|
|
Welcome to the Exploding Garrmondo Weiner Interactive Swiss Army Penis. |
GFF is a community of gaming and music enthusiasts. We have a team of dedicated moderators, constant member-organized activities, and plenty of custom features, including our unique journal system. If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ or our GFWiki. You will have to register before you can post. Membership is completely free (and gets rid of the pesky advertisement unit underneath this message).
|
|
Thread Tools |
And that's the point also, there's probably no single most difficult language. Unless there is some language that is so hard to use that it has a negative effect over the development of its culture. ;P But then again those languages would be extinct by now. There's nowhere I can't reach.
i see no reason for signatures other than mindless spam
|
I would believe that the hardest languages to learn are the ones that have silent consonants. I remember studying psycology, and seeing a case study of nature vs. nuture that involved speaking languages that use silent consonants. When a child is young enough, their hearing is sensitive to all noise, and they don't know how to disregard certain forms of "white noise". Being so, they can develop an understanding of silent consonants because they know how to differentiate them from other forms of sound. If the differentiation is not made at an early age, the person will never be able to differentiate the sound from all forms of white noise.
Imagine parts of a language you can't even hear to begin with. This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.
"I can make a scalpel sing, but that is my gift. The gift is not in my hands, for you see, I can play the notes [on a piano], but I can't make music."
~ Major Charles Emerson Winchester III 4077 M*A*S*H |
I don`t have the slightest fucking clue after reading this thread. I always heard Mandarin would be tops, though. Who knows.
I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body? |
What about French ??
To properly speak in french from english seems to be hard for a lot of people. "Le vache" NO IT'S "LA VACHE". WHY? ...WHO KNOWS ?? I was speaking idiomatically. ---------------{ Currently playing }-- ... Nothing.... really. -----------------------{ Last rips }-- Trauma Center New Blood (Wii) Trauma Center Second Opinion (Wii) Planet Puzzle League (DS) ---{ Currently in ripping progress }-- Dragoneer's Aria (PSP) Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS) -----------{ Other stuffs about me }-- My VGM Collection (last update: mar. 03, 2008) -------------------------------------- |
What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now? |
French is very difficult to get good at unless you grew up speaking it. There are so many grammar rules and even more exceptions to those rules.
Japanese is probably one of the tougher, especially if you don't know any other Asian languages. The grammar is ridiculous from what I hear. Seriously, look at all of the Japanese kids that take extra lessons after school so that they can learn how to write well. Crazy. Also, Mandarin, Cantonese and any other language that has a bunch of intonations is a bitch to learn unless you grew up speaking it. I hear Mandarin grammar is pretty simple, but memorizing all those symbols and learning intonations is friggin' hard. FELIPE NO |
Haha. Interesting viewpoint. Speaking chinese/mandarin is actually quite easy, to me, since I did grow up learning it.
I personally believe that the hardest language for a person, is the language where's it's grammatical rules are totally unfamiliar. What I'm saying is, most language has certain similar rules, and learning new languages that is in someways similar, would be easier, than learning the whole grammar rule from ground up. What more in the later stages of your life where the pace of your learning slows down... What, you don't want my bikini-clad body? |
Chocobo |
Japanese is simple because it uses phonetics. That makes it even easier than English even though Japanese has a weird counting system, verb tenses and uses kanji along with hiragana and katakana. Same goes with Hangul. Chinese is harder because it uses characters only and combines two characters with seperate meanings to form a new word. Everything sounds weird if you're not brought up with it cause you'll be like "what? large window mountain has train seeing up face you?"
I'd say one of the hardest languages is Tamil. Or one of the hundreds of Indian dialects. Most amazing jew boots
[RIGHT]
|
Since french and english are the only two languages I know, it's sorta difficult to say what the hardest language to learn/speak/write is. From my point of view, anything using a different alphabet than what I'm used to would probably be fairly difficult at first. So I'm gonna go with a safe bet and say ancient egyptian. With hieroglyphs and shit. There's nowhere I can't reach. |
This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.
|
From my (limited) experience Chinese and Japanese are quite hard to learn, especially reading and writing. In Chinese there are so many different "words", but instead of letters there are strokes and can combine into so many ridiculous combinations because they aren't as restricted as letters in how they can be put together.
I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body? |
How ya doing, buddy? |
It's more or less, fairly easy to become sufficient with English. However, learning to speak it like a native was pretty challanging. Sure, I managed to do it with in 3 to 4 years but it wasn't a cake walk. I know Armenian, and Arabic, and I dabbeled in some japanese. I have to say out all of those so far, English still was the toughest to master. (Not that I've mastered Japanese unlike the other three languages listed above but, so far, it's not nearly as frustrating to get the hang of)
What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now? |
The Cambodian language (Khmer- pronounced Ka-mai) is pretty damn hard.
Though i was born in the US, i've been speaking it with my family every day for the past 23 years and still can't master it's pronounciation and vocabulary. ^_^'''' How ya doing, buddy? |
An interesting discussion. It is of course not possible to say just which language is the most complex, and therefore the hardest to learn, since one's perception is inevitably distorted by the distance of one's own mother-tongue from the language of study.
