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)
#2some 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.
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#3some 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.
It also depends on the number of languages you already know and use, and way more important, if you are forced to use it or not.
If you are native Finnish speaker left alone in a village where the only practiced language is Arabic, you are going to speak Arabic pretty fast! If you speak 20 different languages and as soon as you try to speak Danish the person in front of you answers in English, you will have hard time learning it.
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#4I just finished reading this very interesting article about Pirahã which seems nearly impossible for non-native speakers to learn. The article is about how it may lack recursion, which Chomsky originally proposed as the key unique feature of human language which now seems to be the generally accepted view.
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...]
(I am not a linguist) (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868259)
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#5some 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 even those inherit the idiosyncrasies of their creators - Perl is a good example). Every language has its weird and difficult aspects, some more than others.
Japanese is "hard" because it has a complex writing system, but (for an English speaker) the pronunciation and grammar aren't particularly difficult: in fact I'd argue that Japanese is probably easier to learn to pronounce for an Anglophone than, say, French, and the verbs are considerably easier too. And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. Having once taught English, I'd say it's no cakewalk either, even for speakers of other Germanic languages: the spelling system barely deserves the name "system" and English verbal phrases are downright weird (put up with == "tolerate"? How?).
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#6some 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 considered the hardest of the lot.
Obvious caveat: the Foreign Service only teaches languages useful for diplomats, meaning that obscure regional languages won't make the cut.
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#7some 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.
It all depends on immersion and motivation, if you desperately need to learn a language you will work hard to get there. Immersion will expose your listening skill to recognize unique sounds in the target language. That is not to say it makes it easier for you to utter them, it just helps with the early comprehension. I met an Urdu speaking taxi driver who spoke English and Arabic as if he was a native speaker of both, after 6 months of merely listening to the radio in his car.
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#8some 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.
some interesting facts [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-number-of-languages-s...]
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#9some 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…
> 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.
Re: Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)
#10Earlier 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.
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 ;)