The hardest language to learn

[Undesired Walrus]

I've heard Japanese is pretty damn hard, but let me know what you think is..

[Pipirr]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

[Katana]

I have no idea.

I would think that it would depend on your native language.

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Whatever it is, I want to learn it.

Espanol es muy facil.

[Merko]

I assume that the 'any African language' should be 'some African language'. African languages are extremely diverse and some seem quite difficult.

Of course, it all depends on what your native language is, but in these cases, even the neighbours may find a language extremely difficult, which I guess is a good criteria if one tries to take a global view on things.

[Miss Anthrope]

I've tried on again/off again to learn Chinese dialects. My house is full of Chinese antiques with all this writing on it...and I wanted to be able to translate it. It's so difficult. I taught myself written and spoken Greek in my teens and found it quite simple. Chinese is really difficult!

(I just assume my furniture has endless, profanity laced ancient curses to the stupid Americans who pay too much for this old junk).

That said, if anyone can read Chinese, there's a big bottle of limoncello for you if you can translate!

[Babylon Sister]

Basque

[andyandy]

I agree it's very much dependent upon your native language - and to judge "hardness" requires an appreciation of the several thousand languages that are in circulation today....

for us Anglo folk, I'd say that both Chinese and Japanese hold distinct problems,

Chinese requires several thousand characters and is tonal dependent

Japanese requires less characters, and it can be written and pronounced with a simple phonetic system but its characters are not fixed in reading, and the sentence structure is Subject Object Verb (I football play) rather than the familiar SVO of Chinese.

I'd say the mastery of tones outweighs the mastery of SOV for us - though both are pretty difficult. And it's no coincidence that Koreans and Japanese who both have SOV based language find the other significantly easier than say English.

If there were a language with a SOV structure, highly tonal, with a non-fixed extensive character alphabet (each character with more than one reading), and with irregular conjugations then I think this would be the daddy of all difficult languages for English speakers. :)

[rymdman]

the marsian dialect in Mars Attacks always gave me hard times.

[Wolfman]

In regards to Chinese, one must keep in mind that there are at least five "Chinese" languages, and literally hundreds of dialects. The best known Chinese languages are Mandarin and Cantonese, but there are other distinct languages groups within China.

Mandarin is the "official" language of mainland China, and the language I've learned. Cantonese is common in southern China and Hong Kong. Of the two, I'd consider Cantonese to be far more difficult; while both are tonal languages, Cantonese has nine tones, while Mandarin has only four (or five, if you include the 'neutral' tone).

What are tones? Well, consider a word like "ma". Seem simple. But if you say it with a high, flat inflection, it means "mother". Say it with an inflection that goes down and then up, and it means "horse". Or even more difficult, the words for "buy" and "sell" in Mandarin are both pronounced "mai"...the only difference is in the inflection of the word.

So if one is voting for "Chinese", you'd need to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese, of which Cantonese is far more difficult (in my opinion).

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

C ;)

[roger]

I don't know, I didn't find writing Japanese so difficult. The Hiragana is phonetic based, and is used for particles, verb endings, and the like. But, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "two different writing systems". You have the fact that chinese characters are used together to form words, more or less using the Chinese derivation of the symbols. Then, the same symbols have Japanese meanings and derivations, with different syllables attached. Then, you have two phonetic alphabets - hiragana, as described above, and katakana, for foreign words. You can, of course, write everything in hiragana - any Japanese reader would understand it, and I've seen this done on some bulletin boards where, I presume, the kanji (Chinese characters) weren't supported. I think the hard part is dealing with the fact that a character can be used in either its Chinese or Japanese context. But after awhile, you get used to it. It's not a hard and fast rule, but you'll find a lot of nouns using the Chinese 2 character combinations, whereas verbs will be using the Japanese symbol for the root, followed by hiragana for the verb ending. I found myself being able to read and understand things I had no idea how to pronounce, because a Kanji character can have up to a dozen or more pronounciations, depending on context. But it's been awhile, and I can't read it at all anymore.

[kitakaze]

Interesting thread with some interesting comments.

日本語をよく喋るのようになる事はあんまり難しくないと思いますけど確かに書くの場合はかなり 難しい。

I often try to impart on other native English speakers that learning Japanese is not as hard as they might perceive though intimidation by the writing is more than fair. Japanese have no problem perpetuating the idea that the language is difficult BTW.

Oh yeah, Engrish spering is on clack.

[Wolfman]

I don't know, I didn't find writing Japanese so difficult. The Hiragana is phonetic based, and is used for particles, verb endings, and the like. But, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "two different writing systems". You have the fact that chinese characters are used together to form words, more or less using the Chinese derivation of the symbols. Then, the same symbols have Japanese meanings and derivations, with different syllables attached. Then, you have two phonetic alphabets - hiragana, as described above, and katakana, for foreign words. You can, of course, write everything in hiragana - any Japanese reader would understand it, and I've seen this done on some bulletin boards where, I presume, the kanji (Chinese characters) weren't supported. I think the hard part is dealing with the fact that a character can be used in either its Chinese or Japanese context. But after awhile, you get used to it. It's not a hard and fast rule, but you'll find a lot of nouns using the Chinese 2 character combinations, whereas verbs will be using the Japanese symbol for the root, followed by hiragana for the verb ending. I found myself being able to read and understand things I had no idea how to pronounce, because a Kanji character can have up to a dozen or more pronounciations, depending on context. But it's been awhile, and I can't read it at all anymore.
I have never learned Japanese, so am basing my judgment on anecdotal statements from others. Among those westerners who have learned both Chinese and Japanese, I've found that they've generally found oral Chinese more difficult that oral Japanese, but have found learning read/write Japanese more difficult than learning to read/write Chinese.

In my own experience, Mandarin Chinese was very difficult to learn; mastering the tonal aspect of the language was a significant challenge, and I am still functionally illiterate in regards to reading/writing the language. What little Cantonese I've learned would indicate that Cantonese is even more difficult. And I'm currently embarking on a venture to learn the Mosuo language, the language of a Chinese minority group who live in the Himalayas (you can click on the link in my signature for more info); learning that language will be quite a challenge as there is currently no written form of the language at all, it is purely oral. And it is also tonal, although it is from an entirely different language family than Mandarin or Cantonese.

[T'ai Chi]

That said, if anyone can read Chinese, there's a big bottle of limoncello for you if you can translate!

I can try.

[tkingdoll]

Jive.

[Harpoon]

A few Russian sounds are unfamiliar to native English speakers.

The cases are different; every native noun takes different forms in each case, and further suffix changes in the plural.

Verbs, escpecially verbs of motion, also cause Americans fits.

But getting past all that, many Russians I've met don't actually form sentences when they speak. They string idioms together -- many totally unfathomable.

Learning Russian may be easier than learning some oriental languages, but becoming proficient in the idioms is worse than in English, or so I'm told.

I understand Navajo is based or verbs of being and requires an entire abandonment of Western philosophical thinking to learn.

[danielk]

C ;)

Nah, C is one of the few languages of which I can claim to have memorized the full vocabulary and most of the grammar rules. I daresay it's way easier to be fluent in C than even in your native language. :D

[Lord Muck oGentry]

[Myles na gCopaleen mode ON]

Your Attic Greek is no easy matter, as many a man has found to his cost.

But that English is desperate stuff.

[/Myles na gCopaleen mode OFF]

[galnoir]

Navajo is difficult.

Finnish? If I remember correctly, it is not related to Indo-European languages.

[this charming man]

Elvish

[Miss Anthrope]

I can try.

Really? And it won't say "interesting"? (I am funning you in the nicest way, I sincerely promise.) I'll post some pictures tomorrow then! (New thread)

[Miss Anthrope]

Really? And it won't say "interesting"? (I am funning you in the nicest way, I sincerely promise.) I'll post some pictures tomorrow then! (New thread)

And I will deliver on my fine homecrafted limoncello!

[Miss Anthrope]

C ;)

Nahh. If I can do basic C, trust me, ANYONE can.

[Harpoon]

Navajo is difficult.
Finnish? If I remember correctly, it is not related to Indo-European languages.

I lived in an area of the US settled by the Basques. Their language is Euskara. One told me that Euskara, Finnish and ancient Sanskrit have many things in common, and it's possible they are the closest surving offshoots of the original language spoken across Europe and Eurasia before the Indo-European languages developed/arrived.

No evidence, of course. But some interesting conjecture, certainly.

[JoeTheJuggler]

I think the age of the brain doing the learning matters a lot. At this point, I think mine's too atrophied to learn another language well.

[Little 10 Toes]

Quick question for those who are studying or have knowledge of the tonal (tonel?) languages. Because of the change in the tone, how can one sing a song? In English, I can sing a song with tones going up and down, but would the words in the tonal song be different. And yes, I know that songs exist, but I'm curious about how the lyrics are done in a song.

[Wolfman]

Quick question for those who are studying or have knowledge of the tonal (tonel?) languages. Because of the change in the tone, how can one sing a song? In English, I can sing a song with tones going up and down, but would the words in the tonal song be different. And yes, I know that songs exist, but I'm curious about how the lyrics are done in a song.
Actually, when singing, the tones are not used; this is not generally very confusing, as people can understand the words easily in context. It also allows for creative plays on words, as one word can have many different meanings, so puns, double-entendres, etc. are quite popular.

[rjh01]

If C is allowed in this thread then the ultimate in hard languages to understand is machine code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code).

[Davo]

I learn a bit of japanese previously. The words I learnt were understood by Japanese people when I spoke.

No chance with mandarin with all the 5 tones. Very difficult to get the vocal chords round the rising and falling tones to the letters. If you dont get the tone right the word can mean something completely different.

I guess it all depends on what age you learn the language. At a young age you would learn automatically to listen out for the tones and be able to make those sounds required

[Nancarrow]

C ;)

Nah. APL!

[danielk]

If C is allowed in this thread then the ultimate in hard languages to understand is machine code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code).

I don't think so, since the vocabuly is limited enough to allow memorizing. At least if you allow for hexadecimal notation. It does in no way beat the several thousand glyphs of CJK languages.

[danielk]

I'd go so far as saying that no artificial language is as complicated as any of the natural languages. What do you think?

[rjh01]

The problem with machine code is that it is very hard to use. Sure any bright person can learn it, but to actually use it to do anything useful requires a genius.

Since 99.99+% of people over the age of 3 years know some how to speak some language or other none of them could be so hard as machine code which can be used by only a handful of people in the world.

[Wolfman]

Since 99.99+% of people over the age of 3 years know some how to speak some language or other none of them could be so hard as machine code which can be used by only a handful of people in the world.
Sorry, but it is entirely illogical to conclude that the number of speakers of a language determines its difficulty; there are languages today that have less than ten people left that can speak those languages, but I could hardly write that because these languages are used by 'only a handful of people' (even less than those who can use machine code), that proved they were more difficult.

And it could easily be argued that the reason only a 'handful' of people can use machine code is simply that only a handful need to know it. I learned Chinese because I came to live in China; I needed to learn that language to communicate with people here. However, there has never been any need whatsoever for me to learn machine code. Even if machine code were incredibly easy to learn, I doubt that more than a "handful" of people would know it because there would be little need or purpose to do so.

I'm not saying that machine code is not more difficult; only that your arguments in this regard do not logically support such a statement.

[Damien Evans]

From what I've heard, Magyar (Hungarian)

[danielk]

The problem with machine code is that it is very hard to use. Sure any bright person can learn it, but to actually use it to do anything useful requires a genius.

