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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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Chinese or Japanese, but I might be biased. Latin isn't easy, either. Let me outline my reasons:

 

Chinese

 

--Thousands of characters must be memorized (and must pick one of two kinds: traditional or simplified, both of which are still used depending on the country or place). I'm somewhat familiar with traditional. Not at all with simplified, even if simplified is more common now, with mainland China using it.

--Tonal language, has 4 (or 5, if including unstressed) tones. Each tone imparts a different meaning on the same basic sound. Quite a bit different from the use of tones in English. It's easy to mistake or miss the differences in tones, if one doesn't listen carefully. Both my father and my brother have a lot of trouble. I can hear them clearly, because I used to speak fluently at one point.

--Thankfully, grammar isn't too hard, but syntax matters, like in English.

--Can speak and understand some, but no longer fluent. I spoke it when I was young. :)

 

Japanese

 

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

--Kind of atonal, so it makes it easier than Chinese in that respect...

--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.

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

 

Latin

 

--Alphabet helps out a lot.

--Learning how to decline and modify things is a challenge, but also provides tremendous flexibility in expression and meaning. I've only learned a little about this, but it reminds me of French and Russian a lot, which I studied when I was younger.

--Dead language.

 

I'm not a linguist. Just like to learn languages when I have spare time.

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vote please, all of those languages are hard all in their own ways:

 

Chinese, loads of syllables, but syllables dont make the language, knowing those, you can read exactly how and what is written. There are no word endings and its not that hard to pronounce chinese.

 

Japanese, hirigana and katakana are mirrors of each other, they spell out the same sounds, but yes chinese is used alot, but once again there are very few word engings and it is easy to read if you know the systems

 

Latin is a dead language hence it is not inclided

 

lets see

 

English is there to not discriminate against the US

 

French and German actually came out of the same language, however german is hard to pronounce and is virtualy unsingable, french is a technical language where words pronounced very sinilarly may mean the difference between food and death

 

arabic, written backwards, also hard alphabet, easy to miswrite something

 

russian is a hard language with all the endings for different tenses, sexes of objects and how they are being addressed, vast vocabulary is used, same words can mean a lot of different things in different contents. And there are too many gramatical rules too. and it is very rare that you see a non russian spealking with no accent at all.

 

Icelandic is virtualy unpronounsable, because a lot of sounds are exhale-type, i was going to throw in finnish, but ran out of options, finnish grammar is so weird you can make words thousands of syllables long

 

Hebrew is also weird and old

 

and Kwenyi.... just go and research, it looks real hard too

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This is not a serious question, and I have not voted.

  • How can one judge about a language one is not familiar with ? From hearsay ?
  • Some languages are so closely related, that if you know A, then B is easy to learn.
  • A language may be quite easy for you to speak, but not to write - which should you count in ?

I hear a lot of language around here, and I judge some of them as very difficult, but I never really tried to learn them yet, so what is the value of my judgement (or is it simply prejudice) ?

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From what I know Finnish and Icelandic probably the most difficult to learn to speak.

 

Chinese has got to be the hardest to learn to read and write.

 

Japanese is tricky because there is a variety of different words you would use for the same meaning depending on your social stature and gender...

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Remember too that what is hard for me may not be hard for you. I have quite a bit of difficulty learning any language, but I'm quite fluent in English. Does that mean that English is an easy language? Because I know English, I'm going to be biased against languages that are very different, and find them more difficult. German makes more sense to me than Mandarin, but how could I know whether that means that Mandarin is harder or simply more foreign to me? I've heard (I'll start looking for studies now) that the average english speaker knows more words than those of most other languages (partially because English has more words than many other languages), does that point to the possibility that learning English is more difficult, because you need to learn more words to become 'average'?

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I haven't learned mush Japanese but i find it harder than Chinese due to the different written styles. But i think Thai has both beat in that they have more tones. the 4 tones in chinese aren't really that hard...being a native English speaker there are only 2 chinese "letters" i have a hard time pronouncing. but Chinese grammar is actually quite a bit easier and in many ways more logical than English. i would say aside from the written aspect chinese is actually a fairly easy one to learn. and in my opinion traditional is easier as 1 character doesnt often mean as many things...although i still have a hard time knowing what a character means as there is often a few.

 

my 2 cents.

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I've often heard that Icelandic is the hardest language to learn. I really never heard someone speak Icelandic until this girl moved from there this year. It turns out she's now in my AP English class and she learned English as a little girl as well as Icelandic.

Well, sometimes I ask her to speak in her native tongue because I find different languages fascinating, but I must say Icelandic seems incredibly complex. :hihi:

 

Currently I'm trying to teach myself German, and I've dabbled in Spanish and Irish Gaelic in the past.

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The language categories were selected carefully so that some people will appeal to at least one (except for one laguage)

 

Most of us here spealk at least one Indo-European language, and it is easier to judge most of the languages presented because a good 1/4 of them are Indo-European, and if you can read this, you spealk one!

 

Fewer spealk a Finno-Urgic language, but there are a few here, i dunno if tormod spealks Finnish, but there has got to be someone who spealks hungarian or something like that, i hope... Tormod?

 

Fewer yet spealk a Slavic language, although it technically is an Indo-European, but so is Finnish, i will categorize Slavic as a separate language family here, because it is different from most other Indo-European languages (namely: spanish, german, norwayan (bokmal and nynorsk), french, italian, icelandic and english (also reminding that french, icelandic and norwayan/norwegian are all germanic languages))

 

That leaves us with Sino-Tibetan family, to which, and not to offend anyone as i wont argue your point, i will put Chinese (Yes I mean Mandarin, its spoken by the overwhelming majority of at least 800 million, followed closely.... err not... by Wu (90 million) and Cantonese (80 million)) and Japanese (that uses lots of chinese characters known as kanji, as well as 2 alphabetical, written languages: hirigana and katakana). We used to have a few people that spoke a Sino-Tibetan language, dunno if there is many people now...

 

I'm sure there has to be people that spealk an Afro-Asiatic language here, so would someone give us some insight into Arabic?

 

That leaves Hebrew and Numee... Anyone Jewish or a Theologian here learn Hebrew? And Numee is just a brain teaser to make those who care do some research. Its a language with a lot of french influence, as New Caledonia was a colony of Frances for a while, but i was hoping that would push most people to do some research, and that brings me to the rant part of my post:

 

Ok, I understand that some of you may not even heard of a language or two i posted, and that was fully to be expected of, so i gave yall a clue:

Before you vote, you may want to look into the languages you dont know or never heard of before...
What surprises me is that there are still people that go "Well i never heard this language spoken, how can i vote?" Have you not heard of Google? Its like, ok, you dont want to do any minor research here to increase your IQ, then why do you waste time by posting that you dont want to do reseach and can not take a guess in a simple matter? If i posted a poll on what car maker produces the best cars and the list went like this: Mercedes, Bentley, Auston Martin, Lotus, Ferrari, Pagandi Zonda, Koenigsegg, McLaren, Alpha Romeo, Vantage, Citroen, Porsche, Ford or Noble, would you still come back with "Well i dunno i havent driven all of them" well yeah, the combined cost of top of the line mobiles in this category is well over 15 million dollars, i dont blame you, but can you google each manufacturer and come up with a definitive answer at least for yourself?

 

If you dont understand that this poll is merely to, perhaps try to get some people to learn something they didn't know before, something that they may have been interested in so this will provide them with an opportunity to do so; or to let you do minor research as a fun activity, the main lesson of school; I specifically do not want you to vote!

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