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The Hardest Language


alexander

What is the hardest language?  

1 member has voted

  1. 1. What is the hardest language?

    • English (Brittish Isles, USA)
      8
    • French (France, Quebeck province, handful of Islands)
      1
    • German (Germany, Sweeden, a few other places like Denmark)
      0
    • Chinese (China)
      13
    • Japanese (Japan, few Russian islands)
      1
    • Russian (Russia, former republics of USSR)
      5
    • Arabic (throughout the middle east and Africa)
      4
    • Icelandic (Iceland)
      4
    • Numee (Kwenyi people of New Caledonia)
      0
    • Hebrew
      1
    • Finnish (Finland)
      0


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I was Stumbling Through Google this morning and happened on the entry of Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant.

 

He is an important link in understanding savantism as he can describe his mental processes to some extent, something which is not normally possible. One of his achievements was to recite the first 22 514 digits of Pi for a charity event; this is currently the world record.:bow_flowers:

 

What does this have to do with this thread on Hypography? Well, he has an exceptional flare for languages and was challenged to learn Islandic in ONE WEEK, a feat he achieved and was conversing on Channel 5, 7 days later. It is mentioned in the Goggle article that Islandic has a reputation as one of the most difficult languages to learn. This statement is backed by 2 references of which one is this thread I'm posting in here.

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  • 5 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

i said Iceland probably because i've never heard it spoken.

 

i didn't see the choice i would have picked though, that African language that uses a variety of clicks to communicate. i used to work with a guy from Nigeria who had those clicks in his middle name. it was cool, but i am glad he could do it. can't say the same for myself though

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  • 8 months later...

If I may respond to a few of maikeru's observations regarding Japanese:

 

Japanese may be hard for speakers of Indo-European languages, but it isn't hard for speakers of structurally similar languages such as Korean. When I taught Japanese at a New Zealand university, I had a number of Koreans in my classes, who all said they found Japanese much easier to learn than English.

 

 

Japanese

 

--Thousands of characters must be memorized

 

Not really; only some 2,000 kanji are approved for general use, and most educated Japanese adults can recognise (even if they might not always be able to write) a further thousand or so.

 

and in addition, must learn two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), and writing consists of a mixture of all three systems.

 

Japanese kindergarten kids learn hiragana before they move to primary school, and learn katakana in their first few months of primary education. They are expected to learn some 1,000 kanji progressively in a prescribed order during six years of primary schooling. Even for non-Japanese, both kana systems, being almost perfectly phonetic, are dead easy to learn to use.

 

--But grammar is harder, because verbs, differing forms of respect and address (for humility, politeness, close or distal relationships), etc. require more learning and mastering. .

 

The conventions of keigo (politeness language) certainly are tricky for those whose language and culture don't include such features — but IMHO one of the much more difficult things about Japanese grammar is the structural feature whereby all noun modifiers, regardless of length, precede the nouns that they modify,

 

For example:

 

In English you can say: The bus THAT I was supposed to arrive at quarter to three, but WHICH had been delayed by a traffic accident, finally arrived at three-thirty.

 

In Japanese all the stuff underlined above has to precede "bus" just like a simple adjective: Was supposed to arrive at quarter to three, but had been delayed by traffic accident bus...etc

 

And that's a relatively simple example.

 

Verb inflection is a relatively simple matter compared with syntactical issues like this, which are no problem for Koreans but which require most if not all Indo-European language speakers to learn to think in a different order. It's not uncommon for students, like those I teach Japanese-to-English translation, to find that they know every kanji and the meaning of every individual word in a Japanese sentence but are unable to make any sense of it how the component parts of the sentence relate to each other and work together to create the meaning of the sentence.

 

--My Japanese is poor at this point, but I hope it will get better with more study.

 

頑張って下さい、マイケルさん!!(Ganbatte kudasai, maikeru-san!!):)

 

 

satsumajin

(translator and teacher of Japanese)

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