the hardest language to learn(for westerners)

[gb]

i guess this really depends on each individual.

Mandarin is initially not difficult to start learning but i reckon is one of the hardest to master. Pronounciation and the different tones as well as the juxtaposition of the different tones in sentences makes it very difficult. Abstract grammar and a great deal of subjectiveness when writing your own chinese can make it frustratingly difficult. the other frustrating thing about mandarin is that you may use it to communicate with most people in china, but outside of beijing almost every other area has their own dialect which you would not be able to understand.

Cantonese is very colloquial and the tones even more subtle than mandarin. traditional characters makes writing more difficult. however if you live in guangdong/hk, the colloquial side of it is easy to get to grips with since it is very vernacular. although what you speak is not necessarily what you write so cantonese is based on many standards of chinese.

Russian and Arabic have bloody tough grammar, and it is very hard to speak these languages coherently and without stuttering. The amalgamation of various hard consonants in russian and the required straining of the muscles in the back of the throat for arabic make pronounciation very strenuous.

some european languages like hungarian and finnish are pretty difficult.

[EA Observer]

I think it's Chinese, for sure, due to their characters-based writing. I heard that a typical college-educated Chinese knows how to read, write, and pronounce around 10,000 Chinese characters. I'll probably die before I can master 500.

[gb]

Kyu-ree: re arabic, is the actual script difficult to learn?? is classical arabic much harder than standard??? is there much difference between egyptian colloquial and saudi standard?

EA Observer: In many ways I agree. The other problem with Mandarin is it is so easy to forget. Being a student of chinese, and having once neglected studying it for a few days, i found that my level had dropped quite a bit just in those few days. unlike very grammatical languages such as russian and (perhaps)arabic, whereby even though the grammar is tough to the point of insanity, it sticks in your head much more easily once it has been remembered.

In terms of hardest grammar anyway, i think it's a contest between russian, arabic and japanese.

[gb]

yeh i always thought germans would be good at arabic!

[supersonic74]

ah no kidding... I think Swiss ppl should handle Arabic pronounciation easily ;D

I think the dutch would be good at it too

btw one of my friend did a self study in japanese..bought some offical books ..and manage to learn the most of it in just one year ..now he's aiming for mandarin.

[muzo]

kyuree said:

gb said:

Russian and Arabic have bloody tough grammar, and it is very hard to speak these languages coherently and without stuttering.

But amir knows more about this I guess...

you have to make a difference between modern standard and colloquial arabic.
modern standard is an artificial language and used for formal purposes ONLY.
colloquial arabic dialects (or rather languages) are very very different compared to modern standard and compared to eachother.

standard arabic is pretty complex and got a very strict grammar etc.
u can also speak a colloquial version of the standard, where u drop endings and vocalizations. thats however not the same as the actual dialects spoekn in the arab countries.
the actual dialects are much easier to learn i guess.
egyptian grammar is like very easy, words are cut, shortened etc etc.

gb said:

Kyu-ree: re arabic, is the actual script difficult to learn?? is classical arabic much harder than standard??? is there much difference between egyptian colloquial and saudi standard?

saudis dont speak standard either, colloquially. syrian arabic is the closest to the modern standard arabic.

kyuree said:

gb said:

I'm learning the non-dialect Arabic (the one no one speaks ). I don't know about Saudi... I just heard that Egyptian is well understood cos most of the soap operas and pop songs are from Egypt!

Just one example I know comparing standard and Egyptian Arabic:

"my heart" --> standard: "qhalbee"
Egyptian: "elbee"

the difference between standard and egyptian is like english and dutch. seriously.
egyptian has many ancient egyptian words and the language is just totally different.

ex of standard -> egyptian

ma hadha? -> eh da?
ana adrussu fil jami3a al2aan-> ana badris fil gami3a delwa2ty.
ma 3arifu -> ma 3arafsh
li2annani la uridu -> 3alashaan mesh 3aaeiz

[Sensei]

I'm reluctant to vote, but I'd probably say Cantonese. I think it is most commonly said to have 9 tones, as opposed to the 5 in Mandarin (if you include the neutral tone). Also, the differences between tones in Cantonese are often more subtle than those in Mandarin, as I understand.

Also as gb said, for Cantonese you have to know traditional characters--whereas you don't need to know them for Mandarin unless you go to Taiwan, Malaysia or overseas communities (okay, I suppose that's quite a few places).

