Language

[maderr]

Went to a panel this morning on language in fantasy/sci-fi stories. It sort of wandered. I never got to ask how they come up with curse words, but I don't know if they would have been amuzed, anyway.

But! They did mention an interesting study that was done x number of years ago. I'm sure the linguists on my flist have heard of it. I had not.

A group studied languages, I guess, and decided that if someone from totally outside came in and had to learn a language, the three hardest on the planet would be Russian, Chinese, and English.

Russian for the grammar, Chinese for the complexity of the written language, and English for the number of exceptions.

The only one which surprised me was the Russian, but my pov is perhaps distorted--Sammikins never seemed to have trouble with it, and quite loves it, or so was always my impression. Me, I suck at foreign languages. I am in constant awe of those who can speak more than one.

But, thoughts? What do you think would be the hardest language to learn, if you knew none of them?

Comments

[bloodied-eden.livejournal.com]

I've always thought that English would be the hardest, personally XD;; And was very glad I grew up speaking it . . . though I do have problems writing it at times, still. And I always thought that several of the Asian languages would be difficult to speak because of the fact that they are tonal . . . .

[maderr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was surprised it was only the written aspect that was mentioned for Chinese, cause it's one of those tonal. I was glad I chose Japanese, rather than chinese, cause nuances in words I can handle--and adore. But watching my precise tone would have killed me.

[rappleart3.livejournal.com]

Do "dead" languages count? Latin is pretty damn complex grammar wise. (I think I'm biased, though ^^;)
But yeah, I'd heard that. I'll hafta ask my cousin how he learned Russian, 'cause for his BA, he wwent to Russia to study math, and I think he only had 1 semester or less before goin' there...

[pineapplechild.livejournal.com]

But Latin is very clear in it's complexity. It's an engineer's language. I learned it the same time I formally learned English, and I thought Latin the easier of the two.

[cobecat.livejournal.com]

I would have trouble with Chinese and English, personally, because I'm terrible at visual stuff and at memorizing exception to rules. ^_^' Easiest language I've ever learned is Swahili, I'd start the aliens on that.

[rappleart3.livejournal.com]

swahili? Really? Maybe you can answer this, since Disney can not...

What do the lyrics in the beginning of circle of life mean?

Back, shortly after the Lion king first came out, my dad and I wrote to Disney, and they actuallyt responded (a few months later...) saying they didn;t know...

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Hee. Way back when, my dad specifically warned me against ever taking German, based on his own personal painful experience. The crazy/painful grammar was what did him in.

[niravive.livejournal.com]

Heck, I'm a native English speaker, and English still trounces me at times. If you have the ear, French isn't too bad, but I don't think I'd inflict it on the poor aliens, because if you don't pronounce it correctly, you can say some really funny stuff. And then who you're talking to will ignore you. Sign language, on the other hand, is actually really easy and fairly intuitive.

[saaski-moql.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, after taking Japanese and learning a little more about the Chinese language, I'd say that Chinese is harder to pronounce but that once you get the hang of the pronunciation, it's much easier sailing from there, whereas Japanese doesn't have many pronunciation difficulties, but the overall structure and grammatical requirements of the language coupled with not only having to learn one but three different syllabaries, one of which is based on the Chinese language anyway so it gets all that difficulty too...I'd have to say Japanese is more difficult, if you consider all the factors and not just the written part.

And English. Definitely English is up there because wow, it's ridiculously complicated.

I'd think Arabic would have to be up there too, just for pronunciation alone. If you've never made a guttural sound in your life, being thrown into Arabic is really, really difficult.

Then again, it really would depend in the strengths of the person, wouldn't it? I'm just terrible at languages in general, so pretty much anything is hard for me XD;

[nikerymis.livejournal.com]

I'd say Chinese, and I'd probably say English if I weren't a native speaker. ^__^ Russian doesn't really surprise me, from what I heard from my sister when she took a course in it (she majored in foreign languages for a few semesters and Russian was one of the languages she took -- Italian, Spanish, and French being the others).

The panel sounds really cool though. I'd love to create an entire language with its own grammar rules and vocab. It would take forever though, so right now I just fake it and make up words as I go along. ^__~

[mokushi-saiki.livejournal.com]

love your icon. (= it's hilarious.
i've tried to make my own language, but i find that i'm basing it more and more off of spanish and french. but taking other languages while creating my own makes it easy, especially if i get to the whole confusing conjugations thing for the verbs. my written language for that is easier, since they're just symbols that can be translated into the english alphabet. the whole new language is fun,but frustrating.

