I think Chinese has to be one of the hardest. I mean there is no phonetic alphabet. People say English is hard, but at least it is phonetic and it borrows from many other languages.
I personally have knowledge(not necessarily speak) about English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese. So I can't say anything about other languages. But among these, I have to say Chinese is the hardest. This is pretty clear when it comes to pronunciation. It's pretty much impossible to pronounce Chinese characters correctly because its tones, which does not exist in the major languages I'm aware of. I know there's more variety than Japanese, but not sure about Korean, which is a fairly similar language. In terms of reading and writing, Oriental languages are much harder than western ones. There's simply no comparison. I think people feel English is hard because of the nuances in the grammar and word usage. For example, the gazillion forms of the verb "to be", which, ironically, isn't actually used itself. But I see this sort of weird messed up rules with other languages too, for those who want to be fluent in them. So I can't see why English is harder than other languages.
English is cake compared to many other languages. But I would say its harder than languages such as Spanish and Italian(which are similar to eachother). However Chinese is probably the hardest. I took a college level Chinese 1 course and I dropped out after three weeks. Man, that F-in class was HARD! Korean and Japanese are much easier to pick up in comparison.
In comparison between Chinese and English, I think the reason why people have such difficulty speaking Chinese is that Chinese is on a different tone than English. It is always decernible when foreigners speak Chinese, their voices are distinctly higher, and it seems the same vice versa, when Chinese speak English our voices are slightly deeper. As for the Chinese character, heck yeah it's way harder than anything English can come up with, I tried to talk about the Chinese characters in comparison to English with one of my friend's dad, but he just got lost. But for some strange reason, ( I speak mandarin and cantonese), when I speak Putonghua, English people are able to imitate it very well (nearly sounds like the original) but when they try to imitate Cantonese the results are horrible.
Arabic is fairly easy to read. It'll take you just a couple of months to learn. Maybe less. I think Ebonics is pretty hard. I was at work and this guy walks in talking normal and then his cell rings and suddenly he switched it to Ebonics. That was pretty cool to listen. I wonder if Ebonics have a real set of grammatical rules and all that or do we just have to get used to it to learn..?
I have heard Nordic languages are extremely difficult to learn. Those languages that are rare, such as Native American languages, are probably also difficult to learn.
actually, chinese is one of the simplest language, especially ancient chinese. there isn't really much grammar to speak off. everything is very condensed. modern chinese is much more like english. you guys are looking at it from pronunciation, but chinese isn't designed for saying the character. it's designed for its meaning. a chinese person can look at a character without knowing how it's exactly pronounced but knows what it means. in english, while you can read all words, but a lot times you have no idea what it means. of course, some words you can break it down in parts and kind figure it out what it means. but that's the same in chinese. a lot characters, you can break down in radical part and pronunciation part. so you can figure out how to say it. a lot japanese and korean can read chinese newspapers and sort of "converse" with chinese by writing chinese character down in paper. heck, even in different chinese dialects, people with different dialects can't understand each other when speaking, but they write on paper and everything makes sense. same thing for chinese reading japanese newspapers, they can kind of figure what what it means, even though japanese and korean are not even in the same language family as chinese. chinese is in the same family as tibetan. but that's a long story. so to sum it up, chinese isn't that hard. you just memorize the strokes while in english you just memorize the spelling.
I think the US army used Navajo Indians to communicate during WWII. Because there aren't that many people that can speak or understand that language.
Agreed. I took 2 years of Chinese in college. I picked up Mandarin quickly when just speaking, writing was a whole different thing. I've heard that Russian is the hardest.
Ebonics does have a grammatical structure. What many people think of as Ebonics is really just slang. The two are different. Ebonics comes from when the West Africans who spoke many dialects were enslaved and brought to other countries primarily the U.S. They weren't allowed to learn English, and since the dialects were different they had a hard time communication with each other. What evolved was a grammatical structure that meshed English with structures of West African dialects. Then as families learned those speech patterns and still weren't allowed to go to school, the children learned them as well. Children learn speech patterns very early on. It is why I child who hasn't gone to school yet, might say "I goed to the park yesterday." It is because they already understand that 'ed' at the end of a word makes it past tense. So when people speak Ebonics and say things like I axed a question or something like that, it is a grammatical structure they are following. But if they just use slang words then it's just slang and has nothing to do with Ebonics. Sometimes verbs which mean slightly different things Ebonics will be switched around as well. Anyway I don't know about the hardest but when I was in Morocco the people there told me that Americans can speak their local language with almost no accent at all, after a few years of study and living there.
They did. I have family in Wales, and they still speak Welsh (as secondary to English). Talk about a freakin' HARD language. And forget about phonetics altogether: even though they use Roman characters today just like modern English, you've got to throw those rules out the window. Lots of consonants and seemingly random 'y's thrown in all over the place: Wales in Welsh: "Cymru," which is pronounced "koom ree" (rhymes with 'room' and 'knee'). Crazy-ass language.
Finnish and Hungarian are the two major languages from the same Finno-Ugric language group, and they are supposed to be extremely complex. Large volumes of information are transmitted by inflection of various words. Thus the same phrase can mean many different things, depending on which words you emphasize. Sami and Estonian are also in this group. So I agree with the inclusion of Finnish.
chinese would be up there on the list. I've also heard russian is difficult. I'd toss icelandic in there too. Ebonics...that aint noth'n
I remember I was in Wales and passed by the town with the one of the longest names in the world. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