No it doesn't require a genius. Machine code is essentially the same as mnemonic assembler, just written differently. Coding a larger project entirely in assembler requires a lot of work and high frustration tolerance. But it's mindless grunt work for the most part. It's boring, extremely inefficient and entirely pointless work, but certainly doable by anyone able to do the same thing in a more abstract language.

[Paulhoff]

English, I still have a hard time understanding Bush.

Paul

:) :) :)

[student23]

Ever seen "The Gods Must Be Crazy"? The Khoisan group as well as various other "click" languages of southern Africa seem quite challenging.

There does seem to be some lack of clarity about what is being discussed here: the spoken (tonal, etc.), or the written ("Japanese seems hard..."?) language.

[Soapy Sam]

It depends on the woman you are trying to impress.

[EvilSmurf]

Vulcan

[newlyfound]

I can talk about the easy ones I know of, german if you speak french and english, there is common ground between english and german as well as german and french vocabulary wise, as far as the pronounciation I would say that german is closer to french than it is to english, the only thing is german grammar is one of kind (I am currently studying german, I am not yet fluent). I studied spanish for a while, it's also another easy one for a french speaker. Also english is easy for a french speaker, and I would imagine it should work the other way around as well. Is it illegal to admit one speaks arabic around here (you know with some tending to think every arabic speaker must be a terrorist)? That one I would openly admit it is a difficult SOB, yes, as a native language, I never got used to the.... maybe I am arabically retarted or something. The one I am in love with is english and I have the hots for german too, french is tending to be part of the past.

[Modified]

No chance with mandarin with all the 5 tones. Very difficult to get the vocal chords round the rising and falling tones to the letters.

That you can learn. The problem I find is in remembering tones, as it seems my brain just isn't wired for it. I can learn and remember hundreds of words a day in any non-tonal language that uses mostly familiar sounds, but only a few dozen or so in a tonal language. It would take a long time to build up a useful vocabulary at that rate.

[Wolfman]

That you can learn. The problem I find is in remembering tones, as it seems my brain just isn't wired for it. I can learn and remember hundreds of words a day in any non-tonal language that uses mostly familiar sounds, but only a few dozen or so in a tonal language. It would take a long time to build up a useful vocabulary at that rate.
From my own experience, for those learning Chinese as adults, those who have stronger music backgrounds tend to do better at learning to speak Chinese. And those who are tone deaf musically also tend to be tone deaf when it comes to Chinese.

I have a Chinese friend here who is doing research on this; thus far, she's found that from a sample group of 32 westerners who classify themselves as 'tone deaf', over 80% have limited or no ability to differentiate between the different tones in Chinese language. But here's the interesting aspect -- among Chinese who are musically tone deaf, but who learned Chinese from birth, there is no difficulty at all in learning and differentiating between the different tones in the spoken language.

She still has to do a fair bit more research in this area, particularly comparing musically talented individuals with tone deaf individuals (which she has not done yet), to determine relative ability to learn Chinese. But I think it does raise some interesting points in studying how we acquire language as infants, compared to how we acquire language as adults.

[-Fran-]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

Apparently, according to a TV-program I once saw, of all the Scandinavian languages (except for Finnish who isn't related to the rest of them) Danish is the hardest to learn to speak. It seems Danish kids are the ones who are the latest to learn to speak their own language when they start to talk.

Swedes are notoriously bad at understanding spoken Danish, I think. When a Dane realizes you are Swedish they just sigh and starts to talk English :o while a Norwegian happily continues speaking Norwegian when encountering a Swede :p

Personally though I think that Icelandic and Färöiska is bit more difficult to understand than Danish, but that could be becuase you so seldom hear it.

[TriangleMan]

As an English speaker I find Arabic difficult as the writing uses different lettering and there are a few letters that have no English equivalent. That said I have heard that Mandarin is even more difficult due to all the different tones, as mentioned by Wolfman and other posters.

[-Fran-]

I lived in an area of the US settled by the Basques. Their language is Euskara. One told me that Euskara, Finnish and ancient Sanskrit have many things in common, and it's possible they are the closest surving offshoots of the original language spoken across Europe and Eurasia before the Indo-European languages developed/arrived.

No evidence, of course. But some interesting conjecture, certainly.

Finnish has more in common with Hungarian and Estonian, I think, they form a group of their own; Finnish-Ugrian languages.

ETA
Isn't ancient Sanskrit an Indo-European language? I might be wrong, it was such a long time ago I studied language history, I have forgotten half of it and mixes the rest of it up :)

ETA again!
I had to go check it up; Sanskrit IS an Indo-European language.

[andyandy]

From my own experience, for those learning Chinese as adults, those who have stronger music backgrounds tend to do better at learning to speak Chinese. And those who are tone deaf musically also tend to be tone deaf when it comes to Chinese.

I have a Chinese friend here who is doing research on this; thus far, she's found that from a sample group of 32 westerners who classify themselves as 'tone deaf', over 80% have limited or no ability to differentiate between the different tones in Chinese language. But here's the interesting aspect -- among Chinese who are musically tone deaf, but who learned Chinese from birth, there is no difficulty at all in learning and differentiating between the different tones in the spoken language.

She still has to do a fair bit more research in this area, particularly comparing musically talented individuals with tone deaf individuals (which she has not done yet), to determine relative ability to learn Chinese. But I think it does raise some interesting points in studying how we acquire language as infants, compared to how we acquire language as adults.


There's been a lot of interesting research on this with babies and their exposure to sounds - babies up to the age of 1~2 have the ability to distinguish between the whole gamult of human sounds upon exposure to human interaction (but not apparently technological interaction), but it seems that as neural pathways harden, this ability is lost and once lost can not be truly regained.

University of Washington neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl reported today that 9-month-old American infants who were exposed to Mandarin Chinese for less than five hours in a laboratory setting were able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language. It is the first experimental demonstration of phonetic learning from natural exposure to language under controlled
laboratory conditions, she said.

In a companion study headed by Kuhl, another group of American infants was exposed to the same Mandarin material using a professionally produced DVD or audiotape but showed no ability to distinguish phonetic units of that language.
"The findings indicate that infants can extract phonetic information from first-time foreign-language exposure in a relatively short period of time at 9 months of age, but only if the language is produced by a human, suggesting that social interaction is an important component of language learning," said Kuhl.


snip

sometime in the second six months of life infants begin to concentrate on learning the sounds of their native language and lose their ability to distinguish the sounds important to foreign languages. This same inability is why many adults have difficulty learning a foreign language and tend only to discriminate the sounds of their native language.

In the two studies, infants were tested to see if they could distinguish between two Mandarin sounds that do not occur in English. Americans often hear both sounds as “chee” or “she.” These sounds are difficult for adult Americans to distinguish between but present no problem for native Mandarin speakers.

In the first study, normally developing 9-month-olds were exposed to Mandarin during a dozen 25-minutes sessions spaced out over four weeks. During these sessions, native Mandarin speakers read from children's books and played with toys while speaking Mandarin. Four different speakers, two men and two women, conducted the sessions, so the babies were exposed to a variety of speaking styles. A control group of infants was exposed to the same procedure in English.

Both groups then were tested for their ability to distinguish between the two Mandarin sounds using a head-turn conditioning procedure that is frequently used in tests of infant speech perception. The infants exposed to Mandarin were significantly better at distinguishing the two target sounds than were infants who only heard English. In fact, the performance of the American infants exposed to Mandarin for the first time between 9 and 10 months was statistically equivalent to infants in Taiwan who had listened to Mandarin for 10 months, according to Kuhl. The results show that the decline in foreign-language speech perception can be reversed with short-term exposure, she said.

In addition, the phonetic learning of Mandarin appears to be long lasting. The American infants were tested from two to 12 days after their last exposure to Mandarin and the researchers found there were no significant differences in their ability to discriminate between the sounds.

snip

The second study explored the role of social interaction in learning a foreign language. The procedure was similar to the initial study except that half the infants were exposed to Mandarin by a DVD showing the same Mandarin speakers and materials on a 17-inch television. The other infants received their Mandarin exposure from an audio-only presentation of the DVD.
At the end of the Mandarin exposure all of the infants were tested using the same head-turn procedure. Results clearly showed that DVD or audiotape exposure did not lead to phonetic learning, Kuhl said. The infants in this experiment scored at the same level as the English-only babies in the first study who were not exposed to any Mandarin. The researchers also noted that the infants who watched the DVD or listened to the audiotape paid significantly less attention than the babies who were in the live Mandarin and English conditions.

"Video plus audio or audio-only presentation did not work for infants 9 and 10 months of age," Kuhl said. "That’s not how infants learn language. Our results show the importance of testing audio and video language learning products aimed at children and already on the market for their effectiveness."
She added, "Babies are very sophisticated language learners who use every clue provided to learn – the sounds they hear, their statistical distribution and even the social clues provided by speakers – to crack code. The babies were mesmerized by the sight and sound of the foreign language speakers. You could see their little brains absorbing the information.http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/2003archive/02-03archive/k021703.html

[andyandy]

and ability to distinguish music itself also seems ingrained from early years....

We all begin life with perfect pitch, suggests study of infants. Most English speakers lose the ability to identify a note by frequency alone because perfect pitch is not necessary for understanding English words.

"Our hypothesis is that the ability goes away for most of us because it's not really useful - unless you happen to be speaking a tonal language like Thai or Mandarin," says Jenny Saffran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Perfect pitch is necessary for understanding the subtle differences between similar sounding words in these languages, she says.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that very early musical training can aid in preserving the ability. Computer games that require a player to recognise perfect pitch might also help, Saffran says.

Train the brain
Saffran's team studied eight month old infants and a group of adults, some of whom were musicians. She found that all of the babies could tell the difference between segments of bell-like 'songs' that differed in absolute pitch, i.e. in key. However, most of the adults could not.

On average, the musicians had started learning to play an instrument at age eight. But the five people in Saffran's group with perfect pitch had started learning aged four.

This, and other anecdotal evidence, suggests that perfect pitch can be retained, if the brain is trained not to lose it, she says.

Beginning and end
While perfect pitch appears to be an inherent ability, learning language as a baby requires the acquisition of many new skills. One is the ability to distinguish individual words.

"One of the major challenges of learning a language is figuring out where one word begins and ends," says Martin Brent, a computer scientist at Washington University.

He has found that the words a baby hears uttered in isolation are the words it is most likely to learn by 15 months. "Short utterances lay bare the structure of language," he says.

Brent analysed more than 200 hours of conversations between eight mothers and their babies and found that the frequency with which a mother says a word in isolation is a direct predictor of whether the child will know that word later.

Natural language
However, he warns that as infants grow older, infants also need to hear more complex speech if they are to acquire language properly. "This doesn't mean parents should use purely monosyllabic speech to their babies."

In fact, his research suggests that most parents naturally use the ideal combination of isolated words and more complex sentences. "My advice to parents who want to help their child learn language is: don't worry about it. Without trying, you'll naturally speak in a way that we believe facilitates language learning."

Brent hopes his work could help in training software to recognise and produce speech.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn444

[-Fran-]

I taught myself written and spoken Greek in my teens and found it quite simple.

That's impressive! I'm half Greek, and I don't speak a word of it :o (I really should learn... :( )

[Wolfman]

Andyandy,

Thanks, those articles were quite interesting; but I'd like to comment here on one problem I have with the last article, the apparent conclusion that English speakers lose the ability to differentiate between notes because tonal ability is not a part of the language.

