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Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

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Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#11

Post by Aengeuad »

sbehlasp wrote: post #2

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

Those are some of the hardest languages to learn but that's only really true for a monolingual English speaker.

When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.

For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#12

Post by Tor3 »

Clewza313 wrote: post #6
sbehlasp wrote: post #2

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

The US Foreign Service has a scale of how difficult languages are for a native English speaker: https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang... Category V, requiring 2200 hours of study, has "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and consists of Arabic, *Japanese, Korean, Cantonese (Chinese) and Mandarin (Chinese), with the asterisk indicating that Japanese is consid…

The only reason Japanese is on that list must be because of the writing system. I can't imagine it would be on the list if it were only about learning grammar and pronunciation. And when that's said - the writing system isn't actually hard, it's just that it takes time to learn it. There's nothing there that's difficult to wrap your head around.

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#14

Post by qsi »

ceceron wrote: post #10
Toutouxc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure. Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)

I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything.

[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#16

Post by yosito »

sbehlasp wrote: post #2

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

There is a Hungarian tongue twister that is a good example of why Hungarian is on this list:

"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese"

But this is not a representative example of what Hungarian is like.

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#17

Post by [deleted] »

Tor3 wrote: post #12
Clewza313 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Foreign Service has a scale of how difficult languages are for a native English speaker: https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang... Category V, requiring 2200 hours of study, has "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and consists of Arabic, *Japanese, Korean, Cantonese (Chinese) and Mandarin (Chinese), with the asterisk indicating that Japanese is consid…

The only reason Japanese is on that list must be because of the writing system. I can't imagine it would be on the list if it were only about learning grammar and pronunciation. And when that's said - the writing system isn't actually hard , it's just that it takes time to learn it. There's nothing there that's difficult to wrap your head around.

[deleted]

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#18

Post by danjac »

Toutouxc wrote: post #9
danjac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech. Arabic is probably easier if you know another Semitic language such as Hebrew, or at least another language written in the Arabic alphabet, such as Farsi or Urdu. Also "hard" is difficult to quantify. Humans are odd and quirky, and so are the languages they create (with perhaps the exception of conlangs like Esperanto or computer languages, but eve…

> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure. Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

Sorry that sentence wasn't clear: Finnish is easy if you know Estonian, and Polish is easy if you know Czech.

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#19

Post by escalt »

sbehlasp wrote: post #2

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

As far as I know Chinese (Mandarin) is actually very easy to talk/understand since it has very simple grammar. The reading/writing on the other hand takes a lot of dedication. At least that's what someone learning Mandarin told me

Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

#20

Post by Toutouxc »

qsi wrote: post #14
ceceron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)

I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything. [1…

Interslavic is like 95 % intelligible for me, a Czech, and has a strong southern (ex-yugoslavian) vibe. I wonder what Poles think of it.
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