7 ms·

The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages

92 points by sethg 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago
A very interesting article. I appreciate the submission, but wonder why you replaced the original title "Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language," as I see that in the submitted article?
- sethg 17y ago
  I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to learn Japanese, then a native Japanese speaker with comparable intelligence in comparable circumstances would be just as frustrated trying to learn English.
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.
    - ars 17y ago
      You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles. The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct. Specifically: "Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall." and "A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely." as two examples.
  - compay 17y ago
    Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common. However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.
  - alex_c 17y ago
    I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.
    - sethg 17y ago
      English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
      - alex_c 17y ago
        English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms). On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible. So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
        decode 17y ago
        "On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down" My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
  - wheels 17y ago
    There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute. For example, comparing English and German: - English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken. - English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines. - English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five. - English does not have formality encoded in its grammar. It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
    - riobard 17y ago
      Learning German right now. Yes, irregular plurals and gendered nouns are killing me!!!! Just doesn't make too much sense to me :(
      - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
        English has a lot of irregular words as well. Of Spanish and German, however, German is much more difficult to learn.
        riobard 17y ago
        Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English. I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German. The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_Koineization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_... and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
  - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
    There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word. That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :). There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
    - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
      s/decades/centuries/
    - delayclose 17y ago
      "to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word." This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider: herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment. Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).
patrickgzill 17y ago
Would have liked to have heard about Farsi or other Arabic languages. Also, would point out that Greek and Latin are not "cousins" to English, more like great-grandfathers, given the large amount of borrowing from both.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  Greek and Latin are not "cousins" to English, more like great-grandfathers, given the large amount of borrowing from both. Second cousins or great grand uncles would be the proper analogy. They share a common ancestor is all. The borrowings are a later artifact following millennia of independent development.
- sethg 17y ago
  Hebrew and Aramaic definitely get a special “so many frigging affixes that it takes half an hour to figure out the root before you can look up the frigging word in the dictionary” award in my book. I assume I would feel the same way about Arabic if I ever learned enough of it to even attempt to use an Arabic dictionary. (I should note, though, that while Farsi and Arabic use the same writing system, they are from different language families.)
  - netcan 17y ago
    On the other hand, once you understand how to construct & deconstruct words, it's a lot easier to build your vocabulary. You learn the word "read" & you immediately know all the verb tenses (read, reading), the nouns (food) the adjectives (written). Inconsistencies & exceptions make going from conversational to fluent a nightmare, but getting to conversational is not too bad. Affixes, like an new alphabet are a bit of a hurdle, but once you're over it it's not hard any more.
- quant18 17y ago
  Farsi is Indo-European. Morphologically it's fairly simple (e.g. you have different verb forms for person and number, but not for gender) --- except that some people like to apply Arabic morphology to Arabic loanwords in certain cases (analogous to how some show-offs use obscure Greek plural paradigms like "metropolei" instead of "metropolises" when speaking English). The writing system's a bit of a pain --- short vowels aren't indicated, and it preserves etymological spelling for Arabic loanwords even though a lot of these sound distinctions have been lost in speech. (Tajik --- the variant of Farsi spoken in Tajikistan, ex-USSR country --- largely eliminated that problem, though, by writing in Cyrillic instead of Arabic script).
joe_the_user 17y ago
It seems like "Whorfism" is always making a come-back with Geeks. I think it appeals to a kind sci-fi imagination. Chomsky's theory is usually presented as all languages work the same in the brain. I think the later versions of the Chomskian theory are more like, all languages allow one to accomplish the same thing - especially, all languages have recursion (despite the counter-claims around the Peraha, I think that's actually demonstrated pretty well).
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  There's still a question of how hard you have to work to acquire them and what other opportunities are foregone as a result.
- jcl 17y ago
  This is due in part to the popularity of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis: if you learn to speak Klingon, you'll learn to think like a Klingon. :)
chrismoos 17y ago
Hungarian is pretty difficult for me as a native English speaker. Spanish/French aren't bad.
- delayclose 17y ago
  For some reason the article chose to use Estonian as an example of Finno-Ugric languages, which have all been traditionally considered difficult for English speakers.
- hristov 17y ago
  Hungarian is even difficult for other Eastern Europeans. I have yet to meet anybody that speaks Hungarian, that is not actually Hungarian.
  - chrismoos 17y ago
    I started learning it about 6 months ago, and was in Hungary from July - September. The language immersion helped me a lot....no one speaks English in Magyarorszag :).
  - agazso 17y ago
    I am hungarian and I met several people in Hungary coming from all over the world, who somehow fell in love with the country or the language and did learn the language quite well. So it can definitely be done (as with any other language), although you need strong motivation and a bit love of the language. But I think there are not many people in the world who has the motivation for learning an obscure language that is only spoken in one Eastern European country.
  - saturdayplace 17y ago
