The hardest language to learn

[sir drinks-a-lot]

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

I never thought it was too bad. Just try saying the word. If it sounds too much like an L, it is wrong. If it sounds too much like an R, it is wrong. To really get it right, it should sound like an R and an L at the same time, maybe with a little bit of D thrown in for good measure.

THis reminds me of a Simpsons episode where the family drove through the Chinatown section of the town of Springfield. I noticed one of the signs for one of the stores said "Toys 'L' Us".

 

[Wolfman]

There is no alphabet, therefore no aplhabetical order, and it is awfully hard to build a typewriter.

Would mostly agree, but this is not entirely true. There are many thousands of Chinese characters; but all of them are based on a total of 214 root characters, called radicals. Chinese dictionaries are organized according to the radicals, and then the number of strokes in a character.

So, for example, if you take all the Chinese characters that have the radical for "wood" in them, you can look for that radical in the dictionary, then if the specific character you are looking for has 10 strokes in it, you go to the section under that radical for 10-stroke characters. Granted, its not quite so efficient as an alphabetical dictionary, but just wanted to point out that the idea that there is no 'order' or 'organization' is not entirely true.

In addition, all Chinese words can also be written in Pinyin, which is the romanized version of Chinese; again, one can buy a dictionary that uses Pinyin, and then look up words alphabetically. Since Chinese has many homophones (a word like "ma" could have 30 or more words that are all spelled "ma", but use entirely different characters), you would look first using the alphabetic system, then according to the radical and the number of strokes (as explained above). Using this system, you can find a Chinese word/character almost as quickly as you can an English word (if you know what the radical of the character you're looking for is).

And I'm often asked what a Chinese keyboard looks like...does it have thousands of keys for all the different characters? Actually, the Chinese use qwerty keyboards exactly the same as those in the West; Chinese characters can be inputed in a number of different ways. The easiest (although a little slow) is to type in the Pinyin form of the character, then the computer will give a list of all the possible characters, and you choose the right one. There is another system that involves a specific code for each character (that is based again on the radical and the number of strokes) that allows for much faster typing, but requires significant memorization and practice before it can be used.

 

[Paulhoff]

No, the hartest is whatever a woman is saying.

Paul

 

[timhau]

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

So? They also keep talking gibberish Norwegian when they encounter a Finn.

 

[Elind]

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.

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.

Oh, as to the OP question: How about the whistling language of the Canary Islands, or the "Click" language of Africa (Congo?). Personally I have trouble with SMS.

 

[Pipirr]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.

Sure - although the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians I'm sure would argue their languages are different - at least different enough to be considered three separate languages, and not just accents.

I learned written Danish first, but found quite quickly that I could also understand written Swedish and Norwegian.

When I went to Sweden for the first time, I still hadn't learnt to speak or understand spoken Danish, but could understand (and speak, somewhat) spoken Swedish. It simply sounded like what was written on the page! Danish, for me at least, did not.

It still doesn't....

 

[Modified]

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

Spanish is easy to learn, then you go to a Spanish speaking country and don't understand half of what anyone says. When you go to Germany though, everyone sounds just like the guy on your "Learn to Speak German" dvd.

 

[Elind]

Sure - although the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians I'm sure would argue their languages are different - at least different enough to be considered three separate languages, and not just accents.

I learned written Danish first, but found quite quickly that I could also understand written Swedish and Norwegian.

When I went to Sweden for the first time, I still hadn't learnt to speak or understand spoken Danish, but could understand (and speak, somewhat) spoken Swedish. It simply sounded like what was written on the page! Danish, for me at least, did not.

It still doesn't....

Yes, the differences are more than accent, even though there is more in common than not, but it makes me wonder what is the definition of a language? When does it become more than a dialect?

 

[-Fran-]

So? They also keep talking gibberish Norwegian when they encounter a Finn.

Really? They do?

 

[-Fran-]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.

I think this, in it's turn, is a rather weird statement too. Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are closely related, yes, but not so much that to call them accents and not separate languages would be a true statement.

 

[VanillaCone]

According to studies the U.S. military uses to rank the difficulty of languages, Arabic and Mandarin are tied for second-most-difficult.

The sole language standing at the No. 1 spot is English. The reason is that in English there are so many exceptions to rules and different ways of pronouncing letters (and combinations of letters) that it's very difficult for the non-native speaker to learn them all. For nearly every so-called rule, there are one or more exceptions, which can be very confusing.

I speak Arabic and Japanese, and in both languages every phonetic is pronounced the same way every time, although that only applies to consonants and long vowels in Arabic. The short vowels are dictated by grammar, word order, case (nominative, accusative, etc.) and to some extent rote memorization. But there are no exceptions -- the rules are the rules.

The same goes for Japanese. In fact, Japanese grammar is extremely simple and easy for English speakers to learn. For instance, there is no verb conjugation, which is one of the most difficult things to learn in some languages. Also, there is no differentiation between singular and plural. The existence of three alphabets is really no big deal -- once you learn the two phonetic alphabets, it's really just a matter of learning all the kanji (Chinese) characters. Although there are thousands, one only needs to learn the most common 1,800 kanji characters to read a daily newspaper. The rest are fairly specialized and technical in nature.

 

[lula]

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.

I think once you get the pronounciation down with Danish then it's not too hard. That can take a while though.

I've always imagined learning a language in any other script would be very hard. However, that is based purely on speculation.

 

[lula]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan).

No, not really. Norwegian and Danish are very similar, Swedish however is quite different. If you can read Danish or Norwegian understanding written Swedish should not be too much of a stretch. Spoken Swedish however sounds very different to spoken Danish or Norwegian - which are very Germanic sounding, while Swedish sounds almost Russian (..but maybe that's just me?). Norwegians and Danes can converse together to a degree in their own respective languages, but not Danes and Swedes or Norwegians and Swedes.

Oh, as to the OP question: How about the whistling language of the Canary Islands, or the "Click" language of Africa (Congo?). Personally I have trouble with SMS.

The "click" language you refer to is Xhosa (and I think Zulu as well) and is spoken predominantly in South Africa.

 

[timhau]

Really? They do?

Yeah. It's the only Scandinavian country where "Sorry, I don't speak Norwegian" (from a Nordic-looking blond guy, at least) results not in a switch to English but a switch to a s-l-o-w and LOUD version of the local language. The contrast to Denmark, where even bums asking for change know English, is striking.

And no, the six years of Swedish I had at school doesn't mean I understand spoken Norwegian. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the kind of Swedish you speak on the other side of the bay.

 

[Vitalstatistix]

I think the age of the brain doing the learning matters a lot. At this point, I think mine's too atrophied to learn another language well.

I agree with this guy. I didn't vote yet since you might as well say that they're all equally easy to learn.
Some of you mentioned the native language-issue already. I believe this is true, but only to a certain degree. Much more depends on the age at which you start learning a new language. Stange as it may seem, if you are the child of an English father and a Chinese mother and if they both raise you in their mother tongue, the child will pick up both languages (though I'm not mentioning the 'in what language do bilingual children think'-topic).
Learning a language (or learning anything) means that new neural connections are made. We are all born with flexible brains, but as we grow older it seems that there is a decrease in flexibility. Scholars are still debating the reason for this, but this doesn't change the fact that the best age to learn a(ny) language is a young age.
Other than that, there are of course a lot of different factors playing a role, such as the degree of exposure to a certain language, the kind of exposure (real life situations v. class room siuations) etc.

Anyways, interesting topic

 

[HarryKeogh]

Apparently, Icelandic is quite difficult. This English savant learned it in a week, though.

 

[blobru]

I know it's a dead language, but Latin -- brutal!

Most unfamiliar to modern English-speakers are the extra noun cases: nominative (I), accusative (me), and genitive (my) we have; but not dative (to me), ablative (by me) and vocative ("I!").

However, it's also very powerful, compressing a lot into a little. E.g.: where in English one might say: "That is the very reason he might have done so." (10 words, there're shorter approximations of that thought but not much) In Latin:

ipso facerit * has the same meaning -- literally:

by [because of] this very (thing) | he might have acted (thus)

*It's been awhile so I can't guarantee that spelling, but the point remains: inflected (grammar) --> compact (expression).

Still, brutal to get the hang of; hours sometimes to translate one sentence; and to speak it!?
When people ask about the collapse of the Roman Empire, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't due to sheer exhaustion from speaking Latin.

 

[Soseki]

Still, brutal to get the hang of; hours sometimes to translate one sentence; and to speak it!?
When people ask about the collapse of the Roman Empire, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't due to sheer exhaustion from speaking Latin.

Well, either that or too many orgies.

I was under the impression that it's generally accepted that almost nobody actually spoke Classical Latin as it was written and as it survives today, probably for the reasons you describe. Rather, it was a sort of lingua franca (heh, there's your Latin) for the educated classes, especially as dialects in spoken language were likely to differ from one end of the Empire to the other.

More or less the same is true of classical Chinese in Japan; literati for the best part of a millenium wrote government documents, stories and poetry in Chinese while being completely unable to speak the language in any form recognizable to anyone in China.

Anyway, re: Japanese and its relative difficulty...true, the writing system is probably one of the most ridiculous ever devised. But then, as the above examples show, you have to differentiate the language itself from the writing system used to denote it, because they're not the same thing. OK, this is splitting hairs somewhat and purely academic from the point of view of someone learning Japanese today, I admit. But I reckon you can (and, to their eternal discredit, some long term expats do) speak about 70% fluent Japanese without being able to read it at all.

Long story short, while there are certain extralinguistic factors that can complicate things (like honorific or humilific language), I don't think the Japanese language itself is that much harder than a lot of European languages (it's not tonal, it has two tenses, no verb conjugation or noun declensions, no plurals, no gender, adjectives don't have to agree in number and gender, etc). But then of course, there's those damned kanji...

 

[Cainkane1]

I've heard that Icelandic was the hardest. A languistic autistic genius was challenged to learn the language in two weeks and he only barely succeeded.

 

[Uncle Feedle]

I've tinkered around with Japanese on and off, and I found it to be a very flexible language. The subject-object-verb sentence structure is quite different from European languages, but it seemed to me you could swap words round quite a bit and still have it make sense. Pronounciation isn't that difficult either. The writing system is another matter, however.