It would seem to me that, if such a correlation were valid, that would mean that we'd find a far greater proportion of musically tone-deaf individuals in an English-speaking society than in a Mandarin-speaking society. However, my own experience of music in China (14 years of hanging out in karaoke joints with my Chinese friends) would lead me to conclude that there are just as many tone-deaf Chinese as there are Canadians (the only difference being that Chinese seem to think lack of singing ability can be compensated for by increasing one's volume...the worse you sing, the louder you sing).

This is hardly quantifiable, verifiable evidence; but I'd tend towards the conclusion that tonality in speech and tonality in music may be linked, but should not be considered equivalent. Learning a tonal language does not seem, in my experience, to have any significant impact on rates of tone deafness.

[Miss Anthrope]

That's impressive! I'm half Greek, and I don't speak a word of it :o (I really should learn... :( )

Yeah, well, if you don't use it, you lose it!

The sum total of what I've retained is perfect pronunciation of good morning, good afternoon, and....you guessed it, good evening!

To be fair, I stopped using it after having a torrid affair with a rascal of a waiter I picked up at a Greek restaurant. Greek became something I wished to thoroughly forget ;)

[-Fran-]

Yeah, well, if you don't use it, you lose it!


True :) I never learned it though. My Dear father was (still is as far as I know) of the sort that lives 20 minutes by car away from his daughter, but still can't be bothered to find the time to visit her even once in... 36 years :rolleyes: So I grew up in a solely Swedish way. Didn't bother me as a kid, but today I think I might have missed out on a lot of things. So I still wish I had learnt it, for my own sake.


The sum total of what I've retained is perfect pronunciation of good morning, good afternoon, and....you guessed it, good evening!

You can get pretty far with that I think...


To be fair, I stopped using it after having a torrid affair with a rascal of a waiter I picked up at a Greek restaurant. Greek became something I wished to thoroughly forget ;)

... especially with Greek waiters :p Never trust those, that's my experience as well ;)

[Miss Anthrope]

True :) I never learned it though. My Dear father was (still is as far as I know) of the sort that lives 20 minutes by car away from his daughter, but still can't be bothered to find the time to visit her even once in... 36 years :rolleyes: So I grew up in a solely Swedish way. Didn't bother me as a kid, but today I think I might have missed out on a lot of things. So I still wish I had learnt it, for my own sake.

:(



... especially with Greek waiters :p Never trust those, that's my experience as well ;)

:wackyjiggy:

[Broes]

I only have experiences with the following languages:

- Dutch (native)
- English
- French
- German
- Spanish

Out of those 5, english is by far the easiest since it has simplest grammar rules with very few exceptions to those rules. Next are spanish and french.

I would say that german and dutch of these 4 are the most difficult since they have a TON of grammar rules with even more exceptions and special cases.

[aries]

The hardest language to learn is --- Danish. We have 9 wolwes that can spoken in 5-6 ways - each. We also have something called 'stød' which is a very a little pause before, slightly before the wowel(s) of the word. Very difficult for foreigners to learn.

However, for westernes I would think that Japanese or Chinese would be the hardest language to learn, simply because they are tonal languages. This mean they use tones to alter the meaning of word(s). And when you think you say: revered sir a slightly altered tone can get it to be you dirty rotten scoundrel.

Not very amusing I would think.

[student23]

Well, this is me again with the click languages.

Let me introduce myself a bit further. I have been schooled in French, Hebrew, Arabic (extensively), Vietnamese (...tonal <6>); have self-studied Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish. Frankly, the only language other than English that I speak with native fluency is Vietnamese.

The big problem with people learning a language, including a tonal language, in my experience, is the same as their problem in simply communicating: they don't (know how to) listen. 38 years ago, when I saw my chin-less staff sargent speaking beautiful Vietnamese, I knew then: it wasn't brains, and though I couldn't test him for perfect pitch, I'm more than willing to bet it wasn't that either. It was simply an act of will; he had a Vietnamese wife, had been there for 4 years, wanted it, apparently a lot.

Tonality is difficult. But-and this is just a guess, lookin' at it-no match for the profusion of different click phonemes involved in speaking Khoisan or it's relatives. I'm betting Martian (sic) would be easier.

[student23]

p.s. forgot (how to spell disappointed), and that I've been schooled in classical Greek, as well. Khoisan stands.

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Alot depends on your native language.

For English speakers, the easiest are usually the romantic languages, with Spanish being the easiest, followed by Italian.

Some of the more difficult of the western languages to learn for English speakers are Russian and Polish.

Then there are the eastern languages. The two most difficult, I think are the Chinese dialects and Japanese:

Chinese Dialects: These are tough due to pronunciation, and the use of the Chinese characters for writing. The pronunciation uses quite a few sounds that are never used in English and also uses pitch to distinguish between words that sound the same. The Chinese Dialects also use the characters. In other words, there is no alphabet. This makes things difficult even for native speakers. There is no alphabet, therefore no aplhabetical order, and it is awfully hard to build a typewriter. ;) Also, most (95%) of the characters cannot be sounded out or figured out in any other way. You have to have memorized them. Even native speakers come across characters they do not recognize. If they have no dictionary, they are stuck.

The easy part of Chinese is that there is such simple grammar. No gender, no plurals, and very little of what can be called conjugation of verbs.

Japanese: Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce. Every time you see a certain character, you make the exact same sound. No dipthongs, and no exceptions I can think of. The tough part is the grammar.

[alfaniner]

...Japanese: Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce. Every time you see a certain character, you make the exact same sound. No dipthongs, and no exceptions I can think of. The tough part is the grammar.

Well, it is a little difficult getting that L/R sound down...

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Well, it is a little difficult getting that L/R sound down...

I never thought it was too bad. Just try saying the word. If it sounds too much like an L, it is wrong. If it sounds too much like an R, it is wrong. To really get it right, it should sound like an R and an L at the same time, maybe with a little bit of D thrown in for good measure.

THis reminds me of a Simpsons episode where the family drove through the Chinatown section of the town of Springfield. I noticed one of the signs for one of the stores said "Toys 'L' Us".

[Wolfman]

There is no alphabet, therefore no aplhabetical order, and it is awfully hard to build a typewriter.
Would mostly agree, but this is not entirely true. There are many thousands of Chinese characters; but all of them are based on a total of 214 root characters, called radicals. Chinese dictionaries are organized according to the radicals, and then the number of strokes in a character.

So, for example, if you take all the Chinese characters that have the radical for "wood" in them, you can look for that radical in the dictionary, then if the specific character you are looking for has 10 strokes in it, you go to the section under that radical for 10-stroke characters. Granted, its not quite so efficient as an alphabetical dictionary, but just wanted to point out that the idea that there is no 'order' or 'organization' is not entirely true.

In addition, all Chinese words can also be written in Pinyin, which is the romanized version of Chinese; again, one can buy a dictionary that uses Pinyin, and then look up words alphabetically. Since Chinese has many homophones (a word like "ma" could have 30 or more words that are all spelled "ma", but use entirely different characters), you would look first using the alphabetic system, then according to the radical and the number of strokes (as explained above). Using this system, you can find a Chinese word/character almost as quickly as you can an English word (if you know what the radical of the character you're looking for is).

And I'm often asked what a Chinese keyboard looks like...does it have thousands of keys for all the different characters? Actually, the Chinese use qwerty keyboards exactly the same as those in the West; Chinese characters can be inputed in a number of different ways. The easiest (although a little slow) is to type in the Pinyin form of the character, then the computer will give a list of all the possible characters, and you choose the right one. There is another system that involves a specific code for each character (that is based again on the radical and the number of strokes) that allows for much faster typing, but requires significant memorization and practice before it can be used.

[Paulhoff]

No, the hartest is whatever a woman is saying. :rolleyes:

Paul

:) :) :)

[timhau]

When a Dane realizes you are Swedish they just sigh and starts to talk English :o while a Norwegian happily continues speaking Norwegian when encountering a Swede :p

So? They also keep talking gibberish Norwegian when they encounter a Finn.

[Elind]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.

Oh, as to the OP question: How about the whistling language of the Canary Islands, or the "Click" language of Africa (Congo?). Personally I have trouble with SMS.

[Pipirr]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.


Sure - although the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians I'm sure would argue their languages are different - at least different enough to be considered three separate languages, and not just accents.

I learned written Danish first, but found quite quickly that I could also understand written Swedish and Norwegian.

When I went to Sweden for the first time, I still hadn't learnt to speak or understand spoken Danish, but could understand (and speak, somewhat) spoken Swedish. It simply sounded like what was written on the page! Danish, for me at least, did not.

It still doesn't.... :(

[Modified]

For English speakers, the easiest are usually the romantic languages, with Spanish being the easiest, followed by Italian.

Spanish is easy to learn, then you go to a Spanish speaking country and don't understand half of what anyone says. When you go to Germany though, everyone sounds just like the guy on your "Learn to Speak German" dvd.

[Elind]

Sure - although the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians I'm sure would argue their languages are different - at least different enough to be considered three separate languages, and not just accents.

I learned written Danish first, but found quite quickly that I could also understand written Swedish and Norwegian.

When I went to Sweden for the first time, I still hadn't learnt to speak or understand spoken Danish, but could understand (and speak, somewhat) spoken Swedish. It simply sounded like what was written on the page! Danish, for me at least, did not.

It still doesn't.... :(

Yes, the differences are more than accent, even though there is more in common than not, but it makes me wonder what is the definition of a language? When does it become more than a dialect?

[-Fran-]

So? They also keep talking gibberish Norwegian when they encounter a Finn.


Really? They do? :D

[-Fran-]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan). Have you ever watched a New Yorker from Manhattan trying to understand spoken directions in the Georgia countryside?

I think your issue is with accents, not language.



I think this, in it's turn, is a rather weird statement too. Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are closely related, yes, but not so much that to call them accents and not separate languages would be a true statement.

[VanillaCone]

According to studies the U.S. military uses to rank the difficulty of languages, Arabic and Mandarin are tied for second-most-difficult.

The sole language standing at the No. 1 spot is English. The reason is that in English there are so many exceptions to rules and different ways of pronouncing letters (and combinations of letters) that it's very difficult for the non-native speaker to learn them all. For nearly every so-called rule, there are one or more exceptions, which can be very confusing.

I speak Arabic and Japanese, and in both languages every phonetic is pronounced the same way every time, although that only applies to consonants and long vowels in Arabic. The short vowels are dictated by grammar, word order, case (nominative, accusative, etc.) and to some extent rote memorization. But there are no exceptions -- the rules are the rules.

The same goes for Japanese. In fact, Japanese grammar is extremely simple and easy for English speakers to learn. For instance, there is no verb conjugation, which is one of the most difficult things to learn in some languages. Also, there is no differentiation between singular and plural. The existence of three alphabets is really no big deal -- once you learn the two phonetic alphabets, it's really just a matter of learning all the kanji (Chinese) characters. Although there are thousands, one only needs to learn the most common 1,800 kanji characters to read a daily newspaper. The rest are fairly specialized and technical in nature.

[lula]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

I think once you get the pronounciation down with Danish then it's not too hard. That can take a while though.

I've always imagined learning a language in any other script would be very hard. However, that is based purely on speculation.

[lula]

That's a weird statement. They are essentially the same language (along with Norweigan).

No, not really. Norwegian and Danish are very similar, Swedish however is quite different. If you can read Danish or Norwegian understanding written Swedish should not be too much of a stretch. Spoken Swedish however sounds very different to spoken Danish or Norwegian - which are very Germanic sounding, while Swedish sounds almost Russian (..but maybe that's just me?). Norwegians and Danes can converse together to a degree in their own respective languages, but not Danes and Swedes or Norwegians and Swedes.



