Hardest Langauge To Learn?
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I would say Elvish, since the only help I can get is from the few scenes in Lord of the Rings. :D
Jokes aside, I would say the answer to the above question varies from one person to another. Take for example the Japanese language; people with some knowledge of chinese may find it easier to learn the former, since there are identical characters. Personally, I would find Arabic and its related languages difficult to learn since words are written in a very different manner from the languages I already know.
Jokes aside, I would say the answer to the above question varies from one person to another. Take for example the Japanese language; people with some knowledge of chinese may find it easier to learn the former, since there are identical characters. Personally, I would find Arabic and its related languages difficult to learn since words are written in a very different manner from the languages I already know.
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Fiery_penguin_of_doom wrote...
(American)English is easy to pick up but, practically impossible to master. As mentioned before I believe it is all about your first language. The "basic" groups of languages can be split into three parts English (American, British) Latin (Spanish, French,etc) Asian (Koren, Japanese, Chines,etc)English find Latin based difficult due to the sentence structure followed by Asian being more difficult because of the much larger character base.
Asians can find English difficult because of the various "rules" and "exceptions to the rules" that English is full of.
Latin based languages are pretty much in the center. English and Asian languages are about the same difficulty for native speakers.
It's not called "British" English, it's called Proper English and is completely different to American English.
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M2991 wrote...
Fiery_penguin_of_doom wrote...
(American)English is easy to pick up but, practically impossible to master. As mentioned before I believe it is all about your first language. The "basic" groups of languages can be split into three parts English (American, British) Latin (Spanish, French,etc) Asian (Koren, Japanese, Chines,etc)English find Latin based difficult due to the sentence structure followed by Asian being more difficult because of the much larger character base.
Asians can find English difficult because of the various "rules" and "exceptions to the rules" that English is full of.
Latin based languages are pretty much in the center. English and Asian languages are about the same difficulty for native speakers.
It's not called "British" English, it's called Proper English and is completely different to American English.
I wasn't calling it "British" english. I was referring to the english spoken in your country. It didn't sound right to put "English spoken in England" or United Kingdom English so I put British. You call it proper English I can it just plan English. So let me rephrase the statement
The "basic" groups of languages can be split into three parts; English (American, England versions) Latin based (Spanish, French,etc) Asian dislects(Koren, Japanese, Chinese,etc).
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from my point of view, I<d have o say japanese, but I'm french,english,spanish
but grammar wise french is harder then japanese
but grammar wise french is harder then japanese
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Chinese!!...It's by far UnHearable language for me...Japanese is hard too, but if you fond to anime or VisualNovel or such stuffs, You'll find it easier to learn....
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Of all the languages I've encountered, I'd have to say Chinese takes the cake for being the most difficult to master. As someone who has attained fluency in even the dreaded Japanese in less than a year's time, I can honestly say that if Chinese was not my first language, I would never be able to learn it.
For one thing, it's pretty much the only commonly-used character-based language in the modern world (Japanese has kana, and Korean is phonetic). Other languages somewhat commonly used today are sound-based or alphabetical (yes, even Arabic). Someone who is considered well-educated in the language will have command of over 5000 characters (there were over 86,000 in existence back in 1994). Because I know some of you will look at that and go "that's not very many", stop for a moment and imagine 5000 breasts. Not 50, not 500, not 1000, but 5000. That's a lot of breasts.
Also, you will find that most people who know Chinese can speak, listen to, and read it far, far better than they can write it. The reason is simple: you really think it's an easy task to memorize over five-thousand of what are pretty much pictograms (compared to the 26 of the English alphabet, or about 200 times less), and be able to recall every single one of them at will when writing something? I myself have had many an experience where I would sort of know how a character I wanted to write roughly looked like, but was unable to produce it on paper; I'm sure those of you who know Chinese or Japanese (well) know what I mean when I say that the character kinda almost surfaces in your brain but never really actually surfaces. And, unlike Japanese, you can't just write out the hiragana to compensate; you forget the character, that's it. Find a dictionary or give up.
And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.
