i'd say chinese since it's a tone language plus it uses completely different characters for writing/reading from english. posted by grafholic at 12:40 PM on October 14, 2005
I learned Irish and French and bits of Spanish handily enough, but I'm finding Bengali really tough (and I am more dedicated than for the other languages). It's a combination of new characters, no evening courses around to join, minimal coursebooks aimed at English speakers to help me along, new sounds that are tough for an english speaker and not seeing much of it around, I think. posted by jamesonandwater at 12:50 PM on October 14, 2005
This is a hard question to answer, because as you hint at, there's absolutely no good way to quantitatively measure something like the difficulty of learning a second language. But here are some ideas.
Obviously looking outside of Indo-European would be a good idea, since this would minimize the amount of vocabulary overlap.
One place to look might be languages that are as different from English in structure as possible - for instance, polysynthetic noun-incorporating languages like inuktitut or mohawk (the mohawk entry has very little on the language beyond the sounds, i.e. it doesn't talk about the morphology, but you can guess the difficulty from looking at the samples towards the bottom). There are many many other languages like this.
Another place to look might be languages that involve morphology with lots of suppletion (i.e. irregular forms), that would require massive amounts of memorizing difficult forms. An example of this is found in Georgian, which also instantiates the first property - it is very different from English (and most other languages).
Finally, you could look at languages which have a hard phonology (sound system). The canonical example of this is the Imdlawn Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber, where there is virtually no restriction on what can appear in the "nucleus" of a syllable - most languages (i.e. English) allow only vowels there. For instance, "txznt" is a word in this language, with no vowels (so it is claimed) found. The best place to look for information about this dialect would be in the linguistic literature, for instance chapter 2 of Prince and Smolensky 1993. I tend to think that this third kind of difficulty (words being hard to pronounce) is a lot easier to overcome than the first two I mentioned. posted by advil at 12:59 PM on October 14, 2005
The US Army did a study after WWII to answer that very question. The answers they got led them to develop the structure currently in place at the Defense Language Institute.
Applicants take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to determine the level of difficulty that they can handle. jamesonandwater is correct about Chinese...
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the hardest languages for English speakers and require the highest score.
I doubt this question is answerable .... but.... I have been trying to learn a little bit of Haida and it is very very difficult for me to get my head around its rules and pronunciation to an extent I am completely unfamiliar with -- but this reflects my ignorance as much as any intrinsic difficulty, perhaps. (if there is such a thing as intrinsic difficulty -- I suspect there is if one considers deliberately simple languages like Esperanto or those with simplified spelling like Spanish) posted by Rumple at 1:04 PM on October 14, 2005
The Defense Language Institute probably isn't looking to grade people on their Mohawk-speaking potential. I'd guess they'd only focus on languages that are likely to be useful in a defense context.
Does anyone know if they bother teaching the smaller dialects? posted by small_ruminant at 1:18 PM on October 14, 2005
I doubt that Mandarin Chinese is the hardest spoken language to learn, because its syntax is very similar to English, but simpler (no plural nouns or articles, for instance). That's not to say it's easy, but I would think that a language with a radically-different syntax and tonal modifiers would be harder, like the ones that advil talks about.
richmondparker's link to the DLI test info doesn't work for me. That the DLI chose those three as hardest after their study is not compelling, since I doubt that they studied any non-major languages like Berber or Navajo. The DoD is probably only interested in potential adversaries, like, you know, the Swedes. posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:27 PM on October 14, 2005
I actually think Chinese is fairly easy to speak, at least to a minimal level of base-usefulness. I don't know about mastery, since I certainly have not mastered it. Writing is another issue, however.
The tones are so easy, I just don't understand why people are so freaked out about them. English already has two of the four used in Mandarin (falling for imperative and rising for questions), they are just used less often.
Actually, the beginning years of Chinese are almost a breeze. There is no pluralization of nouns, and no changing the root word in conjugation. It makes learning vocabulary as much a joy as rote-memorization can be. Pinyin is completely phonetic, so most non-character writing is automatic once you learn the rules for the transliteration system.