Oh, as to the OP question: How about the whistling language of the Canary Islands, or the "Click" language of Africa (Congo?). Personally I have trouble with SMS.

The "click" language you refer to is Xhosa (and I think Zulu as well) and is spoken predominantly in South Africa.

[timhau]

Really? They do? :D

Yeah. It's the only Scandinavian country where "Sorry, I don't speak Norwegian" (from a Nordic-looking blond guy, at least) results not in a switch to English but a switch to a s-l-o-w and LOUD version of the local language. The contrast to Denmark, where even bums asking for change know English, is striking.

And no, the six years of Swedish I had at school doesn't mean I understand spoken Norwegian. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the kind of Swedish you speak on the other side of the bay.

[Vitalstatistix]

I think the age of the brain doing the learning matters a lot. At this point, I think mine's too atrophied to learn another language well.

I agree with this guy. I didn't vote yet since you might as well say that they're all equally easy to learn.
Some of you mentioned the native language-issue already. I believe this is true, but only to a certain degree. Much more depends on the age at which you start learning a new language. Stange as it may seem, if you are the child of an English father and a Chinese mother and if they both raise you in their mother tongue, the child will pick up both languages (though I'm not mentioning the 'in what language do bilingual children think'-topic).
Learning a language (or learning anything) means that new neural connections are made. We are all born with flexible brains, but as we grow older it seems that there is a decrease in flexibility. Scholars are still debating the reason for this, but this doesn't change the fact that the best age to learn a(ny) language is a young age.
Other than that, there are of course a lot of different factors playing a role, such as the degree of exposure to a certain language, the kind of exposure (real life situations v. class room siuations) etc.

Anyways, interesting topic :)

[HarryKeogh]

Apparently, Icelandic is quite difficult. This English savant (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=830166&page=1)learned it in a week, though.

[blobru]

I know it's a dead language, but Latin -- brutal!

Most unfamiliar to modern English-speakers are the extra noun cases: nominative (I), accusative (me), and genitive (my) we have; but not dative (to me), ablative (by me) and vocative ("I!").

However, it's also very powerful, compressing a lot into a little. E.g.: where in English one might say: "That is the very reason he might have done so." (10 words, there're shorter approximations of that thought but not much) In Latin:

ipso facerit * has the same meaning -- literally:

by [because of] this very (thing) | he might have acted (thus)

*It's been awhile so I can't guarantee that spelling, but the point remains: inflected (grammar) --> compact (expression).

Still, brutal to get the hang of; hours sometimes to translate one sentence; and to speak it!? :faint:
When people ask about the collapse of the Roman Empire, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't due to sheer exhaustion from speaking Latin.

[Soseki]

Still, brutal to get the hang of; hours sometimes to translate one sentence; and to speak it!? :faint:
When people ask about the collapse of the Roman Empire, I sometimes wonder if it wasn't due to sheer exhaustion from speaking Latin.

Well, either that or too many orgies. :D

I was under the impression that it's generally accepted that almost nobody actually spoke Classical Latin as it was written and as it survives today, probably for the reasons you describe. Rather, it was a sort of lingua franca (heh, there's your Latin) for the educated classes, especially as dialects in spoken language were likely to differ from one end of the Empire to the other.

More or less the same is true of classical Chinese in Japan; literati for the best part of a millenium wrote government documents, stories and poetry in Chinese while being completely unable to speak the language in any form recognizable to anyone in China.

Anyway, re: Japanese and its relative difficulty...true, the writing system is probably one of the most ridiculous ever devised. But then, as the above examples show, you have to differentiate the language itself from the writing system used to denote it, because they're not the same thing. OK, this is splitting hairs somewhat and purely academic from the point of view of someone learning Japanese today, I admit. But I reckon you can (and, to their eternal discredit, some long term expats do) speak about 70% fluent Japanese without being able to read it at all.

Long story short, while there are certain extralinguistic factors that can complicate things (like honorific or humilific language), I don't think the Japanese language itself is that much harder than a lot of European languages (it's not tonal, it has two tenses, no verb conjugation or noun declensions, no plurals, no gender, adjectives don't have to agree in number and gender, etc). But then of course, there's those damned kanji...

[Cainkane1]

I've heard that Icelandic was the hardest. A languistic autistic genius was challenged to learn the language in two weeks and he only barely succeeded.

[Uncle Feedle]

I've tinkered around with Japanese on and off, and I found it to be a very flexible language. The subject-object-verb sentence structure is quite different from European languages, but it seemed to me you could swap words round quite a bit and still have it make sense. Pronounciation isn't that difficult either. The writing system is another matter, however.

[blobru]

Well, either that or too many orgies. :D
I was under the impression that it's generally accepted that almost nobody actually spoke Classical Latin as it was written and as it survives today, probably for the reasons you describe. Rather, it was a sort of lingua franca (heh, there's your Latin) for the educated classes, especially as dialects in spoken language were likely to differ from one end of the Empire to the other.
...

Yeah, I think pretty much all the uneducated plebes would have spoken "Vulgar Latin" (always makes me smile, sounds like a language of nothing but swear words: "Hey Dickus, bite-us me!"); Classical Latin in discourse being reserved for the patrician ruling class. Yet, how Cicero and Caesar ever said even two words to each other I have no idea.
When I was studying Latin at university, I came home for Xmas once and went to visit a friend whose parents spoke Italian. By this time I had 3 semesters of written Latin under my belt. To everyone's amazement, especially mine, I was now able to understand most of what the parents were saying, and could carry on a slow simple present tense conversation (they had to fill in a lot of words of course, the Romans didn't have toasters, etc). So I guess Classical Latin devolved into Vulgar Latin which led directly to Italian -- in a sense, Italian is 'modern' Latin.

[Senex]

Jive.

Jive isn't that hard. I'm a pretty good jive translater. Let me pick on a post from Fran, someone whom I've previously tranlated into Swedish. This is from this very thread

Fran:Apparently, according to a TV-program I once saw, of all the Scandinavian languages (except for Finnish who isn't related to the rest of them) Danish is the hardest to learn to speak. It seems Danish kids are the ones who are the latest to learn to speak their own language when they start to talk.

Swedes are notoriously bad at understanding spoken Danish, I think. When a Dane realizes you are Swedish they just sigh and starts to talk English while a Norwegian happily continues speaking Norwegian when encountering a Swede

Personally though I think that Icelandic and Färöiska is bit more difficult to understand than Danish, but that could be becuase you so seldom hear it.

Now in jive...

Apparently, acco'din' t'a TV-honky code ah' once saw, uh all de Scandinavian languages (except fo' Finnish who ain't related t'de rest uh dem) Danish be de hardest t'learn t'rap. It seems Danish kids is de ones who is de latest t'learn t'rap deir own language when dey start t'talk. Ya' know?

Swedes is noto'iously baaaad at dig itin' rapped Danish, ah' dink. Ya' know? When some Dane realizes ya' is Swedish dey plum sigh and starts t'talk English while some No'wegian happily continues rappin' No'wegian when encounterin' some Swede

Sucka'ally dough ah' dink dat Icelandic and Färöiska be bit mo'e difficult t'dig it dan Danish, but dat could be becuase ya' so's seldom hear it. Man!

[Harpoon]

Senex, were you ever a passenger on an airplane where everyone who ate the fish got sick?

I see some other drook voted for Russian. Two of us. We're on a roll.

Russian has five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, prepositional and the dreaded genative case.

I say dreaded because the genative case, especially in the plural, doesn't seem to have rules at all. Nouns and adjectives adopt different suffix ending depending on the case, gender and number. The changes are predictable, except in the plural genative -- makes Anglo students bonkers.

As for the truism in an earlier post: use it or loose it: I attended the Defense Language Institute 1963-65. It was a 12-month intensive course.

I was conversant upon graduation, and could read and understand Pravda. On a bet, I read "Vyna ee Meer" ("War and Peace") in Russian. But I last spoke it in 1970. Little remains.

Even back then I got little use out of it other than the hush-hush stuff we did for the NSA in Europe and Turkey. But a few weeks after I moved to Braunschweig, I met a young Polish woman who had lived in Germany since she was 17.

Her English sucked, as did my German. But I asked her if she spoke Russian, knowing it was a requirement in Eastern Bloc countries.

She did. We had a lovely thing going until the suits told me I had to break it off or the security of the Free World was in jeopardy.

Nonetheless, I was thrilled to communicate with someone in a language that was native to neither of us. I know millions of people do that daily using English, but it was a big deal to me back then.

And speaking of English, I'm sure many of the UK posters on JREF think English is the hardest language for Americans to learn.

[Elind]

Apparently, Icelandic is quite difficult. This English savant (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=830166&page=1)learned it in a week, though.

Yes, I saw that a while ago. Interesting in that it seems to prove the premise that language is wired as much as learned, even though it takes a savant to prove it. I don't think this man was a "genius" in the Einstein sense, his brain was wired to accept language.

[Ryokan]

Sure - although the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians I'm sure would argue their languages are different - at least different enough to be considered three separate languages, and not just accents.

Naw, they're the same language, really. The only reason they're considered different languages is political.

Scandinavia has an enormous amount of dialects, and I find I understand someone from Stockholm much easier than a Norwegian with a dialect from some parts of southern and southwestern Norway.

[Elind]

Jive isn't that hard. I'm a pretty good jive translater. Let me pick on a post from Fran, someone whom I've previously tranlated into Swedish. This is from this very thread

Fran:

Now in jive...

Apparently, acco'din' t'a TV-honky code ah' once saw, uh all de Scandinavian languages (except fo' Finnish who ain't related t'de rest uh dem) Danish be de hardest t'learn t'rap. It seems Danish kids is de ones who is de latest t'learn t'rap deir own language when dey start t'talk. Ya' know?

Swedes is noto'iously baaaad at dig itin' rapped Danish, ah' dink. Ya' know? When some Dane realizes ya' is Swedish dey plum sigh and starts t'talk English while some No'wegian happily continues rappin' No'wegian when encounterin' some Swede

Sucka'ally dough ah' dink dat Icelandic and Färöiska be bit mo'e difficult t'dig it dan Danish, but dat could be becuase ya' so's seldom hear it. Man!

That's cool. Funny thing is it almost sounds Swedish. In case I haven't mentioned, I was born there and speak it. Danes politely slow down a bit and then I can understand them. Norwegians...well, it wasn't too long ago we let them loose.. nuff said.(joking, :o, but true).

Language is funny though. I learned French at an earlier age, and still speak it with an accent that surprises (pleasantly) Parisians. I also used to speak pretty fluent Spanish, but that was learned at a later age and I can't do too much with it anymore. Even used to be passable at German, which at least has a lot of common vocabulary with Swedish/Norwegian/ (arrgh) Danish, but that too has passed.

Oh, and then there were those seven years of Latin, but I try hard to forget that.

I think that other than some obvious talents for language in individuals, certainly youth helps.

On the other hand I also think that nobody has an excuse for not learning the language of the country they live in. I'm old (ish) but I'm sure I could move to anywhere in the world and learn to function at a reasonable level in any language at a speech level and I don't think I have any special talents.

That's what pisses me off when I run into people here (US) who can't speak English. Laziness and people who coddle them, because same coddlers think it's a major life hurdle to learn a language just because they've been too lazy to try.

