learn?

I seem to think (I cant remember who told me) that native american languages are the languages the most different grammatically and morphologically from English and therefore the most difficult to learn - I am not sure for sure though - does anyone have any more information or candidates for hard languages?

[Zgarbas]

Hungarian. Hungarian scares me.

I second what Zgarbas says. I can imagine Korean to be pain in the ass, too.

FSI says it's Japanese. ^-^

I heard languages spoken in Africa and regions geographically close to Africa typically have richer phonetical inventories because they tend to retain older phonemes like clicks. Don't quote me on this though. Anyway, if this is the case, those languages might be good candidates if you want to master pronunciation as well, though other phonological aspects may be actually simpler.

There are many languages whose grammatical aspects are completely different from English. But those linguistic aspects are the easiest part for an adult to master because you can take full advantage of your adult brain. What's really difficult to learn when it comes to learning a foreign language as an adult is actual usages rather than general rules. Or you could say it's the exceptions to the rules that is the hardest. Every language is equally complicated at this level, so any language is equally difficult if you really want to be awesome at the language; linguistic similarity to your native language and superficial simplicity in grammar may give you a head start, but it's pretty much negligible if you set your standards high enough.

Also, it's known that adults can't learn certain phonetical aspects for biological reasons while it seems many other aspects not directly related to your accent such as grammar, usage, and vocabulary can be mastered even better than your average native speaker. Research has shown that bilinguals who started learning a language naturally at age 6 the same way as any other kids would still exhibit differences in perception of sound from real native speakers who have been exposed to the language since they were born. In short, you can't get away with interference from your native language you've been exposed to since you were a baby. So you need to compromise or come up with a way to get around this disadvantage. So if oral aspects are equally important to you and if your standards are quite high, you might want to look into what you can't learn anymore and how this affects your learning a specific language.

With that all said, I think, in a sense, it's your native language that is the most difficult to master. If you're learning a foreign language, people think your command of the language is great if you're just as good as your average native speaker, which is quite mediocre if you think about it. But you should hold much higher standards to be considered great when it comes to your native language. There are tons of nonnative speakers who have achieved "great" proficiency in their second languages. But usually the level they actually achieved is just mediocre or even poorer when compared to native speakers. People give you no slack when they judge your mastery of your native language.

Of course, if you just want to impress ignorants out there, you can always pick an Asian language or two plus Arabic or maybe some really exotic language. Don't forget to throw in popular ones like Latin and French if you want to look smart to people who look down on certain groups of people for racial reasons as well.

So, I think it all depends on your purpose, the level you want to achieve, and which aspect you care most.

Japanese.

is japanese harder than chinese for english speakers?

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I thought Korean was the most difficult among the popular Asian languages...

I read it in the guiness book of records http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories...nguages-0/ but have heard it said elsewhere that amerindian languages are hard - I agree with Zgarbas on Hungarian

One thing you have to be careful about is whether writing is being factored into the difficulty or not; remember that to most linguists a "language" means speech (or signs) so if you're reading something comparing languages, they may not be taking the writing system into account.

Bokusenou Wrote:FSI says it's Japanese. ^-^

This list doesn't seem to include any Amerindian or African languages.

I'm always surprised when lists like this put Japanese at the very top. My reaction is always "yeah, it's hard, but is it really that hard?" Of course, some time later I'll be reading some Japanese text and start thinking it's the most overly complicated, cockamamie language a human mind could have ever conceived.


It also always surprises me to see that Hungarian isn't even in the top group, after hearing the horror stories about it. Anything with a conjugated case system is indimidating to me, and Hungarian sounds like it has a whopper of a conjugated case system.

[Zgarbas]

Actually Hungarian scares me because I've known how to ask for a beer for what, 6 years now. I've been to Hungary numerous times. Where I've asked for a beer. This after having been explained how to pronounce stuff in Hungarian dozens of times.
And yet, every time I ask for one, any Hungarian who hears me has no idea what I'm saying. Then explains to me how to ask for a beer and no matter how hard i try it always sounds just like I said it. This happens with roughly any Hungarian word or phrase I know.

