The hardest language to learn is..
- Thread starter igl00
- Start date
I can speak Mandarin Chinese (well enough to get by at least) - and can tell you it's not that difficult. The main thing is how to pronounce things properly since the actual grammar & language very basic.
Reading & Writing is a different game altogether.
It helps if you date a Chinese girl for a few years
Slovenian (my language) is also a pain in the ass.
A couple noun cases:
I have a car (Slovenian: avto)
I don't have a car/avta.
I gave my car/avtu new tires. (this one sounds strange but I used it for the sake of case illustration)
I destroyed that car/avto.
With my car/avtom.
Also with the varying nouns the adjectives change too:
I have a fast car - Imam hiter avto.
I don't have a fast car - Nimam hitREGA avta.
I gave my fast car new tires - Dal sem mojemu hitREMU avtu nove gume.
You can also notice how the personal pronoun stays the same in English but is changing depending to context in Slovenian: imam/nimam/sem.
Then in English when you go one car, two carS, three carS. You don't differentiate between two or more of something. AFAIK Slovenian is one of only a couple languages on the world that goes 1: me/jaz, 2: us/midva, 3+ us/mi.
With nouns it's a bit trickier: 1 - avto, 2 - avtA and then 3,4 - avtI 5+ - avTOV
Then with genders, for example:
in English you go:
Male/female: I like this car.
In Slovenian:
Male: Rad imam ta avto.
Female: RadA imam ta avto.
As far as genders go most inanimate objects have a random gender assigned to it. Some animals are male, some female. Sometimes you can find a correlation if the word ends with a specific letter.
Mouse/miš in English it's of neutral gender. But in Slovenian it's a she. "That mouse" becomes "Tista miš" tista indicating a female gender. Refrigerator/hladilnik is male "Tisti hladilnik". But the sea for example is neutral gender. It's all mixed up.
Then there's also special characters like Č,Š,Ž. Learning where to put commas was also a pain in the ass in Elementary and is sometimes troublesome even for higher educated individuals.
Honestly, it's hard for me to understand you have educated adults in English speaking countries that have issues with basic grammar and word spelling considering just how elegant and simple to learn your language is. Well I kind of understand the issue with spelling since you don't spell phonetically but still...
A couple noun cases:
I have a car (Slovenian: avto)
I don't have a car/avta.
I gave my car/avtu new tires. (this one sounds strange but I used it for the sake of case illustration)
I destroyed that car/avto.
With my car/avtom.
Also with the varying nouns the adjectives change too:
I have a fast car - Imam hiter avto.
I don't have a fast car - Nimam hitREGA avta.
I gave my fast car new tires - Dal sem mojemu hitREMU avtu nove gume.
You can also notice how the personal pronoun stays the same in English but is changing depending to context in Slovenian: imam/nimam/sem.
Then in English when you go one car, two carS, three carS. You don't differentiate between two or more of something. AFAIK Slovenian is one of only a couple languages on the world that goes 1: me/jaz, 2: us/midva, 3+ us/mi.
With nouns it's a bit trickier: 1 - avto, 2 - avtA and then 3,4 - avtI 5+ - avTOV
Then with genders, for example:
in English you go:
Male/female: I like this car.
In Slovenian:
Male: Rad imam ta avto.
Female: RadA imam ta avto.
As far as genders go most inanimate objects have a random gender assigned to it. Some animals are male, some female. Sometimes you can find a correlation if the word ends with a specific letter.
Mouse/miš in English it's of neutral gender. But in Slovenian it's a she. "That mouse" becomes "Tista miš" tista indicating a female gender. Refrigerator/hladilnik is male "Tisti hladilnik". But the sea for example is neutral gender. It's all mixed up.
Then there's also special characters like Č,Š,Ž. Learning where to put commas was also a pain in the ass in Elementary and is sometimes troublesome even for higher educated individuals.
Honestly, it's hard for me to understand you have educated adults in English speaking countries that have issues with basic grammar and word spelling considering just how elegant and simple to learn your language is. Well I kind of understand the issue with spelling since you don't spell phonetically but still...
There is a joke here about OP
And a very good one at that....
Imagine how shitty his Polish would be.
Yeah - genders is another easy aspect to Mandarin. There simply are none in the spoken language!
(Which is why Chinese people will often say "she" when they mean "he" & vice versa.)
edit: Oh and I disagree with the OP chart - French is most definitely no harder to learn than English.
(Which is why Chinese people will often say "she" when they mean "he" & vice versa.)
edit: Oh and I disagree with the OP chart - French is most definitely no harder to learn than English.
Perhaps that's why everyone speaks English, Spanish and French and no one speaks Polish outside of Poland?
Having a "hard" language is completely counter-intuitive, and retarded. The harder a language is to learn, the less people will adopt it.
Beat me to it.
of course.im not syaing its anything good to have hard language. its just pure information.
but actually in england where u live, enough people speak polish
i speak polish, english + french/dutch at 'simple level' + latin at average level. latin more like i write but its preety useless
I can speak Polish, since my family spoke it in the home. I don't agree that you won't be fluent until you're 16, and my linguist friend feels the same way. Here's what my linguist friend said about this on wechat:
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Completely retarded
Written by someone who has no understanding of linguistics
The best measure of language "difficulty" for English speakers is always gonna be how long the Defense Language Institute takes to train military interpreters
And Polish is not classed with the east Asian languages there. Japanese and Chinese have the longest courses
But it's all relative to each learner, really. I found Russian way harder than Chinese
And I would definitely expect Hungarian and Finnish to be much more challenging than Russian or Polish, considering their agglutinative nature (like Japanese) and the fact that they're not even Indo-European languages
The shit about English children and Polish children being fluent at what age just makes me angry
As if five year old kids aren't fluent in their native language. It's completely bullshit ignorant
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Also I am learning Mandarin, and I agree that it isn't nearly as hard as people think it is. Well SPEAKING it anyway. Reading and writing Chinese characters (as opposed to pinyin) is pretty tough. Reading and writing in pinyin is easy.
One thing that I think Polish helped me with, is being comfortable with languages that have totally different sounds than English.
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Completely retarded
Written by someone who has no understanding of linguistics
The best measure of language "difficulty" for English speakers is always gonna be how long the Defense Language Institute takes to train military interpreters
And Polish is not classed with the east Asian languages there. Japanese and Chinese have the longest courses
But it's all relative to each learner, really. I found Russian way harder than Chinese
And I would definitely expect Hungarian and Finnish to be much more challenging than Russian or Polish, considering their agglutinative nature (like Japanese) and the fact that they're not even Indo-European languages
The shit about English children and Polish children being fluent at what age just makes me angry
As if five year old kids aren't fluent in their native language. It's completely bullshit ignorant
------------------------------
Also I am learning Mandarin, and I agree that it isn't nearly as hard as people think it is. Well SPEAKING it anyway. Reading and writing Chinese characters (as opposed to pinyin) is pretty tough. Reading and writing in pinyin is easy.
One thing that I think Polish helped me with, is being comfortable with languages that have totally different sounds than English.
Find a Russian that's learning English, and communicate by you speaking Russian and him/her speaking English, win-win, that's how I learned most of my Russian.
