34 replies to this topic

[Shirou]

I ll keep it short, the three major languages around me, which is the hardest to learn?

Being dutch german is a piece a cake, only real difference is that german uses a grammatical system with four cases that's ran quite obsolete in the netherlands, (we only have two but they aren't even really grammatically related anymore). English is even easier at that without such cases, but their verb system again is a lot more complicated. Same goes for french, but that's a bit of a blend as their case system is just as easy to dutch, and the verb system is as elaborate as english.

Also english is pretty much everywhere and german is a sister language, so it's easy to say french. You see that it is so heritage related that the TS question virtually has no global answer. A british person for example, of the four languages I used, it will probably be the most easy to learn french as it's the closest to the own 'tracks' of language.

Edited by Aftershock, 05 September 2008 - 17:37.

[Rich19]

Navajo Indian was used as a sort of code against the Japanese by the Americans in WW2, and never broken. Because it's so unlike any other language and only a handful of people spoke it (all native Americans), it was perfect for ensuring secrecy. So I'd say a language like that is hardest.

[Dauth]

Aftershock, on 5 Sep 2008, 18:35, said:

Also english is pretty much everywhere and german is a sister language, so it's easy to say french. You see that it is so heritage related that the TS question virtually has no global answer. A british person for example, of the four languages I used, it will probably be the most easy to learn french as it's the closest to the own 'tracks' of language.

Speaking as someone who tried to learn both French and German, German was easier than French since it does mirror English better.

[Shirou]

Then my logic on british people fails.

Meh, french is hard anyway.

[Brad]

French has the whole masculine and feminine thing, which makes learnining it that much harder.

But in my opinion chinese would be the hardest to learn, there being many different dialects, even if its onl mainly madarian chinese now-a-days. It also has a very hard writing style to learn, as far as i know (so dont be affended) there isnt even a chinese alaphabet, but im most certanaly wrong.

[BeefJeRKy]

Arabic grammar is so idiotic IMO. So many rules and so many exceptions. It's a language whose rules haven't changed for the last 1400 or so years and is drastic need of overhaul. Unfortunately that is not possible for religious reasons. So yeah. I myself have found that English is easiest with Spanish and French being mildly more difficult. This is all from a grammatical point of view. Alphabet-wise I would believe Mandarin is most difficult especially with traditional characters. Spoken would likely be some aboriginal languages from Africa or Australia or even Nunavut and the Yukon (Inuit anybody?)

[Kichō]

@Aj, Mandarin Chinese is the easiest to learn than the others.

Chyros, on 5 Sep 2008, 12:09, said:

^ He means that not all of China speaks the same language. IIRC the three main "dialects" are pinyin, cantonese and mandarin. That's why you can't just speak of "chinese".

That's not entirely true, While we mainly speak Mandarin (North China and Taiwan + Tibet) the South Speak a variety of languages including Hakkien, Shanghainese, Taiwanese(Yes it's a language of China.)

Also Pinyin isn't a language, infact it's just using the letters as the selected language.

I.E: qǐng duō guān zhào < That's Pinyin of the Mandarin version.

Anyway imo Russian/Ukrainian seems the hardest.


EDIT:Oh and the north uses the 'Traditional' Variant of the Chinese symbols while the South uses the Simplified version.

Edited by Zhen Ji, 05 September 2008 - 22:44.

[Rai]

When filipino children hear a lot of english words and when they don't know what's the meaning of it they get nosebleeds. I don't know if it's true, but seeing is to believe after all.

[CodeCat]

I believe that Arabic might well be one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn. It has many features that are completely foreign and unintuitive to English, and the large number of unfamiliar consonants doesn't help either. The writing is also rather hard to read at least initially, but that goes with reading Arabic and not actually learning the language (since writing is independent of language). Russian or Polish are probably not easy to learn either, but they still share some common features with English since they are both Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese has little in common with English, especially with respect to its use of tones and the general unfamiliarity with the sounds of the language. And although so many people seem to be learning Japanese for cultural (anime) reasons, I doubt that they fully understand how complex Japanese really is as a language, compared to English.

The easiest languages are probably Dutch, German and French, since English shares a significant amount of traits with them. French is probably easiest in terms of structure and syntax, while Dutch is probably easiest in terms of grammar. And since English is still primarily a Germanic language, other Germanic languages like Danish and Swedish are not going to be too much of a problem either. Icelandic is probably the hardest of the Germanic languages to learn for an English speaker, but it's still significantly easier than Russian. Icelandic shares some features with Latin as well, which most other languages have since lost, so learning Latin will help in learning Icelandic too.

[markintellect]

Another factor to remember is hat different dialects of languages will find it easier to pronounce some languages, and find it harder to pronounce others. For example, German and the Scottish dialect share some sounds which may be quite hard for others to pronounce, like the 'ch' in 'loch' (Scots 'lake'), which isn't pronounced 'lock' but as (IPA: Lo[x]), or like how you would pronounce 'Bach', as in the composer. On the other hand, people who have an accent more common to the south of England may find it easier to pronounce French. However, these are not set in stone, and would quite definitely not be the case for some people.