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I think some of the hardest languages to learn for any non native speaker has to be some of the indigenous languages of the Americas such as Inuktitut, Comanche and Navajo. Their polysynthetic nature and difficult phonemes make it extremely difficult for non natives to master. There is a reason why these languages were used as the basis of codes by the allies during the two world wars...
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.
4 tones lolololo, why not learn Nuxalk or !xoo and complain about 4 puny tones!
The writing system is tough, but we have modern technology and pinyin input programs, you don't need that keyboard.
And that poem is not colloquial chinese at all! It's just a tongue twister, nobody would speak that in real life. But I suppose everything is bizarre to everyone except me.
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Originally Posted by Rams_Lord
I don't which one is harder out of Arabic and Mandarin/Cantonese, but they are definitely at the top of my list.
Finnish would be in my top 20 too, I find it so complicated.
Finnish is genderless, regular, and managably complex. There are complex gradation processes but are absolutely nothing compared to the sheer overflow of sagging redundancy and irregularity of something like Ancient Greek, Latin, or Russian.
I will never get why people always say "my language has 100 forms for a verb lololol" despite the fact that they are just recombinations of a few elements, people say "lolol, the verb in English with the most forms is to be with just 8, unlike 30 in spanish" forgetting that those 8 forms are principal parts outside of the usualy formation, Turkish verbs having maybe a 100 forms that are always regular. It's just a giant bragging match!
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Originally Posted by Davy-040
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
Couldn't learn it? The language has barely any grammatical restriction between word classes and absolutly no irregularities, the 5 tones are just a unique feature and there is absolutely no rule stating tonality is somehow a compensation for low grammatical complexity, none whatsoever. I know a british girl who learned it in a year after taking classes.
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Originally Posted by deneb78
I think some of the hardest languages to learn for any non native speaker has to be some of the indigenous languages of the Americas such as Inuktitut, Comanche and Navajo. Their polysynthetic nature and difficult phonemes make it extremely difficult for non natives to master. There is a reason why these languages were used as the basis of codes by the allies during the two world wars...
There were used because there was barely any information on their structure in the enemies hands, Inuktitut is complex but managable like finnish, Navajo is very complex with all verb roots being irregular yet limited to 550 roots minimum and simple noun formation, Comanche is basically like turkish, a regular language that seems complex just because there are fewer spaces between words, it has barely any verb stem root changes.
As for Comanche:
So if it was, "iliketoswimintheocean" instead of "I like to swim in the ocean", the language is automatically difficult?
My opinion on the hardest languages to learn grammatically are Icelandic, Lithuaninan, Russian, Latin, and Ancient Greek types, these are Indo European languages where everything is randomly formed with absolutly no regular processes, redundancies are abundant, thousands of decaying non-productive forms are dragged along as more new forms are shoved in, and random extensions are just thrown all over in the derivational morphology. Navajo, Arabic, Zulu, and more are all more regular. Second place would be some Northeast Caucasian languages which have irregular morphology as much as them too, but the difference is that they have very very regular derivational morphology and little syntactical redundancy.
Last edited by Mahhammer; 03-01-2015 at 11:19 AM..
Have anyone ever consider American English? We speak it and therefore take it for granted. American English must be a bear of a language to learn if you naturally speak any of the "harder languages". American English is basically comprised of many other laguages and therefore may be hard to figure out to someone else.
Have anyone ever consider American English? We speak it and therefore take it for granted. American English must be a bear of a language to learn if you naturally speak any of the "harder languages". American English is basically comprised of many other laguages and therefore may be hard to figure out to someone else.
English didn't take me that long to grasp. I wouldn't really call it a hard language at all. But it might be to some, seeming as I'm a Swedish speaker, there was a lot of similarities between the two.
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.
Georgian and Mongolian are not Finno-Ugric languages. Mongolian is believed by some to be related to Turkish (in a family called "Altaic") but some think they are separate families that just had a lot of mutual influence on each other. Georgian is in a family called "Kartvelian", one of the three Caucasian language families (again, some think they are one big family, or just two instead of three). The Caucasian families certainly contain some "hardest language" candidates. The hardest of all was probably Ubykh, sadly now extinct, it had something like 80 different consonants.
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.
Chinese is difficult for an English-speaker, no doubt. But now that we have computers, looking up the meanings of characters has become exponentially easier. I don't speak or read Chinese, but I do speak and read Japanese. If I come across a character I don't recognize, I use Google Translate. Just write the character in a little box using the mouse, and you instantly see the meaning and pronunciation.
There's no "one hardest language in the world," and it's certainly the case that languages which are far removed from our Indo-European roots are going to be more difficult, as are those with unique features such as tones and clicks. For an English-speaking, many Native American languages such as Navajo are extremely difficult, as are the Khoisan languages of South Africa.
English and French are both spelled VERY irregularly, compared with languages like Spanish, in which each letter forms only ONE sound (except the letter "C" which can be soft "S" or hard "K"). In Spanish, there is no need for school "spelling bee" contests, as each letter makes one, and only one, sound. On the other hand, Spanish words are longer, so that any written text in Spanish is much longer than its equivalent in English, and books/ magazines must be thicker.
Also, English, instead of simply reversing the subject and verb order, to form questions, like other languages do, requires the word "do, did, does" which is confusing, as you must remember which conjugation of "To Do" to use with your question.
French has at least EIGHT different ways to spell the sound "AY" (e, ee, ai, ais, ait, aix, et, est) and it also has many silent letters at ends of words, which are wasteful and should be eliminated. And the sound "OH" in French can be spelled (about?) NINE ways (au, aux, aut, eau, eaux, ot, os, ote, o).
I've heard that Basque language is very complex and difficult.
Last edited by slowlane3; 03-01-2015 at 10:12 PM..
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