The hardest language in the world?

Originally Posted by lord-of-shadow

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".

I surrender

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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Originally Posted by Nahual

How about some of the languages in Africa that use clicking in them? I think those would be pretty tough.

For people like you and me, it might actually be impossible. I recall reading somewhere that if you don't grow up learning a language that involves manipulating clicks and other sounds (such as many African languages and their dialects), by the time you're past eight or so, it registers in a different hemisphere of your brain as sound and noise, not as a language. Someone correct me if you know I'm wrong.

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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Originally Posted by Max Biggs

For people like you and me, it might actually be impossible. I recall reading somewhere that if you don't grow up learning a language that involves manipulating clicks and other sounds (such as many African languages and their dialects), by the time you're past eight or so, it registers in a different hemisphere of your brain as sound and noise, not as a language. Someone correct me if you know I'm wrong.

As far as I know this extends beyond clicks... basically when we're young we cannot discriminate, and therefore our ears pick up all the phonemes we hear in a language. Those phonemes which are not part of the mother tongue however are ignored until the listener can't actually hear them as phonemes or else does not differentiate between that phoneme and a similar one in his native language. That is why speakers of Chinese and Japanese can't hear any difference between the 'r' and 'l' sounds, I was told... basically their phoneme is somewhere in the middle of those two sounds, and since there isn't a pure 'l' or 'r' in the original languages they tend not to pronounce them when speaking a foreign language.

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.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by *AkirA*

I studied spanish for 3 years and I still cant speak it despite how easy everyone says it is to learn.

For me Spanish is easy, since I'm Spanish. :biggrin:
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.

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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

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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.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

...some formidable consonant clusters, as may be seen in words like gvprtskvni ("You peel us") and mtsvrtneli ("trainer").

It also has a complicated (I suppose) morphological system:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Georgian has seven cases of the noun: nominative, ergative, dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative.

I could never learn German because I never understood the dative and accusative cases, so I shudder to think what I would have done with Georgian ^_____^.

Even the number system is bloody strange:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Georgian has a vigesimal number system, based on the counting system of 20, like Basque or Old French. In order to express a number greater than 20 and less than 100, first the number of 20's in the number is stated and the remaining number is added. For example, 93 is expressed as four-score-and-thirteen.

Ok, this is not necessarily difficult, but it is a little weird.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by vanity_

I could never get my mind around french...genders for chairs?

like really..wtf

yeah, in france, in games like who wants to be a millionaire, an impossible question pops up "which of these words is masculine?", usually people fail at these questions


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...

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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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Originally Posted by Oric

And Linear A isn't a language. It's a script.

True, but a lot of the discussion in this thread has revolved around scripts, especially ones radically different than the Latin script. And let's not forget that sounds are typically associated with ancient scripts (like hieroglyphs) once they're deciphered, making it possible to speak the language. It will almost certainly be different than it was when it was spoken natively, but the fact remains.

Originally Posted by Oric

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 undeciphered 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.

Hence my mention of it. If the language were simpler, deciphering it would be easier, especially given the tentative links with other languages as described in the article.

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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Originally Posted by Hello_Kitty

yeah, in france, in games like who wants to be a millionaire, an impossible question pops up "which of these words is masculine?", usually people fail at these questions

You know, people never mention it, but I just realized at least Spanish and Italian do the same exact thing, aka giving genders to objects and animals.

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 was speaking idiomatically.

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.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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.

FELIPE NO

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:

Originally Posted by Barry Farber

For two different reasons, Finnish and Korean. Finnish because of the complexity of the grammar – a lot of people bloody their noses against the six noun cases in Latin/Russian, seven in Serbo-Croatian, you have 15 noun cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. I like to joke that I was in my hotel room in Helsinki for five days trying to learn enough to get downstairs.

Korean has a different kind of difficulty. There are some languages – we should invent a catchy phrase for this; the repeat/rely index, that’ll work for now – if you learn a word in Italian and say it to an Italian person, the Italian will immediately understand. If you learn a word in Indonesian, the Indonesian will immediately understand. There’s good repeat/rely there. If you learn a word in Korean, the Korean’s eyes will glaze over; he’ll be hopelessly confused. Then you say the word again, and you say it louder, and he still won’t understand. Then you show him the word and he’ll say “ah!” and he’ll repeat to you exactly what you’ve been saying, at least to your ears. That happens a lot in Mandarin, and it happens all the time in Korean.

I love the languages that make you suspect the person you’re talking to has the same book at home.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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?

Originally Posted by Tawnee Stoner

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.

Never really thought about those things you pointed out, but very true. It´s so easy when it comes naturally and you never have to give a second thought to what you´re saying.

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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

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by eriol33

Just lately I've been studying japanese intensively and so far my progress is quite good. Even though it's quite painstaking, but I think japanese is probably not as hard as I thought. For a break, I browsed for articles about the hardest languages in the world. It seems Finnish and Hungarian deserve the title of being the hardest language in the world, while Indonesia/Malay is the easiest.

Well, what do you think about this? Do you study language a lot? What is the hardest language you ever learn?

English! English can be quite complicated and downright intimidating to anyone who does not speak it as a first language! Sure, most of us take it for granted because we have been speaking it for so long, but look at it in another light; all the grammer ruls and punctuation makes it a nightmare!

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Mucknuggle

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.

To write well as in diction, or penmanship?

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.

FELIPE NO

in my opinion, the most difficult language to learn is the sanskrit...

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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. =)

Jam it back in, in the dark.

English. So many spellings of the same words and yet they mean different things to confuse those that wish to learn it. However, I will also put forward one language that is not native to me and I have had trouble learning; Cantonese. Been told that I can manage the "sing-song" dialect well but I find it difficult to remember all the different tones.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by cubed

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 ??

Simply 'cause une vache is feminine, hence you use the feminine article la as opposed to the masculine article le.

amman2003

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