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Which language is the hardest (for a native Chinese speaker) or an English speaker
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View Poll Results: Which language is the hardest for you or in general
English 0 0%
French (français) 1 5.56%
German (Deutsch) 0 0%
Russian (русский) 3 16.67%
Mandarin (汉语 / 漢語) 9 50.00%
Japanese (日本語) 3 16.67%
Korean (한국어) 4 22.22%
Arabic (عربي) 6 33.33%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 18. You may not vote on this poll



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atitarev -

Hello,

I hope you don't mind taking part in this poll.

I learned and dabbled in a number of different languages and I won't include languages I have no
idea about (like Suahili, Hindi or American Indian languages). Please vote using your feeling,
experience or knoweldge.

My feeling is standard Mandarin (and other dialects) are almost complete opposites to standard
Arabic. (I saw a few Japanese forums for learners of Arabic but couldn't find many Chinese of
those, is there any interest to Arabic in China?).

(The vote is public - you can see who voted), multiple choices are allowed.

I voted for 2 most difficult ones in my opinion, although each language has easier aspects.

Regards,
Anatoli



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gato -

I don't quite understand the question. Hardest for an native Chinese OR a native English speaker?
Chinese wouldn't be hard for the former, and English wouldn't be hard for a native English
speaker. I don't see the logic for setting up the question this way.










atitarev -

If you're English native speaker but you insist that your native language is the hardest (your
objective opinion), you can still vote that way, I thought about such questions but allowed to
vote in any direction because I know such opinions exist and they have some merit.










flameproof -

I have some doubts that there are too many people out there who learned a large number of
languages and could say which one the hardest is.

I think you should have knowledge of at least 10 languages to take part in the poll.

And then the term "hard" is relative in itself. Hard to pronounce would mean many phonetic
elements which are not used in the native language. Or you can refer to writing, sentence
structure, etc, etc.... And last not least the impression of the learner itself.

In short, there is no answer.










atitarev -

You take it too seriously guys, I know it's all relative to your background and you need to know
other languages so you can compare but people have different life experiences and why not share
some ideas about diffculties learning a language? I haven't heard much from Chinese speakers,
especially about their experience learning a language other than English, well this is an
English-speaking forum, but still, there might be some around.

I want to meet more people who are interested in a few languages, meet some polyglots, hear what
they have to say, etc.










nephridium -

Actually, to have an objective survey about 'language difficulty' we'd have to use an ideal
"empty" model (akin to the 'black body' in physics). The results may not be very practical;
creating a relational graph between the languages might prove more useful.

How fast babies aquire certain language skills may be an indicator, but is affected by lots of
surrounding factors (such as education of parents, efficiency of school etc.).

Ok, enough of the preliminary blabla. In your list I'd go for Mandarin if you include the writing
system, seeing as even adults have considerable problems writing many words.

Korean and Japanese could be considered difficult because they don't show many similarities with
most other language one might know beforehand (whereas learning Chinese with a
Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese background will be easier). They are categorized as 'isolated
languages' or as the members of the 'altaic language family' (which is a very loosely-knit
family). The writing systems, especially the Korean Hangeul, are very intuitive and easy to learn,
which in turn facilitates easy learning and pronunciation of new vocabulary. Thankfully we
nowadays have Pinyin for Mandarin, even Chinese children in school use Pinyin to learn the
pronuncation of words.

Pronunciation can be a hurdle complicating the learning process. In the list I'd go for Japanese
as the easiest one to aquire followed by Mandarin and Korean. The other languages all used
alphabets for centuries and thus created a wider range of phonemes per syllable. This makes it
hard e.g. for grown up Chinese to learn the correct pronunciation of "tent" (often resulting in
"tente").

"Arabic" has a special role here, because similar to "Chinese" it encompasses a family of dialects
that historically had the same writing system (which didn't encode vowels), but have created
strong regional diffrerences (especially in terms of pronunciation). An Arab from Syria will have
a huge problem trying to comprehend an Egyptian talking.

Arabic is also special in that many of its words (as well as the numbers) have found their way
into languages like Spanish and even English (e.g. alcohol, guitar or coffee).

Within the alphabetical languages there are also differences between the difficulty of
orthography. E.g. in English you have words with the same spelling but different pronunciations
(e.g. route) and vice versa (e.g. 'plane' and 'plain'), whereas German for instance sports a less
sloppy use of the alphabet. On the other hand this makes English spelling bees more interesting
than German or Spanish ones. Another example I read about recently was the word 'polish', which
changes its meaning AND pronunciation when you capitalize it.

If we disregard the writing system Mandarin becomes one of the easier languages, the number of
phonemes and tones e.g. in Cantonese or Vietnamese is considerably higher. Solely looking at the
phonology I believe Russian is the most complex of the languages listed.

Argh, this reply has gotten longer than I thought.. Suffice it to say that this is a very complex
question and even if we use the "black body model" from above the answer varies from individual to
individual. Some may find aquiring grammar is easy, some may find it impossible to twist the
tongue in a way the native speaker does etc. In any case it's an interesting discussion. It leads
into equally interesting questions such as "How does the language we are thinking in affect our
thinking?" or "What effects does a certain language have on culture and philosophy?"










HashiriKata -

Nice post, nephridium!



Quote:

"How does the language we are thinking in affect our thinking?" or "What effects does a certain
language have on culture and philosophy?"

