For me, the easiest languages are Portuguese, Italian and French in that order. English is the non-Latin language more easy to learn. All the rest are a lot more difficult but European languages like German and Russian seem relatively accessible for me.

 

Non-European languages are another matter. Korean, Egyptian and Arabic, together with Polynesian and Native American languages, seem to me in a similar level of difficulty, which is to learn a language which has an alphabet, and that is not in anyway related with the Indo-European languages.

 

Worst of all is Chinese, because is a tonal language, it is written with ideograms, and has no point in contact at all with western culture.

 

Pinguin

 

 

 

 

 

Originally posted by Knights Yes that's pretty much true, except once it is in context or conjugated. I find the whole masculine/feminine thing illogical. I mean come on, rocks, rivers and everything inanimate has no gender. It's silly with say a cat (le chat - masculine), but there's female cats too!  ..

 

I don't know if that's what he mean, but Coptic language is still in use by the Egyptian Coptic Church. And that's the language of ancient Egyptians.

 

Pinguin

I dont really think there is a most difficult language. It all depends how different the language you are learning from the one you know.

 

I've heard North American Indian Languages can be the very difficult.

 

SE Asia and East Asian languages are tonal, varying from 4-6 tones. These can be very difficult if you are from a non--tonal background. But it's not so difficult to learn a different tonal language if you speak one aready. The 4 tones of Chinese are not so hard to learn if you speak the six tones of Lao.

 

Yes, but Coptic schollars speak Coptic, which is Ancient Egyptian.

 

Pinguin

 

Ah... tricky!

 

Well, I've learnt my native language much faster than English one. And I can say that opposite to English language I know my native language perfectly

 

How? Ho long did it take for you to learn your first language? It's got to be at least over 7 years... (Assuming that you are exceptionally talented)

 

As such, I do not imagine other language sytems to be hard to learn either.

Because They are agglutinative languages. They only have suffixes and these suffixes define the tenses, relations an d all other grammatical issues.

 

For example.If you want to ask: Are you one of those who we could not Anglicized in Turkish( the most widespread Turkic language), the approxiamte sentence turns to be only one word and it is so:

İngliz+les+tir+e+me+di+k+ler+i+miz+den+mi+siniz?

Ingiliz: English

-leş: To become

-tir:to make , to cause, to lead to

-e: can, be able

-me: not

di: past making suffix

-k: we

-ler. plural suffix

-i : a kind of linker

-miz: we, ours

-den from

-mi: question suffix

siniz: be form for you

 

Ingilizlestiremediklerimizden misiniz?

 

Meaning:

Are you one of those who we could not Anglicized?

 

Word by word translation:

 

English become make could  we those of us from are you

 

Or more meaning fully :

Are you of those we could not make become English?

 

Oh my God How could I teach Turkish to an Englishman if I were a Language teacher. God forbid. It is horrible.

,

As a Turk for me it is easy but surely Turkish will be a nightmare for a westerner.

 

I think only those who are obsessed with mathematics or other numerical sciences  would take pleasure from learning Turkish. Because Turkish is a science on its own.

There is not so many bookworms in the world.

 

 

 

 

Turkic language is the most difficult language among the languages I know. A single verb can have more than six thousand different forms as an Uyghur linguist told me. You can express very subtle inner feelings just by changing the verb form.  

 

Well, in theory a Scandinavian or Germanic noun can be thousands of letters long, even though you hardly encounter that on an everyday basis. I really doubt that many forms are used.

 

As for hardest, I don't know. Of those I've tried, Finnish was the worst, the grammar was disastrous. Chinese is doable, but some sounds are really really hard. Japanese is comparably easy.

Hah!

 

That's why I picked it.

 

(I know hardly anything about Korean.)

 

Well noun formation and verb formation are two different things.  I wasn't talking about theory neither. Those different forms are the ones that areactually used. Of course some are more frequenly used, some are not.