Disclaimer - three years of college Chinese, a long while ago - I am no master. posted by Invoke at 1:32 PM on October 14, 2005
!Kung is famous for having one of the largest sound inventories in the world. posted by PurplePorpoise at 1:33 PM on October 14, 2005
doesn't chinese have 4 ways to say "ma" and depending on the tone, it means something totally different?
as in japanese "sake" (salmon) and "sake" (alcoholic bev) or "hashi" (chopsticks) and "hashi" (bridge).
(or "ame" (candy) and "ame" (rain)...i can go on and on)
i'm just mentioning because i've seen native english speakers having a hard time differenciating tonal differences, hense my assumption that tonal language would be a difficult one to master/learn. posted by grafholic at 1:37 PM on October 14, 2005
Perhaps Malayalam, my native language. Heck, it's hard for other Indians to learn and speak like a native, let alone regular English-speaking folk.
I'd throw in a vote for Cantonese too, however.
(How would you objectively measure something like this without trying to learn each language on the planet?) posted by madman at 1:38 PM on October 14, 2005
grafholic, those are the four tones Invoke mentioned. They aren't that hard. And while Cantonese is unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker, I doubt it's harder to learn. posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:50 PM on October 14, 2005
I'll just quickly reveal my motivation for posting this question. I've studeid Spanish for four years, and Japanese for nearly six (having lived in Tokyo for about a year) and I simply refuse to believe people's assertions that Japanese is the hardest language to learn for a Westerner.
Does anyone have any knowledge on African languages or any more info on Native American languages and their relative difficulty? posted by dead_ at 1:57 PM on October 14, 2005
After suffering through three years of French in high school, with all of its conjugation and masculine/feminine and general unpleasantness, I took Mandarin in college and found it to be quite easy (and fun!) to learn. I am, by far, the worst linguist to ever walk the Earth, so if I could do it, anyone could. posted by rentalkarma at 2:01 PM on October 14, 2005
I simply refuse to believe people's assertions that Japanese is the hardest language to learn for a Westerner.
hahaha, it is not fair then that i still have a hard time pronouncing "r" (especially when the word contains both L and R) after 10 years of living here in the US. posted by grafholic at 2:06 PM on October 14, 2005
My answer endorses advil's response--pronounciation is only one third of the problem. Cases are my personal nemesis. English has a very small number of cases. Languages with larger numbers of cases are languages with components which do not exist in English. Thinking in new ways is certainly much more difficult for most people than simply learning how to make a new sound. Russian should be on the list. posted by zoratu at 2:16 PM on October 14, 2005
Hardest language? Hmmm. There are two components: how hard it is to gain new vocabulary (speaking or writing) and how hard it is to usefully use that vocabulary (grammar). I think part of the reason Japanese gets such a bad wrap for difficulty is that both of those are a bit tough. For vocabulary, learning to read/write is just a long term proposition when you have to effectively memorize 2000+ distinct characters with 2+ pronunciations (and that is a gross simplification). The grammar is also very different from English (SOV most of the time, but with somewhat different notions of dependent clause composition).
Just an aside .. Japanese pitch accent isn't really the same as Chinese tones. In chinese, too different tones on the same base phonemes can be two different words and you will be misunderstood (or at least for a moment while the listener figures out which choice makes the most sense.)
But, in Japanese, it's only in some dialects that pairs like hashi (bridge and chopsticks) are actually distinguished by pitch. Even in Tokyo dialect (where this difference is most commonly noted), the pronunciation of the same word can change within context depending on the pitches of surrounding words. In other dialects the pitch accents of these word pairs might be distinguisable in the dialect, but not the same as Tokyo. In yet other dialects, there may be no difference in pitch in the same words. (At least in one dialect, almost everything is spoken with a flat tone).
Most of the time, you can just pronounce everything with an even tone and will be perfectly understood. It will be obvious that you don't speak the local dialect (or Tokyo dialect) but as long as you don't mangle anything too bad, you probably won't sound too inexperienced with Japanese.
