What's The Hardest Language To Learn?

[burnlaur25]

I suppose this is a common topic for debate, but this guy has done a pretty exhaustive overview on the subject. Split into two parts, IE, and non-IE, and runs to 90 pages total.

Non-IE http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-non-indo-european-languages/

IE http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn/

Pretty interesting. Chinese, Polish, Finnish, Hungarian, Navajo, Czech and Slovak come out very high on the hard to learn index. Spanish, Portuguese and Bahasa Indonesia come out easiest to learn.

[Renaçido]

Impressive list, you don't usually see language families from Africa and the New World appearing in lists of "hardest to learn" languages, or lists of languages by difficulty.

There's ONE thing that the author missed though:

What's The Hardest Language To Learn for English speakers?

I've always wondered how difficult it is for native Hongkongers to learn Mandarin compared to Spanish.

[Kasuya]

I've always wondered how difficult it is for native Hongkongers to learn Mandarin compared to Spanish.

Spanish is obviously much more difficult for them.

[burnlaur25]

"There's ONE thing that the author missed though:

What's The Hardest Language To Learn for English speakers?

I've always wondered how difficult it is for native Hongkongers to learn Mandarin compared to Spanish."

The piece seems to be coming from an English-speaker centric POV for sure."

However, Mandarin is not as easy as you think for Cantonese speakers. There are Mandarin speakers in that area who have been there 20 years and still cannot understand one word of Cantonese. They simply do not wish to learn it. Cantonese and Mandarin are nearly completely unintelligible - intelligibility is less than 5%.

Sure, Spanish is harder, but if you ask a Hong Konger who is learning Spanish, they will tell you it's not that hard to learn.

Thing is, people who speak languages that are very hard to learn like Finnish, Chinese and Polish are at an advantage. Once you have mastered the evilest languages of em all, most of the rest of them seem pretty simple. But the converse is not true at all.

I will say though that many Chinese do not speak English very well. The differences between the two languages are almost complete differences in ways of thinking altogether. Hence, Chinese speakers of English seem to mess it up more than even, say, Finns do.

Some of these languages actually warp your brain. I understand that in order to speak say Navajo or Chinese well, you almost have to start looking at the world and thinking about it in a totally different and new way. Which is one more thing that makes these languages hard.

Check out Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for more.

[pittmirg]

IE http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn/

Wow, some cool claims about pl:

Polish has seven cases, and there are no particular rules about the cases, unlike German.

wat

P0lish, like Hungarian and Finnish, can also have very long word. For instance, pięćsetdwadzieściajedenmiliardówdwieścieczterdzieścisiedemmiloionów-trzystaosiemdzisiątpięćtysięcyczterystadziewięćdziesięciopięcioletni is a word in Polish (There is no dash in the word – I was just dividing the line).

Which means 521,247,385,495 years old... Why not 521,247,385,495,521,247,385,495,521,247,385,495,521,247,385,495 years old?
And I'm not saying tha Polish orthographical rules concerning the spelling of some compounds aren't retarded.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones , whether you have 2 or 1000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many phones you have: 2, 3 or 4 telefony, but 5 telefonów. Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands: 4 ręce, but 5 rąk.

But it is the case that changes, not the number or 'word'. Telefonów is genitive. In fact English has similar traps: I often wonder whether it should be "plenty X" or "plenty of X" etc.

Future – Bede grac. – I will play.
Continuous future – Bede gral. – I will be playing.

These are synonymous. Also, it's spelt będę grać, będę grał with diacritics, for that matter.

Pluperfect – Doesn’t work in the 1 singular form but does in the 2nd singular, 3rd singular and 2nd plural forms – Tys gral. – You had played.

This isn't any pluperfect, only the past ending that used to be a cliticized auxiliary is shifted to the personal pronoun; and it means the same as ty grałeś.
There used to be a true pluperfect tense in Polish which has become obsolete.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing in Polish.

Well, the sentence-level order is determined by discourse factors and not totally random, so one could argue the theoretically possible variants aren't exactly the same and not equally right in every context.

You can use up to 5 negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence: Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedzia – Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

You can use any number and the number of pronouns doesn't matter. Also, this is rather normal cross-linguistically. Negative pronouns just agree with the verb in respect of grammatical polarity.

A major problem with Polish grammar is that it is not regular at all. There are probably more exceptions than there are rules.

Oh yeah.

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish children do not reach this milestone until age 16. Even adult Poles make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly.

Kill the prescriptivists with fire.

To sum up:

[Renaçido]

@Pittmirg: Don't bother. I already sent the author a huge message criticizing various of his comments. Just kidding, that's quite interesting. Make sure to send him all those points too.

@Burnlaur:

However, Mandarin is not as easy as you think for Cantonese speakers.

