Languages

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KOH

well, i know chinese is hard and so is japanese...arabic has not been a walk in the park either...Russian also seems to be a toughy as well..

whats wrong with english, arabic, french and spanish

Compared to Chinese, Japanese is relatively piss easy.

Next to French or German, then its relatively hard.

I was in a Chinese restaurant last night reading aloud the symbols in a Japanese reading, attempting to decipher it. The waitress behind the counter thought I was drunk or perhaps a little mentally ill. The lesson here, is never to confuse the two, or people will think you are insane.

I would rank Japanese below Chinese and its other slight affiliates like Thai and Vietnamese. Vietnamese gets off easy because it has a modified Latin script but retains the complex intonation.

katrin_tara

I'm (probably one of the only) freakish people who have studied Russian AND Japanese... it's hard to compare the two imo, because Japanese grammar is really quite easy, whereas Russian grammar *still* sometimes confuses me - after 5 years [6 stupid cases] :mad:

On the other hand, Russian took me a month or two to learn to read, and a couple more months to learn to write; japanese took me a year to learn to read one alphabet & some basic symbols, and the other alphabet is still beyond me...

There is a method to it.

I don't pity you - having decided to study two of the hardest languages combined. (Hardest grammar + plus hardest script.)

Japanese grammar is very minimalist tbh. If you study hard at Japanese you'll soon find the kanji you learnt will often crop up. But it takes years and years for even the most facile Japanese native to master it.

Reply 21

carefree_sloth

gaijin

I was in a Chinese restaurant last night reading aloud the symbols in a Japanese reading, attempting to decipher it. The waitress behind the counter thought I was drunk or perhaps a little mentally ill. The lesson here, is never to confuse the two, or people will think you are insane.

Agreed! Even though I don't study Japanese myself, I noticed that the language has borrowed many Chinese words and they are pronounced very differently.

Reply 22

quintsy

Becca

Basque is apparently the most difficult language to learn, AFAIK....

Oh yeah, because it's a language isolate (and one of the few left which are still quite commonly used). I'd love to learn it though- how can you not want to learn a language with the numbers 7 and 8 as zazpi and zortzi? :biggrin: