http://www.economist.com/world/internati...d=15108609

The Economist Wrote:With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

They manage not to drop a single line about Japanese.

I don't think Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or English come even close to being hard to learn. Maybe the writing systems of each is mind boggling to some, but speech wise it doesn't seem very irratic/illogical.

Yeah, if you read the whole article you can see that they're talking only about the languages, not the writing systems. Although they certainly could have talked about Japanese's horrifically complex politeness system.

I think it's impossible to find the "most difficult language", because it's different for each person. I'm sure the people who natively speak the "hard languages" don't think it's very hard at all.

I found Spanish/French really hard in high school, even though I've spent my whole life using English. However Japanese was really painless (having grown up around it a lot), which is completely opposite of most native English speakers.

Language is all about exposure, not levels of difficulty.

What about the African Bush languages that involve different tongue clicks? Here's a fun example:

The language in the video is Xhosa, which has 18 different click sounds - can you hear the difference?

Ok, so of the languages that have tens of thousands of hours of mass entertainment available in that language, which is harder.

Jeez, picking a bush language? Why not go with a dead language that only has the writing system left of it that we still can't decipher? Any language you have no interest in learning is going to be damn hard to learn.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Yeah, if you read the whole article you can see that they're talking only about the languages, not the writing systems. Although they certainly could have talked about Japanese's horrifically complex politeness system.

It's like they said in that newer and not as good Star Wars film with the irritating racial stereotype: there's always a bigger fish. In this case, Korean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_hono...ech_levels

Japanese is looking pretty easy right now.

The USA's Defense Language Institute considers Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to be the hardest languages for native speakers of English to learn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Institute

"The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."

That's pretty effing crazy!

To me the most difficult one was French, back in high school. Japanese does not even compare.

Hmm, I don't think there can be any one most difficult language. I think all languages are extremely complex. I also don't really understand why people always say things like "language X is easier than language Y," or "such-and-such language is such an easy language." How hard you find learning a foreign language depends on all sorts of things, but definitely how closely related it is to your mother tongue or other languages that you know is a big factor. I also think you could find "hard" and "easy" things about pretty much all languages.

jajaaan Wrote:"The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."

That's pretty effing crazy!

Ahahaha yikes, seriously. XD

That was the most boring read ever

I'd say the hardest to learn is that which you have the littlest access to. Japanese and Chinese are perceived as the hardest for speakers of English out of any languages that are actually worthwhile or common place in the world.

Dunno why anyone sitting in their living room would one day think that they wanted to learn some random language spoken by less than a thousand people in a place they'll never go would be a good idea. Guess that's linguists for ya.

The Economist Wrote:Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see.

So, since Japanese has counters, that means that each group of nouns that uses a specific counter is part of a specific noun class, right?

mezbup Wrote:Dunno why anyone sitting in their living room would one day think that they wanted to learn some random language spoken by less than a thousand people in a place they'll never go would be a good idea. Guess that's linguists for ya.

Yep. Pretty much. Then again, you could say the same thing for any other type of scientist. At the end of the day they study the things they study because they are nerdy scientists, but often this type of research leads to other things, like important discoveries, new insights about the world or theoretical basis for still more research.

shirokuro Wrote:So, since Japanese has counters, that means that each group of nouns that uses a specific counter is part of a specific noun class, right?

That's an interesting observation, but I don't think it's quite on target. Noun classes generally have to do with inflections, on both the noun and adjective (when used to modify that noun). Since Japanese nouns have no inflections and Japanese adjectives only have one form before all nouns, I wouldn't use the same term "noun class" to describe the semantics of counters. Lots of languages (all the ones I'm familiar with) have counters and though I'm not familiar with any Amerindian or African language, I don't know of a language where the counters are directly related to word gender or noun class (though it's easy to imagine that they would be in a language where nouns are grouped according to semantic categories).

jajaan Wrote:

shirokuro Wrote:So, since Japanese has counters, that means that each group of nouns that uses a specific counter is part of a specific noun class, right?