Difficult languages lead to difficult thinkings ?










gato -



Quote:

If we disregard the writing system Mandarin becomes one of the easier languages, the number of
phonemes and tones e.g. in Cantonese or Vietnamese is considerably higher. Solely looking at the
phonology I believe Russian is the most complex of the languages listed.

That's a big "IF." The writing system is a big part of the language. I assume that you mean
reading as well as writing. If you can't read the language you are trying to learn, it would be
very difficult to acquire new vocabulary in that language. You would have to learn everything
orally (or, let's say, by pinyin in the case of Chinese). While it is quite feasible to learn
enough survival Chinese without being able to read characters, I doubt that anyone would be able
to speak Mandarin like an educated adult (say with a high school-level vocabulary) without being
able to read Chinese characters.










wushijiao -

Nice post nephridium.

I think that all spoken languages are equally complex. Part of that reason is due to Steven
Pinker's The Langage Instinct. In that, he writes:

"Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn the way we learn to tell time
or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of
our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously,
without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying
logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities
to process information or behave intelligently.” He then goes on to term language an
“instinct”. And the term “instinct”, “….conveys the idea that people know how to talk
in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs”

So, from that point of view, all languages created by children are equally complex because our
brains our equally complex.

If all spoken languages are equal, then what could make one language than another?

My personal opinion is that there are few important factors:

1) Difficulty of the writing system. Chinese, of course, is more difficult than the fairly
straight-forward systems like Korean or Spanish.

2) As far as speaking, the degree of standardization makes a big difference. For example, some
countries have hardcore diglossias in which people speak a standard at official events and places,
but then speak a colloquial dialect or language at informal gatherings. These two types of speech
are sometimes merged as well. Arabic and Chinese are examples of this. Other languages have
basically completed the process of standardization. It seems that Japanese and Koreans have
accents, it isn’t too common to completely not understand someone who is a native of those
languages. The case is fairly similar with English and Spanish.

Another notorious example of the spelling of a language being hard to learn is Tibetan. They do
have a phonetic alphabet, but it was fixed over 1000 years ago. English, in contrast, (I think)
started to become set around 500-350 years ago. So, it is hard to learn the contemporary Tibetan
spoken language and the writing system at the same time, while the Spanish alphabet almost always
reflects the sounds of spoken language.

3) As Gato mentioned, to what degree does the written language influence the spoken language is
another factor that is worth considering. Mandarin has the unique situation in which most of the
spoken language consists of two syllable words but the ancient written language mainly consisted
of single characters. Similarly, Chinese words can be abbreviated in ways that are not obvious. In
most European languages, to my knowledge, words are abbreviated with letters (USA, YMCA, NBA, UN,
UK…etc). While listening, you mat not know the specific abbreviation, but because it is in
letters, it’s not hard to realize that someone just said an abbreviation. With Chinese on the
other hand, you may not know what běidà, zhōnggōng, máoxuǎn, wéngě…etc. are
abbreviations when listening to them for the first time because they sound more like plausible
words than abbreviations using letters do.

My point is that the terseness of the Chinese written language can sometimes carry over into the
spoken language, especially when talking to people who read a lot. Of course, every language has a
written language that differs from the spoken language, but in Chinese that difference is
stretched pretty far.

So, in absolute terms, I think because of the character system, widespread diglossia, and the
influence of the characters system into the spoken language, there is a decent case to be made
that Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. But even with that said, I
still don’t think it is that much different than other languages, just slightly harder. (By the
way, I’ve heard from some people feel that Japanese is harder because it contains the a
difficult grammar combined with the difficulty of kanji. I don’t know.)

In terms of “what is the hardest language” for an individual person, that mainly depends on
that person’s native language and what that person is good at. If you native language is Dutch,
it will be easier to learn German or English than it would be to learn French or Korean. Or to use
another example, for me, a native English speaker, it is easy to remember the Spanish word
universidad because it is similar to the English "university". Also, when learning Spanish, I had
a much more difficult time remembering the words that weren’t related to English, via Latin or
French

Also, some people like grammar. Some people are good at mimicking foreign sounds. Some people can
do both well. All languages require a combination of those skills, but some languages are more
grammar-intense than others, while others require more agile tongues. From that personal,
subjective point of view, it’s hard to measure what the hardest language is.










bhchao -

The grammar structure of Mandarin Chinese is similar to English, SVO, while the grammar structure
is SOV for Korean and Japanese. Therefore some people may find Mandarin easier to learn than
Korean and Japanese because its grammar pattern is "straightforward" and similar to English.

Japanese has the verb and adjective conjugations that Mandarin doesn't have.

Korean has the honorific verbal endings that are used to indicate politeness, casualness, or
bluntness. This social hierachy influence found in Korean is also lacking in Mandarin. Examples
like "sarang hae" and "sarang haeyo", or "odi ga" and "odi gayo", or "adasu" (I understand) and
"adasumnida". How you include these endings have a big impact on the level of politeness perceived
by the listener. There are also the difficulties in pronunciation regarding aspirated and
unaspirated sounds. Also dual counting systems are another issue; one set of numbers ("pure
Korean") for counting purposes; and another set of numbers ("Sino-Korean) borrowed from Chinese
numbers that are used for expressing years, months, days, and currency.

Mandarin has the complexity of the written language (no alphabet versus an alphabet writing system
for English and Hangul), the difficulties of Classical Chinese, and the tones. But once you get
past that, I think the rest is a breeze compared to Korean and Japanese when taking into account
grammar patterns, conjugations, and honorifics.












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