And, anyone who's gone further than knowing enough to survive in China (or even has advanced Japanese skills) will know, Chinese makes use of expressions, many of which whose meaning is rooted in some ancient story or moral and is not immediately apparent in just the idiom. For example, "å¡žç¿å¤±é©¬" literally means "Old Cai lost his horse", but we say it to remind people that something greater may come in place of what you have just lost. There are so many of these in the Chinese language that even the average teenager will know very, very many of them. Oh, and did I mention that China has a history of almost five millennia, meaning the Chinese language had that much time to develop and get more complicated, incorporating various historical events and legends that arose?
And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.
I hope this was informative. In fact, everything people struggle with in Japanese is due to what they imported from Chinese: kanji, numerical modifiers (eg. 一枚), idioms (some common ones are 一石二鳥, 一生懸命, ç²¾ä¸€æ¯ etc.), you name it. Feel free to disagree, but from my experience (I am fluent and literate in English, Chinese (Mandarin and two other dialects), and Japanese, and know some French and German) and what I know about various societies from my studies this is the conclusion I have come to.
For one thing, it's pretty much the only commonly-used character-based language in the modern world (Japanese has kana, and Korean is phonetic). Other languages somewhat commonly used today are sound-based or alphabetical (yes, even Arabic). Someone who is considered well-educated in the language will have command of over 5000 characters (there were over 86,000 in existence back in 1994). Because I know some of you will look at that and go "that's not very many", stop for a moment and imagine 5000 breasts. Not 50, not 500, not 1000, but 5000. That's a lot of breasts.
Also, you will find that most people who know Chinese can speak, listen to, and read it far, far better than they can write it. The reason is simple: you really think it's an easy task to memorize over five-thousand of what are pretty much pictograms (compared to the 26 of the English alphabet, or about 200 times less), and be able to recall every single one of them at will when writing something? I myself have had many an experience where I would sort of know how a character I wanted to write roughly looked like, but was unable to produce it on paper; I'm sure those of you who know Chinese or Japanese (well) know what I mean when I say that the character kinda almost surfaces in your brain but never really actually surfaces. And, unlike Japanese, you can't just write out the hiragana to compensate; you forget the character, that's it. Find a dictionary or give up.
And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.
And, anyone who's gone further than knowing enough to survive in China (or even has advanced Japanese skills) will know, Chinese makes use of expressions, many of which whose meaning is rooted in some ancient story or moral and is not immediately apparent in just the idiom. For example, "å¡žç¿å¤±é©¬" literally means "Old Cai lost his horse", but we say it to remind people that something greater may come in place of what you have just lost. There are so many of these in the Chinese language that even the average teenager will know very, very many of them. Oh, and did I mention that China has a history of almost five millennia, meaning the Chinese language had that much time to develop and get more complicated, incorporating various historical events and legends that arose?
And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.
I hope this was informative. In fact, everything people struggle with in Japanese is due to what they imported from Chinese: kanji, numerical modifiers (eg. 一枚), idioms (some common ones are 一石二鳥, 一生懸命, ç²¾ä¸€æ¯ etc.), you name it. Feel free to disagree, but from my experience (I am fluent and literate in English, Chinese (Mandarin and two other dialects), and Japanese, and know some French and German) and what I know about various societies from my studies this is the conclusion I have come to.
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Raze wrote...
Of all the languages I've encountered, I'd have to say Chinese takes the cake for being the most difficult to master. As someone who has attained fluency in even the dreaded Japanese in less than a year's time, I can honestly say that if Chinese was not my first language, I would never be able to learn it.For one thing, it's pretty much the only commonly-used character-based language in the modern world (Japanese has kana, and Korean is phonetic). Other languages somewhat commonly used today are sound-based or alphabetical (yes, even Arabic). Someone who is considered well-educated in the language will have command of over 5000 characters (there were over 86,000 in existence back in 1994). Because I know some of you will look at that and go "that's not very many", stop for a moment and imagine 5000 breasts. Not 50, not 500, not 1000, but 5000. That's a lot of breasts.