Nevertheless, specialists in the field of Comparative Linguistics would identify a number of areas of the world where spectacular language density occurs. That is, the number of languages in a relatively small area is high, the number of speakers of each language is low and the mutual intelligibility between geographically close languages is much lower than logically might be expected. The highest language densities occur in: 1. Papua New Guinea - the mountainous island to the north of Australia. 2. The Caucasus - the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas, between Europe and Asia, where the huge number of consonants and consonant clusters cause especial problems for non-native speakers. And to this can be added 3. Australia - where the huge number of Aboriginal Languages have so far mostly defied classification. Those wishing to explore further can look at Wikipedia, where sensible overviews and links to more in-depth references are given: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papuan_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral...ginal_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_families Rob What, you don't want my bikini-clad body? |
Maltese was the first language I learnt, so I can't say whether it was difficult or not... the first language is always "easy", being acquired when our Language Acquisition Device is still functioning at its best. There are some people here, however, who are not native speakers of Maltese even though they're Maltese (and born to Maltese parents) - a certain part of the population believes in speaking to newborns in English, and sometimes even continues to speak mostly English for the rest of its life. Such people usually find it difficult to learn Maltese, though part of it might be their attitude towards the language - they usually believe that Maltese is somehow a lesser language to English. So they might study it at school and have ample opportunity to practise it, but they still have somewhat stilted Maltese. This happens even with people who start learning Maltese as a second language from a relatively young age, say around 12 years of age. Many Maltese, including myself actually, are put off (to different extents) by the perceived difficulty of Maltese ortography. The grammar is relatively easy - no declensions, very few tenses, no tones, etc. Most people have appalling ortography however... I think the culprit is a low amount of reading in our language, since there isn't much actually. Apart from some newspapers and magazines (themselves usually filled with appalling syntax and vocabulary choices) there are few books worth reading. On to vocabulary. The influx of new words from English and Italian (I suppose this is the Latin influence you mentioned?) means that apart from really basic or everyday words, Arabic is becoming less and less represented in the language. This is because people when speaking tend to mangle English or Italian words instead of thinking of the Maltese equivalent... we're becoming too lazy to speak Maltese. Foreigners who live in Malta for some time and do make the effort of learning the language usually learn it quickly enough, however. Jam it back in, in the dark. |
I'm completely amazed to see people listing English as one of the hardest languages to learn. My native language is Croatian, and I found English too damned simplistic. I picked it up in a single summer and I barely did any formal studying while doing so. Just sat down in front of the TV and read books. Eventually I just sort of absorbed it.
Probably the hardest change to adjust to was the fact that I couldn't write down words as I spoke them. In Serbian and Croatian, the letters are made of sounds - not a bunch of letters like in English. I'm not sure what the technical term is so here's an example. Say we're talking about the letter 'j'. In English, you write down j and pronounce it as jay. In Serbian, you would write it down as j and pronounce it as j - the y sound in yard. It's really an awesome system because spelling is not necessary. When someone tells you a word, you can spell it because you just write down the sounds that you hear. I have good spelling in English because of this non-phonetic writing style. Whenever I speak a word in English, I visualize it in my head. When I say things out loud, it's as if I'm reading them - I'm aware of their proper spelling and I use the letter formation as a guide for pronounciation. Also, out of the blue - I find English to be damned choppy. It isn't as musical as other languages like Italian and French. It seems to be switching directions with each word and ... it just doesn't flow. Anyone else get this feeling? There's nowhere I can't reach. |
Neus, Serbian and Croatian, from what you've explained, have a phonetic ortography. English was never standardised before the mid 16th century, I think, so everybody basically wrote as he felt it was best. English already had absorbed many words from a variety of languages, and their ortography was not based on English but rather on the language of origin (French, for example). So when it was standardised they probably chose the form which was most common, not which made the most ortographically sense.
This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it. |
I'm also amazed why is english mentioned in this thread. You guys don't use acute accents, which makes english very easy for those who actually use them.
Take these spanish words for example: Como - I eat Cómo - How? Como - Like (comparative) Solo - Alone Sólo - Only Por qué - Why? Porque - Because Man, I could go for hours. I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body? |
its suprising how many languages depend on changes in tone of voice and so forth..it goes a bit haywire when it comes to pronouciation
How ya doing, buddy? |
And I'm still surprised so many native English speakers mention English. I was also sure French would be cursed a lot more for it's use of genders and pronounciation. What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now? |
like really..wtf FELIPE NO |
I don't think there is any "hardest". It just depends on whatever you're already familiar with.
What, you don't want my bikini-clad body? |
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.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
"I can make a scalpel sing, but that is my gift. The gift is not in my hands, for you see, I can play the notes [on a piano], but I can't make music."
~ Major Charles Emerson Winchester III 4077 M*A*S*H |
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".
There's nowhere I can't reach. |