[lula]

Language is funny though. I learned French at an earlier age, and still speak it with an accent that surprises (pleasantly) Parisians. I also used to speak pretty fluent Spanish, but that was learned at a later age and I can't do too much with it anymore.

Honey, that's textbook psychology. Once you get past about age 12, learning languages becomes infinitely more difficult. There is a term for this but it escapes me now. I went to France when I was eleven and picked up the language easily when I was there. I went to New Caledonia a couple of years later and it just didn't come. Funny....



That's what pisses me off when I run into people here (US) who can't speak English. Laziness and people who coddle them, because same coddlers think it's a major life hurdle to learn a language just because they've been too lazy to try.

I abhor this attitude. Have you ever moved overseas, to a country where you don't speak the language? It's HARD. It takes time. If that makes me a coddler, well, whatever. I'd rather be a coddler than a bigot. Maybe the people you run into who have trouble with English have only just moved to The States. As we've already established, English is an incredibly difficult language to learn. To dismiss people to have initial troubles with it as 'lazy' is simply not fair. Maybe you could get of your high horse and make a greater effort to learn the languages of minority groups in your country - or maybe it's you that's too 'lazy'? Or maybe you could step back and realise how lucky you are to have English as a first language? Not everyone has that luxury. [/rant]

[timhau]

Yes, I saw that a while ago. Interesting in that it seems to prove the premise that language is wired as much as learned, even though it takes a savant to prove it. I don't think this man was a "genius" in the Einstein sense, his brain was wired to accept language.

I'm not at all sure special cases like that guy have anything to do with how normal people learn things, just like autistic math savants don't necessarily tell us anything of the way normal people do or learn math.

[Vitalstatistix]

Honey, that's textbook psychology. Once you get past about age 12, learning languages becomes infinitely more difficult. There is a term for this but it escapes me now


I guess you're referring to the so-called 'critical age'. As you indicate, it used to be a general accepted idea among psychologists and psycholinguists that this was around your twelfth. Used to be, because since research suggested that this critical point is individually variable they've changed the term into 'critical period'. As many probably have experienced themselves, it is still possible to learn a new language in your late teens, twenties and even older. Yes, it's likely to take some more time. But then again, the more languages you speak, the easier it beomes to learn a new one.

[Elind]

Honey, that's textbook psychology. Once you get past about age 12, learning languages becomes infinitely more difficult. There is a term for this but it escapes me now. I went to France when I was eleven and picked up the language easily when I was there. I went to New Caledonia a couple of years later and it just didn't come. Funny....

Sweety, you read too many theoretical books. I learned French in my late teens and Spanish in my 30's and I could speak the latter too, although I have lost the fluency, presumably because it was learned later than French.



I abhor this attitude. Have you ever moved overseas, to a country where you don't speak the language? It's HARD. It takes time. If that makes me a coddler, well, whatever. I'd rather be a coddler than a bigot. Maybe the people you run into who have trouble with English have only just moved to The States. As we've already established, English is an incredibly difficult language to learn. To dismiss people to have initial troubles with it as 'lazy' is simply not fair. Maybe you could get of your high horse and make a greater effort to learn the languages of minority groups in your country - or maybe it's you that's too 'lazy'? Or maybe you could step back and realise how lucky you are to have English as a first language? Not everyone has that luxury. [/rant]Actually English is my second language. French third, Spanish 4th and German would be 5, but I don't do very well with the latter anymore. I have no special linguistic skills believe me. It's a matter of whether one has to learn or not. Immersion works like a charm. I started to learn Arabic once too, but since the educated Arabs already spoke English the only places where one might need it was bargaining in the shops, and that took only a few dozen words and numbers to do.

Perhaps lazy isn't the best word, but it comes close. When we coddle immigrants (I'm one) with schooling in their language, annoying telephone systems that say "press 1 for English, 2 for..", government forms and translators at our expense and so on, then why should anyone bother to make the effort?

I'm not on a high horse, but I think you are with your apologies for why one shouldn't get down and dirty with a language. As to English being difficult, that's only true if you want to play at a certain level. There are plenty of native born English speakers with a vocabulary that's 10% of yours or mine, and we won't talk about grammar. They are perfectly understandable, to the limited extent they express themselves.

Rap music ring a bell with you?

[Giraffe107]

"press 1 for English, 2 for.."
In Switzerland they have this option- one for German, two for French, three for Italian and four for English. While I do speak German well, I appreciated the option of being able to speak in the language I know best. I regard it as courtesy to be able to explain yourself in the most coherent way.

And as for what language bilingual children think in, when I was little (and much better at German) I thought in English and German- depending on who I was talking to. That way, I could say something without having to 'translate' it first. My mother, who lived in Germany for 38 years, now thinks in English.

[Elind]

You don't mean real German do you? It's not quite that is it? Scweitzerdeutz, or however you spell it. Now why would they have English as well? That sounds condescending to me.

Anyway, Switzerland has an entirely different history and it's amazing it has stayed together all this time given the cultural differences and languages. Something to be learned there I'm sure. Geneva/Lausanne is where I learned my French.

The US has no such geographical distinctions. The language is English. I have no respect for those unwilling to accept that.

[-Fran-]

No, not really. Norwegian and Danish are very similar, Swedish however is quite different. If you can read Danish or Norwegian understanding written Swedish should not be too much of a stretch. Spoken Swedish however sounds very different to spoken Danish or Norwegian - which are very Germanic sounding, while Swedish sounds almost Russian (..but maybe that's just me?). Norwegians and Danes can converse together to a degree in their own respective languages, but not Danes and Swedes or Norwegians and Swedes.

I think it's linguistically true that Danish and Norwegian are a little bit more closely related to each other than any of them to Swedish, but I think most Swedes really think it's much easier to understand spoken Norwegian than spoken Danish. Though Norwegian has two rather distinct versions, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and one of those can be trickier to get then the other, though at the moment I can't remember which is which :)

We Swedes sound Russian :confused: I've never heard that before :)

[-Fran-]

Yeah. It's the only Scandinavian country where "Sorry, I don't speak Norwegian" (from a Nordic-looking blond guy, at least) results not in a switch to English but a switch to a s-l-o-w and LOUD version of the local language. The contrast to Denmark, where even bums asking for change know English, is striking.

That's so funny, uh... in a rude kind of way :) I've never thought about if they do this.


And no, the six years of Swedish I had at school doesn't mean I understand spoken Norwegian. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the kind of Swedish you speak on the other side of the bay.

Yes, I can imagine. There's a difference between the Swedish taught in Finnish schools, and Finlandssvenska? I am not quite clear on this?

[-Fran-]

Jive isn't that hard. I'm a pretty good jive translater. Let me pick on a post from Fran, someone whom I've previously tranlated into Swedish. This is from this very thread

Fran:

Now in jive...

Apparently, acco'din' t'a TV-honky code ah' once saw, uh all de Scandinavian languages (except fo' Finnish who ain't related t'de rest uh dem) Danish be de hardest t'learn t'rap. It seems Danish kids is de ones who is de latest t'learn t'rap deir own language when dey start t'talk. Ya' know?

Swedes is noto'iously baaaad at dig itin' rapped Danish, ah' dink. Ya' know? When some Dane realizes ya' is Swedish dey plum sigh and starts t'talk English while some No'wegian happily continues rappin' No'wegian when encounterin' some Swede

Sucka'ally dough ah' dink dat Icelandic and Färöiska be bit mo'e difficult t'dig it dan Danish, but dat could be becuase ya' so's seldom hear it. Man!

*LOL* :D Hey, why do you keep picking on me? :D

[lula]

We Swedes sound Russian :confused: I've never heard that before :)


Okay it really must just be me..:blush:

[lula]

Actually English is my second language. French third, Spanish 4th and German would be 5, but I don't do very well with the latter anymore. I have no special linguistic skills believe me. It's a matter of whether one has to learn or not. Immersion works like a charm. I started to learn Arabic once too, but since the educated Arabs already spoke English the only places where one might need it was bargaining in the shops, and that took only a few dozen words and numbers to do.

Tell me about it. Is there any other way? :p

I do see your point on this, it just upsets me when people dump on those with English problems...probably because it's often so closely linked to racism, in my experience at least. i.e. "Those stupid Asians who can't speak English should go home".

I have met people who try so, so hard to learn languages and just can't do it. Some people just don't have the aptitude for it, for whatever reason. What a lot of people don't realise is that it's a lot harder for them to be so isolated in their community than it is for us to have to repeat things a few times in the McDonalds line.

[timhau]

Yes, I can imagine. There's a difference between the Swedish taught in Finnish schools, and Finlandssvenska? I am not quite clear on this?

At least 20 years ago when I was in school, what we learned was (mostly) Finlandssvenska. The taped language material we listened to was mostly Finlandssvenska, with some standard, newsreader-type 'Rikssvenska' (do you guys even use that term?) thrown in occasionally. The result is that while I'll gladly speak Swedish in Åland and our coastal, Swedish-speaking areas (some parts of Ostrobottnia excepted), I'm really tempted to switch to English even in Stockholm. However, even though when watching Tina Nordström on TV I depend almost entirely on subtitles, I have no problem reading Dagens Nyheter or Svenska Dagbladet. In other words, my Swedish is a mess (but for a mess, it's pretty advanced even if I say so myself :) ).

[Professor Yaffle]

What do they speak on Planet X?

[timhau]

What do they speak on Planet X?

Various dialects of Xsh.

[Corpse Cruncher]

I would think Chinese was the a hardest. One tone wrong and you could be - bashed about.

I feel my weak point and would struggle with the written side of language. If a language is spoken and written as it sounds I may well be able to speak it. I would love to learn another language or more but I feel I may find it too stressful in my frustration.

[timhau]

I feel my weak point and would struggle with the written side of language. If a language is spoken and written as it sounds I may well be able to speak it.

Finnish would be your kind of language then.

Of course, some people say it's hard, with the 15 cases and all; I suspect it's just a sign that you damn furriners ain't none too bright.

[Langis]

I think it's difficult to learn any language.

Though latin languages are similar enough that learning one gives you a big advantage when learning another.

[Elind]

Tell me about it. Is there any other way? :p

I do see your point on this, it just upsets me when people dump on those with English problems...probably because it's often so closely linked to racism, in my experience at least. i.e. "Those stupid Asians who can't speak English should go home".

I have met people who try so, so hard to learn languages and just can't do it. Some people just don't have the aptitude for it, for whatever reason. What a lot of people don't realise is that it's a lot harder for them to be so isolated in their community than it is for us to have to repeat things a few times in the McDonalds line.

As I said our system takes some blame for this because we pander too much to the issue; and, respectfully, so do you.

However many people seem to think that to learn a language functionally one needs to understand grammar well and all the nuances, and how to write it, which demands much better skills than reading or speaking or listening.

That's not true and even old people can learn a new language to a functional level if given some help.

It's hard to say whether the social segregation leads to language deficiency or the other way around. Probably both are true, but we create the former by allowing young children, who can learn English in a matter of months if they have to, be taught in their native tongue.

[Vitalstatistix]

... but we create the former by allowing young children, who can learn English in a matter of months if they have to, be taught in their native tongue.

I totally agree (although i doubt that it will be possible in a few months). At a number of European universities, they're investigating the benefits of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This means that subject matter is being taught in a language other than the mother tongue. Some schools have been applying this for a few years now, with amazing results. Not only do the pupils pick up the foreign language much easier, neurologists are also investigating other protential benefits. fMRI scans have indicated that bi- or multilingualism influences brain organization in a way that still needs further exploring. But one thing's for sure though, there have not been any negative side effects yet. So the often heard argument that multilingualism messes up the child's brain cuts no ice...

