There are 9 choices, 13 votes for cosmosis' debate

the hardest language on earth

from a linguistics point of view, what do you think the hardest language out of all the languages in the world is?


  • different aspects of languages

    different languages tend to be more or less difficult in different aspects of it. for example, mandarin (chinese) has an incredibly hard writing system consisting of thousands of characters. plus the use of tones to distinguish words also makes it a difficult language. but on the other hand mandarin has incredibly easy grammar. there are no things like noun genders, no ackward grammar, and no ackward declination of nouns, verbs, etc.

    german, though it has similar vocabulary to english has very "disturbing" grammar and such. for example there are 6 the's in the german language (der, die, das, dem, den, and des)and verbs and nouns change depending on how their used(for example, the word for my: mein, meine, meinen, meiner. the verb "to be": bin, bist, ist, sind, seit, sein)so things can get screwy.

    for japanese, the main thing that i found extremely difficult at first was suprisingly not the writing, but the multitude of ways one could say something. long ago, japan borrowed many words from china and now modern japanese has multiple ways of saying almost every word/morpheme depending on context. (so they are not synonyms). for example, the word for light is hikari and the word for year is toshi but light-year is kounen. hikari and toshi are native japanese while kou and nen are borrowed from china. however you could not say hikari-toshi. another example is the word for day...the other day is senJITSU, everyday is maiNICHI, mother's day is haha no HI, and today is kyoU. the capatilized part being the various pronounciations of "day". these are not interchangable so you have to learn each one on its own. in contrast, the grammar is not as irregular as european languages but there is a lot more of it. the writing which consists of two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) and about 3000 logograms (kanji) are a lot to memorize but in themselves are not difficult. last but not least...japanese has a very lengthy honorific system that takes a long time to learn.

    so i personally think that every language has something hard about it.

    30%  Voted for by cosmosis, Millyphilly, Robbwindow, cafegroundzero.
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  • Are you from around here?

    I think it really depends on what you speak as your first language. E.g.: If I spoke spanish fluently, then Italian, French, and Latin (all romantic) would be easier than English. If I was German, however, then since many English words come from my language it would be easier to learn it. Of course, than there are 31 (last time I checked, mabey some have died) people across the globe who are the last one of their race/tribe/community/religion/etc that speak their native language, possibly with completely different sentace structure than any other language. So, it really depends on where you're coming from.

    15%  Voted for by normality, looking4realtruth.
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  • hardest language

    when i was in school my teacher told us that its the English language that is the hardest diff parts of the words come from diff countries. It has so many diff origins when u look up in the dictionary. There are updates of the dictionary and added words. Some people arent very versed in the English language and need to visit a dictionary cause a person isnt familiar with the word and sometimes thats just pathetic as heck or maybe because the "culture" they live in doesnt have that certain trait as many cultures have diff behaviors.

    Voted for by tinygirl8.
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  • Finnish sounds pretty hard

    I thought Russian was tough to master because it has 8 different cases, then a friend of mine told me about what he was studying; Finnish, which has twice as many as Russian. gave ne a headache just thinking about it.

    Voted for by NeferMaatNetjer.
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  • Binary Code

    Or some other computer program language.

    But seriously, it's proven that Japanese and Chinese are the hardest language out there... with just a slight change in tone can change the entire meaning of words. Second would be English.

    Voted for by Sharcu.
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  • Math

    math is the hardest languege because it is always changing. As soon as a person where to learn all of the formulat, theorems, and what not, someone comes up with another one.

    Voted for by drastic plastic.
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  • The Heart

    I personally think the language of the heart is the hardest to learn.

    Voted for by Energizer Bunny.
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  • I say it's Polish. >_>;

    There is no absolute hardest language, because most languages are related in some way or other to each other.

    English is the hardest language to learn for non-speakers, because of its grammar, spelling, and pronunciation exceptions.

    Chinese is actually a lot easier than English; there is no verb conjugation, and the tones are easy to learn, /and/ there /are/ rules to pronunciation with consonants and vowels. You only have to be able to read about 1,000 or so characters in Chinese to be considered literate, out of the 3,000 they have, and Chinese actually has less syllables than English (English has about 1200 ish, and Chinese has a couple hundred). The Chinese alphabet is actually simply made up of radicals and roots, and Japanese uses the same alphabet (although the characters don't always mean the same thing). Japanese is mostly phonetic.

    Russian has an entirely new alphabet from English, but it also has the same cases as English does (even though we don't change words for cases as much), and they have conjugations like many other languages.

    German is the easiest language for English-speakers to learn, because it is so similar to English; it is also related to French.

    French is hard to read & write because of the vowel combinations, but once you know the vowel combinations and their sounds, it's a piece of cake.

    The other Romance languages (Spanish, Rumanian, Portuguese, Italian, and Latin) are easy, since once you've learned one (especially Latin), you basically have learned them all.

    But I personally find Polish daunting. ;

    Voted for by Trinh Rizci.
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  • Gaelic

    My name is Gaelic is Sorea, and my name is Clare! It's pronounced the same I'm told, which just proves how weird Gaelic spelling is.

    Voted for by asphyxiated grace.
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