How much do you think that I think it is? No language is easy to learn, all of them require a huge amount of effort, even Esperanto, where words have different ratios of usage and it seems that there are some limits to how much you're allowed to calque the syntax of your language.

I'm just comparing what it is to a Cantonese speaker to learn Mandarin in contrast to Spanish.

There are Mandarin speakers in that area who have been there 20 years and still cannot understand one word of Cantonese. They simply do not wish to learn it.

Well, then it's them Mandarin speakers who don't want to learn it... This is more on the sociolinguistic aspects of learning Cantonese though, not on the difficulty of the language per se.

Cantonese and Mandarin are nearly completely unintelligible - intelligibility is less than 5%.

However once you start learning the words you'll see many of the characters have similar pronunciations, and these can serve as a mnemonic. I do it all the time to improve my vocabulary in English, where lots of the Latinate words have an equivalent in Spanish, or that at least there's a word in Spanish that sounds similarly and is in the surrounding semantic class, even if I still have to learn the pronunciation and English's more etymological spelling.

Also, the syntax of Mandarin is very similar to Cantonese's, being both isolating, and well, both belonging to the same sub-family.

Sure, Spanish is harder, but if you ask a Hong Konger who is learning Spanish, they will tell you it's not that hard to learn.

Yeah right.

Thing is, people who speak languages that are very hard to learn like Finnish, Chinese and Polish are at an advantage. Once you have mastered the evilest languages of em all, most of the rest of them seem pretty simple. But the converse is not true at all.

I will say though that many Chinese do not speak English very well. The differences between the two languages are almost complete differences in ways of thinking altogether. Hence, Chinese speakers of English seem to mess it up more than even, say, Finns do.

This is nonsense!

Some of these languages actually warp your brain. I understand that in order to speak say Navajo or Chinese well, you almost have to start looking at the world and thinking about it in a totally different and new way. Which is one more thing that makes these languages hard.

Check out Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for more.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is not even about this! What's worse, Sapir and Whorf never proposed it as a real hypothesis, but mentioned the idea in one of their works. It was a critic of theirs who started calling it the Sapir-Whord Hypothesis...

[''']

Kill the prescriptivists with fire.

Bring it.


As others seem to have noticed, this page is one of the biggest loads of crap, misinformation, partial information, and lack of information ever conglomerated into one steaming e-turd the linguistic interwebs has ever known. Let's begin.

appart form citing sounds which are not hard for english speakers to learn, bitching about consistant phonetic scripts for being different, and listing languages as level 5 based on "are said to be difficult to learn [but I have no clue myself]", this guy can't count.

"Some say that Quechua speakers spend their whole lives learning the language." I doubt it's anymore so with Quechua than any other language.

"Further, [Arabic] is full of irregular plurals similar to octopus and octopi in English, whereas these forms are rare in English. The language is full of stuff like that." well, a/ octopus is not iregular, it follows latin declension, not to mention that it should be greek (octipodes) and b/ while arabic does boast many borken plurals, most nouns are nice and behave, not to mention it has a very regular verbal system which he doesn't mention. There are 4 ways to write a letter not 3 as he claimed but most are the same and many letters are just derivations of other letters. " you have to learn all of the expressionistic nuances" expressionistic? That's news to me.
"To attain anywhere near native speaker competency in Egyptian Arabic, you probably need to live in Egypt for ten years" This is not unusual for any language. MY parent's have lived here for 18 years and still make errors in their speech. And they're good at languages.

"Hebrew is said to be hard to learn, but I am not sure why. Part of the problem may be the writing system, which leaves out vowels if I am not mistaken.

Hebrew gets a 4 for extremely difficult."
So you heard it's hard but with not even enough experience to know that a semitic language's native script is probably going to be an abjad (ethiopic not withstanding) he calls it hard. Hebrew is nowhere near arabic, not the modern variants at any rate, and dropping vowels is completely logical for a semitic script even though in Hebrew many vowels are written.

"There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way [In jap]." First of all, there are only 1850 or 2000 joyo kanji, add to that all the main hiragana, plus all the extras, small versions of letters and so on, you still should have only 80-ish hiragana. Double it for katakana and (I'm guessing here) again for all the extra sounds kataka can represent, you've still only got tops 2240-ish symbols. I don't know how often non-joyo kanji are used but to my knowledge all media have to provide at the very least furigana equivalents.
"[they] came up with all sorts of crazy and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse." The romanisation isn't used in the standard language afaik, except perhaps on adveritisng, and even I (who hates kanji) don't think it's that hard to learn that they removed all non-joyo kanji en-masse and simply substituted them with hiragana.
"The grammar is quite complicated, one of the most complex on Earth. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs." While their verbs are epic, the conjugation is (so I hear) regular and mostly japanese verbs inflect for various types of moods. The number of forms pales in comparison to say Hungarian, and japanese nouns not only remain uninflected, they don't even have inherent gramatical definiteness gender or number. "Like Chinese, it has short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense." No verb inflections? he just bitched about the verbs, besides which japanese DOES have a past tense 食べる -> 食べた.