    Amerikai vagyok, de Magyarul tudok beszélni. A nyelv lego-hoz hasonlit - kis kockákkal építsz szavakat. Szeretem. I'm American, but I can speak Hungarian. The language is like legos. You build words out of little blocks. I love it.
- Nosferax 17y ago
  Finnish and Hungarian definitely have their place amongst the hardest languages to learn. If I'm not mistaken, Hungarian has 22 cases of declension.
xiaoma 17y ago
"For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."
oscardelben 17y ago
A very difficult language to learn is navajo[1], in fact it was used during the WWII by americans to communicate and it was one of the few ciphers that wasn't broke by enemies. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language
- delayclose 17y ago
  Having no native teachers available increased the difficulty, and the WWII usage was against non-native English speakers. That said, the Native American languages that I know of are grammatically quite different from English.
  - oscardelben 17y ago
    In that specific case there were less than 30 people who knew that language in the US during WWII, and the navajo language was also completely different from other native languages. UPDATE: I mean 30 people outside the navajo tribe.
    - eru 17y ago
      And they added a (simple) coding system on top.
- RevRal 17y ago
  I can attest that this language is very hard to learn. It is an incredibly fun language and very VERY descriptive. The hardest part is actually speaking the language itself, since we're not used to using some of the extra sounds that Navajo uses. Also, single words literally translate into English phrases or sentences. The language hasn't done much for me these past few years, until I started learning Chinese. It is freaky how similar the languages sound. And I don't mean linguistically, of course. Learning Chinese is thankfully easier for me since I can replicate the phonetics without trouble.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
plaes 17y ago
A short story about "The origins of Estonian Language" http://www.hiiumaa.ee/douglas/keel.htm http://www.hiiumaa.ee/douglas/keel.htm
hristov 17y ago
This is an interesting article. It makes me want to share a little known fact about my own native tongue. It is actually the only language in the world that has a voice exclusively used for sarcasm. I am wondering if those Whorfianist theories are correct and that feature of the language makes me and my co-patriots especially sarcastic.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  I'd be interested to know what language that is so I can learn more about it. Thanks.
  - hristov 17y ago
    The language is Bulgarian, and I was referring to the re-narrative mood. Although I did overstate it a bit, the re-narrative mood can also be used to express extreme doubt in what you are saying or that you have obtained the information very indirectly. But I would say that most of the time it is used to express sarcasm at least up to some extent.
    - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
      Благодаря (That and the very basic greetings are the only Bulgarian I retain - I will have to go and investigate the "re-narrative" in my copious free time. Thanks.)
julio_the_squid 17y ago
I find this really interesting from the perspective of programming languages. The languages that add on information not required in English reminds me of type declaration for variables versus languages where you don't have to declare a type, for instance. What computer languages are the hardest to learn (for a C speaker?). How does the design of the language influence the thoughts one has or can easily express in that language? (We know it does matter, Whorf or no Whorf!)
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
>Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth. This makes sense, given the idea that there is only one truth ("the" truth) but any number of falsehoods (each being "a" falsehood).
- astine 17y ago
  Things get interesting when one tells a truth. Are we saying he lied through omission? Or is the truth actually ambiguous?
cturner 17y ago
Perhaps the hardest language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. When learning latin I was surprised at how similar the genative case is in Latin and English. It would be like making an assumption about a platform by using your knowledge of a separate and familiar platform, and then using inference, and getting it right first time - eerie. The pronounciation in latin is also easy, and the spelling, and the vocab has similiarities that helps with learning. I suspect part of what makes Latin more difficult to learn than some indo-European languages is that it's very disconnected from practical considerations. (see http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html) The ability to learn like that is a practical skill in its own right though.
- dkarl 17y ago
  I took four years of Latin in high school, and by far the hardest part compared to other languages I studied was the sheer number of things to memorize. Five noun declensions by five cases (more than that, really, but only five to memorize) by two numbers made fifty noun endings. Verbs were even more complex: four verb conjugations, four principal parts to memorize for each verb, three moods (that I can remember), plus the active/passive distinction. That's a hell of a lot of charts to memorize. There are patterns in these charts, but lots of exceptions to the patterns. Plus all the various ways the various moods and cases can be used. Here's a nice list of the ways the ablative case can be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin Compared to all this memorization, getting the feel of the language, even though it was very alien to my mind, seemed easy.
- balding_n_tired 17y ago
  Agreed. I think the regularity of Latin makes it straightforward.
nate 17y ago
A linguist once told me that Icelandic was the hardest. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hardest+language+icelandic http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...
Spikefu 17y ago
I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.
- dkarl 17y ago
  It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages. Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality. By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.
  - Spikefu 17y ago
    Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.
genieyclo 17y ago
Strange Amharic wasn't mentioned, it has a unique script and long alphabet that is similiar to Indic ones, except for the various stress sounds and "clicks" you put on different letter sets. I'm betting that these stress sounds would be difficult for native English speakers to pick up
diego_moita 17y ago
> "The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds". I remember that when I began speaking English coloquially my maxilar muscles and tongue would get very tired. That was when I realized that English is way more oral than my native nasal Portuguese. > A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Portuguese and Spanish have 2 different verbs to entail the meaning of the verb "to be"; they are the verbs "ser" and "estar", with very different meanings. Depending on where and how you use it can mean very different things. E.g.: "estar" sick means that you have a temporary desease like stomach sickness, a cold or a flu; "ser" sick means that you either have an incurable genetic desease or you are a psycopath. Also, when it comes to the grammar I totally agree: English grammar is a blessing, a wonder of simplicity. Portuguese and Spanish have lots of tenses for past and future, each with a different verb conjugation.