[Harpoon]

American Sign Language, ASL, is a completely separate language from English. Speakers of British Sign Language and ASL cannot understand each other unless they resort to the written word.

There are dozens of other sign language systems in other cultures -- all legitimate languages on their own.

I wonder if any of these could give the most complicated spoken language a run for the OP title.

[Elind]

So the often heard argument that multilingualism messes up the child's brain cuts no ice...

I can't believe anyone with an education would say that. Must be people who failed a course in language somewhere.

Personally, I think any child under 10, maybe more, put into a school system with only one language, English in this case, will be fluent in 6 months or less, and will be better than a native who has always taken the language for granted.

[lula]

It's hard to say whether the social segregation leads to language deficiency or the other way around. Probably both are true, but we create the former by allowing young children, who can learn English in a matter of months if they have to, be taught in their native tongue.


Okay ... except for until they have a decent knowledge of English they should be denied an education? I hardly agree with that.

Perhaps their classes should be split 50/50 (language wise I mean), like they do in some South African schools.

[Vitalstatistix]

I can't believe anyone with an education would say that. Must be people who failed a course in language somewhere.

Personally, I think any child under 10, maybe more, put into a school system with only one language, English in this case, will be fluent in 6 months or less, and will be better than a native who has always taken the language for granted.

Well, it's often used in the CLIL case. Some people fear that the foreign language will interfere with the ability to understand subject matter. Which is not the case.
More than people who failed a language course, i'm afraid the argument is used in an emotional-political context. In multilingual societies where one language has been dominating another one in the past it's not always easy to keep the debate on a scientific level. Simply because the mere idea of raising your children in that other language seems to increase the fear that they will lose their mother tongue again. Whereas in reality, they will keep it, they are even likely to improve it and they will gain another language.

[BPScooter]

Hey all, just must chime in esp. as I just changed a crapped-out hard drive and it took me some time. I remember AndyAndy as being really interested in language so I followed the 3 pages thus far and it's really fun.

I think I will answer the poll "English" but that's only because I think I understand it and yet don't. I'm about a third of the way through the 1970's version of Mencken's "The American Language" and I'm way smarter now since I read it. I had no idea that literary people from England, at least up until WWII, had a really nasty and condescending attitude toward "Americanisms" in print or voice. Stuff I thought was plain good talk turns out to be not so good, but then you can find it in Chaucer or Shakespeare (sometimes not). Mark Twain wrote so many great words that everybody had to fold their cards and admit the slang, and even admire it.

So maybe it's not the phonology or grammar, that is OK, but the syntax and vocabulary that makes something hard to learn. As I go back, I just used the phrases: "chime in" "crapped out" "way smarter" "good talk" "fold cards"...as if I would even understand the Finnish! But I bet the sentiments are easily expressible. Maybe I could learn them. English supposedly has a vast vocabulary compared to other languages and a flexible way of coming up with new-wordisms (neologisms).

[blobru]

...
So maybe it's not the phonology or grammar, that is OK, but the syntax and vocabulary that makes something hard to learn. As I go back, I just used the phrases: "chime in" "crapped out" "way smarter" "good talk" "fold cards"...as if I would even understand the Finnish! But I bet the sentiments are easily expressible. Maybe I could learn them. English supposedly has a vast vocabulary compared to other languages and a flexible way of coming up with new-wordisms (neologisms).

I think you hit the nail on the head (whoops, English idiom), the target bullseye ('nother idiom), struck gold (damn!), are bang on (:mad:)... what I'm tryin' to say is -- ya done good, BP, real good, with that post of your'n.

English's vast vocabulary and flexibility (its strengths), and eccentric pronunciation and grammar (weaknesses, except for poets), come right of out of England's history.
The Gaelic then the Bretons settle the islands. The Bretons are conquered by the Romans. As soon as they leave, the Anglo-Saxons show up. They are in turn invaded by the Danes, and then conquered by the Normans. The English then tackle France, mix a bit, and then finally thank god show some spine and sink the Spanish. This seems to give 'em a right kick in the trousers and off they go to conquer the world -- Hong Kong, India, Thailand, a third of Africa, Egypt, Persia, Gibraltar, Ireland, North America, Australia, etal. And then as they leave they leave dialects behind. Even before the internet age, there was hardly a language anywhere English wasn't either derived from or influenced by.

So all that mixing explains the vocab, flex, odd spelling and syntax. And also why it's become the global language of choice: it's a mongrel, and purebreds these days I'm afraid just can't cut it (aaa -- another idiom!) ;)

[jhunter1163]

My wife speaks fluent Hungarian. She's tried to teach it to me but all I've picked up are a few words and phrases. However, I have to give them credit for some of the most creative curses known to man. Google "Hungarian swear words" to see how they express really complex things in a word or two.

ETA: Actually, do that at your peril.

[Corpse Cruncher]

Finnish would be your kind of language then.

Of course, some people say it's hard, with the 15 cases and all; I suspect it's just a sign that you damn furriners ain't none too bright.

Then I will attempt to learn to speak Finnish and probably kill a few of the inhabitants of that part of the world through my attempts. Does clapping restore them back to life?:D

[Gurdur]

Bantu languages (subsaharan Africa) are relatively easy to learn for English speakers as long as they are not too tonal (Bantu languages vary in tonality extant). Swahili, for example, strikes many English speakers as being beautifully logical. Not coincidentally, Swahili has no tones at all. In epic poetry from the 14th-17th centuries, Swahili sounds quite beautiful.

Zulu adopted a couple of phonemes from the KhoiSan (Bushmen etc.) languages, but the underlying grammatical structure is very Bantu.

One major underlying unrecognised premise on this thread is tonality -- English speakers very often can't or won't get their ears trained for tones, though basically most people can if they really try. Another one is cultural assumptions -- Navaho and Lakota (Sioux) are easier to learn if you're willing to train yourself to make differences in classes of things, rather than demanding everyone be like English speakers.

That goes, in a different direction, for Bantu languages as well -- students will often scream when they hear that Swahili has 22 different genders, but in fact the gender system of Swahili is amazingly easy to understand if explained well and if you're willing to listen. Grammatical gender of course has bugger all to do with sex gender --- even in German, with its theoretical masculine / feminine / neutral, you can detect a much more complex underlying system, which makes life difficult for those learning German as a second language, and in French grammatical gender is often at wild variance with apparent sex gender.

Even English has hidden genders -- for example, to refer to a child as "it" is very rude, but to refer to a dog as "it" is not rude; all ships are "she" except for oil tankers and dinghies, which are "it".

[Meadmaker]

I know a tiny bit of several languages. French is the only one in which I can actually sit down and read a book.

I thought that having a different alphabet would make things very, very hard. I had learned a bit of Russian, and didn't found it too difficult, but really after a bit you realize that the alphabets aren't as difficult as they look. Then, I tried Hebrew, with an extremely different alphabet, and found that it wasn't all that hard at all. I never really learned to read Hebrew, but I can transliterate fine.

The hardest of the languages I ever really tried to learn a little bit of was Irish. The problem is that, like English, it has irregular spelling. I never realized how weird our spelling was until I tried learning something that also was irregular.

[malbui]

The hardest of the languages I ever really tried to learn a little bit of was Irish. The problem is that, like English, it has irregular spelling. I never realized how weird our spelling was until I tried learning something that also was irregular.


Irish spelling is pretty regular now - one of the reasons for the massive language reform of the 1940s was to weed out the ludicrous strings of characters that used to pass for single sounds and replace them with something shorter and more consistent. As a result of that, my wife, who doesn't speak a word of the language but has an exceptional ear, can read aloud from one of our kid's books and be completely understandable.

[illogical]

assembler is important. i believe it's used in kernels, device drivers, and boot loaders. i've also seen it used, in moderation, in scientific computing.

it depends on the chipset. i have an old MP1312 which is easy to program. certainly Brainf*ck and Intercal are hard.

[illogical]

i believe the DOD ranked languages from 1 to 4. Russian was a 3, and Mandarin and Cantonese were 4. i personally found German much harder than Spanish. of course, i am referring to native speakers of English learning something new.

anything tonal, with thousands of kangi, or OSV/OVS structure should be hard for Americans.

[Elind]

Okay ... except for until they have a decent knowledge of English they should be denied an education? I hardly agree with that.

Perhaps their classes should be split 50/50 (language wise I mean), like they do in some South African schools.


But you aren't addressing, or listening to, what I say. Compromise on principle in this matter for PC principles is more damaging than anything else.

Who is denying an education and do you think that 3 or 6 months behind for elementary or middle school kids will be damaging to their lives? I am saying they will be able to catch that up in less time than it took them to learn the language. Hell give them one year, and will make zero difference by the time they get to college; but I'll bet you, because it was harder for a while for them, the majority will speak better English than the native speakers.

In any case, they would have initially what is called remedial special classes.

Ever watch those spelling bee shows on TV? have you noticed where most of the stars come from? Everywhere except the US.

I learned English when I was about 8, knowing nothing before, but I've found I know it better than 90+ percent of native speakers since; although I'm getting older and slipping a bit these days.

There is no point in coddling to native language in school. They will get plenty of that at home anyway, so nothing is lost.

[Elind]

I know a tiny bit of several languages. French is the only one in which I can actually sit down and read a book.

I thought that having a different alphabet would make things very, very hard. I had learned a bit of Russian, and didn't found it too difficult, but really after a bit you realize that the alphabets aren't as difficult as they look. Then, I tried Hebrew, with an extremely different alphabet, and found that it wasn't all that hard at all. I never really learned to read Hebrew, but I can transliterate fine.

The hardest of the languages I ever really tried to learn a little bit of was Irish. The problem is that, like English, it has irregular spelling. I never realized how weird our spelling was until I tried learning something that also was irregular.

You are way ahead of me, in the sense that all I've ever done is absorb; not study. Well, that is not entirely true, but the point is significant, and in my earlier comments I never mentioned the 5 or more years cruel cruel people made me go to classes in Latin. I suspect it had an unconscious benefit for understanding the roots of other languages, but I would fail any test on grammar in anything I can speak or read, but who cares?

[Ersby]

I found German difficult. Not the vocabulary, but the grammar. All those der, die, das, den, dems... Couldn't get my head round it. Japanese is comparatively easy.

I'm about to start teaching my Japanese teacher Italian. It should be interesting to see how she copes with a language where the verbs are conjugated all over the place! She knows English, so she should be okay. I hope so, anyway.

[Elind]

Well, it's often used in the CLIL case. Some people fear that the foreign language will interfere with the ability to understand subject matter. Which is not the case.
More than people who failed a language course, i'm afraid the argument is used in an emotional-political context. In multilingual societies where one language has been dominating another one in the past it's not always easy to keep the debate on a scientific level. Simply because the mere idea of raising your children in that other language seems to increase the fear that they will lose their mother tongue again. Whereas in reality, they will keep it, they are even likely to improve it and they will gain another language.

Used to be that when people emigrated, and immigrated, to another country for life, they actually wanted to join that society. One hears stories of the Scandinavians (prominently mentioned here) who forbade their family from speaking anything but English in the US. That was a commitment to a new life.

Too many people these days want it both ways, no commitment, and we, in the US, encourage that by pandering to that type of attitude.

If they don't want to risk losing the mother tongue (which most won't), then they should go back "home", since home is obviously not here.

