from a linguistics point of view, what do you think the hardest language out of all the languages in the world is?
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different aspects of languages25% Voted for by cosmosis, Millyphilly, Robbwindow, cafegroundzero.
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.
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The Heart12% Voted for by Energizer Bunny, Jessa M..
I personally think the language of the heart is the hardest to learn.
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Are you from around here?12% Voted for by normality, looking4realtruth.
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.
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MathVoted for by drastic plastic.
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.
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hardest languageVoted for by tinygirl8.
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.
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Finnish sounds pretty hardVoted for by NeferMaatNetjer.
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.
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Binary CodeVoted for by Sharcu.
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.
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I say it's Polish. >_>;Voted for by Trinh Rizci.
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.
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GaelicVoted for by asphyxiated grace.
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.
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ArabicOh come on people, I can't hear you saying: "the Arabic language"!Voted for by Yazan.
How hard it can be, yet it is still one of the most lovely languages I've learned. Might not be as lovely as French whilst speaking, but when it comes to Grammar, Poetry and so, it is really powerful and strong.
Oh, before I forget, Modern English these days is so rubbish and doesn't interest me, and I think the same for everyone who speaks English. It isn't as descriptive as the Arabic(and Hebrew, I think?) language. -
European languages with lot's of conjugations/declinationsEuropean languages with lot's of conjugations/declinations! Simply because of all the difficulties with correction.Voted for by jonny2.
Being multilingual in English, German, Chinese and Malay. Each language has its own difficulties (apart from Malay). It is not the learning part that is difficult but the language-mastering part.
English is easy to learn but not that easy to master as it takes years and lots of reading to get a feel of the language - e.g. differentiating between 'in time' and 'on time', 'stress' and 'pressure' (sorry, that's the best I can come up with at this moment). Most non-native lerners would not be able to appreciate the subtle difference in the expressions, which might not exist in their mother tongue.
On the other side, German, although being similar to English, is not easy to master. While it is less sophisticated, the sentence structure, gender, cases & declinations, inconsistent word-forming/joining rules (when can you join words and when must you not. 'school-bus-driver' or 'driver of school-bus'?) and especially the prepositions are a nuisance.
As for Chinese, in my opinion does deserve its place as one of the hardest (but not the hardest of all) languages. Some people who had learnt the language for 1-2 years or , as I would call it, 'skimmed the surface' will not be able to appreciate the difficulty of it. Being one of the oldest language in the world, learning chinese does not only means learning the characters and being able to grasp the ton/sound, but also to learn the rich history and cultural of the civilisation - to learn the origins, ambiguous and symbolic meanings of some expression (e.g. '7788' in Chinese means 'almost', 'half a catty, 8 tael'), the thousands of idioms and sayings, the cultural elements of the language. Furthermore, there is also the classical chinese text, which presents significant difficulties even to native chinese speakers and is necessary for reading and comprehending classical/historical/poetic/philosophical literatures. And finally, the chinese character does not correspond one-to-one to the english equivalent, by pairing a character with another character, the meaning of the word (and sometimes (very rarely) the sound) also changes. This means that one must understand the different meanings of a character when pairing it with another character to form a verbal expression.
Sorry for the long rant, I got too carried away. All in all, I would just like to stress that, the most difficult language is not the language that is hardest to learn but the hardest to master. My personal opinion, with all that horrible experience of correcting my 10,000-words thesis in German, is the european languages with all the conjugations/declinations.
Just my 2 pence!
