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I actually didn't find Arabic to be too challenging. Although I haven't even delved into Mandarin/etc., I've heard that it is much more difficult to learn than Arabic. And, note, when I think of "learning a language," I think of speaking, reading, and writing a language fluently.
You know some have come to the conclusion and believe that the farther away a language is from obe's own language 'tree' determines whether or not it is hard to learn. Kind of makes sense if you look at vocabulary, syntax, grammar etc etc.
So those who who are only grounded in English will have a hell of a time learning Chinese or Arabic or any of those Finno-Ugric languages which include Finn, Georgian, Hungarian, Mongolian or Estonian. By the way I saw that Norwegian and Swedish plus the Romance languages take the least number of hours to learn than all the above.
You know some have come to the conclusion and believe that the farther away a language is from obe's own language 'tree' determines whether or not it is hard to learn. Kind of makes sense if you look at vocabulary, syntax, grammar etc etc.
So those who who are only grounded in English will have a hell of a time learning Chinese or Arabic or any of those Finno-Ugric languages which include Finn, Georgian, Hungarian, Mongolian or Estonian. By the way I saw that Norwegian and Swedish plus the Romance languages take the least number of hours to learn than all the above.
I guess the tree does come into play.
But then what about when you leave the Indo-European tree, it'll be hard to judge the difficulty between two different trees. I'm also surprised Hindi is in the same language tree as English, didn't know they had common roots.
Thai, was in Thailand 50% of the time between 2012 and 2015, have a Thai girlfriend living with me already for 3 years but i still know only a couple Thai words
Thai, was in Thailand 50% of the time between 2012 and 2015, have a Thai girlfriend living with me already for 3 years but i still know only a couple Thai words
So technically speaking you spent around 18 months in Thailand. How did you only pick up a couple of words?
Chinese - every word has at least 4 or more (or much, much more) completely unrelated meanings depending on the tone of your voice - and sometimes not even that. Cantonese has 6-9 tones for every word:
On top of that the writing system is galling. You'll need to memorise about 4000 complicated characters to be able to read a newspaper, out of 80,000-100,000 characters in the language. And good luck with trying to consult a dictionary without an alphabet/ alphabetical order.
On top of that the writing system is galling. You'll need to memorise about 4000 complicated characters to be able to read a newspaper, out of 80,000-100,000 characters in the language. And good luck with trying to consult a dictionary without an alphabet/ alphabetical order.
I think you'll need to understand at least 4000 words to read English newspaper as well, so memorising 4000 characters is not that special.
Besides, Chinese dictionary has an order - order in strokes and radicals.
Not sure how others feel about it but in my opinion I think the best way to learn a 'hard' language is to just simply immerse oneself in the culture for awhile. Just completely. That has to be the ideal. I have to say I admire people coming here to the States not knowing anything about the language but yet succeed in learning it.
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