what do you think is the most difficult language?
- Thread starter Hyper99
- Start date
Well, I can't speak any of the oriental languages, I'd guess those are pretty hard considering they don't use the western alphabet or latin or greek sounds.
For me, German was the hardest. Dutch is my native language, followed by Papiamento (the language spoken on the island where I grew up), Spanish, English, French and German. German is a pain in the butt. I can still hear my teacher yappin' about 'Die, Der and Das', even though I've been out of school for a loooooong time!
For me, German was the hardest. Dutch is my native language, followed by Papiamento (the language spoken on the island where I grew up), Spanish, English, French and German. German is a pain in the butt. I can still hear my teacher yappin' about 'Die, Der and Das', even though I've been out of school for a loooooong time!
Spanish and French are by far the easiest languages to learn IMO. I find English to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest to learn.
It really depends on where you're from, your origin, your ethnicity. For an American, obviously English is extremely easy to learn and say maybe Chinese is extremely difficult to learn. But for a German, obviously German will come naturally and maybe Italian will be hard.
Homer
Homer
I've heard from many people that english is one of the hardest languages to learn. Although I think that Chinese and Japanese would be hard becuase of their alphabets.
But Spanish was easy enough for me to learn. Until I graduated from high school and forgot it all.
But Spanish was easy enough for me to learn. Until I graduated from high school and forgot it all.
well i took japanese in high school for 3 years and i gotta say it's not all that hard. yeah i know no one really learns a foreign language in high school, but it has shown me japanese is not that difficult. the hardest part is the memorization of chinese characters for writing, but even that wasn't too bad.
i would think that learning to speak that african click language is probably the hardest. i mean it's gotta impossible to learn to distinguish between all the clicking sounds a person can make.
i would think that learning to speak that african click language is probably the hardest. i mean it's gotta impossible to learn to distinguish between all the clicking sounds a person can make.
We had some french students at my school several years ago. They claimed that students taking English courses in France have an extremely difficult time learning English. The pronounciation is not the problem. The grammar is extremely difficult for them to grasp.
Hungarian strangely seems to have no words cognate with anything in the main European languages. There are some "adopted" words, but the roots of the language are foreign to all of the other languages.
Swedish gets a vote too since the sounds are so difficult to form.
Swedish gets a vote too since the sounds are so difficult to form.
you should add Latin to the list - incredibly difficult. the pronunciation is easy, and some of the vocabs since 60% of english is derived from it. but the grammar's a killer. word orders in english sentences have different meanings. as for latin, word orders doesn't matter. for example, the sentence "dog kicked I the" in latin is valid. so how are you supposed to determine the subject and direct object? by different endings. and that was just a simple example, there are pretty much endings for every person, tense, numbers (ie singular or plural) etc etc. I'm taking latin 3 next year - I won't be able to survive .
.hmm. I always thought latin was fairly easy, too. I took 4 years in high school and 2 semesters in college.
[edit]But don't think I'm insinuating that you're not intelligent, Emporer, I did poorly in Spanish :Q in high school...Latin just makes sense to some people[/edit]
[edit]But don't think I'm insinuating that you're not intelligent, Emporer, I did poorly in Spanish :Q in high school...Latin just makes sense to some people[/edit]
My parents' native tongue, Tamil is a difficult South Indian language. Pronounciation is killer and the alphabet...fuhgedaboutit! If anyone who is from South India should see my profile they would see that my name is about as common as "Chris Johnson" there. I can speak but can't write Tamil.
I'm sure there are harder examples, but Tamil has got to be up there.
I'm sure there are harder examples, but Tamil has got to be up there.
English:
i before e, except after c, or when sounding like a, as in neighbor or weigh. WTF?!
Or how come you can't say, "Yes it's poop is here" Because for some darned reason, that would mean "Yes it is poop is here?" So You have to say, "Yes, its poop is here". Clearly not demonstrating any sort of posession. Stupid english. What about Diagramming sentences...schtupid schtuff!
What about through. Sound it out...sounds like threw. Now what about trough? No...not tuhrow...but troff.
Desert? Dehsert.
Dessert? Duhsert.
BAH!!!!!!!!!!!
Paul
Cuando tus gringos dices Espanol! Es la futuro!
Nuh megook saddam, weh goodeh? Hangool mal jom heh!
i before e, except after c, or when sounding like a, as in neighbor or weigh. WTF?!