There, I said it:eye-poppi

[BPScooter]

I just saw on pp. 25-26 of this month's Scientific American a brief report of some research that has correlated some genetic information with people's propensity for tonal languages. I probably got that wrong but they also mention Diana Deutch's research at UCLA which found a higher incidence of absolute pitch (ability to generate or identify pitch without reference) among speakers of tonal languages. I always interpreted that as a training effect, if you are required to discriminate tones in order to communicate fully, you get better at it. This hint at a genetic link is pretty interesting.

I've never tried to learn a tonal language, but it seems to me that to get good at speaking anything you need to be aware of pitch as well as rhythmic issues of cadence to get the accent. I got pretty good at speaking Spanish and my German and French teachers always complimented me on my pronunciation and I seemed fairly quick at picking it up through listen-and-imitate. I'm also a musician, and Suzuki made the language/music link in his Talent Education program for teaching violin and other instruments after WWII.

This relates a bit to a nature vs. nurture interpretation of things. There are great examples of these amazing linguists, or multi-language speakers I remember running across from time to time. I would be willing to think that "sensitivity to tone or rhythm" or "ability to manipulate the vocal apparatus to accurately produce tones without excessive repetition" are definite traits, that may occur in varying degrees in individuals, as well as across the lifespan.

I am out of my depth here, though--if I had a second choice, I think I would have gone into linguistics.

[Vitalstatistix]

Too many people these days want it both ways, no commitment, and we, in the US, encourage that by pandering to that type of attitude.

If they don't want to risk losing the mother tongue (which most won't), then they should go back "home", since home is obviously not here.

There, I said it:eye-poppi


See what i mean, you just took the debate to an emotional-political level :) . Which is your right, of course. But I'm not going there...

I also disagree when you say that the mother tongue shouldn't be included in the curriculum. Pupils seem to pick up the foreign language and to improve their mother tongue best when both languages are included, i.e. teach maths in english and spanish/danish/french whatever.

[rjh01]

The link to what BPScooter is talking about is here Speaking in Tones (http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=507DF9F8-3048-8A5E-10DDEAD30F469A19). It is in September 2007 edition of Scientific American. Page 25. To read it in full you need a subscription. However for free you get

Speaking in Tones; September 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Charles Q. Choi; 2 Page(s)
Just as humans are different genetically, so are they diverse linguistically, speaking at least 6,800 known tongues worldwide. New findings suggest genetics could explain some of the variety seen in language by, at times, leading to preferences for tones. The means by which this link works remains unclear, and some researchers dispute whether it exists.
For the most part, languages are either unambiguously tonal or not. In tone languages, such as Mandarin in China or Yoruba in West Africa, the pitch of a spoken word affects its meaning. For instance, in Mandarin, ma said in a high, level tone means "mother" but in a low, rising tone means "horse." In English, a word's pitch conveys emotion but often does not influence meaning. (Notable exceptions to this dichotomy include Japanese, where words can differ depending on the pitch of syllables--technically, moras--within them.)


Another relevant article is Genetic Basis for Language Tones? (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=D87BB853-E7F2-99DF-3CE5ED42E188F867&sc=I100322) You can read that for free. It seems to be an early draft for Speaking in Tones (http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=507DF9F8-3048-8A5E-10DDEAD30F469A19)

[BPScooter]

Thanks rjh01, that's the exact thing. I think it's correlation, and pretty sketchy for now, but very exciting if we can somehow avoid old-school racial thinking and use genetic markers to define our groups for comparison. Maybe even revise our theories some! Yay for science. What if it turned out that at some key evolutionary branching phase, there were two "brains" that turned out different language preferences, then concocted different language types, then tended to inter-breed and such. This does seem hot to handle especially if there are social-cognitive things on top. I wouldn't want to stake my tenure on it, but it's still of interest, I think.

I'd be really keen on doing some basic work with very young children, with the batteries of perceptual tests that are now accepted pediatrics, and tracking those kids through something like the Seashore tests of music, and then seeing their grades in second-language learning. That's a nearly impossible study. But as Ladd of Edinburgh said in the article we've referred to:

"Even remarkable correlations can arise by coincidence—or, in this case, possibly by prehistoric migration factors that are currently unknown to anthropology and archaeology—so we can't rule that out," Ladd says. "The next step is to attempt to correlate individual genotypes with measurably different behaviors on experimental tasks that are plausibly related to language and speech."

[T'ai Chi]

Really? And it won't say "interesting"? (I am funning you in the nicest way, I sincerely promise.) I'll post some pictures tomorrow then! (New thread)

Yup, just let me know.

It might say interesting, ya never know.

[Harpoon]

i believe the DOD ranked languages from 1 to 4. Russian was a 3, and Mandarin and Cantonese were 4. i personally found German much harder than Spanish. of course, i am referring to native speakers of English learning something new.

Re: DOD. The method used to teach Russian at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) at Monterey, Calif., had people conversational within nine months (R-9). Those who were in the 12-month program (R-12) had broader vocabulary knowledge. And the top-tier students in R-12 were allowed to stay an additional six months, during which they were student aides who lived with the native-speaking instructors. Their accents were flawless and they could discuss anything from military to politics, the arts, history, religion or pop (what there was of Russian pop during the Cold War) after they graduated.

All instructors were native speakers. English wasn't allowed in the classroom block. Tough pace: students were expected to give a three-minute speech in Russian on the second day:( .

Role playing from memorized scripts in Russian was a daily drill every morning. Tests were frequent, scored immediately and discussed because that provided positive feedback. Mimicing the profs was encouraged to develop the feel for the language.:)

Curriculum included food, culture and history (Did you know the Russian Navy saved the Union's bacon during the Civil War?). Profanity was taught, which was at times colorful, but mostly maternal references. The R-18 students became well versed in idioms.

I imagine things were pretty much the same in all the other language departments. Russian was No. 1 in those days ('63-'64) for total enrollment. Parsi was No. 2. I suspect Arabic is No. 1 these days.

Learning a language isn't just about how hard it is. It's your circumstance and environment. If you are able to concentrate all your efforts into learning the language and are surrounded by it and also receiving classroom training in it, you'll learn almost any language quicker than by just being dropped into a country cold Turkey (heard that's not an easy language to learn, either).

Of course the best way to learn any language is to live with a family speaking it. That's got everything, including the motivation to learn it and get out. :D

[Elind]

See what i mean, you just took the debate to an emotional-political level :) . Which is your right, of course. But I'm not going there...

I also disagree when you say that the mother tongue shouldn't be included in the curriculum. Pupils seem to pick up the foreign language and to improve their mother tongue best when both languages are included, i.e. teach maths in english and spanish/danish/french whatever.

You're not going there! Is that because you are too politically correct to be political?

I hope you were being facetious, otherwise I can only think of something rude to say.

[Vitalstatistix]

You're not going there! Is that because you are too politically correct to be political?

I hope you were being facetious, otherwise I can only think of something rude to say.

Not at all, my friend. I'm just saying that the neurological studies of language and bi/multilingualism is a whole different debate than the one about language policies. Both can be interesting, but they shouldn't be confused.

[hoemaco]

The hardest thing is to read every post before you reply :D
No, I can't do that, just read the first third or less.. or the last.

I haven't met with many westerners who learned any eastern asian languages... Though I can believe it's hard for them. To Hungarians, however, I think Japanese is much easier - the word order is different in Hungarian than other European languages and the writing system is phonetic. (And actually we write our names family name - given name style, like japanese/chinese). Chinese would be more difficult for the intonations already mentioned. At least I find it difficult to reproduce a word I hear (Ok, Singapore is quite a mix of languages). Anyway, it seems to me that Hungarians (at the rare moments they are motivated), can learn most languages easily, probably easier than english-speakers. But it's not statistical sample...
Btw there only about 55 or so hiragana and katakana, surely not a big number. And only about 2000 official kanji. In China I don't know, but think they use way more kanji. And there you have the traditional (used in Taiwan and in calligraphies) and the simplified writing (used in mainland China); and in seals (for names) they use a very old type of writing (something from 1..2000 years ago, i'm not sure). The calligraphers and literature ppl know all three...

Many (or most) of the Japanese (and also Chinese) people I met had problems with English. One reason for this can be the different sounds (like there's no distinct r and l there, not English also tend to not pronounce r :) ). Another reason might be the education system. Reading the blogs of some expat US teachers, they mentioned they were not allowed to teach using their own methods, but the japanese have their own ones, which, as seen, are not efficient (someone from Japan, enlighten me pls if it's true...). I had a similar feeling with Russian people. I've seen them reading English text from paper - it was written down phonetically in cyrillic (btw it's a funny activity, to try and guess at a conference etc whether they do this or not). When my father was learning in Russia looong ago, they taught him such pronunciation as 'zis' for "this" and 'ze' or 'zö' for "the"...

For me presently the hardest language is Singlish. That is, Singaporeans speaking local dialect of English (something like pijin-english). Even if you learn the chinese (all dialects) and malay words in it, the pronunciation (esp of chinese mother-tongued ppl) can be terrible for me (having had american teachers (not from texas,though)). Sometimes I can't recognize they are actually speaking English... And the funniest is when two guys talking, one in Mandarin, and the other in English, and understand each other. (younger generation Chinese here often speak English as mother-tongue, and they usually speak the British one).

[Complexity]

DNA.

I win!

I studied some French when I was younger. Learned a bit of Old English. Took a semester of Attic Greek when I was a bad student. Have a book on Welsh (mutation mid-word?!?).

The language I'm slowly learning on is Homeric Greek. I'll be happy if I can read parts of the Iliad in the original. Probably the last thing I'll ever do.

[BPScooter]

Hoemaco, welcome to the thread, and in a very sincere way I say "right on, bro" with a little high-five on the side.

Bartok Bela is one of my heroes, as well as Kodaly Zoltan and I did have the chance to visit Budapest once and went to the Bartok museum. If anybody wants to know what we're talking about, listen to Bartok's *Concerto for Orchestra* and read about how it was written and who this guy was. It is one of the most amazing achievements of the human creative spirit. More to say about that in time, but please do check out BARTOK music. I am not Hungarian when I say this, just an appreciator of music that makes you breathless.

[plumjam]

Me Japanee. Hingrish brury difficurr :mad:

[dudalb]

I understand Sindarian Elvish is a real bitch to learn,while Quenya is pretty easy.

[BPScooter]

Welsh is one of the hardest I've ever tried to figure out. In order to capture the speech in basic roman alphabet, one needs things like "LL", which represents a sort of fricative sound, tongue is up to the palate. So to the un-Welsh a name like "Llewellyn" really does sound like "Tsclesssh l shshsln" and the English speakers mangle it to something like "Lou-ellen".

Everybody who had a family name mangled through pronunciation difficulies, stand up and be counted! I think the Polish names are Oh so difficult...so many -sclavs and -eenyovzys...

[Wildy]

Personally I have found it a bit harder to learn a language now. I can still pick up stuff pretty quickly though.

In my case I think I have managed to screw up my brain.

I am learning German (again technically).

German was the first language that I spoke when I was young and when I learned English a lack of German meant that I couldn't speak it basically at all. Understanding it was a different story. However now that I am trying to learn it again I find that I confuse myself because I want to be grammatically correct but my brain has an argument with itself.

It is a quite well structured language though.

[timhau]

Everybody who had a family name mangled through pronunciation difficulies, stand up and be counted! I think the Polish names are Oh so difficult...so many -sclavs and -eenyovzys...