by now I thik he's rated at least 3 languages as the 2nd hardest to learn.
"There are 5 different types of verb conjugations [In Hungarian]." Well this I've gotta see. "Nearly everything in Hungarian is inflected, similar to Lithuanian or Czech." Except that uinlike most Ie languages our adjectives NEVER agree (sole exception is predicate adjectives who act like nouns but need to take the nominative anyway and hence can only agree in number). What i love is this bit:
"Hungarian is full of synonyms, similar to English.

For instance, there are 78 different words that mean to move: halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál , andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál , bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér , botladozik, őgyeleg, slattyog, bandukol, lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng, csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol , tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog and mozgolódik .

Only about five of those terms are archaic and seldom used, the rest are in current use."
I call myself a native speaker, but I am ashamed to admit about half of these words are, well, incomprehensible to me. I can guess at them from the sound ofc but the point is that never have I needed to know the vast majority of those words. English has words like amble and saunter which are hardly ever used, the same goes for most of that list (btw "rohan" appears twice). Some of those words do not mean "to move" and if we are to concider every single verb of motion, the list would be an order of magnitude greater (as it would for any language). It's just a pretty chuck of misleading vocab.
"There are many irregularities in inflections, and even Hungarians have to learn how to spell of these in school and have a hard time learning this. Hungarian phonetics is also strange, and to make matters worse, there is tons of slang."
Well slang there is, but that's true of every language. Most of the inflectional irregularities are in fact sub-classes, or at the very least are historically logical. As for spelling, the only true irregularity of Hungarian spelling is the homophony of ly and j which are still being argued over. A native speaker can often guess.

"Vietnamese also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on" Not really, many english dialects use creak natively.

"Khmer ... has one of the most complex honorifics systems of any language on Earth." this I'm just genuinely interested in.
Nguni and Xhosa, two languages of South Africa, are quite difficult, with up to nine click sounds in both. Clicks do not exist in other languages, and are extremely difficult to learn. Even native speakers mess up the clicks sometimes."
a/ Clicks exist in the Australian language Damin b/ they aren't hard to learn, at least not the basic clicks, they take along time to perfect but it's not a hard process, it's just a matter of practice.
"Zulu has pitch accent, tones and clicks. There are 9 different pitch accents, 4 tones and 3 clicks, but each click can be pronounced in 5 different ways. However, tones are not marked in writing, so it’s hard to figure out when to use them. Zulu also has depressor consonants, which lower the tone in the vowel in the following syllable. In addition, Zulu has multiple gender – 15 different genders. And some nouns behave like verbs." Noun classes are not a problem in zulu since the prefixes are easy enough to memorise and every noun with have one. There are from memory only 3 tones (but that might explain why I did poorly on that assignment) not to mention MOST tones follow a predictable pattern, high falling then low for the rest of the word.

wow that felt good. That's all I've got on his non-IE page, but the Ie was enough to boil blood imho.

[Kasuya]

"There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way [In jap]." First of all, there are only 1850 or 2000 joyo kanji, add to that all the main hiragana, plus all the extras, small versions of letters and so on, you still should have only 80-ish hiragana. Double it for katakana and (I'm guessing here) again for all the extra sounds kataka can represent, you've still only got tops 2240-ish symbols. I don't know how often non-joyo kanji are used but to my knowledge all media have to provide at the very least furigana equivalents.

Non- Jouyou Kanji are often used. Some common everyday Kanji aren't Jouyou Kanji. For example: 藤 誰 俺 岡 頃 奈 阪 韓 弥 那 鹿 斬 虎 狙 脇 熊 尻 旦 闇

Knowing all of the Jouyou Kanji is certainly a great foundation, but it's not nearly enough. You will run into plenty of other Kanji, often without furigana.

However, your point stands about that guy having nooooo idea what he is talking about.

[lumiel]

Here you can see the Finnish word "kauppa" (=shop (n)) in 2253 different forms. I thought you guys might find it interesting as this is a discussion about hard languages.

[Draven]

"Vietnamese also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on" Not really, many english dialects use creak natively.

I'm surprised he picks on that, since the Anglo learner of Vietnamese would have far bigger problems to worry about.

Vietnamese grammar, like Chinese, is simple

And how simple is Chinese grammar anyway?

[Varislintu]

Hence, Chinese speakers of English seem to mess it up more than even, say, Finns do.