Or how come you can't say, "Yes it's poop is here" Because for some darned reason, that would mean "Yes it is poop is here?" So You have to say, "Yes, its poop is here". Clearly not demonstrating any sort of posession. Stupid english. What about Diagramming sentences...schtupid schtuff!
What about through. Sound it out...sounds like threw. Now what about trough? No...not tuhrow...but troff.
Desert? Dehsert.
Dessert? Duhsert.
BAH!!!!!!!!!!!
Paul
Cuando tus gringos dices Espanol! Es la futuro!
Nuh megook saddam, weh goodeh? Hangool mal jom heh!
I personally think the hardest thing would be to learn how to write in your native language if you were never taught how. I can't read or write Chinese but I can speak it... but if I were taught to write it I know I would struggle because I know a lot of slang and shortcuts through a lot of sentences. Writing proper sentences would kill me.
I think that French has been pretty darn easy for me. 4 years in high school, taken one quarter so far in college and I'll take one more in the fall.
Anyone who is learning English... I feel so sorry... I thought French was bad with its eighty gazillion verb tenses, but then in English the verbs mean different things... very confusing.
I think that French has been pretty darn easy for me. 4 years in high school, taken one quarter so far in college and I'll take one more in the fall.
Anyone who is learning English... I feel so sorry... I thought French was bad with its eighty gazillion verb tenses, but then in English the verbs mean different things... very confusing.
English is definitely the most difficult language to learn.
The grammar is disgustingly irregular, the orthography only pretends to be phonetic, and the vocabulary is the largest of any language. (Some 400,000+ words)
Comparitively, Mandarin (the most commonly spoken 'dialect' of Chinese) does not conjugate anything, as all words are basically monosyllabic. (There's some minor debate over this, but not about whether or not there's conjugation, just the monosyllable-ness of it.) The writing system, while seemingly complex, can be broken down into radicals, which make remembering the characters considerbly easier.
Japanese seems to difficult to most modern westerners, but I imagine a classical Latin speaker would not find terribly much difficulty with it. They are both inflective languages, unlike english, so all the conjugation takes place with word endings. The word ending changes in Japanese are pathologically regular, and phonetically predictable (mostly). The writing system, which was stolen wholesale from the Chinese (The two languages are almost, but not entirely, unlike one another.) is large, but, unlike mainland china, there is a (truely) phonetic syllabary, so even if you know NO kanji, you can still write something down and have someone else read it. (Although, once you know the Kanji, writing anything in Hiragana/Katakana is just plain irritating.)
The grammar is disgustingly irregular, the orthography only pretends to be phonetic, and the vocabulary is the largest of any language. (Some 400,000+ words)
Comparitively, Mandarin (the most commonly spoken 'dialect' of Chinese) does not conjugate anything, as all words are basically monosyllabic. (There's some minor debate over this, but not about whether or not there's conjugation, just the monosyllable-ness of it.) The writing system, while seemingly complex, can be broken down into radicals, which make remembering the characters considerbly easier.
Japanese seems to difficult to most modern westerners, but I imagine a classical Latin speaker would not find terribly much difficulty with it. They are both inflective languages, unlike english, so all the conjugation takes place with word endings. The word ending changes in Japanese are pathologically regular, and phonetically predictable (mostly). The writing system, which was stolen wholesale from the Chinese (The two languages are almost, but not entirely, unlike one another.) is large, but, unlike mainland china, there is a (truely) phonetic syllabary, so even if you know NO kanji, you can still write something down and have someone else read it. (Although, once you know the Kanji, writing anything in Hiragana/Katakana is just plain irritating.)
I believe as far as western languages go, English is by far the hardest. Good thing I am american!! I have learned German, and while the der die das thing is kind of hard to learn at first, the language pretty much sticks to all of the rules. English on the other hand has no rules that really apply all the time. there are so many exceptions to everything, I would have hated learning it if I was from another country.
I would say English. Even the natives have trouble speaking and writing it properly.
But Chinese, while I would love to learn it, would be a hard one. I cannot imagine my writing having to look as beautiful as theirs does all the time.
But Chinese, while I would love to learn it, would be a hard one. I cannot imagine my writing having to look as beautiful as theirs does all the time.
They say English is the hardest to learn..because there are so many rules and things to learn. Yet, there are many exceptions to those rules which makes it even more confusing.
English is by far the hardest language to master. You might not think that because you speak it everyday. But grammatically it is the hardest language to master.
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