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There's no "hardest": Chinese has an elementary grammar is really basic, but its writing system and the tones make it hard..
Chinese and almost all the east Asian tonal types are acquiring more complex grammar. Reconstructions show Proto Sino Tibetan, Proto Tai, and Proto Mon Khmer to have had morphology but it seems to have just dropped off for no reason.
Old Chinese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Before 500 BC the grammar was even simpler than today's, there were no tones, grammatical boundaries were less existent, so what was going on? The consonants were complex but that may have been an innovation.
Tones and complex grammar are not entirely mutually exclusive. There are some central american languages, but their syntax and derivation seem very transparent, I've yet to find a fully tonal language with at least 3 tones that qualifies completely except for some click languages in Africa like this" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language#Grammar
164 consonants, maybe 104 vowels, 4 tones, 9 genders, what the hell.
But your point that learning a language is not hard if there is the right mindset is true, except for the one above maybe.
Last edited by Mahhammer; 03-03-2015 at 09:19 AM..
You know it's a testament to humanity that apparently at least some individuals in human groups were intelligent enough and managed to initially have the wherewithal to learn languages that they do not 'know' be they easy or hard through the milleniums. Surely the ones who could not distinguish between 'yes' and 'no' in their understandings probably had to deal with some major problems..;-)..by the way this still goes on today even if the language aspect gets 'understood'.
It 's interesting to see how the brain and mind became so flexible to the extent that when it came across another language and people that the initial shock at an 'unknown' in time diminished and eventually led us to become understood with verbal and written communication.
I read a lot of people saying that Finnish is one of the hardest languages for learning.
I don't think so. It's only different because it's not an indo-european language. I read a bit about the finnish grammar in the past - I got some interest in it because of Kalevala. Words appear to be easy to memorise, there are no consonant clusters nor weird sounds like czech, for example... no gender, no articles... if we don't try to compare it with English, I think it's not really hard.
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Well, any accurate response depends on someone’s background and where they live in the World. Responses might dramatically vary depending on individual.
I feel all of these languages are quite advanced, unique, and pleasantly challenging to learn: Turkish, Georgian, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Malay, Kazakh, Hungarian, Khmer. Azeri, Armenian, Persian, Zulu. My thinking about these languages is usually much more of a compliment than anything else, with some exceptions.
Their writing system script, word combinations, length of each word, sentence structure, vowel consonants, pronunciation, and/or tones are all involved in making a language.
There is a monopoly of Sinosphere Asian, Turkic, and some Slavic languages said in nomination about this topic.
Turkish is probably the most underrated language out there! Really seems mystical, exotic, and hypnotically noteworthy in combination of words, and how they represent themselves in written typed version. Maybe a specific rhythm, and unique version of communication happens in Turkish. I have mutual feelings about Czech, and Malay, other extremely underrated languages.
Some people think Georgian is Turkic, yet this language is an isolated language family group, a similar situation compared to Finnish, and Hungarian. Georgian is a Kartvelian language, and this writing script looks exactly like this: ქართველიქართველურიენის, დაამდამწერლობისგამოიყურებაზუსტადისევე
Ironically, Vietnamese, and Malay rely on a Latinized writing system, and don't use Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Thai writing looking characters at all. In writing, they are entirely different.
West Slavic languages(Czech, Polish) use a Latinized writing system while East Slavic (Russian), and some South Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian) rely on a Cyrillic writing system: лавянский (русский), а некоторые южнославянская (болгарский, македонский) полагаться на кириллице системы письмa.
Sinosphere Asian non-Latinized writing system languages have their own high amount of variation happening, and varied from each other in reality between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Khmer, and Thai. A Sample in Chinese: 在樣品中國 Sample in Japanese: 韓国でのル Sample in Thai: ตัวอย่างในไทย Sample in Khmer:គំរូនៅថៃ.
Around 3 sample paragraphs in Turkish!: Türk muhtemelen orada! Gerçekten onlar yazılı yazılan sürümü kendilerini temsil nasıl, mistik, egzotik ve kelimelerin birlikte hipnozla çekicidir görünüyor, ve. Belki iletişim belirli bir ritim, ve benzersiz bir sürüm Türk olur. Çek ve Malay, diğer çok karşılıklı duygular var.
Peki, herhangi bir doğru yanıt birinin arka plan ve nerede Dünyada yaşayan bağlıdır. Yanıtlar dramatik birey bağlı olarak değişebilir.
Onların yazı sistemi komut, kelime kombinasyonları, her kelimenin uzunluğu, cümle yapısı, ünsüz, telaffuz ve / veya sesleri tüm dil yapımında katılıyor.
Around 3 sample paragraphs in Turkish!: Türk[/font] muhtemelen orada! Gerçekten onlar yazılı yazılan sürümü kendilerini temsil nasıl, mistik, egzotik ve kelimelerin birlikte hipnozla çekicidir görünüyor, ve. Belki iletişim belirli bir ritim, ve benzersiz bir sürüm Türk olur. Çek ve Malay, diğer çok karşılıklı duygular var.
Peki, herhangi bir doğru yanıt birinin arka plan ve nerede Dünyada yaşayan bağlıdır. Yanıtlar dramatik birey bağlı olarak değişebilir.
Onların yazı sistemi komut, kelime kombinasyonları, her kelimenin uzunluğu, cümle yapısı, ünsüz, telaffuz ve / veya sesleri tüm dil yapımında katılıyor.
Those 3 paragraphs seem to be from google translate because any of them are right gramatically.
Not comparable. Mandarin, Japanese and many many African languages are way harder than Finnish.
Finnish IS hard, but it's definitely exaggerated, it's not THAT hard. For example, in many languages you have first learn a completely new alphabet.
I think the Japonic, Sino-Tibetan and Semitic language groups are definitely harder than Finnish. I'm not sure whether or not Hebrew is harder than Finnish though, but I guess it is , mainly because of the alphabet.
Would you say Russian and Ukrainian are harder than Finnish? If you were to ignore the Cyrillic alphabet...
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