Rachael posted by R343L at 2:20 PM on October 14, 2005
I'm a computational linguist specializing in elicitation. Part of my job description is knowing the language typology for most world languages. Different languages are hard based on their grammar, phonology and writing systems.
From my experience the language with the hardest writing system is Japanese. There are three basic alphabets, but this isn't what makes writing and reading Japanese hard. Different characters have different readings based on their usage, which can be less than predictable. Chinese isn't as hard to read or write because the characters have one reading and if you're lucky you'll get a clue from a phonetic radical.
Phonetically, tones, clicks, uncommon consonants and subtle vowel distinctions are hard for English speakers. Cantonese has nine tones. I think anything with a high consonant to vowel ratio is bad news for English speakers. Some Kartevelian languages (spoken in the Causcus) have upwards of 40 different consonants. Ingush has three types of stops and fricatives, uvular stops and continuals, glottalized consonants and four different 'k'-like sounds. New consonants and sounds can be more difficult and subtle than clicks or tones for English speakers.
Grammatically speaking, a language with complicated morphology, subtle epistemic marking and a large variety of cases would be difficult. Mapudungun and Finnish would be tough for these reasons.
So, depending on your criteria there are several different answers. posted by Alison at 2:57 PM on October 14, 2005
I had read that Korean is actually one of the hardest languages for an English-speaking person to master. This arises from there being so many levels of conjugation depending on politeness level and tense.
This is compounded by the fact that if you try to go to Korea to master your skill, most everyone there will rather try to speak English with you than to let you speak Korean. posted by GeneticFreek at 3:00 PM on October 14, 2005
Thinking about it, Kartevelian languages also have some bizzare grammatical properties. There are weird noun phrase case changes with changes in tense and aspect. I think I would vote for a language like Ingush or Georgian. For more information see:
Harris, Alice C. 1981. Georgian Syntax:
Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Also, I'm a volunteer Japanese interpreter and I agree that Japanese is not the hardest language to learn. It is a pain in the ass to write, though. posted by Alison at 3:03 PM on October 14, 2005
All of the above answers address current languages - I'm certain that a dead language like Ancient Egyptian would be far more difficult than any of the above, since no one today knows exactly what they sound like, and you'd have a hell of a time trying to find a speaking partner to improve your skills. posted by birdsquared at 3:44 PM on October 14, 2005
As a failed student of a number of languages, I can attest that Japanese is not difficult*. The rules of grammar are relatively few and fairly rigid (two tenses!), so once you pick that up it's all vocabulary from there. It's the only language I had a knack for, and I think it's because it was so dissimilar from english.
I would put Chinese on the list.
*To speak and listen to that is. Reading is whole other kettle of fish. posted by o2b at 3:52 PM on October 14, 2005
On a much less pedantic note, I agree that Japanese is easy to 'learn to speak' (as per the web title) but difficult 'to master' (as per the wording of the question). AFAIK, the comments made by GeneticFreek about Korean apply as well to Japanese, since I have heard that the two languages are congruent. Of course, this 'tie' is 'won' by Japanese, which is much harder to read and write than Korean, as per Alison, above. posted by birdsquared at 4:23 PM on October 14, 2005
Wouldn't it likely be Xhosa, the African "clicking" language? I seem to recall the Guinness Book of World Records certifying a Xhosa tongue-twister as the most difficult in the world. The English translation was "The skunk rolled down the hill and ruptured its larynx", but in Xhosa it contained an astronomical number of "clicks". posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:34 PM on October 14, 2005
You have to decide first whether you're talking about the spoken or written language, because those are two completely different kettles of fish. Spoken Chinese is easy for English-speakers (as has been said, the tones are not a serious obstacle); the written language takes years and years. Spoken Japanese is much harder thanks to the complicated system of politeness built into the verbs (you literally cannot speak to someone unless you know where you stand with respect to them on the prestige scale, which is why the first thing Japanese do upon meeting is exchange business cards). Georgian is a bitch (I've learned it twice now, and will probably have another go at it eventually), but not for English-speakers in particular -- it's just got nasty grammar. The same is supposedly true in spades for Australian aboriginal languages, but I've never tried to learn them, so can't speak from experience. Personally, I had a hard time for some reason with Arabic, which I never did get very far with; sometime I'll have to try it again. I did not find Russian particularly hard, except for the damn verbs of motion. posted by languagehat at 5:37 PM on October 14, 2005
As for clicks and other supposed phonetic obstacles, look, you get over those in the first few weeks of any language class; it's like learning a card trick. At first it seems weird and impossible, but once you "get it" it's no problem and you go on from there. It's the grammar that causes real problems. posted by languagehat at 5:38 PM on October 14, 2005
RichmondParker writes:
Applicants take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to determine the level of difficulty that they can handle.