 

Another thing is that the formation of the verb isn't necessarily that long to give deep meaning.  a single syllible added after the root verb also can give very subtle meaning. Turkic language is extremely rich in suffix.

 

For example:

 

Al ---- means "to take"

 

Here I just give some imperitive forms:

 

Ale --- take it.

Alinge --- please take it.

Alsila ---- please take it (with more polite way)

Alghine --- take it (asking with sincere request and a kind of affection)

Alipbaqe --- try to take it.

alipbaqqin --- just try to take it.

alsangchu --- take it (with annoyance after several times of request)

aliwer --- take as you want.

almamsen --- don't worry to take it. (with reproach) 

...................

 

 

I can go on and on. Remember this is only the imperitive form.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you mean by 'Egyptian'?

 

If you only want to learn enough for daily conversation, it is relatively easy. Chinese (Mandarin) only has four tones and the grammatical structure is same as English, which is SVO.

 

I have seen many European/American who can speak Beijing Style Chinese(Mandarin) fluently as if they were born there.

For me, Japanese wasn't all that hard and Korean has been a total breeze. Korean and Japanese are actually very easy in a way because you only need one word to make a proper sentence. Also, Korean has the easiest writing system in the world. Both Japanese and Korean follow a Vowel-Consenant-vowel-consenant rule, so they flow very easily.

 

The fact that Turkish does that with a single word is actually immaterial. For each line of your statement above you need to get the correct meaning in English a different phrase (including the intonation as part of the phrase, since changes in intonation affect meaning in English more than any other language I'm aware of except Chinese and Norwegian).

 

It's just as hard to learn all those phrases in English as it is to learn the different verb forms (which are actually just condensed phrases) in Turkish.

 

In fact, what students of English seem to have the hardest time with is (a) distinguishing between phrasal verbs[1] and (b) getting the intonation (the shifts in pitch) right.

 

On the other hand, since English has so many variants and so many 'native' speakers with different accents/dialects, natural English speakers find it easy to get the intended meaning in spite of mistakes, which in one way makes the language 'easy to learn'.

 

[1] E.g. 'come to', 'come along', 'come round', 'come over', 'come by', 'come up', 'come down', 'come in'.... all of which have meanings that have nothing to do with motion (as in 'come here')

 

Originally posted by mamikon I have heard Magyar and Estonian languages are the hardest (thus the Finno-Ugric group) 8 people voted for English

Maybe because even the English find it hard to speak/write correct English. It's too wasy in English to get away with incorrect English.

 

Apart from that what makes English difficult for most people is the reliance on pitch and intonation to convey meaning. (Granted it's not the only language that does that.)

 

The simple sentence "You went to Paris yesterday" depending on intonation can mean

"I thought it was someone else who went to Paris yesterday"

"You really hate Paris: why did you go there?"

"So you did go like you said you would"

"So you went even after saying you would never go"

"So you weren't already in Paris the day before yesterday?"

"I thought you were going somewhere else"

"I thought you were planning to stay here"

I thought you were going earlier (or later) than that"

and probably more things than that.

 

It's not easy for a non-native speaker to get them all right.

 

I wonder if native speakers can get them right either. It's nothing but confusion. Intonation is common to every language.  Anyway, you don't give any of those meanings when you right them down without adding other sentenses, do you?

 

 

 

Similar, though the actual intonation patterns are different. I've found that the best non-native speakers at mastering English patterns are Norwegians.

 

Originally posted by barbar Originally posted by gcle2003     The simple sentence "You went to Paris yesterday" depending on intonation can mean "I thought it was someone else who went to Paris yesterday" "You really hate Paris: why did you go there?" "So you did go like you said you would" "So you went even after saying you would never go" "So you weren't already in Paris the day before yesterday?" "I thought you were going somewhere else" "I thought you were planning to stay here" I thought you were going earlier (or later) than that" and probably more things than that.   It's not easy for a non-native speaker to get them all right.   I wonder if native speakers can get them right either. It's nothing but confusion. Intonation is common to every language.