92 points by sethg 17y ago

A very interesting article. I appreciate the submission, but wonder why you replaced the original title "Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language," as I see that in the submitted article?

sethg 17y ago
I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to learn Japanese, then a native Japanese speaker with comparable intelligence in comparable circumstances would be just as frustrated trying to learn English.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.
  - ars 17y ago
    You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles. The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct. Specifically: "Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall." and "A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely." as two examples.
- compay 17y ago
  Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common. However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.
- alex_c 17y ago
  I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.
  - sethg 17y ago
    English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
    - alex_c 17y ago
      English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms). On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible. So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
      - decode 17y ago
        "On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down" My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
- wheels 17y ago
  There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute. For example, comparing English and German: - English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken. - English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement. - As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines. - English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five. - English does not have formality encoded in its grammar. It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
  - riobard 17y ago
    Learning German right now. Yes, irregular plurals and gendered nouns are killing me!!!! Just doesn't make too much sense to me :(
    - BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
      English has a lot of irregular words as well. Of Spanish and German, however, German is much more difficult to learn.
      - riobard 17y ago
        Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English. I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German. The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 That said, I have also read in the linguistics literature a hypothesis that there is a language-universal process of forming creoles and koineization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_Koineization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language#Process_of_... and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
  There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word. That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :). There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
  - Tuna-Fish 17y ago
    s/decades/centuries/
  - delayclose 17y ago
    "to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word." This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider: herne(k)keitto leu(v)an rei(j)än isän (=m)maa sydäm(m)en You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment. Here's a long but relatively easy-to-follow article on the subject http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/orto.html (in Finnish).

patrickgzill 17y ago

Would have liked to have heard about Farsi or other Arabic languages. Also, would point out that Greek and Latin are not "cousins" to English, more like great-grandfathers, given the large amount of borrowing from both.

