposed to a variety of speaking styles. A control group of infants was exposed to the same procedure in English.

Both groups then were tested for their ability to distinguish between the two Mandarin sounds using a head-turn conditioning procedure that is frequently used in tests of infant speech perception. The infants exposed to Mandarin were significantly better at distinguishing the two target sounds than were infants who only heard English. In fact, the performance of the American infants exposed to Mandarin for the first time between 9 and 10 months was statistically equivalent to infants in Taiwan who had listened to Mandarin for 10 months, according to Kuhl. The results show that the decline in foreign-language speech perception can be reversed with short-term exposure, she said.

In addition, the phonetic learning of Mandarin appears to be long lasting. The American infants were tested from two to 12 days after their last exposure to Mandarin and the researchers found there were no significant differences in their ability to discriminate between the sounds.

snip

The second study explored the role of social interaction in learning a foreign language. The procedure was similar to the initial study except that half the infants were exposed to Mandarin by a DVD showing the same Mandarin speakers and materials on a 17-inch television. The other infants received their Mandarin exposure from an audio-only presentation of the DVD.
At the end of the Mandarin exposure all of the infants were tested using the same head-turn procedure. Results clearly showed that DVD or audiotape exposure did not lead to phonetic learning, Kuhl said. The infants in this experiment scored at the same level as the English-only babies in the first study who were not exposed to any Mandarin. The researchers also noted that the infants who watched the DVD or listened to the audiotape paid significantly less attention than the babies who were in the live Mandarin and English conditions.

"Video plus audio or audio-only presentation did not work for infants 9 and 10 months of age," Kuhl said. "That’s not how infants learn language. Our results show the importance of testing audio and video language learning products aimed at children and already on the market for their effectiveness."
She added, "Babies are very sophisticated language learners who use every clue provided to learn – the sounds they hear, their statistical distribution and even the social clues provided by speakers – to crack code. The babies were mesmerized by the sight and sound of the foreign language speakers. You could see their little brains absorbing the information.

http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/2003archive/02-03archive/k021703.html

 

[andyandy]

and ability to distinguish music itself also seems ingrained from early years....

We all begin life with perfect pitch, suggests study of infants. Most English speakers lose the ability to identify a note by frequency alone because perfect pitch is not necessary for understanding English words.

"Our hypothesis is that the ability goes away for most of us because it's not really useful - unless you happen to be speaking a tonal language like Thai or Mandarin," says Jenny Saffran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Perfect pitch is necessary for understanding the subtle differences between similar sounding words in these languages, she says.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that very early musical training can aid in preserving the ability. Computer games that require a player to recognise perfect pitch might also help, Saffran says.

Train the brain
Saffran's team studied eight month old infants and a group of adults, some of whom were musicians. She found that all of the babies could tell the difference between segments of bell-like 'songs' that differed in absolute pitch, i.e. in key. However, most of the adults could not.

On average, the musicians had started learning to play an instrument at age eight. But the five people in Saffran's group with perfect pitch had started learning aged four.

This, and other anecdotal evidence, suggests that perfect pitch can be retained, if the brain is trained not to lose it, she says.

Beginning and end
While perfect pitch appears to be an inherent ability, learning language as a baby requires the acquisition of many new skills. One is the ability to distinguish individual words.

"One of the major challenges of learning a language is figuring out where one word begins and ends," says Martin Brent, a computer scientist at Washington University.

He has found that the words a baby hears uttered in isolation are the words it is most likely to learn by 15 months. "Short utterances lay bare the structure of language," he says.

Brent analysed more than 200 hours of conversations between eight mothers and their babies and found that the frequency with which a mother says a word in isolation is a direct predictor of whether the child will know that word later.

Natural language
However, he warns that as infants grow older, infants also need to hear more complex speech if they are to acquire language properly. "This doesn't mean parents should use purely monosyllabic speech to their babies."

In fact, his research suggests that most parents naturally use the ideal combination of isolated words and more complex sentences. "My advice to parents who want to help their child learn language is: don't worry about it. Without trying, you'll naturally speak in a way that we believe facilitates language learning."

Brent hopes his work could help in training software to recognise and produce speech.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn444

 

[-Fran-]

I taught myself written and spoken Greek in my teens and found it quite simple.

That's impressive! I'm half Greek, and I don't speak a word of it (I really should learn... )

 

[Wolfman]

Andyandy,

Thanks, those articles were quite interesting; but I'd like to comment here on one problem I have with the last article, the apparent conclusion that English speakers lose the ability to differentiate between notes because tonal ability is not a part of the language.

It would seem to me that, if such a correlation were valid, that would mean that we'd find a far greater proportion of musically tone-deaf individuals in an English-speaking society than in a Mandarin-speaking society. However, my own experience of music in China (14 years of hanging out in karaoke joints with my Chinese friends) would lead me to conclude that there are just as many tone-deaf Chinese as there are Canadians (the only difference being that Chinese seem to think lack of singing ability can be compensated for by increasing one's volume...the worse you sing, the louder you sing).