Meet.... The Unpronouncables!

_s-NOZXIOPk

[Cainkane1]

Danish, for me. Ok, easy to learn the written language, but speaking it and understanding the spoken word, that's another story.

Whereas Swedish was super easy by comparison.

I've heard that Icelandic was extra hard to learn.

[Furi]

I Found Gibberish very Easy to Learn,
and North Wales Welsh quite difficult (even though I spent half my childhood either there or just accross the Dee)

[Matteo Martini]

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

In Japanese, you have three alphabets (kanji, katakana, hiragana), but two of them are fairly easy to learn

[IMST]

Polish strikes me as the hardest one that I have any knowledge of whatsoever. There is no word order. At all. Grammar is entirely due to suffixes, which I have difficulty discerning to begin with. Since I'm generally pretty musically intelligent this seems much more insurmountable than the tonal languages do.

[genesplicer]

I would say English, simply because it has so many, differing rules. Unlike most other languages, which have a single linguistic root, English comes from many roots, with many vocabularies and many, often mutually exclusive linguistic rules.

For example, the plural of house is houses, but the plural of mouse is mice. That is due to the multiple language base of English. To learn all the rules and when to apply them, as opposed to others, is very difficult.

My linguistic professor explained that English exists only because Norman conquerors were trying to get dates with Saxon Barmaids...

[Almo]

There is not a single hardest language, in my opinion. It depends on which language you already know. For example, Chinese would be VERY difficult for me, but not as tough for a Japanese person.

But for the sake of the Poll, I'm putting Chinese since it is so utterly foreign to me in its grammar, pronounciation and writing.

[sir drinks-a-lot]

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.

Chinese is undoubtedly the most difficult language as far as the written language is concerned. They have no alphabet, and alot of the characters cannot be sounded out. If you've never seen the Chinese ccharacter for a specific noun, for example, there is nothing you can do. Even if you are a native speaker, you are out of luck until you get your hands on a dictionary.

[sir drinks-a-lot]

English is tough too, because all of the exceptions.

Plus, English has the most nouns of any language, I believe.

[badnewsBH]

Too lazy to read all of this. Anyone say Klingon yet? :p

Not sure what's hardest, but for me, *any* language that's non-English is nigh on impossible. I constantly try to translate from English, making the whole effort pretty much a waste.

[Olowkow]

I've studied quite a few languages, but only two in depth. I taught French and Spanish for 5 years in high school and college. Pretty close to native accent in both I am told.

My wife speaks Thai as her native language. Now, the hardest languages for me are Thai and Chinese. I have had a lot of Chinese friends over the years and learned a fair amount, but I am no good at the tones unless it is an expression I have memorized.

In Thailand, I used to watch CNN and pick out a fair amount, but it just fascinated me that (for example) every time the announcer said "song kram", ("war"), he would get the tone right. Crazy, I know, but as a native English speaker, it is so tempting to tie tone to emotion or question intonation etc., not meaning. Then there is something called "sandhi" which shifts tones depending on where they come relative to other ones.

I have American friends who speak pretty good Thai and Chinese. I'm jealous!

Chinese grammar is no problem, since there are no tense endings, verb conjugations, or plurals. But there is a really different approach to things like relative clauses, and the use of particles for tense and questions.

So, the hardest language I ever played with was an African language called Kanuri, from the Chad lake region. The morphology was unbelievably extensive and the phonology, while not mysterious was complicated. I don't think I could ever master this. Many of the Amerian Indian languages and Eskimo (Athabaskian sp?) are really something else. Oh, yes, Swahili...they have something like 22 noun classes or genders and all adjectives have to agree as I recall: kisu kizuri (good day)

For me the bottom line is whether you can be exposed to full immersion in a language. That is, if you hang out with a native speaker (preferably several) long enough, you will learn any language quite readily. Learning in a classroom is always much more difficult.

Currently trying to learn some Japanese. Loving it! Sugoi!!:) Just something about SOV that makes sense to me. Not sure why.

[bignickel]

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.
Hmmmm. So... how does Japanese rate in difficulty when it comes to reading?

[shuize]

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.


I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

Japanese is not anywhere near as hard as Japanese people would have you believe. But the statement that writing can be mastered in a weekend is complete garbage.

[BPScooter]

I suppose we'd be better off by separating spoken lingos from written. I always tip my hat to the intrepid linguists that tried to capture phonology, grammar, syntax back in the bad old days of Victorian scholarship. You know, the guys in pith helmets with guns that had a few geeky scholars in tents that were working on translations or insect collections. Bad old days for militarism, colonialism, etc. but there were always a few eccentrics that, what, saw Rosetta Stones and realized what they were.

Given the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), there must be harder languages to SPEAK than others. From an outsider's perspective, of course. A Spanish speaker learning French is probably going to have an easier time than a Spanish speaker learning Welsh, on purely spoken terms. Very foreign, that Welsh.

A reader, on the other hand will be stymied by alphabets. No matter how related my native English is to Greek or Russian, I will not immediately be able to make sense of a written utterance in those languages without instruction or study. That was my reaction to the Edgar Rice Burroughs conceit in the original Tarzan books, that somehow the young Lord Greystoke was able to use his immense native intelligence to learn how to read English--as little bugs that moved around--mangani this or that. Stick me with Arabic or Hindi and I will die of old age before I figure it out from the written symbol. But given some time to try to communicate verbally, and some time to connect that with a written word, well, yeah, I think I could probably learn to function .

[sir drinks-a-lot]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

Japanese is not anywhere near as hard as Japanese people would have you believe. But the statement that writing can be mastered in a weekend is complete garbage.

Well, when it comes down to it, andything that can be written in Kanji can also be written in Kana. And, I know Kana can be learned in a weekend, because that is how long it took me to learn it.

Of course, you can't really learn to write Japanese in a weekend, because you have to know what to write! I was just trying to make the point that people are mistaken when they think Japanese must be harder than Chinese because it has three character sets as opposed to Chinese only having one.

But katakana, especially, can be learned in a weekend by an English speaker, and then they'll have access to a fair number of words and their meanings. Try doing that with Chinese!

[scratchy]

English, I still have a hard time understanding Bush.

Paul

:) :) :)
No at all, i thing english mucher eesy lern!

[bigred]

I've heard linguists talk on this and the overwhelming fav seems to be Chinese FWIW.

[technoextreme]

A computer language. *rimshot*

[Tatsu]

Any polysynthetic language like Inuit or Cherokee sounds almost impossibly complex to learn unless you are taught from birth. Just the thought of a language where you can create a word on the fly to describe a unique concept, and that another native speaker will automatically understand, amazes me. Of course, having never actually tried myself, I can't offer a deeper opinion than that.

[Anders W. Bonde]

What makes Danish difficult to learn are the numerous and illogical exceptions in grammar and pronunciation. There's also a very wide gap between spelling and pronunciation, made worse by the fact that Danes are very, very sloppy with their pronunciation - and it's only getting worse. We've got nine distinct vowels, but the younger generation (and worse, their teachers and many other language "professionals") tend to fuze many of them into a few woolly ones - even to the extent that they thus mix up both spelling and meaning.

I reserve the right to correct Danes when they're too sloppy with their own language...

On another topic, I think it is generally easier for Danes to understand Swedes and Norweginas than the other way round - this may well be due to the Norwegians, and especially the Swedes, being musch crisper and more consistent in their pronunciation than the Danes.

Nynorsk, as far as I am concerned, is a rather silly artificial language created in spite simply to separate Norwegian from its Danish past. IMO, it's a mess. Bokmål is very similar to (written) Danish. Norwegian pronunciation is much more tonal than Danish, with Danish being much more similar to German than the other Scandinavian languages.

It could be argued that Norwegian and Danish are different dialects of a common language, but Swedish certainly is gramatically quite different. Then again, even in tiny Denmark, we have many different dialects, a few of which I find difficult to understand.

[Colorama]

I speak them all. I just don't understand any of them...

[Mobyseven]

Another vote for Chinese. I'm a native Strine speaker, but I'd still rank Chinese above English. Hebrew isn't actually that hard, and I'll never understand why people think Japanese is hard - Japanese is one of the most logical languages in the world, and the writing systems are not really that hard. Certainly the number of kanji one has to learn could be a bit overwhelming, but the same could be said for a new word in any language, and the beauty of kanji is that it means you can often figure out the basic meaning of words that you haven't seen before (even if you still need to check pronounciation).

[Mobyseven]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

I tried calligraphy in Japan, and got promptly shown up by a room full of fifth graders... :boxedin:

[TheAnachronism]

This is quite a difficult question to answer, especially since it relies heavily on personal experience and perception.

As someone who speaks both English and German, I'd say that the hardest western, European language is Icelandic.

I've been trying to learn a bit for months, and the only thing I can say is andskotann and heyvagn.

I've never tried any oriental languages, however.

[Radrook]

I think other is the most difficult to learn. As much as I have tried, I flounder miserably when trying to speak other. Maybe it's the syntax requirements, or the irrational inconsistency of its grammatical rules. Or maybe I was introduced to other too late in life. Language is easier for the young, and other is no exception. In any case, learning other from my perspective is the pits and I do not recommend it.

: )

[Crundy]

Not sure about learning to speak, but I think Traditional Chinese is meant to be the hardest to learn to read / write. The example I read in one of my cantonese books is that if you spent an hour a day learning to speak cantonese then you would be able to have a good conversation with someone after 6 months. If you studied for an hour an day then it would take two years for you to learn how to read a local newspaper written in traditional chinese.

Hence the reason China invented simplified chinese, because even chinese people couldn't read and write it!

[Sickly Crypsis]

My grandparents worked in Hong Kong and my family went there for a while when I was 3 and apparently I soaked up a lot of it and I could order my meals in Mandarin and understand a lot of what was said to me.

I remember a few words and my grandmother can still speak a fair bit of it.
( I can even ask if some one has an attractive older sister :D)

Anyone know esperanto?

[Crundy]

Is esperanto the made up language that everyone was meant to be speaking by now?

Heh, did you use to watch Red Dwarf? Rimmer tries to insult Holly in esperanto and ends up saying "Could you please call for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my beday"

[Sickly Crypsis]

Is esperanto the made up language that everyone was meant to be speaking by now?

Heh, did you use to watch Red Dwarf? Rimmer tries to insult Holly in esperanto and ends up saying "Could you please call for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my beday"

Thats the one, it was supposed to be a universal second language but i think like only 2 million people speak it.

I didn't see that red dwarf episode but William Shatner made the movie "Incubus" which was filmed in esperanto. I have a feeling that it would be lousy, despite its best efforts.

[SoBitter]

I don't think I can give a good opinion as I've only mastered English and almost mastered Spanish. I'm working on Japanese currently, and it's not that hard. It's a lot of memorization, but the pronunciation is fairly easy, and sentence order is just something you get used to.

Someone else made the point early in the thread that you can really know Spanish but when you hear someone speak incredibly quickly and with accent and slang thrown in, it is a lot more difficult. I can read something written in Spanish with ease and carry on a slowly paced conversation. If I listen to a conversation between two native speakers I'm lost within a sentence or two.

[ChrisH]

Klingon is a bit of a bugger...

nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e' --- Where is the bathroom?

[Crundy]

Someone else made the point early in the thread that you can really know Spanish but when you hear someone speak incredibly quickly and with accent and slang thrown in, it is a lot more difficult.
I think that's true of all languages. Wasn't the film Trainspotting subtitled in America, because a lot of Americans couldn't understand the strong Scottish accents?