But in some languages it is much more complex than others, notably Chinese. After all, words are common to all languages.

Anyway, you don't give any of those meanings when you right them down without adding other sentenses, do you?

You don't need to add any other sentences or phrases. The entire meaning can be conveyed with intonation, just using the five words I gave.

 

A difficulty many English speakers with only a limited acquaintance with foreign languages is that they try to use intonation the same way as they normally would, and don't understand why they're not understood.

 

In French, especially it seems to my ear in Paris, the sentence 'Tu es allé à Paris hier' means nothing much more than the simple statement that you went to Paris yesterday, French being comparatively flat tonally.

 

Otherwise you have to construct something like 'C'était hier que tu es allé à Paris, non?'.

 

Of course you CAN say 'it was yesterday that you went to Paris, no?', but you wouldn't naturally do so. It makes you sound like a policeman questioning a suspect.

 

 

Another important point is possibility of practising the language. English is "easy" since you can listen, speak and write anytime, but Cornish wouldn'd so "easy" since it is almost impossible to come across a Cornish speaker on any street of the world (even in Cornwall would be difficult!)

     The Brittanic languages (Breton, Cornish and Welsh) would be difficult due to the mutations (similar to Tolkien's Sindarin), but I think that the Amerindian languages would be very difficult.  They have features similar to the exceptionally long Turkish words that were demonstrated earlier.  As for the most difficult Germanic language, grammatically speaking, would be Icelandic or Faroese (both close to ON which was highly inflected).  Hardest IE language, I'm not sure.   Icelandic might rank in there, but Russian's rich morphology would make it a contender.  Also, Shughni, a dialect of Persian (though I am told that it is a very ancient dialect, and a native speaker of it told me it was Old Persian) spoken in Tajikistan (near the Afghani border) also is a very difficult language.  But, I would say that the many 'indigenous' languages to many areas are the hardest.  Some of the African tribal languages with their clicks would be a real pain!!

 

I think the confusion regarding Cornish is because there are two dates given for its extinction.

 

- Death of the last known monolingual Cornish speaker (Molly the Fisherwoman)   1780s

- Deaths of the last speakers who had varying degree of fluency in the language    1890-1910

 

The continuity of Cornish,  can be looked at two ways.  There was an academic effort  to preserve grammar and vocabulary by studying both early written sources and interviewing the last speakers.  The strongest effort, however, occurred after the deaths of the last people speaking Cornish.

 

So... the break was relatively small and it was not a clear break.  Exact pronunication and subtle vocabulary was lost, but alot of the real language was preserved.  

 

The points regarding the break are very good

I agree.  The later dates 1890-1910 should be used.

 

Originally posted by Olme   For example, I don't think that there are many minority languages (that are prominent) in which the speakers aren't bilingual.  Frisian isn't extinct, but I would say that over 99 percent of the native speakers of it also speak Dutch.  Along with Welsh, which isn't exctinct, they all speak English.

I agree, except with the reference to Welsh.  I believe that there are still several thousand  monolingual Welsh speakers in the North of Wales.  I guess that this is a testimony to their determination and stubborness.

 

Well..... Louisiana might have very small numbers of Cajun / Creole French  monolinguals.   That would leave Native Hawaiian.  One of the Islands in the chain is a community land trust only for certain Native Hawiians.   If there are any monolinguals left, they might be there.  

 

 

Yes, we are stubborn old buggers!! The monoglots live in the north and west, they're usually the very old or the pre-school population.

 

The secret about learning one of the Celtic languages or any other language for that matter is to understand how they work, no language is really difficult to learn, I`d rather call them challenging!

 

Funny you were talking about intonation, I was talking to one of my friends about this. In welsh, we don't have to do this, instead we just move the words around for emphasis.

 

YOU went to the park - CHI wedi mynd i'r parc?

 

You went to the PARK - Y PARC chi wedi mynd i?

 

Welsh is very flexible!