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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)

#31

Post by FabHK »

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…

^ this. I find it a bit annoying when people tell me that Chinese "has no grammar" because it is not inflected.

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

#32

Post by FabHK »

If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy the fascinating course "Language families of the world" by the excellent John McWhorter. He elaborates on many of the aspects mentioned in the article. (It's quite expensive though, unless you resort to a pirated version.)

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/language-families-of-the...

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

#33

Post by FabHK »

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…

The linguist John DeFrancis (author of the insightful and somewhat controversial The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) opines (in that book, IIRC) that among character-based writing systems, Japanese is the worst, and among alphabetic ones, English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...

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

#34

Post by 0ld »

gnosek wrote: post #25
Toutouxc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other.

i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand

say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.

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

#35

Post by ajb »

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.

That's like the one in Chinese: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ (and so on for 94 syllables) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

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

#36

Post by gnoll_of_gozag »

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…

> And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese

and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences

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

#37

Post by greggman3 »

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.

So I had this debate at a meetup. The issue here is how you define "hardest". Spoken Japanese is actually judged by linguists as easier than English. Written Japanese is harder because it takes years to learn all the kanji but a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English.

So being "literate" (able to read and write) is different than being "fluent" (able to listen and speak) (not sure that's the definition of fluent, just pointing out there are more issues.)

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

#39

Post by yorwba »

qsi wrote: post #23
Toutouxc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

Phoible lists four phoneme inventories with the Czech ([r̝] in IPA), three of which are varieties of Czech and the fourth being Lyélé in Burkina Faso: https://phoible.org/parameters/1214D761CC44F5F017FD63EA26B45...

However, Phoible is not exactly complete. E.g. Wikipedia has a different list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_po...

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

#40

Post by inglor_cz »

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 ;)

There is a saying that both Poles and Czechs perceive the other language as if small kids were speaking. From a Czech perspective, this seems to be true. And the resulting cuteness is a major source of fun :)
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