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Robbwindow
January 18, 2006
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Binary no, say maybe Dutch
Three years of trying to translate dutch to English was to no avail, why, because everybody spoke English and the same goes for binary code everyone is speakin it so why change it. So the Dutch language inspired ( influenced rather) by a quarter Duieschueland, quarter Afro khans, a quarter English and the rest of Flemish origin. This was a revelation to me as much as the amount of chinese literate characters from you. Thats why I agree also with your conclusions, for whats hard for one is easy peasy, lemon squeezy for another.May 27, 2006
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Chinese
But the thing about Chinese is that you don't have to know all 3,000 characters to be considered literate; you only have to know about 1000. Also, Chinese has less syllables than English does; English has somewhere around 1200, and Chinese only has a couple hundred, I believe. (On Japanese) Oh, yeah, and I heard/read awhile ago that hirigana and katakana are almost obsolete now, and they're supposedly going back to all kanji. I don't know how true that is, but I just thought I'd throw that in.cosmosis
May 28, 2006
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to lilsacha
i'm currently studying the Japanese language and trust me, there is no possible way that they are going to make hiragana and katakana obsolete. they are needed far too much for things like conjugating verbs and other grammatical points. on the contrary, the use of katakana (which is used primarily for writing loan words from other languages) is actually going up due to the fact that japanese is borrowing tons of words from english. also, kanji are actually the part of the japanese writing system that are technically unnecesary. in japanese, all kanji can be written out in hiragana and/or katakana. so if you don't know the kanji for a word, you can just write it out in hiragana and it wouldn't make any difference. but at the same time, kanji can't be operated to form the same grammatical functions that hiragana and katakana do. and on mandarin, yes, they do have a lot less syllables but they have tones. meaning that each word has to be pronounced with a certain, precise pitch (rising, falling, flat, dipping) in order to obtain the desired meaning. the word "ma" could mean "horse" or "mother" depending on the tone used. also, there are much more than only 3000 characters in mandarin. it has been estimated to be over 50,000 but only about 3000 are in common use. i also have a couple chinese friends who are fluent in mandarin and they'll tell you that it does take a knowledge of at least a few thousand characters to be able to read. i'm sorry to make this post really long. lol. i just kinda felt like i had to explain things in depth.Xelgaroth
February 13, 2009
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Thank you
Yes, I am from the United States, and so speak English fluently, but also speak fairly decent Spanish (I'm still studying it of course), and I know from just learning one Romance language that English is incredibly easy. It's mainly because it is a highly simplified form of Old English, which of course is a bastardized blending of Anglo and Germanic tribes from Scandinavia and Northern Europe. It also has severe Celtic and Welsh influence in its grammar (oddities like the "meaningless do" as in expressions like "I do not like that", and so on, or the use of "ing" as the usual format for the Present Tense), then heavily affected by the Vikings later on. It's an incredibly easy language to learn. Perhaps some of its details are difficult (for instance, a lot of my non-English-as-their-first-language friends forget to use the meaningless do, saying "What I did?" instead of "What did I do?" and so on), but beyond little things like that, it is itself an easy language to pick up, very flexible and forgiving with its usage.Russian, on the other hand, I have heard is extremely difficult to learn. It starts out hard and STAYS hard, for people who have not known it since birth.
Xelgaroth
February 14, 2009
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Ingles es mas facil a hablar que es a escribir (la manera de la que son escrito las palabras es muy extrano a veces, por ejemplo: though, rough, cough, bough, through. Todas estas palabras tienen "ough", pero todas tienen sonidos diferentes). Sin embargo, todavia es facil a escribir tambien! Ingles es muy facil, y aunque Espanol es mas dificil que Ingles, tambien es facil a aprender-- todos las palabras son pronunciado como te aparecen! Las solas cosas que hace un poco mucho tiempo a aprender son todas las conjugaciones de los verbos.
A proposito, soy estadunidense.
WannaBeKid
February 14, 2009
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impossible ideals and squabbling
While researching material for a paper, I once saw an entire book (several of them in fact but I only skimmed through one) about bilingualism, and everything under the sun, every possible scenario was in the book - so I don't really think you can have absolute terms. Look at feral children. Without learning language at a crucial point in development they lose all chance at ever acquiring human speech. So without having come from somewhere you can't possibly go anywhere!WannaBeKid
February 14, 2009
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impossible ideals and squabbling
While researching material for a paper, I once saw an entire book (several of them in fact but I only skimmed through one) about bilingualism, and everything under the sun, every possible scenario was in the book - so I don't really think you can have absolute terms. Look at feral children. Without learning language at a crucial point in development they lose all chance at ever acquiring human speech. So without having come from somewhere you can't possibly go anywhere!WannaBeKid
February 14, 2009
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impossible ideals and squabbling
While researching material for a paper, I once saw an entire book (several of them in fact but I only skimmed through one) about bilingualism, and everything under the sun, every possible scenario was in the book - so I don't really think you can have absolute terms. Look at feral children. Without learning language at a crucial point in development they lose all chance at ever acquiring human speech. So without having come from somewhere you can't possibly go anywhere!Please register or login to comment! It's fast and totally free!