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After reading what everybody has said, I have created a hypothesis. It is harder to learn a non-latin based language than it is to learn a latin-based language. I'd love for someone to come up with solid proof that I'm wrong.
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It's all relative based on your innate lingual abilities and how similar the languge you're learning is to your first, as people have already said. There can be no solid proof of anything - for or against your "hypothesis".
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Is really does depend on your linguistic skills, developed at an early age, Latin based or not. So I guess the question becomes, which language has the most complexity to it? ...Meh. I think I am done answering questions with questions. |
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Every language I've studied aside from English aren't too hard. I mean, I'm not a language expert, but studying languages such as French and Spanish is like studying any other subject you would have in school. I wish I knew how hard English would be without growing up with it. I don't think it'd be up for most difficult language, but it would definitely be on the more difficult side. |
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I'm not speaking from experience there, since I've never asked a Japanese whether this is true, but I do know that I can't hear the difference between the open and closed vowels in Italian (there are 7, not 5, vowels) because in my native language there isn't this distinction. |
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However, when I listen something said in English I just get some random words and...a headache. It may be the %#@! accent that obfuscates the words. |
The hardest language in the world is Linear A. It's so difficult that no one has ever successfully learned it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A |
In linguistics, there is no such thing as the "hardest" language. If a language has a complex morphology, it probably has a simpler syntax or phonology. Each language is difficult, just in different ways. Russian is very difficult morphologically, but syntax is very free. On the other hand, Chinese has almost no morphology, but the syntax is very strict and complex. The phonology is no piece of cake either. English tends to tend towards Chinese on this scale. Yes, it is an Indo-European language, but it has diverged a lot, losing most morphological endings.
And Linear A isn't a language. It's a script. And it's like that only because no one has deciphered it yet. Who knows, it could have been used to write English for all we know. The reason it's deciphered is that the language that it probably was used to write is lost to us now, and it's not related to any other script we know of. |
I agree with what Oric said, but I remembered what I had heard about Georgian and checked with Wikipedia (ok, not the most authoritative reference, but whatever... the article seems professional enough). Georgian has
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Even the number system is bloody strange: Quote:
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by the way, i stumbled upon this video about counting stuff in japanese : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY8YsB14ABI that's some scary crazy stuff, but has a hot chick in the video so... |
I think Chinese is really hard. The four intonation thing just messes me up, and also knowing all those characters and how to write them. You have to memorize quite a bit to get just the basics.
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In fact, being undeciphered and spoken by no one, you might argue that Linear A is impossible to learn, and therefore the hardest language by default (a distinction it would share with all undeciphered and/or lost languages. |
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Dunno why French gets picked on about it when everyone agrees Spanish is apparently so easy to learn. =/ la casa / el castillo = la maison / le chateau = the house / the castle el gato / la vaca = le chat / la vache = the cat / the cow etc ... |
I think it has to do with the fact that masculine nouns typically end with -o, and feminine nouns usually end in -a. French, while having some indicators, is a lot less concrete in that sense =s
That's probably one of my biggest problems when writing in French. |
Aaaah very true. It does make things a lot easier. Although I couldnt even explain it, there is some sort of phonetical coherency with noun genders in French though. Any French person can tell you if a word *sounds* feminine or masculine, with a certain error rate, of course. But yeah, nothing as obvious as what Spanish has.
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Hi guys. A while ago I made a thread asking how many languages a person could theoretically learn and retain. Well...
POLYGLOTS! There's some people who speak 60+ languages there Anyway, there's an interview with one guy who knows over 25 languages. Here's what he has to say in reply to being asked what that hardest language was: Quote:
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Another undeciphered language. There are many of them -- for a long time, Egyptian was until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. If that had been destroyed or hadn't existed, it would probably remain an undeciphered language to this day. |
As Spanish spoken as i am, i really envy all you North Americans because you dont need to use one of the worst things ever made: Accents.
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Burp, it only takes lots of practice and intention to defeat the accent. I didn´t start learning English until about three years after starting Spanish, since I was raised in Guatemala first. But I pretty much defeated my accent before getting deported. I wonder if speaking so much Spanish now is going to make it return?
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Thats one of the reasons why I had so much trouble learning spanish. I could never get the accents down and every time I tried speaking it I sounded like a country bumpkin trying to speak in tongues. :P
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Of the languages i looked at/studied with a (more or less) latin alphabet, German is the hardest. they have THREE genders, and in comparison to french/spanish, there doesn't seem to be much "logic" into them. PLus, ordering the words is a total pain
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Anyway, I personally believe that languages that place emphasis on vocal tones (Vietnamese is a language that comes to mind) are harder for some people to learn. I don't think there is a 'hardest' language; since technically any language that is classified as such can be learned, right? You might want to break things while trying certain ones, though. :tpg: |
in my opinion, the most difficult language to learn is the sanskrit...
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In my opinion, Latin has to be one of the hardest languages I've tried to study. So many case and tenses it annoys me...not only that, you also have to make the genders agree....etcetcetc. Very challenging, but was fun none the less. =)
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