Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

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

#41

Post by unionpivo »

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…

It sounds very familiar to me, I am Slovenian and our sound Ž sounds similar to ř

I know that Czech also has Ž, but to my ears we pronounce it harder, so words like žrelo, or žrebiček ... it kind of comes close.

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

#42

Post by yosito »

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).

It sounds even more like Morse code when you realize that the double Ts are a longer sound than the single Ts. It really is like dots and dashes.

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

#44

Post by bradrn »

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.

> Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish

Why all well-known Eurasian languages? Lesser-known languages have difficult features galore, especially for European speakers. (The first example which comes to mind is the Papuan language Kalam, which has only ~100 verbs, but uses these to build up precise descriptions of complex actions in a way which is quite difficult for the European speaker to master; but there of course many more examples of difficult-to-learn features like this.)

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

#45

Post by jrd259 »

FabHK wrote: post #32

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...

I express my dismay that you would even suggest using a pirated edition. Do you deny that McWhorter (and/or his publisher) is entitled to sell his work?

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

#46

Post by yorwba »

greggman3 wrote: post #37
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 th…

> a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English.

Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?

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

#47

Post by maininformer »

jrd259 wrote: post #45
FabHK wrote: post #32

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...

I express my dismay that you would even suggest using a pirated edition. Do you deny that McWhorter (and/or his publisher) is entitled to sell his work?

Don't.

Piracy has its awesome use-cases if not abused.

I grew up in Iran where we have access to very little. Had it not been for piratebay, I could not educate myself on so, so many topics. Even Udacity was blocked there cause their videos are hosted on Youtube!

So if someone reads HN and they need to pirate it, I'm pretty sure McWhorter would be okay, he's a chill dude.

I believe the problem lies with people who can buy it but decide to not; in which case it becomes abusive.

So I wouldn't express dismay just at the suggestion of piracy. It's more nuanced imho.

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

#48

Post by danjac »

euroderf wrote: post #28
danjac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes: I noticed in Tallinn the police cars were called "Politsei" (from German Polizei) in contrast to Finnish "Poliisi" (from Swedish Polis).

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

#49

Post by nonbirithm »

gnoll_of_gozag wrote: post #36
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…

> 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

That the nice thing about Japanese. It's pretty easy to guess the meaning of a word by only knowing the kanji. For example, the word 配信, meaning "stream" or "broadcast", is made up of the kanji that generally indicate "distribution" and "signal". Conversely, English doesn't have as much of that benefit for unknown words.

After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice.

The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.

Post reply on HN