As for grammar, anyone who says Chinese is easy, has perhaps only studied it at a beginner's level. There are so many complex verb-compliments in Chinese--it makes my head spin sometimes, for eg:

huo2 bu xia4 qu4 [literally "live-not-down-go" for cannot live.]

[jefe]

I was born and raised in the USA and used mostly English at home. I did study French and some Spanish.

But Asian languages I got exposed to include
- Toishan dialect (Chinese) -- language my grandparents and aunts spoke
- Cantonese
- Mandarin
- Japanese
- Tagalog
- Bahasa Melayu (Malay) and some Bahasa Indonesia
- Hokkien / Taiwanese
- Thai

and at one point I learned the Korean Hangul alphabet and several dozen words.

so a cross-section of Asian languages.

I think that Bahasa Melayu is easiest for Westerners as it uses latin letters, has fairly regular and uncomplicated grammar, and is not too hard to pronounce. Many words are also borrowed from English or Dutch (and in some cases, Portuguese) Tagalog is similar (being in the Malayo-Polynesian family), but the grammar is much more complicated and some words are a veritable tongue twister.

Japanese not only uses thousands of Chinese characters (many of which are modified from Chinese, and are different from both simplified and traditional characters), but also two separate alphabet systems. And each character generally has at least two pronunciations (on-yomi and kun-yomi) and sometimes even more (up to 5). Characters may have more than one pronunciation in Chinese (also up to 5), but the vast majority have a single pronunciation.

Japanese also has formal / informal, honorific / humble, masculine / feminine etc. forms of speech. This can be very difficult to master.

Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese are tonal languages. Many westerners find this difficult.

Toishan dialect is even difficult for Cantonese speakers to learn and understand, so I think that is very difficult if it is not your native tongue.

Thai orthography is a b*tch. That is the most difficult language for spelling with an alphabet that I have encountered.

sensei said:

I'm reluctant to vote, but I'd probably say Cantonese. I think it is most commonly said to have 9 tones, as opposed to the 5 in Mandarin (if you include the neutral tone). Also, the differences between tones in Cantonese are often more subtle than those in Mandarin, as I understand.

Cantonese also has another problem -- tone sandhi. That is, the tone of the word is transformed when combined with certain other words. This happens *occasionally* in Mandarin, but is very common in Cantonese. This is the most difficult thing about pronouncing Cantonese in my book.

Also as gb said, for Cantonese you have to know traditional characters--whereas you don't need to know them for Mandarin unless you go to Taiwan, Malaysia or overseas communities (okay, I suppose that's quite a few places).

Whether or not you use traditional or simplified characters for Cantonese is beside the point. For example, Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou will certainly use simplified characters and may not even know how to write traditional characters. Younger generation Cantonese speakers in Kuala Lumpur also learn simplified characters. But Cantonese speakers in Vancouver, New York or San Francisco will generally use traditional characters.

Mandarin is taught in HK generally using traditional characters, even though it is technically part of China.

[gb]

The hard thing about cantonese is that it is written in a style similar to mandarin although with many more aspects of classical chinese in it (anyone ever tried reading the hk economic journal?). However the spoken language is very vernacular and differs very much from the writing. Modern cantonese now even has a written form for this vernacular side. All these aspects combined, and the traditional characters part make it very difficult for a westerner who has never spent a considerable amount of time in somewhere like HK to learn.

Wow jefe you really know your stuff about languages. How many of those can you speak?? How many fluently??

[Sensei]

^Interesting, didn't know that. I think another testiment to the difficulty of Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin) is that a lot of people don't stick with it--like they might with French or a European language. My friend was speaking French and my Chinese friend could understand most of what he was saying because so many of the words he had said sounded similar to their English counterparts. It's not always that way--but you'll never see that happen with Chinese!

[jefe]

gb said:

The hard thing about cantonese is that it is written in a style similar to mandarin although with many more aspects of classical chinese in it (anyone ever tried reading the hk economic journal?). However the spoken language is very vernacular and differs very much from the writing. Modern cantonese now even has a written form for this vernacular side. All these aspects combined, and the traditional characters part make it very difficult for a westerner who has never spent a considerable amount of time in somewhere like HK to learn.