[zeffy-amethyst.livejournal.com]

Oh god, English, definitely. Ten years living in Australia and I still have trouble with it. Writing it is even worse.

[chilayse.livejournal.com]

English easily. Just when you figure out one rule you realize it only applies to about 20 words and the rest are all exceptions.

[spy-c.livejournal.com]

So here's some interesting facts:

Chinese is the most difficult because of the 50,000 characters they use on a regular basis for writing, never mind the thousands of others that aren't used regularly but still are used is special cases. In addition, the intonation of each word can mean completely different things. if you didn't grow up learning it, they say it is impossible for a foreigner to hear the difference. I can't hear the difference and I have some very good friends that try and try to get me to say the words right. I can't do it.

English is the second hardest because, like you said, the exceptions. The whole language actually doesn't have a set of solid rules or guidelines to go by. That's how many exceptions there are. Spelling has been thrown out the window. This is because, unlike most languages that have one or two base languages, English has eight base languages. Here they are: Latin, Greek, Normand French, Modern French, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Celtic and Germanic. All the invaders of England basically. The good thing is, because there are so many languages that went into the making of English, it has the ability to adopt new words very easily and make up new words just as easily. No other language has that ability.

Russian is one of the harder because of syntax structure, but there are a set of very complex rules that go along with the structures. Once you memorize these rules you basically have the language. At least, one of my good friends who speaks Russian told me that's how it works.

Japanese is up there in difficulty too, because of honorifics. The language structure and words change depending on who you're talking to. So it's considered difficult because you're technically learning several variations on one language.

German and French are up there because of spelling and syntax structure. And, I think some of the sounds that have to be made with the language. Basically all languages are hard for different reasons.

[mokushi-saiki.livejournal.com]

languages do tend to be difficult, yeah. i've done French, and i read it better than i speak or write it, i can understand my mother's native language (which is tagalog, the language ofthe Philippines), i can understand my cousin's fluent japanese and i'm taking spanish. so, for me, i'm not good at speaking the languages but i can read it and understand it well. except for spanish - that's easy.

[gweneiriol.livejournal.com]

I would vote English. I'm a native speaker (and have been for 35 years) and I still get confused using it. Heck, it was due to my years of taking French in college that I learned to use English better.

[niravive.livejournal.com]

Learning a foreign language does wonders for learning the parts of speech in English. I had to learn what a participle was in English before I could use them in French. Now I have to explain grammar to family because I know what it is.

[(Anonymous)]

Chinese, without a doubt. Seriously, if living in Hong Kong without understanding a lick of canto is an indicator, well... go figure. Honestly, those years I spent slaving away at mandarin were hellish; don't forget that its the order in which you write the characters (as in the strokes that make up a single character, if I'm not explaining this properly, like remembering to put the dot on the top of the letter "i" after writing the main body of it etc.), never mind the pronunciation. Oh, and don't forget the whole traditional chinese vs. simple chinese as well. English would definitely be next, but chinese without a doubt would be the hardest to learn. Poor, poor aliens :P

[kalldoro.livejournal.com]

I'm Icelandic, most people don't count it because they don't know about it. Lol. But Icelandic is very complicated grammar wise. Complicated enough to me English grammar is practically non-existent. The spelling is tough and pronunciation is almost random, but the grammar is ridiculously simple. I grew up reading English rather than speaking it, so I guess I learned it better that way.

I've studied German, French, Spanish and Latin. All have more complicated grammar than English, but only Latin is trickier than Icelandic. Both have declension of nouns and adjectives. I've studied Danish too, but that's really simple too.

I'm surprised they didn't mention Finnish. They have declension too...but instead of the 4 cases in Icelandic and the 6 in Latin they have like...18 or something mad like that. And they hardly have spelling rules. Plus it's not related to any of the indo-european languages. To me studying English, French, Spanish, German, Danish and Latin is fairly easy because I can always hear how they are related. Similar words, similar grammar rules and stuff like that...but once you start learning something completely unrelated like the Asian languages, you're up for a lot more work.