This is hardly quantifiable, verifiable evidence; but I'd tend towards the conclusion that tonality in speech and tonality in music may be linked, but should not be considered equivalent. Learning a tonal language does not seem, in my experience, to have any significant impact on rates of tone deafness.

 

[Miss Anthrope]

That's impressive! I'm half Greek, and I don't speak a word of it (I really should learn... )

Yeah, well, if you don't use it, you lose it!

The sum total of what I've retained is perfect pronunciation of good morning, good afternoon, and....you guessed it, good evening!

To be fair, I stopped using it after having a torrid affair with a rascal of a waiter I picked up at a Greek restaurant. Greek became something I wished to thoroughly forget

 

[-Fran-]

Yeah, well, if you don't use it, you lose it!

True I never learned it though. My Dear father was (still is as far as I know) of the sort that lives 20 minutes by car away from his daughter, but still can't be bothered to find the time to visit her even once in... 36 years So I grew up in a solely Swedish way. Didn't bother me as a kid, but today I think I might have missed out on a lot of things. So I still wish I had learnt it, for my own sake.

The sum total of what I've retained is perfect pronunciation of good morning, good afternoon, and....you guessed it, good evening!

You can get pretty far with that I think...

To be fair, I stopped using it after having a torrid affair with a rascal of a waiter I picked up at a Greek restaurant. Greek became something I wished to thoroughly forget

... especially with Greek waiters Never trust those, that's my experience as well

 

[Miss Anthrope]

True I never learned it though. My Dear father was (still is as far as I know) of the sort that lives 20 minutes by car away from his daughter, but still can't be bothered to find the time to visit her even once in... 36 years So I grew up in a solely Swedish way. Didn't bother me as a kid, but today I think I might have missed out on a lot of things. So I still wish I had learnt it, for my own sake.

... especially with Greek waiters Never trust those, that's my experience as well

 

[Broes]

I only have experiences with the following languages:

- Dutch (native)
- English
- French
- German
- Spanish

Out of those 5, english is by far the easiest since it has simplest grammar rules with very few exceptions to those rules. Next are spanish and french.

I would say that german and dutch of these 4 are the most difficult since they have a TON of grammar rules with even more exceptions and special cases.

 

[aries]

The hardest language to learn is --- Danish. We have 9 wolwes that can spoken in 5-6 ways - each. We also have something called 'stød' which is a very a little pause before, slightly before the wowel(s) of the word. Very difficult for foreigners to learn.

However, for westernes I would think that Japanese or Chinese would be the hardest language to learn, simply because they are tonal languages. This mean they use tones to alter the meaning of word(s). And when you think you say: revered sir a slightly altered tone can get it to be you dirty rotten scoundrel.

Not very amusing I would think.

 

[student23]

dissapointed

Well, this is me again with the click languages.

Let me introduce myself a bit further. I have been schooled in French, Hebrew, Arabic (extensively), Vietnamese (...tonal <6>); have self-studied Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish. Frankly, the only language other than English that I speak with native fluency is Vietnamese.

The big problem with people learning a language, including a tonal language, in my experience, is the same as their problem in simply communicating: they don't (know how to) listen. 38 years ago, when I saw my chin-less staff sargent speaking beautiful Vietnamese, I knew then: it wasn't brains, and though I couldn't test him for perfect pitch, I'm more than willing to bet it wasn't that either. It was simply an act of will; he had a Vietnamese wife, had been there for 4 years, wanted it, apparently a lot.

Tonality is difficult. But-and this is just a guess, lookin' at it-no match for the profusion of different click phonemes involved in speaking Khoisan or it's relatives. I'm betting Martian (sic) would be easier.

 

[student23]

disappointed

p.s. forgot (how to spell disappointed), and that I've been schooled in classical Greek, as well. Khoisan stands.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Alot depends on your native language.

For English speakers, the easiest are usually the romantic languages, with Spanish being the easiest, followed by Italian.

Some of the more difficult of the western languages to learn for English speakers are Russian and Polish.

Then there are the eastern languages. The two most difficult, I think are the Chinese dialects and Japanese:

Chinese Dialects: These are tough due to pronunciation, and the use of the Chinese characters for writing. The pronunciation uses quite a few sounds that are never used in English and also uses pitch to distinguish between words that sound the same. The Chinese Dialects also use the characters. In other words, there is no alphabet. This makes things difficult even for native speakers. There is no alphabet, therefore no aplhabetical order, and it is awfully hard to build a typewriter. Also, most (95%) of the characters cannot be sounded out or figured out in any other way. You have to have memorized them. Even native speakers come across characters they do not recognize. If they have no dictionary, they are stuck.

The easy part of Chinese is that there is such simple grammar. No gender, no plurals, and very little of what can be called conjugation of verbs.

Japanese: Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce. Every time you see a certain character, you make the exact same sound. No dipthongs, and no exceptions I can think of. The tough part is the grammar.

 

[alfaniner]

...Japanese: Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce. Every time you see a certain character, you make the exact same sound. No dipthongs, and no exceptions I can think of. The tough part is the grammar.

Well, it is a little difficult getting that L/R sound down...