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the hardest languages for English speakers and require the highest score.
State Department has the same rankings, not surprisingly. And I'm wondering if Mr Parker is in any way related to Ambassador Parker posted by IndigoJones at 6:17 PM on October 14, 2005
Languages like Chinese and Arabic may be among the hardest major languages to learn but I would go with other posters that African languages like Xhosa and !Kung are much harder for English (or any European language) speakers. posted by TheRaven at 7:17 PM on October 14, 2005
All of the above answers address current languages - I'm certain that a dead language like Ancient Egyptian would be far more difficult than any of the above, since no one today knows exactly what they sound like, and you'd have a hell of a time trying to find a speaking partner to improve your skills.
This is true in some sense, but the bar is lowered for a dead language like this. My girlfriend actually has a degree in egyptology and says that the syntax is only medium difficulty (now she is a linguist specializing in syntax), the writing system isn't too bad, and because the phonology/phonetics is not entirely known you don't have to worry so much about it being right. Like most dead languages there is no emphasis in conversation or writing. The difficulty would probably be finding a place to take the class.
African languages like Xhosa and !Kung
Click languages are regularly taught as required second languages in school in some parts of South Africa, whose first languages are English and Afrikaans, so there might actually be information somewhere about difficulties involved. I'm not sure where to look, though I do distantly know someone who went through such a schooling system. posted by advil at 8:14 PM on October 14, 2005
any more info on Native American languages and their relative difficulty?
There are lots of immersion programs on or around various reservations in cases where the native language is dead or close to it, but people now want their (too old to acquire it natively) children to speak it. Consequently there is a lot of material on 2nd language teaching of these languages. I have no direct experience with these programs, but I have worked with a speaker of Mohawk who taught in one, and they do seem to work. Googling things like "Mohawk immersion programs" gets some results, and if you switch the language name, you'll get more, though I doubt there will be any quantitative studies. One article this brings up is here. In any case, information about immersion programs would be the place to look for the answer to this question, especially if you can find someone (or someone posts in this thread) who has worked directly in one in some capacity. posted by advil at 8:23 PM on October 14, 2005
The same is supposedly true in spades for Australian aboriginal languages, but I've never tried to learn them, so can't speak from experience.
Australian languages are highly diverse, but I'm familliar with Warlpiri and to a lesser degree Kayardild. The phonetics are a bit tricky, but the free word order can be a bit of a blessing if one can master the case marking system. They have a sort of vague quality to their semantics that can be hard to learn. Interestingly, these sorts of languages with free word order are nasty for computer parsing and second in difficulty to Algonquian languages (they have argument ranking based on importance; this is rather tough for computers). posted by Alison at 9:50 PM on October 14, 2005
There was a recent question that's related, about concepts that exist in other languages that don't exist in English. I'd imagine those languages would be pretty hard to wrap your head around. posted by edjusted at 12:46 AM on October 15, 2005
I looked at the table at the link Sharcho posted and wasn't really surprised to find Polish as one of the most difficult languages to learn. It's one thing to speak a little Polish, or to understand it, and something completely different to speak it well.
It's a language where you conjugate not only verbs, but nouns, proper nouns, adjectives and names. It has almost free word order, but not quite. It contains exceptions which are conditioned on historical references - you refer to countries based on islands (Cyprus) or those that were once part of the empire (Ukraine, Hungary) in a different way than other countries.