And then there's the crazy grammar, but the fact that I've never gotten past the basic phonetics with it just keeps me from even attempting it =(.

JimmySeal Wrote:

Bokusenou Wrote:FSI says it's Japanese. ^-^

This list doesn't seem to include any Amerindian or African languages.

I'm always surprised when lists like this put Japanese at the very top. My reaction is always "yeah, it's hard, but is it really that hard?" Of course, some time later I'll be reading some Japanese text and start thinking it's the most overly complicated, cockamamie language a human mind could have ever conceived.


It also always surprises me to see that Hungarian isn't even in the top group, after hearing the horror stories about it. Anything with a conjugated case system is indimidating to me, and Hungarian sounds like it has a whopper of a conjugated case system.

FSI is the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department. They teach diplomats languages. Based on their decades of experience teaching tens of thousands of native English speakers multiple languages, they've determined that Japanese is up at (or near) the top in terms of difficulty.

Amerindian and African languages don't show up in the list because they are not important enough to teach diplomats how to speak them.

The Foreign Service Institute says Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are the five hardest. Actually, different publications from the FSI have sometimes said that either Korean or Japanese are hardest of them. So Japanese and Korean are definitely up there, at least compared to the 63 languages the FSI has programs for.

Which means, we're all a little crazy for studying Japanese.

Hungarian is certainly difficult for English speakers, but it can't be considered harder than Japanese which has such things as Kanji that can have multiple readings. Both Japanese and Hungarian are very different from English in terms of grammar rules, but which one is more different?. Well, Japanese is more isolated than Hungarian, which albeit belonging to a totally different branch of languages, is still a European language and cultural exchange has been present between its speakers and the rest of the world for a longer period of time than in Japanese. The same idea applies to Arabic, but I guess the FSI puts it in the top because of its writing script which is more complicated than say, the Greek or the cyrillic alphabet.

I don't know about Hungarian phonology because I haven't studied it properly, but I looked at its IPA page in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Hungarian and unless there are some special rules not mentioned there I conclude that if anything, Hungarian pronunciation should the easiest part of learning the language. The only catch are [ɟ] which is present in Greek and it's very close to [dʒ] and perhaps the [ø] vowel which is just a compressed Spanish 'e'.

Spanish 'e' is the initial 'e' sound in the English face and a compressed vowel is found in the Japanese 'u'. For pictures of compressed lips check this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundedness

kitakitsune Wrote:FSI is the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department....

I'm sorry, did my post offend you somehow? There's no need to be so defensive on behalf of the FSI.

All I said was that it seems weird to me that Japanese is always at the top of these lists, because I can't help feeling like there must be languages that are harder than this.

I'm well aware why that list only has a certain selection of languages on it, but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't give very conclusive answers as far as this thread's discussion goes.

kitakitsune Wrote:Amerindian and African languages don't show up in the list because they are not important enough to teach diplomats how to speak them.

Yes, and because of that the FSI report can't be considered the ideal reference to answer OP's question properly, as he mentions things such as native American languages and language isolates as possibilities. English speakers who try to learn much more uncommon languages, such as ǃXóõ and ǂHõã for example, with an incredible vast number of speech sounds, idiosyncratic grammar and virtually no learning or reference materials, are usually only linguists doing some kind of research, and even the materials they have written are hard to find and not enough to learn much.

Then, to learn these isolated languages to a basic level, people often have to live where others speak them (maybe bringing them to their homes would work too, but I'm not sure how that would work out), places that are often very poor, underdeveloped and uncomfortable to be in for someone from a richer place. Also, it's necessary to find natives who have the patience to deal with an adult who can't communicate using the right words for years, who very likely will never be able to pronunce them properly, and a strong determination to overcome the frustration that comes from that inability. In addition, they can't use the language for any type of 'useful' communication outside those places, because the small number of natives who know them mostly don't have access to any type of modern communication technologies such as telephones or the Internet, and there are no recorded movies, music, literature or anything like that to be entertained with the language and reminded of it - unless, sure, they record something while in there and find a way to transcribe what's being said.