Also, you will find that most people who know Chinese can speak, listen to, and read it far, far better than they can write it. The reason is simple: you really think it's an easy task to memorize over five-thousand of what are pretty much pictograms (compared to the 26 of the English alphabet, or about 200 times less), and be able to recall every single one of them at will when writing something? I myself have had many an experience where I would sort of know how a character I wanted to write roughly looked like, but was unable to produce it on paper; I'm sure those of you who know Chinese or Japanese (well) know what I mean when I say that the character kinda almost surfaces in your brain but never really actually surfaces. And, unlike Japanese, you can't just write out the hiragana to compensate; you forget the character, that's it. Find a dictionary or give up.
And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.
And, anyone who's gone further than knowing enough to survive in China (or even has advanced Japanese skills) will know, Chinese makes use of expressions, many of which whose meaning is rooted in some ancient story or moral and is not immediately apparent in just the idiom. For example, "å¡žç¿å¤±é©¬" literally means "Old Cai lost his horse", but we say it to remind people that something greater may come in place of what you have just lost. There are so many of these in the Chinese language that even the average teenager will know very, very many of them. Oh, and did I mention that China has a history of almost five millennia, meaning the Chinese language had that much time to develop and get more complicated, incorporating various historical events and legends that arose?
And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.
I hope this was informative. In fact, everything people struggle with in Japanese is due to what they imported from Chinese: kanji, numerical modifiers (eg. 一枚), idioms (some common ones are 一石二鳥, 一生懸命, ç²¾ä¸€æ¯ etc.), you name it. Feel free to disagree, but from my experience (I am fluent and literate in English, Chinese (Mandarin and two other dialects), and Japanese, and know some French and German) and what I know about various societies from my studies this is the conclusion I have come to.
My brain has stretch marks after reading that. Though it was informative.
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Fiery_penguin_of_doom wrote...
Raze wrote...
Of all the languages I've encountered, I'd have to say Chinese takes the cake for being the most difficult to master. As someone who has attained fluency in even the dreaded Japanese in less than a year's time, I can honestly say that if Chinese was not my first language, I would never be able to learn it.For one thing, it's pretty much the only commonly-used character-based language in the modern world (Japanese has kana, and Korean is phonetic). Other languages somewhat commonly used today are sound-based or alphabetical (yes, even Arabic). Someone who is considered well-educated in the language will have command of over 5000 characters (there were over 86,000 in existence back in 1994). Because I know some of you will look at that and go "that's not very many", stop for a moment and imagine 5000 breasts. Not 50, not 500, not 1000, but 5000. That's a lot of breasts.
Also, you will find that most people who know Chinese can speak, listen to, and read it far, far better than they can write it. The reason is simple: you really think it's an easy task to memorize over five-thousand of what are pretty much pictograms (compared to the 26 of the English alphabet, or about 200 times less), and be able to recall every single one of them at will when writing something? I myself have had many an experience where I would sort of know how a character I wanted to write roughly looked like, but was unable to produce it on paper; I'm sure those of you who know Chinese or Japanese (well) know what I mean when I say that the character kinda almost surfaces in your brain but never really actually surfaces. And, unlike Japanese, you can't just write out the hiragana to compensate; you forget the character, that's it. Find a dictionary or give up.
And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.
And, anyone who's gone further than knowing enough to survive in China (or even has advanced Japanese skills) will know, Chinese makes use of expressions, many of which whose meaning is rooted in some ancient story or moral and is not immediately apparent in just the idiom. For example, "å¡žç¿å¤±é©¬" literally means "Old Cai lost his horse", but we say it to remind people that something greater may come in place of what you have just lost. There are so many of these in the Chinese language that even the average teenager will know very, very many of them. Oh, and did I mention that China has a history of almost five millennia, meaning the Chinese language had that much time to develop and get more complicated, incorporating various historical events and legends that arose?
And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.
I hope this was informative. In fact, everything people struggle with in Japanese is due to what they imported from Chinese: kanji, numerical modifiers (eg. 一枚), idioms (some common ones are 一石二鳥, 一生懸命, ç²¾ä¸€æ¯ etc.), you name it. Feel free to disagree, but from my experience (I am fluent and literate in English, Chinese (Mandarin and two other dialects), and Japanese, and know some French and German) and what I know about various societies from my studies this is the conclusion I have come to.
My brain has stretch marks after reading that. Though it was informative.
and this is one of the reasons he is a admin...