[goldenwolfwitch.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised that English is on that list. I always thought it would be one of the easiest. Mainly because I've known so many people learn to speak it fluently just by listening to tv and playing videogames without a single actual language lesson. The grammar is the simplest out of any language I've ever learned, despite the exceptions. I've always thanked my mother for not sending me to English school, here because French is so much harder to learn -.- Heck, native French speakers here can't speak French that well, to the point that they're really going after we teachers in training so that we can better guide the next generation by example. The saying here is "Le francais s'apprend, l'anglais s'attrape" (french you learn, but English you catch like a cold). I've found that to hold true. All you need to do to really learn English is listen to it often enough, maybe with a lesson or two. Whenever I have a friend who asks me how to learn English, I tell them to just pick up a few kids' books and watch tv and movies in English

[goldenwolfwitch.livejournal.com]

And isn't English the language with the most non-native speakers?

[blackstarart.livejournal.com]

Language is really fascinating, which is sad that I'm so bad at it D: recently I made friends with a girl from Germany, and through her I've decided to learn German. She learnt English, which I know to be pretty hard anyways, but German also has it's difficulties. She often complains that German's are lazy, and don't use the proper form when speaking, which gets very confusing for me! Because then I'm not sure if I should use what she taught me, or shorten it like a lot of German's do.

One of my other friends does Anglo-Saxon as part of her PHD, which is really fascinating. It's actually easier to learn if you speak English and German (another reason we want to learn it!), but what's really random is it has no future tense. So you can't say "I'm going to the market", you have to say "I go to the market later/tomorrow". Very odd!

But then again, Elvish, one of the more famous made up languages, is based on Anglo-Saxon. Shockingly, one of my friends who is a big fan of LOTR's didn't know this, and thought Tolkien had just created it :/

[sixpence1323.livejournal.com]

Well, I take Russian too and I find it hard because of the way I learn languages. (You know, everyone has a different learning process and yadda)

And my Spanish teacher is dislikes English for the all the exceptions. She's always complaining about it - and I never realized how hard English was until my history teacher pointed it out to me a year ago - he wrote the words 'through, though, thorough,' and 'thought' on the board. Then he grunted, 'See that? ough, ough ough, ough - all pronounced differently. English sucks if you're not born knowing it.' *ponder* One of the few things I really took from that class...

You should try etymology - if I spelled that right. We were looking at it in my Spanish class and watching how the word evolved was really intriguing.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, none of those surprise me. English and Chinese are the ones that are obviously going to pop up-even my friend who speaks fluent Mandarin at home can't read or write it-and one of my Russian-speaking friends says that it's one of the hardest languages to learn if it's not your first. (My two friends who speak Russian were both born in Russia and speak it at home.)

[jemixe.livejournal.com]

I've studied french, spanish, latin, japanese and arabic, in addition to english. Of them, latin was the hardest because of the overwhelming number of rules and bits of grammar that needed to be memorized, However, I was never expected to speak it conversationally. In that instance, Arabic was the hardest. French was the funnest, and I just thought Japanese was weird.

In learning centers in the DOD, such as in Cali, Germany, Egypt, and such, the languages are broken down into categories depending on level of difficulty. Things like French, Spanish, Russian, Pashtu, Dari, Farsi and such are Category 3 languages. There are 3 category 4 languages and they are Korean, Chinese and Arabic. The only cat-5 language is English because it is the hardest.

All in all, it all depends on one's own personal learning abilities-whether they learn better by sight, hearing, kenetically etc. But it also depends on whether the individual wants to learn and is having fun doing to. There is a reason people say it's easier to learn a language drunk-never truer than for Arabic--and it isn't because of the magical properties of alcohol. It is because, usually the environment is upbeat and enjoyable, and our brains can more easily process and remember it in recall. And this is starting to sound more and more like a lecture I've had with my friends in chinese or korean on which is the hardest. I argue Arabic, and they each argue their own respective languages. Truth is, learning a language is hard, but rewarding for the bragging rights one can own up to.

[mewenn.livejournal.com]

Strange, I had to learn english and german (french is my mother tongue) and of the two German is still the one I find the hardest. Its grammar just puzzle me whereas english seems very simple in comparison (not that many tenses, no difference aside from he/she form, all objects are neutral) it's true that there are a lot of exceptions but you can still learn to use it faster than German (I think). And French has quiet a lot of exceptions as well.

