What has got to be the most difficult language to learn?

[mwooldri]

Not that learning another language is easy...

I figure that non-Roman alphabet using languages would be harder (Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic come to mind first)

But then there's something about the Welsh language that gets me. It uses the Roman alphabet but makes up new letters - 28 letters in the Welsh alphabet. Plus unlike Chinese where if you Romanize the words you can at least rponounce them out... with Welsh I find it hard to do.

Any more candidates for "difficult languages"? And I'm talking linguistic languages here. You can tell me that C++, Perl, Java are "hard languages" but they're not for humanspeak.

Mark.

[flvegan]

1. Dolphin.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. Eeee!

Eep eee eeee eep, meeep eee eeeep!!

[flvegan]

7. Nice post, Flipper.

[ZombieNixon]

2. Celtic languages are notoriously difficult.

Gaelic is almost impossible for non-native speakers to master. (18 letter, 50-60 individual sounds, depending on dialect). It has words like "aoibhneas" (pronounced EVE-nase or EVE-nyas). :crazy:

[DarkTirade]

11. And sidhe

pronounced either 'shee' or 'eeshee', depending on who you ask.

And damned if I can figure out how they got from point A to point B or C for that one. :)

[ZombieNixon]

14. There's actually a set of sound change rules that, when you grasp the concepts of

lenition and eclipsis, make a lot of sense.

[DarkTirade]

15. Yeah, I figured it wasn't just random letters.

But since I don't know those rules, I'm a bit lost when it comes to pronouncing words like that. :)

[hobbit709]

3. Magyar

[dolo amber]

37. That's what I always heard, but my Hungarian grandma didn't seem to have

any problem with it. :shrug:

:D

[zanne]

5. English. I'm finding it difficult. nt

[pokerfan]

6. It depends on one's native language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardest_language

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Exactly--Japanese is difficult for English speakers but easy for Korean speakers

It's not that Japanese and Korean are closely related. IF they are related, and it's not a universally accepted idea, they split from each other about 5,000 years ago.

However,their grammatical patterns are remarkably similar, and the things that bug an English speaker, such as word order, particles, passive causatives, and honorifics, barely phase a Korean speaker.

Most European languages belong to the Indo-European family and are related to English to some extent, except for Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian (part of the Uralic family), Basque (believed to be the last survivor of whatever was spoken in Spain before the Romans arrived), and Maltese (a dialect of Arabic). The Indo-European languages represented in Europe are Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Breton), Germanic (German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and English), Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovene), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Greek, Albanian, and Romance (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian).

English has a Germanic base with a heavy influx of Romance language words via French and Latin. For that reason, Germanic and Romance languages are the easiest for English speakers to learn.

Of the non-European languages, I think Chinese is pretty easy to speak, although horribly difficult to write, and I've heard that Indonesian is easy, too. Some of the Native American languages are supposed to be amazingly hard for outsiders, especially Navaho.

[IndianaJones]

12. blasphemy. nt.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

27. Thanks for that summary.

I've only studied Romance languages: Latin, Spanish and Italian.

[billyoc]

32. I've heard that there are no known instances of an adult learning Navaho.

I have no idea where I heard it, but I suspect it was here in the lounge. :hi:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

33. I know an Episcopal priest who

tried when he was sent to serve some small churches in Navaho country, but he gave up after he made some seriously embarrassing mistakes.

[Chan790]

8. !Kung . That'd be my guess.

It's that clicky language you sometimes see portrayed in film as being spoken by Kalahari bushmen.

It's endangered because its' native speakers (all 15,000 of them) are being infringed upon by their neighbors (many of whom speak English or other languages more practical for communication with the rest of the world) and because it is by-and-large impossible to learn for anybody who is not a native speaker.

[FloridaJudy]

9. Basque is reputed to be the most difficult

It's completely unrelated to any other language, anywhere. Navajo is so difficult to learn that they used it as a code during WWII.

For me, it would be any inflected language. I'm so tone-deaf I'd probably try to say "Beautiful day, isn't it?" and it would come out "Your grandmother milks diseased water buffalo".