This peculiar social aspect, and the constant reminder that all the time spent learning the language will be for nothing (again, unless they work with the language somehow, such as linguists) adds much to the difficulty of learning them, often as much as the absolute aspects such as phonetics and grammar.

yudantaiteki Wrote:One thing you have to be careful about is whether writing is being factored into the difficulty or not; remember that to most linguists a "language" means speech (or signs) so if you're reading something comparing languages, they may not be taking the writing system into account.

This is noteworthy; accordingly, languages that use han characters are often considered harder than any other in that regard. In a related subject, people in other places (not in RevTK) often mention the considerably higher number of hanzi that Chinese uses as something that makes it harder than Japanese, but this is to some extent overcome by the fact that they are much more consistently used in Chinese and have a much better integration with the spoken language for having grown organically with it (plus a better standardization of all the characters people use nowadays, in both Taiwan and China) while in Japanese the kanji was seemingly forced on top of it, as in they had the words and said, "what Chinese characters from this list can we use for this Japanese word?", which invariably caused that which people call "multiple pronunciations for the same kanji", source of so many problems for learners, and what gives Japanese the highest rank when it comes to the difficulty of the writing system. More when reading than when writing, though, because when writing by hand is possible to use kana in the place of the kanji you don't remember.

magamo Wrote:I heard languages spoken in Africa and regions geographically close to Africa typically have richer phonetical inventories because they tend to retain older phonemes like clicks.

I've heard of this theory. IIRC it was meant to tie the "out of Africa" theory of human origins and migrations (the dominant theory nowadays) with the "proto-human language" theory and show that all human languages descend from the same ancestor which was spoken in Africa. I don't have any objections to this claim, but I find the assumption that clicks must be an old feature of human language dubious (and most modern linguists seem to agree). I've always thought that the idea that clicks are a primordial feature rather than a more recent innovation was based on patronizing attitudes towards hunter-gatherer cultures ("their lifestyles are primitive, which means that their languages are primitive, which means that clicks are also primitive"). Besides, the language spoken in the "old country" is quite often less conservative than that spoken in regions settled later: (e.g. Danish vs. Icelandic, Mandarin vs. Cantonese, Satem vs. Centum).

CarolinaCG Wrote:is japanese harder than chinese for english speakers?

For the most part, unless the English speaker has an incredible difficulty with the sounds of Chinese, which are much more abundant and different than Japanese, and a block concerning the much bigger number of hanzi being used all the time. That doesn't mean it would take the learner a lot less time to be 'fluent' in Chinese than in Japanese, though - that's a wrong interpretation of the facts.

I felt like I made much faster progress in Chinese than in Japanese and learned a lot more in a shorter period of time. Being able to hear and pronounce the tones was a big problem at first, but once that "clicked" I felt like it got easier.

Here's a good comparison of the difficulty of various aspects of Chinese and Japanese on different stages of learning. And here (starting from the second comment) is a rather well-known polyglot's argumentation for his opinion that Korean is more difficult than Japanese.

Studying both Japanese and Korean, Japanese is definitely easier vocabulary-wise or speaking/listening comprehension-wise. The grammar is similar in both. The thing that makes Japanese rather difficult are kanji.

I have no experience with Chinese, so I don't know how hard it is to master the tones to the point where you're able to differentiate them mid-speech, but my Korean listening comprehension is quite bad. I often don't understand what my professor is saying (even though I'd understand it if I had the text in front of me) unless he slows his speaking to the point where it's just plain silly.

So if Chinese is anywhere near as hard as Korean, add to that the one thing that makes Japanese difficult, hanzi, and it wins in the difficulty among the languages hands down.

The African or Native American languages have a very small vocabulary, and you have to take that into account, so I don't think they even count.

Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies? These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually. They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

Quote:I find the assumption that clicks must be an old feature of human language dubious

As you should; it's a dubious claim. No current language, dialect, or language we have any records of is more or less "primitive" than another, and the only languages that are "old" are dead languages that are no longer spoken by anyone.