Not to mention the pronounciation that all anglophones I've ever spoken to have had imense problems with, problems with spelling that even most natives have... All in all, it's a can of worms, and I'm still having problems with it 12 years after moving back. posted by jedrek at 2:36 AM on October 15, 2005
I looked at the table at the link Sharcho posted and wasn't really surprised to find Polish as one of the most difficult languages to learn. It's one thing to speak a little Polish, or to understand it, and something completely different to speak it well.
It's a language where you conjugate not only verbs, but nouns, proper nouns, adjectives and names. It has almost free word order, but not quite. It contains exceptions which are conditioned on historical references - you refer to countries based on islands (Cyprus) or those that were once part of the empire (Ukraine, Hungary) in a different way than other countries.
Not to mention the pronunciation that all anglophones I've ever spoken to have had immense problems with, problems with spelling that even most natives have... All in all, it's a can of worms, and I'm still having problems with it 12 years after moving back. posted by jedrek at 2:37 AM on October 15, 2005
I think a lot of people are overestimating how easy it is for native english speakers to speak chinese. If anything reading and writing are easier than speaking. The tones are easy to pronounce when done one at a time but when you need to combine them in sentences it becomes much more difficult. There are also a lot of subtle pronunciations that aren't apparent unless you have a native speaker really sound them out for you (eg "q j x" vs. "ch zh sh"). Pinyin is also very misleading to english speakers on this point because it does not correspond to english spellings and the same spellings sometimes have different pronunciations (eg the "an" in shan and yan and or the "u" in chu a qu).
In chinese, if you do not have the tones and the pronunciation just right, it is very difficult to make yourself understood. I think in english it is easier to understand people even if they aren't speaking very standard english.
Another way to look at how difficult a language is for english speakers is to see how much difficulty they have in learning english. And from my (limited) travels around the world, East Asians have the worst English by far, despite extensive emphasis on English education. This isn't to say that East Asians are stupid, but that east asian languages are the very different from english so it takes more of an effort for them to learn english or for us to learn their languages. posted by afu at 3:27 AM on October 15, 2005
In chinese, if you do not have the tones and the pronunciation just right, it is very difficult to make yourself understood.
This is simply not true. I lived in Taiwan for a year and found people extremely tolerant of my bad Chinese; nobody ever seemed to have a problem understanding what I meant. And the pronunciations are no more "subtle" than any other language's; you just have to get used to them. You may simply have a problem with foreign languages in general; have you tried others?
East Asians have the worst English by far
This isn't true either.
As for jedrek's remarks about Polish:
It's a language where you conjugate not only verbs, but nouns, proper nouns, adjectives and names.
Dude, that's what inflecting languages are like; it's true of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and all Slavic languages, not to mention most of the Germanic ones. But you have a point about the pronunciation; I remember dropping in on a beginning Polish... not class, because it wasn't in a classroom, a sort of informal outside get-together, and the instructor couldn't get anyone to say the vowel y in a way that satisfied him. I tried, and he looked at me with something verging on hatred -- I was used to Russian, and I think he heard the Vowels of the Oppressor in my voice. (This was many years before the downfall of the Soviet Empire.) posted by languagehat at 5:45 AM on October 15, 2005
Pronunciation will be difficult in ANY foreign language, I think, because there will always be pairs (or more) of similar words with slightly different pronunciation. Even German, which you would expect to be close to English, is tricky, particularly the vowel sounds -- and practicing with native speakers is hard because the dialects vary enough to really mess you up.
I think languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic would be difficult for me to gain readintg/writing fluency in because I just am not a visual person. I barely have this whole English writing thing down when I'm seperated from a keyboard. But, from what I've heard, spoken Japanese is actually fairly simple, grammatically speaking.
