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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)

#21

Post by Toutouxc »

yosito wrote: post #16
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.

Sounds like Morse code to me. :)

Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing.

Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk).

Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).

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

#22

Post by lormayna »

escalt wrote: post #19
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

I have been study a bit of Mandarin and the tones are hard, but when you get rid of them it's not so hard. The main difficult for me in spoken Chinese is to learn the huge number of homophones and some idiomatic phrases. On the counterpart, there is almost no grammar. Reading is hard (a normal educated person know around 10/12k ideograms, people with high level education are over 20k), writing is even harder because you need to know the exact order of the traits. I know that also overseas chineses frequently forgot how to write in ideograms.

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

#23

Post by qsi »

Toutouxc wrote: post #21
yosito wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like Morse code to me. :) Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing. Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk). Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).

In addition Czech has the sound ř, which is almost impossible to pronounce unless you learn it in childhood. I don't know of any other language with that sound. Tongue-twisters will almost by definition explore the weird sound combinations in any language, but Czech is a fruitful hunting ground for these!

Interestingly, the geographically close but linguistically unrelated Hungarian makes up for all the vowels that Czech eschews. They're almost polar opposites in vowel usage.

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

#24

Post by yorwba »

escalt wrote: post #19
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

The grammar is not that simple. I think that misconception is caused by people noticing that they don't have to memorize conjugation tables like when learning fusional languages, but then they fail to realize that the complexity has not disappeared, it's just encoded in word order and choice of grammatical particles instead.

There's actually an NLP shared task challenging researchers to automatically detect grammar errors learners make when writing Chinese: http://www.cged.tech/

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

#25

Post by gnosek »

Toutouxc wrote: post #20
qsi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same. It takes a little effort to read but it's understandable and it does feel Croatian or thereabouts. On a somewhat funny note, Chrome decided to translate the page in Interslavic from Czech to Polish and did a passable job.

What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest).

* the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.

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

#26

Post by geraneum »

danjac wrote: post #5
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.

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…

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

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

#27

Post by danjac »

geraneum wrote: post #26
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…

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

Sure: the point is that every language has its own set of difficulties and hurdles, and your existing knowledge of other languages may remove or lessen some of those hurdles. So a Farsi speaker will not need to learn the Arabic alphabet from scratch, but (other than loanwords) the languages' vocabularies are different. On the other hand, a Maltese speaker will need to learn the Arabic alphabet, but will find Arabic vocabulary familiar as both Maltese and Arabic are Semitic languages.

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

#28

Post by euroderf »

danjac wrote: post #18
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.

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

The grammatical differences between Finnish and Estonian are largely systematic, except in the declining of nouns (where Estonian is kind of chaotic). Fully 35% of Estonian word stock is Germanic, so knowing some German would help.

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

#29

Post by FabHK »

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.

I'd venture to claim that many of the hardest languages are fairly small ones that most people will never have heard of (as Tuyuca mentioned in the article).

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

#30

Post by lormayna »

yorwba wrote: post #24
escalt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The grammar is not that simple. I think that misconception is caused by people noticing that they don't have to memorize conjugation tables like when learning fusional languages, but then they fail to realize that the complexity has not disappeared, it's just encoded in word order and choice of grammatical particles instead. There's actually an NLP shared task challenging researchers to automatically detect grammar e…

I know that it's not so simple. But at least for a basic conversation, grammar it's not the biggest roadblock.
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