That's an interesting observation, but I don't think it's quite on target. Noun classes generally have to do with inflections, on both the noun and adjective (when used to modify that noun). Since Japanese nouns have no inflections and Japanese adjectives only have one form before all nouns, I wouldn't use the same term "noun class" to describe the semantics of counters. Lots of languages (all the ones I'm familiar with) have counters and though I'm not familiar with any Amerindian or African language, I don't know of a language where the counters are directly related to word gender or noun class (though it's easy to imagine that they would be in a language where nouns are grouped according to semantic categories).

Oh, OK, then is there a specific term in linguistics to refer to a group of nouns that all share the same counter?

Also, I don't really think of English as having counters, although you do have to say things like a loaf of bread, but this still seems a lot different from how counters are used in languages like Japanese and Korean.

And is there any actual distinction between "word gender" and "noun class," or is it just that "noun class" is the more accurate term in linguistics?

So how developed are these amazon languages. Do their vocabularies include scientific, mathematical, etc spans that for example French or Russian would.

I mean, I dont see the criteria for classifying these languages on difficulty. Would they be easier if they were given more exposure and not made up of "weird" sounds.

shirokuro Wrote:Oh, OK, then is there a specific term in linguistics to refer to a group of nouns that all share the same counter?

I don't know of one. Maybe someone else will chime in here.

Quote:Also, I don't really think of English as having counters, although you do have to say things like a loaf of bread, but this still seems a lot different from how counters are used in languages like Japanese and Korean.

You've got a point there. Japanese counters definitely seem to be inflectional, whereas English counters are always phrases. I'd still say that they work the same way, though. The main difference is that every noun in Japanese must be counted with a counter, but in English some nouns may be counted directly. You can have a loaf of bread in Japanese and English, but you can also have a slice of bread in either language. Counters in Japanese can also be used "incorrectly" for satire or metaphor, and a lot of nouns aren't bound to any single counter. For instance in the use of -hiki for animals in general, even when -tou might be more appropriate, or the use of the -tsu and -ko series when the speaker doesn't know the more correct counter.

Quote:And is there any actual distinction between "word gender" and "noun class," or is it just that "noun class" is the more accurate term in linguistics?

I'd say that word genders are usually noun classes, but not always the other way around. I dunno. Linguists and Grammarians study many of the same areas and borrow terminology from each other indiscriminately. It really depends on the language you're talking about and who started work on describing its grammar as to which terms are preferred.

Erubey Wrote:So how developed are these amazon languages. Do their vocabularies include scientific, mathematical, etc spans that for example French or Russian would.

I mean, I dont see the criteria for classifying these languages on difficulty. Would they be easier if they were given more exposure and not made up of "weird" sounds.

Many of these Amazonian tribes traditionally don't have much contact with the western world, much less higher education, so...probably not a lot of scientific terms in their vocabularies. Though they probably would have hundreds of words for concepts we describe with only a few words like "rain" and "snake."

jajaaan Wrote:Though they probably would have hundreds of words for concepts we describe with only a few words like "rain" and "snake."

"hundreds"

lol

In defense of the article, this comes from the double holiday issue of The Economist, which allows its editors to write some articles on whatever topic they want, so they tend to be slightly lighter/fluffier articles. This isn't intended to be an in-depth linguistic article, just kind of a fluff "look at these hard languages" piece.

1) Hungarian
2) Japanese
3) Russian
4) Chinese

yudantaiteki Wrote:In defense of the article, this comes from the double holiday issue of The Economist, which allows its editors to write some articles on whatever topic they want, so they tend to be slightly lighter/fluffier articles. This isn't intended to be an in-depth linguistic article, just kind of a fluff "look at these hard languages" piece.

It would still be nice if the writer knew how to use punctuation correctly.

Where are the punctuation errors? The Economist is a British magazine (or "newspaper") so the comma outside the quotation mark is not an error, but I didn't see anything else.