Yes, that is certainly difficult, but by far I think that Cantonese intonation is very difficult for a westerner. Speakers of non-tonal languages will have to make extra effort to master this for Cantonese (whose tones are more difficult than Mandarin or Thai). Added to that is the fact that the tones in Cantonese *switch* (tone sandhi) to a large extent, and there is no hard and fast rule about this.

Ex.
The Cantonese word "daan" (egg) in "daan gou" (cake) has a different tone than the word for chicken egg ("gai daan"). In Mandarin, it does not switch tone. I can find hundreds, if not thousands of examples of this tone switching in Cantonese, but only relatively few in Mandarin.

Regarding the written vernacular, I must admit that I could only read about 60-70% of the local tabloid newspapers when I first arrived in HK, compared to about 95% of normal newspapers, due to the vernacular slang. But all you have to do is simply read more of the "baat gwa" entertainment and gossip pages and after several months you can read it OK.

Wow jefe you really know your stuff about languages. How many of those can you speak?? How many fluently??

It is a matter of USE or LOSE.
Currently I use English, Mandarin and Cantonese on a daily basis.

My company had sent me to Tokyo to work for 8 weeks a few years ago. I had studied Japanese for about 4 years before, and I went on a 2-week study tour to Japan about 10 years earlier and had not been back. My first 2-3 days in Japan I could only understand about 30% of what people were saying and could not really understand the TV. But after about 1 month, I could hold conversations much more easily and could understand about 60-65% of the TV, and up to about 75-80% by the time I left. I remember running into someone from HK in a noodle shop who could not speak japanese, and I explained to the shop keeper what he wanted to say.

But now, my Japanese is rusty again.

The same thing happens in the other languages. I was surprised how long I could hold conversations in Spanish when i went to Iguassu Falls on the Argentina / Brazil border. It really is a matter of use or lose. I am really happy when I run into people who like to USE.

[jefe]

sensei said:

^Interesting, didn't know that. I think another testiment to the difficulty of Chinese (Cantonese or Mandarin) is that a lot of people don't stick with it--like they might with French or a European language. My friend was speaking French and my Chinese friend could understand most of what he was saying because so many of the words he had said sounded similar to their English counterparts. It's not always that way--but you'll never see that happen with Chinese!

Actually Simon, you do see that with Chinese, but between dialects. Chinese dialects differ from each other like European languages differ from each other.

With 1.3 billion people in China and another 100 million overseas, speaking different Chinese dialects is like speaking different European languages. I see very little difference between figuring out 50% of something in Portuguese because you know Spanish from figuring out 50% of something in Teochew (Chiuchow) dialect because you know Hokkien / Taiwanese.

You also see it in the Malayo-Polynesian family, including the languages of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as some of languages in the Pacific Islands and in Madagascar. I can tell you that maybe about 25% of the words in Bahasa Indonesia / Malay and Tagalog share the same or very similar route. Add to that words borrowed from English or Chinese dialects, or from other euro languages (ie, Spanish for Tagalog or Portuguese for Malay) and there is a high correlation in vocabulary, not to mention grammar as well.

[Thir Jiang Li]

I'm Norwegian and started learning mandarin a few months ago, and I find it quite difficult. The grammar is extremely easy, but the pronounciation, sentence structure and words are nothing like Norwegian at all...! I'm a bit afraid of speaking Chinese, because if I pronounce the word in the wrong tone, it might mean something completely different and I might insult someone... When it comes to Chinese characters...I'm struggling just to learn how to spell the words in pinyin, so I think I'll wait when it comes to learning the characters... I'm not giving up though, I'm determined to learn Chinese!

[Sensei]

thirjiangli said:

The grammar is extremely easy

You just wait! I thought it was extremely easy too when I took my first course.

Then you learn about the many functions of le5 or liao3. le5's main function is to indicate completion of an action (sort of like tense, but not).

Then comes directional and resultative compliments (of which we have very few in English); the particle de5 which indicates the possibility of the completion of a verb--though sometimes using the verb neng2 (to be able to) instead is more appropriate.

I could go on forever, lol. On the other hand, in many ways Chinese grammar is probably easier than that of English (and I gather Norweigan).

Anyway, best of luck, thirjiangli! ;D

[helles]

German and Korean - the grammar more than anything.

Those are the 2 languages that I just could not get a hold of. And I'm usually pretty good with picking up languages.