Hardest Language?

Poll

Which languages is the hardest to learn from scratch?

abshirf2

1

Also How hard is it to learn two languages? i.e. french and mandarin from scratch OR french and arabic from scratch?

Reply 1

abshirf2

OP

1

ofcourse it varies from person to person but i want peoples opinions!!!

Reply 2

Ferrus

19

What is regarded as a "hard" language will largely bet determined by which language you speak as a native. Other European languages are easier to a native speaker of an European language; equally Mandarin is easier than French to a speaker of Cantonese of Japanese because of the paucity of cognates. The only slight excpetion is langauges with exceptionally hard grammar - Finnish for example - or when they have differences in pronunciation. For example, Chinese tonal pronunciation or the very different sounds used in many African languages (such as Xhosa). Although here again your speaking a similar language will help considerably.

Reply 3

abshirf2

OP

1

Ok one more time: in your opinion whatever language you speak who ever you are which is the hardest for YOU?

Reply 4

Excalibur

15

In my OPINION, I'd say Japanese - even as a native speaker I find the language intricately complex sometimes. Although at school/uni level it may be relatively simple, the language is full of nuances, tones etc that is difficult to grasp for a learner (and for a native person whose Japanese is rusty). Chinese and other oriental languages may be difficult too for similar reasons.

The only foreign language I know are German, Spanish and English, and the forner two only to GCSE level so I don't think I'm in any position to judge. English wasn't particularly difficult for me, although that's probably because I grew up with it.

I do hear that Hungarian and Norwegian are very difficult though.

What about Russian ?

abshirf2

Also How hard is it to learn two languages? i.e. french and mandarin from scratch OR french and arabic from scratch?

Are you asian? Do you speak Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi/Gujarati/Bengali?

(Judging from your name, it seems your asian..)

Reply 7

cabeza_loca

Ever tried to learn Irish?? Its not for the faint-hearted :|

Reply 8

kellywood_5

17

Out of those, I would say Mandarin but that's because to me it's the most 'exotic' and probably the least similar to English. I only study French and Spanish though, and out of those, I find Spanish harder because of the grammar, listening and pronounciation. It's probably just because I've been learning French for much longer and had much more practice though. I'd say it would be very difficult to study 2 languages from scratch, but it wouldn't be impossible as long as you put the work in.

Reply 9

zorah

Well, arabic is hard but you can do it with a good teacher and regular lessons!
I think if you this for 2 to 3 years you will get a high mark in GCSE, it takes time!

Reply 10

BovineBeast

miltonkeynes

Well if your going to call Mandarin a language (which it isn't)

Yes, it is. At least, Mandarin and Cantonese are at least as seperated as English and German. Though they share a common written form, to call them the same language is stretching it. Though I agree that Cantonese is harder.

I voted for Mandarin, but that's probably a bit inaccurate. The Spoken language itself doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to me (except the tones). The trouble would come with the writing system. Which would be better described as Chinese. So I'd say that when I voted for Mandarin, I meant Standard Chinese.

Reply 11

khil

15

miltonkeynes

Well if your going to call Mandarin a language (which it isn't), you should add Cantonese too, which is significantly harder. Both are dialects of Chinese.

Mandarin is a language. I can understand why one might not consider Cantonese as a language but certainly Mandarin is! The only reason for anyone not counting Cantonese as a language is that it's not written. But then my bf raised an interesting point - does it mean that before writing was invented, people didn't have a language then cus it wasn't written? :p:

I think he makes a good point!

Anyway, I voted Mandarin cus being tonal, it's pretty hard for anyone who wasn't brought up with it to speak, and then you got the writing to deal with. I have no knowledge of Arabic so I wouldn't know with Arabic. Anyway, generally, I'd argue that Cantonese is harder than Mandarin cus spoken and written Cantonese are different and you get a lot of words that are solely spoken and not written. Canto also uses traditional Chinese writing which makes it harder than Mandarin since Mandarin uses simplified. Or should I say China teaches Simplified and HK teaches Traditional?

Reply 12

Alexthepenguin

miltonkeynes

Well if your going to call Mandarin a language (which it isn't), you should add Cantonese too, which is significantly harder. Both are dialects of Chinese.

Mandarin is indeed the offical language of China

Reply 13

Alexthepenguin

irisng

Anyway, I voted Mandarin cus being tonal, it's pretty hard for anyone who wasn't brought up with it to speak, and then you got the writing to deal with. I have no knowledge of Arabic so I wouldn't know with Arabic. Anyway, generally, I'd argue that Cantonese is harder than Mandarin cus spoken and written Cantonese are different and you get a lot of words that are solely spoken and not written. Canto also uses traditional Chinese writing which makes it harder than Mandarin since Mandarin uses simplified. Or should I say China teaches Simplified and HK teaches Traditional?

i speak cantonese and i live in hong kong for quite a long time. not all cantonese people write in traditional chinese...its only used in the hong kong and macau area. Simplified chinese writing. has a much shorter history then traditional chinese writing. simplified chinese was only invented under the instruction of chairman Mao with an intention of making chinese easier and only existed for like 50 years or so. but with traditional chinese you can trace back to hieroglyph and ideogram and it has a history of more than 50 years.

