The hardest language to learn

[Undesired Walrus]

I've heard Japanese is pretty damn hard, but let me know what you think is..

 

[Pipirr]

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.

 

[Katana]

I have no idea.

I would think that it would depend on your native language.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Whatever it is, I want to learn it.

Espanol es muy facil.

 

[Merko]

I assume that the 'any African language' should be 'some African language'. African languages are extremely diverse and some seem quite difficult.

Of course, it all depends on what your native language is, but in these cases, even the neighbours may find a language extremely difficult, which I guess is a good criteria if one tries to take a global view on things.

 

[Miss Anthrope]

I've tried on again/off again to learn Chinese dialects. My house is full of Chinese antiques with all this writing on it...and I wanted to be able to translate it. It's so difficult. I taught myself written and spoken Greek in my teens and found it quite simple. Chinese is really difficult!

(I just assume my furniture has endless, profanity laced ancient curses to the stupid Americans who pay too much for this old junk).

That said, if anyone can read Chinese, there's a big bottle of limoncello for you if you can translate!

 

[Babylon Sister]

Basque

 

[andyandy]

I agree it's very much dependent upon your native language - and to judge "hardness" requires an appreciation of the several thousand languages that are in circulation today....

for us Anglo folk, I'd say that both Chinese and Japanese hold distinct problems,

Chinese requires several thousand characters and is tonal dependent

Japanese requires less characters, and it can be written and pronounced with a simple phonetic system but its characters are not fixed in reading, and the sentence structure is Subject Object Verb (I football play) rather than the familiar SVO of Chinese.

I'd say the mastery of tones outweighs the mastery of SOV for us - though both are pretty difficult. And it's no coincidence that Koreans and Japanese who both have SOV based language find the other significantly easier than say English.

If there were a language with a SOV structure, highly tonal, with a non-fixed extensive character alphabet (each character with more than one reading), and with irregular conjugations then I think this would be the daddy of all difficult languages for English speakers.

 

[rymdman]

the marsian dialect in Mars Attacks always gave me hard times.

 

[Wolfman]

In regards to Chinese, one must keep in mind that there are at least five "Chinese" languages, and literally hundreds of dialects. The best known Chinese languages are Mandarin and Cantonese, but there are other distinct languages groups within China.

Mandarin is the "official" language of mainland China, and the language I've learned. Cantonese is common in southern China and Hong Kong. Of the two, I'd consider Cantonese to be far more difficult; while both are tonal languages, Cantonese has nine tones, while Mandarin has only four (or five, if you include the 'neutral' tone).

What are tones? Well, consider a word like "ma". Seem simple. But if you say it with a high, flat inflection, it means "mother". Say it with an inflection that goes down and then up, and it means "horse". Or even more difficult, the words for "buy" and "sell" in Mandarin are both pronounced "mai"...the only difference is in the inflection of the word.

So if one is voting for "Chinese", you'd need to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese, of which Cantonese is far more difficult (in my opinion).

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

C

 

[roger]

I don't know, I didn't find writing Japanese so difficult. The Hiragana is phonetic based, and is used for particles, verb endings, and the like. But, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "two different writing systems". You have the fact that chinese characters are used together to form words, more or less using the Chinese derivation of the symbols. Then, the same symbols have Japanese meanings and derivations, with different syllables attached. Then, you have two phonetic alphabets - hiragana, as described above, and katakana, for foreign words. You can, of course, write everything in hiragana - any Japanese reader would understand it, and I've seen this done on some bulletin boards where, I presume, the kanji (Chinese characters) weren't supported. I think the hard part is dealing with the fact that a character can be used in either its Chinese or Japanese context. But after awhile, you get used to it. It's not a hard and fast rule, but you'll find a lot of nouns using the Chinese 2 character combinations, whereas verbs will be using the Japanese symbol for the root, followed by hiragana for the verb ending. I found myself being able to read and understand things I had no idea how to pronounce, because a Kanji character can have up to a dozen or more pronounciations, depending on context. But it's been awhile, and I can't read it at all anymore.

 

[kitakaze]

Interesting thread with some interesting comments.

日本語をよく喋るのようになる事はあんまり難しくないと思いますけど確かに書くの場合はかなり難しい。

I often try to impart on other native English speakers that learning Japanese is not as hard as they might perceive though intimidation by the writing is more than fair. Japanese have no problem perpetuating the idea that the language is difficult BTW.

Oh yeah, Engrish spering is on clack.

 

[Wolfman]

I don't know, I didn't find writing Japanese so difficult. The Hiragana is phonetic based, and is used for particles, verb endings, and the like. But, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "two different writing systems". You have the fact that chinese characters are used together to form words, more or less using the Chinese derivation of the symbols. Then, the same symbols have Japanese meanings and derivations, with different syllables attached. Then, you have two phonetic alphabets - hiragana, as described above, and katakana, for foreign words. You can, of course, write everything in hiragana - any Japanese reader would understand it, and I've seen this done on some bulletin boards where, I presume, the kanji (Chinese characters) weren't supported. I think the hard part is dealing with the fact that a character can be used in either its Chinese or Japanese context. But after awhile, you get used to it. It's not a hard and fast rule, but you'll find a lot of nouns using the Chinese 2 character combinations, whereas verbs will be using the Japanese symbol for the root, followed by hiragana for the verb ending. I found myself being able to read and understand things I had no idea how to pronounce, because a Kanji character can have up to a dozen or more pronounciations, depending on context. But it's been awhile, and I can't read it at all anymore.

I have never learned Japanese, so am basing my judgment on anecdotal statements from others. Among those westerners who have learned both Chinese and Japanese, I've found that they've generally found oral Chinese more difficult that oral Japanese, but have found learning read/write Japanese more difficult than learning to read/write Chinese.

In my own experience, Mandarin Chinese was very difficult to learn; mastering the tonal aspect of the language was a significant challenge, and I am still functionally illiterate in regards to reading/writing the language. What little Cantonese I've learned would indicate that Cantonese is even more difficult. And I'm currently embarking on a venture to learn the Mosuo language, the language of a Chinese minority group who live in the Himalayas (you can click on the link in my signature for more info); learning that language will be quite a challenge as there is currently no written form of the language at all, it is purely oral. And it is also tonal, although it is from an entirely different language family than Mandarin or Cantonese.

 

[T'ai Chi]

That said, if anyone can read Chinese, there's a big bottle of limoncello for you if you can translate!

I can try.

 

[tkingdoll]

Jive.

 

[Harpoon]

A few Russian sounds are unfamiliar to native English speakers.

The cases are different; every native noun takes different forms in each case, and further suffix changes in the plural.

Verbs, escpecially verbs of motion, also cause Americans fits.

But getting past all that, many Russians I've met don't actually form sentences when they speak. They string idioms together -- many totally unfathomable.

Learning Russian may be easier than learning some oriental languages, but becoming proficient in the idioms is worse than in English, or so I'm told.

I understand Navajo is based or verbs of being and requires an entire abandonment of Western philosophical thinking to learn.

 

[danielk]

C

Nah, C is one of the few languages of which I can claim to have memorized the full vocabulary and most of the grammar rules. I daresay it's way easier to be fluent in C than even in your native language.

 

[Lord Muck oGentry]

[Myles na gCopaleen mode ON]

Your Attic Greek is no easy matter, as many a man has found to his cost.

But that English is desperate stuff.

[/Myles na gCopaleen mode OFF]

 

[galnoir]

Navajo is difficult.

Finnish? If I remember correctly, it is not related to Indo-European languages.