Finns do what ? I admit we have serious problems with pronunciation (the evil voiced consonants), but as for English grammar I don't think Finns stand out in their poor grasp of it. Finnish has cases at the end of the word, but you never hear a Finn putting a prepostion in English at the end of a word because of that. We do have difficulty with articles (a/the), but usually that manifests as a dropping of them, which doesn't actually affect understandability very much (imho). We might confuse he and she when absent minded.

But yeah, pronunciation is the only severe national deficiency I admit to .

[邪悪歌]

Kill the prescriptivists with fire.

Bring it.


As others seem to have noticed, this page is one of the biggest loads of crap, misinformation, partial information, and lack of information ever conglomerated into one steaming e-turd the linguistic interwebs has ever known. Let's begin.

"There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way [In jap]." First of all, there are only 1850 or 2000 joyo kanji, add to that all the main hiragana, plus all the extras, small versions of letters and so on, you still should have only 80-ish hiragana. Double it for katakana and (I'm guessing here) again for all the extra sounds kataka can represent, you've still only got tops 2240-ish symbols. I don't know how often non-joyo kanji are used but to my knowledge all media have to provide at the very least furigana equivalents.
"[they] came up with all sorts of crazy and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse." The romanisation isn't used in the standard language afaik, except perhaps on adveritisng, and even I (who hates kanji) don't think it's that hard to learn that they removed all non-joyo kanji en-masse and simply substituted them with hiragana.
"The grammar is quite complicated, one of the most complex on Earth. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs." While their verbs are epic, the conjugation is (so I hear) regular and mostly japanese verbs inflect for various types of moods. The number of forms pales in comparison to say Hungarian, and japanese nouns not only remain uninflected, they don't even have inherent gramatical definiteness gender or number. "Like Chinese, it has short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense." No verb inflections? he just bitched about the verbs, besides which japanese DOES have a past tense 食べる -> 食べた.

crazy and senseless rules the rules about choosing whether to use hiragana or katakana is about as crazy and senseless as the "rules" for using italicized script in English or other Romanized languages. As for ローマ字, it is mainly used in ads (with the exception of numbers) and in special situations. More often than not, if a word is taken from English or another language, it's usually written in katakana. Anyway, there are 1945 常用漢字(jouyoukanji) and there were about 1850 当用漢字(touyoukanji) in use before the jouyoukanji came into use. As for the kana, there are about 100 regular symbols altogether (actually a few less than that) and all the rest of them are only about as different as say, remembering the difference between o and ö or something
Also, Japanese (like Korean) is a highly inflected language when it comes to verbs and adjectives, so the thing about verb inflections and tense is utter bs... adjectives themselves even have their own tenses. These forms, however, are highly regular. There are only a few irregular verbs in Japanese, and they're very commonly used (the main ones being だ・です　有る・有ります　来る・来ます　する・します) Other words are formed mainly by forming compounds just like in any IE language.

"There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way [In jap]." First of all, there are only 1850 or 2000 joyo kanji, add to that all the main hiragana, plus all the extras, small versions of letters and so on, you still should have only 80-ish hiragana. Double it for katakana and (I'm guessing here) again for all the extra sounds kataka can represent, you've still only got tops 2240-ish symbols. I don't know how often non-joyo kanji are used but to my knowledge all media have to provide at the very least furigana equivalents.

Non- Jouyou Kanji are often used. Some common everyday Kanji aren't Jouyou Kanji. For example: 藤 誰 俺 岡 頃 奈 阪 韓 弥 那 鹿 斬 虎 狙 脇 熊 尻 旦 闇

Knowing all of the Jouyou Kanji is certainly a great foundation, but it's not nearly enough. You will run into plenty of other Kanji, often without furigana.

However, your point stands about that guy having nooooo idea what he is talking about.

I thought most of those were 常用漢字... I guess I know more non-jouyoukanji than I thought

[derevon]

Polish ortography is highly complicated, yet amazingly regular. As for grammar, exceptions isn't the problem in Polish, the problem is that there are simply too many rules and too many inflection patterns. The pronunciation, although almost 100% predictable in theory, is very difficult, often requiring some real tongue acrobatics. It's not all that impossible to learn to read aloud well in Polish, but when you have to think about what you say plus grammar plus pronunciation at the same time... Listening comprehension is highly difficult due to the high frequency of sh/ch-like sounds. Often there are more of them than there are syllables in a sentence. I really wonder how Polish fighter pilots manage to communicate over the radio. Those sounds are not all that distinguishable from static interference.

[Car]

I only had a quick glance at his German section and immediately stumbled upon a mistake in a sample sentence plus sentences which showed that the author simply doesn't know the rules well enough...

[Abii]

"The grammar is quite complicated, one of the most complex on Earth. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs."

When he rates English he states:

"The problem with English is that it’s a mess! There are languages with very easy grammatical rules like Japanese"