[niravive.livejournal.com]

Only nebulously on subject, but can I pathetically beg you to be some sort of IM or e-mail buddy for me to practice French? I've had seven+ years, and I am forgetting almost all of it from not using it. I apologize if this is too random and out of left field.

[(Anonymous)]

From my personal experience I'd say Arabic was the hardest to learn and the easiest to completely forget. I'm from a country where Arabic is the native tongue, yet the majority of the country speaks some dialect that's derived from a mixture of French and Arabic. Out of all of them English was actually the easiest for me to learn, but I've never tried to learn Chinese or Russian.

[miaruma.livejournal.com]

Huh, I'm a native German speaker and while it took me a while to get into English, once I actually started understanding it, it was really easy to follow. The grammar was almost laughingly easy compared to french ( haha I still hate french so much for its subjonctive), but since I also took latin, there was a lot of vocab that just bled over from a lot of other languages.

But one thing that I often found very fascinating was the fact that English has so many descriptions for feelings and facial expressions (for example there is no german equivalent for smirk, but in German you can just throw nouns together and create a new word :D.

Mmmmh language :D

[goldenwolfwitch.livejournal.com]

Wait until you try the subjonctif plus que parfait!

French verbs are hell. Ten years of memorising a few pages of my conjugation book every week and i still can't figure out what verb tense to use when speaking, sometimes...

[(Anonymous)]

eyestealer says:

uhm, imo, for writing.

in describing -

i guess it'll have to be the malay language. i mean, you can learn basic convo skills in a while and the words are not that hard to pronounce, but if you want to /master/ it, be warned that my native language even has one word to describe something slung over the shoulder. or the arm. or how if you lie down on the floor with your arm under your body or your leg sticking out (well, not really, but it's something like that).

and then there's the idioms and stuff. ): it's really weird.

OH OH OH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY SEE LIKE, TRADITIONAL MALAY. 83

i think malay is a beautiful language. even though i suckz0rs at it. i love my country. <3 but not the morons ruining it

for like, the complexity of written characters, chinese wins hands down. after that might be the thai characters, i'm not really sure.


and i'm so glad i grew up speaking english 8D it's my second language, and i loves using it.

pronunciation wise, i think arabic and chinese are the hardest for me. i grew up learning how to read arabic (it's not that complicated) but pronouncing, oh man. i still have troubles with it sometimes. read as in, read, you know. not understand it.

chinese for the tones :3

i'm not too sure on European languages tho, like russian and german, but they sound very awesome. for like an asian like me, i find their words hard to pronounce.


maderr, i love you very muchly. :3 keep up the good work and have a great life.

[maderr.livejournal.com]

Awwww, I was just thinking about you ^___^ Love you, too <3

[destinee-carols.livejournal.com]

How ironic; I find myself much amused. Just this past week my friend and I had another miscommunication and he commented how much he hated English, to which I responded that it was the only language in which we could communicate. I am Chinese and I grew up speaking English as well as Chinese...he is Russia-born and is fluent in both by now, I think, Russian and English. We mentioned which language would be harder...I said mine, he said his. So, hm.

Chinese does have rather more complex-looking words. Myself, I cannot read it since I never really learned. Here's a tip, though. Don't try learning Cantonese, spoken - you'll end up realizing one sound can have up to eight different tones indicating different words,

[(Anonymous)]

AGREED about the Cantonese. I'm a fluent speaker, and hearing my non Chinese friends mangle the tones has taught me how difficult it must be. I say the word 123243 times, yet they're always just the sliiiiightest tone off. Mandarin is easier, from my experience. Plus, Cantonese has crazy colloquialism. Written Cantonese is really rigid and formal sounding as opposed to casual Cantonese.

Mandarin is much easier.

But I STILL have a lot of trouble with simplified Chinese, as I grew up learning traditional.

Chinese is a pain in it's written characters and tones, but I think I'd still consider English harder. The HUGE array of exceptions leave even me, a fluent speaker, bemused at times. (Why, oh why must it be "ran"? Why not "runned"? T_T) In that, Chinese is much easier. No grammar conjugations whatsoever. xD

[hyperjirou.livejournal.com]

I've always heard that Japanese is the hardest to write because it includes the Chinese writing system and mixes in two others with a whole mess of conjugation and grammer stuff.