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The hardest language to learn

Hardest language to learn?

  • English

    Votes: 13 12.6%

  • Chinese

    Votes: 26 25.2%

  • Japanese

    Votes: 10 9.7%

  • Arabic

    Votes: 9 8.7%

  • Hebrew

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Swedish

    Votes: 1 1.0%

  • Russian

    Votes: 2 1.9%

  • Any African language

    Votes: 4 3.9%

  • other

    Votes: 23 22.3%

  • all very hard

    Votes: 15 14.6%
  • Total voters
    103
galnoir said:
Navajo is difficult.
Finnish? If I remember correctly, it is not related to Indo-European languages.
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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.
 
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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.
 
Quick question for those who are studying or have knowledge of the tonal (tonel?) languages. Because of the change in the tone, how can one sing a song? In English, I can sing a song with tones going up and down, but would the words in the tonal song be different. And yes, I know that songs exist, but I'm curious about how the lyrics are done in a song.
 
Little 10 Toes said:
Quick question for those who are studying or have knowledge of the tonal (tonel?) languages. Because of the change in the tone, how can one sing a song? In English, I can sing a song with tones going up and down, but would the words in the tonal song be different. And yes, I know that songs exist, but I'm curious about how the lyrics are done in a song.
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Actually, when singing, the tones are not used; this is not generally very confusing, as people can understand the words easily in context. It also allows for creative plays on words, as one word can have many different meanings, so puns, double-entendres, etc. are quite popular.
 
I learn a bit of japanese previously. The words I learnt were understood by Japanese people when I spoke.

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. If you dont get the tone right the word can mean something completely different.

I guess it all depends on what age you learn the language. At a young age you would learn automatically to listen out for the tones and be able to make those sounds required
 
rjh01 said:
If C is allowed in this thread then the ultimate in hard languages to understand is machine code.
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I don't think so, since the vocabuly is limited enough to allow memorizing. At least if you allow for hexadecimal notation. It does in no way beat the several thousand glyphs of CJK languages.
 
I'd go so far as saying that no artificial language is as complicated as any of the natural languages. What do you think?
 
The problem with machine code is that it is very hard to use. Sure any bright person can learn it, but to actually use it to do anything useful requires a genius.

Since 99.99+% of people over the age of 3 years know some how to speak some language or other none of them could be so hard as machine code which can be used by only a handful of people in the world.
 
rjh01 said:
Since 99.99+% of people over the age of 3 years know some how to speak some language or other none of them could be so hard as machine code which can be used by only a handful of people in the world.
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Sorry, but it is entirely illogical to conclude that the number of speakers of a language determines its difficulty; there are languages today that have less than ten people left that can speak those languages, but I could hardly write that because these languages are used by 'only a handful of people' (even less than those who can use machine code), that proved they were more difficult.

And it could easily be argued that the reason only a 'handful' of people can use machine code is simply that only a handful need to know it. I learned Chinese because I came to live in China; I needed to learn that language to communicate with people here. However, there has never been any need whatsoever for me to learn machine code. Even if machine code were incredibly easy to learn, I doubt that more than a "handful" of people would know it because there would be little need or purpose to do so.

I'm not saying that machine code is not more difficult; only that your arguments in this regard do not logically support such a statement.
 
rjh01 said:
The problem with machine code is that it is very hard to use. Sure any bright person can learn it, but to actually use it to do anything useful requires a genius.
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No it doesn't require a genius. Machine code is essentially the same as mnemonic assembler, just written differently. Coding a larger project entirely in assembler requires a lot of work and high frustration tolerance. But it's mindless grunt work for the most part. It's boring, extremely inefficient and entirely pointless work, but certainly doable by anyone able to do the same thing in a more abstract language.
 
English, I still have a hard time understanding Bush.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
Ever seen "The Gods Must Be Crazy"? The Khoisan group as well as various other "click" languages of southern Africa seem quite challenging.

There does seem to be some lack of clarity about what is being discussed here: the spoken (tonal, etc.), or the written ("Japanese seems hard..."?) language.
 
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