The hardest language in the world?

Originally Posted by Kolba

I was looking up Kalaallisut, the inuit language of native Greenlanders, and it looks like someone's having a laugh.

Wikipedia, in Kalaallisut!

Neat words there, pretty long but I guess they are not too hard to pronounce.. unless they don't use finnish pronunciation, that is.

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 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 don`t have the slightest fucking clue after reading this thread. I always heard Mandarin would be tops, though. Who knows.

Originally Posted by Devo

Are you kidding me? Just because our language doesn't have super coherent rules about verbs, and god forbid some homonyms doesn't make it hard.

I know foreigners or those with english as a second language (native puerto ricans) who speak english better than American born people who've grown up with it.

I wonder why you`re promoting Puerto Rican`s! Anyhow, my sister spent three years in the United States in the late 80`s and still has better, much better, English than my mother who has lived there 22 years. I don`t necessarily think English is an easy language to learn, but all your example and my example says to me is that some people are just far more adept at learning new languages.

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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.

Originally Posted by DragoonKain

English probably is. English has so many words with the same pronunciation, but with different spellings. There, their, they're and words like then, than, etc.

For foreigners, people can move to the US and live here their whole lives and still not pick up the language. English has to be up there.

Wow. No. That is completely false. The funny thing is, people from other countries that came here can distinguish between than/then, there/their/they're, and avoid many other common errors that people that were born here commonly make.

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?

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.

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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 ??

Duh. A cow is obviously more feminine than masculine. No, wait, actually that works since a cow, in french anyway, only applies to the female animal. A better example would have been "La table". Why is a table more feminine than masculine? Who knows... There are even words which no one seems to remember the gender of, even native french speakers. For example "apostrophe". Yeah, that has a gender. But half of the time you'll ask someone and they'll have no idea which gender it is. So yeah, I can easily imagine how fun it must be to learn french for people who haven't grown up speaking it. In my opinion, english is orders of magnitude easier. I'm not even sure you can find an exception or some weird rule in the english language that doesn't have an equivalent in french, or something even more bizarre.

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.

Originally Posted by YeOldeButchere

So I'm gonna go with a safe bet and say ancient egyptian. With hieroglyphs and shit.

Agreed

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?

Originally Posted by MeTaL_oRgY

I agree. English was a breeze to learn and, although I still confuse some verbs and conjugations from time to time, I believe my level is pretty good. Yet, I know shit about grammar rules (I've never been good with those), so probably if I knew about them I'd have a different opinion. It is true, though, that English has one of the most large vocabulary out there. But I bet you that most of those words are not used or known by english speakers.

Spanish, on the other hand (which is my native language), seems very hard. With all the ortographic rules (which I don't even know perfectly) and the pronunciation I've heard from foreigners, it seems like a though one.

Also, japanese and chinese. Writing those must be quite an adventure.

Well then it seems it depends on the person. Because spanish was more of a breeze for me, and for most ppl who I know learned it didnt have too much trouble with it.

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?

Originally Posted by Acro-nym

Anybody have any idea if Maltese is hard to learn? Being a blend of Arabic and Latin, it seems like it should be at least slightly confusing.

I'm Maltese, so I'll probably ramble on this one. ^^;

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.

Originally Posted by neus

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?

I don't notice it, but everybody says that's true. Also, it's difficult to hear a song in Italian (and probably French, but I don't know it) and not understand most of the song. I tend to not understand certain verses of songs in English, even after a lot of listens (and I mean a lot).

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?

Originally Posted by Spike

Wow. No. That is completely false. The funny thing is, people from other countries that came here can distinguish between than/then, there/their/they're, and avoid many other common errors that people that were born here commonly make.

I think it may be due to the fact English, for native speakers, is first learned phonetically in early childhood while people from abroad learn it when they're already capable to actually understand the difference. Just a thought. =/

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?

Originally Posted by niki

I was also sure French would be cursed a lot more for it's use of genders and pronounciation.

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

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.

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.