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. Tone languages don't have absolute pitches, just contours

For example, in Mandarin Chinese, if you say "ma" in a straight tone, it means "mother."

If you say "ma" with a low, sweeping contour, it means "horse."

Once you get used to it, it's not hard.

[KamaAina]

35. My grandmother actually did milk diseased water buffalo

:P

[Hawkeye-X]

16. I'm told Hawaiian is quite difficult to learn...

and I was all-twitter and getting ready to go to Hawaii next year before I learned that the prices went up on me..

Going to Mexico instead in 2010, and have time to brush on some Spanish.

Hawkeye-X

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. Fortunately for tourists, most residents of Hawaii don't speak Hawaiian

although the past twenty years or so have seen a big revival of the language.

When I spent my first summer session at UH in 1977, you'd hardly know there was a Hawaiian language except for those place names full of vowels.

When I spent another summer there in 1991, there were immersion schools for children, high enrollment in Hawaiian language classes at the university, and even people giving speeches in Hawaiian at an environmental program I attended.

[KamaAina]

38. 'A'ole no, E Hawkeye!

"no, indeed" -- even for Haole Boy here. Actually, I can only get through the first page or so of the conversational lesson. :-)

But seriously, there are only twelve letters. I often joke, "Yes, we do get Sesame Street out here, but the song goes 'A-E-H-I-K-L-M, N-O-P, U-W". No confusing diphthongs or anything. There is, though, a great deal of use of figurative language (e.g., koa is a native species of acacia tree, but it can also mean 'soldier', because the ranks of soldiers were thought to look like koa growing in the forest).

Um, exactly how much did the prices go up? I just booked a flight all the way back to NYC for about $900 RT. And tourism is down to the point that you might be able to save enough on a hotel to make up for what the airlines are soaking charging you.

[JVS]

17. Linear A

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

Since it hasn't been deciphered, one could argue that nobody knows it. How much harder can you get?

[Orrex]

18. I've been having a devil of a time learning Etruscan

Well, not me personally, but other people.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. Especially since there's no one to talk to!

:-)

[Orrex]

28. I just thought that everyone was ignoring me

:cry:

[XemaSab]

19. Russian isn't that hard

If you get the alphabet down, it's mostly phonetic. Plus, a lot of the words have Greek roots, so it's not totally without reference to an Anglophone.

[jobycom]

22. I studied a tiny bit of Arabic. It was tough, but not too bad. Latin was worse.

Latin and Arabic have some similarities, in that endings are more important than word order, so knowing one helps a little.

More than the alphabet is the age of the language, and the group it belongs to, when it comes to difficulty. Older languages are more primitive. It's almost like computer languages, where programming in Fortran has so many rigid structures, compared to modern languages that are more free-flowing. Latin has rigid conjugations and declensions that require a lot of memorization.

Seems to me, anyway. And no, I can't read or speak Arabic or Latin. I used to be able to translate Latin, slowly, but I haven't tried in a decade. Those were just my impressions back when.

[JeffR]

23. Finnish.

Absolute murder, other than the Finnish cuss words directed at me when my mom was really pissed off. Those I can repeat with a pretty convincing accent.

[Angleae]

24. From what I understand, English.

It makes & breaks it's own rules with no rhyme or reason. Although if your trying to decipher it on your own, Cherokee, to my knowledge has never been translated be a non-cherokee.

[JI7]

25. for those of us who know English we can't see it

but i have heard from those who speak another language and learned mutliple languages including english that english is tougher than the others they learned.

[JCMach1]

26. Arabic is tough... ask my daughters

[HEyHEY]

36. I found farsi easy

[sentelle]

29. everyone knows that

Its either finnish or hungarian

[Orrex]

30. I can only Finnish if I'm really Hungary

Too much Greece in the Turkey, and don't get me started about the Chile.

[mainegreen]

31. I've heard Icelandic is damned difficult to grasp.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

34. But at least it's related to English

like the other Scandinavian languages.

I've learned some Norwegian, and that was quite easy to read, if not necessarily to pronounce.

[Iggo]

39. I took a year of Chinese.

It's like learning two languages at once.