cantanoese also has a longer history than mandarin. cantonese was spoken for thousands of years while mandarin was only "invented" (whatever you wanna call it like in last five hundred years or so. cantonese is the most widely spoken dialect in china atm and i think cantonese is much harder to learn. appearently there is a list compiled by a scientist after years of research and he stated cantonese among other languages (or dialects) that it is one of the 10 most difficult (existing) languages to learn. sometimes for the same pronounciation, we have nine different intonations (nine different characters as well) for it meaning nine different things while mandarin only has four. in fact, mandarin is one of the easiest chinese dialects to learn and perhaps for this reason it became the official languages of china lol

irisng

Mandarin is a language. I can understand why one might not consider Cantonese as a language but certainly Mandarin is! The only reason for anyone not counting Cantonese as a language is that it's not written. But then my bf raised an interesting point - does it mean that before writing was invented, people didn't have a language then cus it wasn't written? :p:

I think he makes a good point!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_%28linguistics%29

japanese

Another factor is how motivated you are to learn a language. If you aren't really that keen you will get frustrated and it will seem harder than it is. Likewise if you're really passionate about learning it, it will come easier.

Reply 16

khil

15

euanovsky

i speak cantonese and i live in hong kong for quite a long time. not all cantonese people write in traditional chinese...its only used in the hong kong and macau area. Simplified chinese writing. has a much shorter history then traditional chinese writing. simplified chinese was only invented under the instruction of chairman Mao with an intention of making chinese easier and only existed for like 50 years or so. but with traditional chinese you can trace back to hieroglyph and ideogram and it has a history of more than 50 years.

cantanoese also has a longer history than mandarin. cantonese was spoken for thousands of years while mandarin was only "invented" (whatever you wanna call it like in last five hundred years or so. cantonese is the most widely spoken dialect in china atm and i think cantonese is much harder to learn. appearently there is a list compiled by a scientist after years of research and he stated cantonese among other languages (or dialects) that it is one of the 10 most difficult (existing) languages to learn. sometimes for the same pronounciation, we have nine different intonations (nine different characters as well) for it meaning nine different things while mandarin only has four. in fact, mandarin is one of the easiest chinese dialects to learn and perhaps for this reason it became the official languages of china lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_%28linguistics%29

Wow 66million speakers? Yay Cantonese won't die out after all! :biggrin:

I was thinking that Cantonese might die out one day cus so few people seem to speak it - certainly it doesn't seem like a widely known language around England. And no one ever seem to wanna learn Cantonese - they're all only interested in Mandarin :redface:

Shame, really. Although, I sure hope Cantonese won't die out in HK :redface:

I keep thinking that a few decades down the line, HK would eventually become a Mandarin-speaking region and I'd hate that. HK should become independent. Since when has any HK-ese considered themselves truly "Chinese" as in to belong to China anyway!

Now that I didn't know, the fact that Cantonese is older than Mandarin - that's actually pretty cool! :biggrin:

Btw I speak Cantonese too :biggrin:

only I moved to England when I was 8 (am now 19) so it's been a while and I'm not really in touch with the Chinese side much anymore, except for certain desserts, anime and the language - can still speak, listen and read although not so much write anymore but I hope to recap cus Chinese Literature I imagine must be soooo beautiful. So why not take advantage of my background? :p:

Anyway, traditional Chinese looks so much more beautiful. I hate the look of simplified Chinese. I got taught traditional anyway in HK.

Reply 17

isometric

Except german and portuguese i have learnt the other languages to a good degree and I would definitely say mandarin, or rather Chinese, (with simplified writing) the harder as it is the most different to english. i guess portuguese can't be too hard (it's similar to spanish isn't it!?) Then again, after learning chinese for a couple of years it gets considerably easier to grasp...

Reply 18

shyopstv

15

None of the above: Without studying it, I can say that Korean is probably more difficult that any of the languages in that poll that I have studied/know (Mandarin, German, French, English). For me anyway:

Its verb conjugation is horrendous: Each verb has over 600 different endings depending on context
Adjectives are conjugated in a similar way. Though in this case you only have to remember 500 different endings. Easy.
They have the same kana/kanji system as the Japanese (its only slightly easier than Chinese)

From the very little Mandarin I have learned, the tones aren't that bad. There are only four and I can clearly hear the difference between them. Besides, no matter what langauge you learn, you need to learn the correct intonation or you will look like an idiot (try saying elevator without stressing teh third syllable). It also has very easy grammar (word order is the same as English, nouns and verbs never change). The most difficult thing for me in the spoken part is the fact that no words have latin roots so they share absolutly no similarity to European languages. At least in French or German, you can recognise a few hundred words just because they are the same as English. In Mandarin, you have to learn everything from scratch and if you have never come across a word before, unless you can guess by context, you have no chance of knowing what it means.

Writting is very difficult but Mandarin at least has the advantage of simplified characters. Yes traditional look nicer but I tried to write one and was soon running back to good ol' simplified :biggrin:

None of the Romance or Germanic languages are that difficult for a native English speaker. Finnish is probably the hardest European language with extreme case overload. 14 in total. Ask anyone learning German how they get on with just 4 :p:

Out of the ones in your poll, I would say French simply because it happens to be the one language that is almost as irregular as English

Reply 19

BovineBeast

euanovsky

cantanoese also has a longer history than mandarin. cantonese was spoken for thousands of years while mandarin was only "invented" (whatever you wanna call it like in last five hundred years or so.

Now that's not quite true. Both are descendents of Middle (and Old) Chinese. Now, Cantonese resembles Middle Chinese closer in some respects (for example, allowing stops (p, t, and k) at the ends of words), and is further in others (Middle Chinese had only four tones, for example, whereas Cantonese has 6).

Hardest Language?

Which languages is the hardest to learn from scratch?

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