Another thing to think about is that once you've learned a significant amount in a second language, you have two sets of tools for understanding language, and that will effect learning additional languages. I took a class called "Latin for Modern Language Students" for example and we found that, while the Spanish and French students were good with the vocabulary, as you might expect, the German students understood declensions much better, because an aspect of them still exists in German (adjective endings), but not so much in Spanish and French. posted by dagnyscott at 6:21 AM on October 15, 2005
Languagehat ... try them "consonant clusters" in Czech sometime. posted by RavinDave at 6:36 AM on October 15, 2005
I've got a friend who picks up languages as a hobby. He's up to about 27. He said arabic languages made his head smoke. posted by StickyCarpet at 7:38 AM on October 15, 2005
I disagree with languagehat somewhat about the importance of tones in Chinese. Yeah, local people might be able to understand very basic pidgin Chinese with crap tones. But there are FAR too many beginner-level students who have that lacksidaisical attitude towards tones and then they hit a gigantic brick wall when they try to say anything more advanced than 廁所在哪裡? You should NEVER settle for "Well, I have no idea what the tones are, but he could guess what I said by context, so that's good enough."
And Mandarin has got to be one of the easier Chinese dialects. Besides only having four tones, there's very little tone sandhi (i.e. changing tones depending on their position relative to other tones.) For instance, in Mandarin, the only major tone sandhi you have to worry about is when you have two third tones in a row, which then changes to a second tone and then third tone. On the other hand, Taiwanese/Hoklo not only has 7-10 tones (depending on how you count them), it also has a ridiculous amount of tone sandhi. posted by alidarbac at 10:19 AM on October 15, 2005
It also depends on the way you learn. I have a visual based memory and so found the tonal system of Mandarin a nightmare. Languages which are written phonetically, are far easier for me to learn. I believe Turkish is the closest to an be written exactly as it is spoken posted by bluefin at 10:24 AM on October 15, 2005
And from my (limited) travels around the world, East Asians have the worst English by far, despite extensive emphasis on English education. This isn't to say that East Asians are stupid, but that east asian languages are the very different from english so it takes more of an effort for them to learn english or for us to learn their languages.
Chinese/Taiwanese (and I'd wager Koreans and Japanese as well) people's difficulty with learning English has more to do with pedagological methods (i.e. lecture halls of 30-40 students cramming lists of vocabulary and grammar rules, rather than small groups actually conversing) than any inherent difference between English and their native language. posted by alidarbac at 10:25 AM on October 15, 2005
Just to agree, Japanese really isn't that much of a scary monolith. I graduated with a minor in the language and my hardest barrier was simply remembering my vocabulary. People see the katakana or hiragana plus the kanji, and they freak out. Same goes for Chinese. As long as you don't let yourself be intimidated, I think most languages are accessible to the willing. posted by Atreides at 10:42 AM on October 15, 2005
Is English an easy or hard second language to learn? posted by Rumple at 10:54 AM on October 15, 2005
Languagehat ... try them "consonant clusters" in Czech sometime.
My friend, if you think Czech is bad, stay far away from the Caucasian languages. Georgian has words like gvprtskvni ('you peel us') and mtsvrtneli ('trainer'). posted by languagehat at 5:56 PM on October 15, 2005
I maxed the Army Language Aptitude Test on my way to DLI. I was given a list of languages I could take with exactly one item on the list: Russian. At that time (let's just say the Cold War was in full swing), the demand for Russian lingies was so high that everyone was shunted into that course. My nieghbor's son scored low on the DLAB and went for Russian. When he flunked out, they placed him in the Arabic course because of the need for Arabic speakers. (He didn't make it there, either.) So it's not just performance on the test -- it's the current need for a particular language.
DLI offers courses for friendly-nation languages. I was allowed to audit Turkish since that's where I was heading after DLI. Others in my Russian class audited German. posted by forrest at 7:42 PM on October 15, 2005
LH: I'm a medicore language learner, but i found french much easier than mandarin. I still think that tones can be a major barrier in learning chinese or in tonal language for that matter for english speakers. A tonal language is almost always goign to be harder to learn than a non tonal one for a large portion of english speakers.
I was just bitching about pinyin cause I think it is a shitty system, you are of course right that every language has wierd sounds to non native speakers. posted by afu at 1:27 AM on October 17, 2005
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posted by grafholic at 12:40 PM on October 14, 2005