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Raze wrote...
...
And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.
...
And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.
....
This just amazes me. I wonder how the language even survives.
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every language that uses roman characters is pretty easy to learn for me,because i am accustomed to reading them.
from my experience,if i can read it easy,then i could learn it easy as well.
but my problem is when faced with a language that uses non-roman characters.
for example,japanese(although i picked up japanese conversational skill quite naturally from watching all those animes,i'm still having problems with writing),chinese(of the 10000 characters and many more),korean,russian,etc.etc.
but that's just me.
from my experience,if i can read it easy,then i could learn it easy as well.
but my problem is when faced with a language that uses non-roman characters.
for example,japanese(although i picked up japanese conversational skill quite naturally from watching all those animes,i'm still having problems with writing),chinese(of the 10000 characters and many more),korean,russian,etc.etc.
but that's just me.
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Im studying Japanese, and its the hardest language i have come across.
Other than that i think English is the hardest.
Other than that i think English is the hardest.
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languages evolve, like living beings. they are 'fads' so to speak. Most languages evolve more slowly, now that books are being published, specifically about learning a certain language. Now, not many rules are being broken, grammatically in each language. adjectives usually come before nouns in english, and vice versa in spanish. This also means that different languages can be similar to each other. For example, a japanese man may find korean particularly easy.
If you are asking me what language is the hardest from the standing point of an english-only speaker, i would say that Chinese, Armenian, and Indian are the hardest
If you are asking me what language is the hardest from the standing point of an english-only speaker, i would say that Chinese, Armenian, and Indian are the hardest
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Which language is the hardest to learn depends on who's learning... it's really a relative. for someone like me who grew up with an exclusively English background, languages that are a significant departure from English, like Japanese for example would be especially hard to learn
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illumi wrote...
I believe it really depends on your first language.My first language was Japanese, and Japanese is phonetic which languages (Like Spanish) pretty simple. Spanish way of writing is also like Japanese.
Im spanish, about the phonetic is true but the principal difficult i see in japanese lenguage is learn to write and read, is not easy.
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one-sided character languages would be the tough ones. There are many languages out there that have similar characters as English. French has some recognize letters: "Je suis" which means I am. Japanese which has unrecognizable signs would be tougher.
but, if I had to say. It would be Arabic. Not only does it have one of hardest vocabulary tongues, but the writing is very hard.
but, if I had to say. It would be Arabic. Not only does it have one of hardest vocabulary tongues, but the writing is very hard.
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Thai (not because it is my mother language) because it really not 'systematic'.
The letter is not the 'alphabet system' as the Germanic Group of Languages (eg. English, German, French, etc.), or the 'each character equals each word system' such as Chinese or Japanese.
It really hard to explain what sort of system it is (actually we, the Thai, usually use 'sense' in pronouncing our language)
For example, 'เปล่า' (pronounce: 'ploud') it really do not have any rule or grammar that tells you to pronounce it 'ploud'. Actually it also possible to pronounce 'pae - laa' but no one would pronounce that way.
And there many, many word like this (approximately 10,000 words...I think)
Also the grammar is really strange. Very 'unsystematic'.
Anyhow, I never learn 'Arab' language which seems to be very hard also, thus I not yet know which is the hardest. (Or I could say that I will never really know which language is the hardest until I, myself, have learned all the languages in this world"""which is impossible)
With Respect
The letter is not the 'alphabet system' as the Germanic Group of Languages (eg. English, German, French, etc.), or the 'each character equals each word system' such as Chinese or Japanese.
It really hard to explain what sort of system it is (actually we, the Thai, usually use 'sense' in pronouncing our language)
For example, 'เปล่า' (pronounce: 'ploud') it really do not have any rule or grammar that tells you to pronounce it 'ploud'. Actually it also possible to pronounce 'pae - laa' but no one would pronounce that way.
And there many, many word like this (approximately 10,000 words...I think)
Also the grammar is really strange. Very 'unsystematic'.
Anyhow, I never learn 'Arab' language which seems to be very hard also, thus I not yet know which is the hardest. (Or I could say that I will never really know which language is the hardest until I, myself, have learned all the languages in this world"""which is impossible)
With Respect