pradocchia 17y ago
Greek and Latin are not "cousins" to English, more like great-grandfathers, given the large amount of borrowing from both. Second cousins or great grand uncles would be the proper analogy. They share a common ancestor is all. The borrowings are a later artifact following millennia of independent development.
sethg 17y ago
Hebrew and Aramaic definitely get a special “so many frigging affixes that it takes half an hour to figure out the root before you can look up the frigging word in the dictionary” award in my book. I assume I would feel the same way about Arabic if I ever learned enough of it to even attempt to use an Arabic dictionary. (I should note, though, that while Farsi and Arabic use the same writing system, they are from different language families.)
- netcan 17y ago
  On the other hand, once you understand how to construct & deconstruct words, it's a lot easier to build your vocabulary. You learn the word "read" & you immediately know all the verb tenses (read, reading), the nouns (food) the adjectives (written). Inconsistencies & exceptions make going from conversational to fluent a nightmare, but getting to conversational is not too bad. Affixes, like an new alphabet are a bit of a hurdle, but once you're over it it's not hard any more.
quant18 17y ago
Farsi is Indo-European. Morphologically it's fairly simple (e.g. you have different verb forms for person and number, but not for gender) --- except that some people like to apply Arabic morphology to Arabic loanwords in certain cases (analogous to how some show-offs use obscure Greek plural paradigms like "metropolei" instead of "metropolises" when speaking English). The writing system's a bit of a pain --- short vowels aren't indicated, and it preserves etymological spelling for Arabic loanwords even though a lot of these sound distinctions have been lost in speech. (Tajik --- the variant of Farsi spoken in Tajikistan, ex-USSR country --- largely eliminated that problem, though, by writing in Cyrillic instead of Arabic script).

joe_the_user 17y ago

It seems like "Whorfism" is always making a come-back with Geeks. I think it appeals to a kind sci-fi imagination. Chomsky's theory is usually presented as all languages work the same in the brain. I think the later versions of the Chomskian theory are more like, all languages allow one to accomplish the same thing - especially, all languages have recursion (despite the counter-claims around the Peraha, I think that's actually demonstrated pretty well).

houseabsolute 17y ago
There's still a question of how hard you have to work to acquire them and what other opportunities are foregone as a result.
jcl 17y ago
This is due in part to the popularity of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis: if you learn to speak Klingon, you'll learn to think like a Klingon. :)

chrismoos 17y ago

Hungarian is pretty difficult for me as a native English speaker. Spanish/French aren't bad.

delayclose 17y ago
For some reason the article chose to use Estonian as an example of Finno-Ugric languages, which have all been traditionally considered difficult for English speakers.
hristov 17y ago
Hungarian is even difficult for other Eastern Europeans. I have yet to meet anybody that speaks Hungarian, that is not actually Hungarian.
- chrismoos 17y ago
  I started learning it about 6 months ago, and was in Hungary from July - September. The language immersion helped me a lot....no one speaks English in Magyarorszag :).
- agazso 17y ago
  I am hungarian and I met several people in Hungary coming from all over the world, who somehow fell in love with the country or the language and did learn the language quite well. So it can definitely be done (as with any other language), although you need strong motivation and a bit love of the language. But I think there are not many people in the world who has the motivation for learning an obscure language that is only spoken in one Eastern European country.
- saturdayplace 17y ago
  Amerikai vagyok, de Magyarul tudok beszélni. A nyelv lego-hoz hasonlit - kis kockákkal építsz szavakat. Szeretem. I'm American, but I can speak Hungarian. The language is like legos. You build words out of little blocks. I love it.
Nosferax 17y ago
Finnish and Hungarian definitely have their place amongst the hardest languages to learn. If I'm not mistaken, Hungarian has 22 cases of declension.

xiaoma 17y ago

"For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."

oscardelben 17y ago

A very difficult language to learn is navajo[1], in fact it was used during the WWII by americans to communicate and it was one of the few ciphers that wasn't broke by enemies. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language

delayclose 17y ago
Having no native teachers available increased the difficulty, and the WWII usage was against non-native English speakers. That said, the Native American languages that I know of are grammatically quite different from English.
- oscardelben 17y ago
  In that specific case there were less than 30 people who knew that language in the US during WWII, and the navajo language was also completely different from other native languages. UPDATE: I mean 30 people outside the navajo tribe.
  - eru 17y ago
    And they added a (simple) coding system on top.
RevRal 17y ago
I can attest that this language is very hard to learn. It is an incredibly fun language and very VERY descriptive. The hardest part is actually speaking the language itself, since we're not used to using some of the extra sounds that Navajo uses. Also, single words literally translate into English phrases or sentences. The language hasn't done much for me these past few years, until I started learning Chinese. It is freaky how similar the languages sound. And I don't mean linguistically, of course. Learning Chinese is thankfully easier for me since I can replicate the phonetics without trouble.
- jacquesm 17y ago

plaes 17y ago

A short story about "The origins of Estonian Language" http://www.hiiumaa.ee/douglas/keel.htm http://www.hiiumaa.ee/douglas/keel.htm

hristov 17y ago

This is an interesting article. It makes me want to share a little known fact about my own native tongue. It is actually the only language in the world that has a voice exclusively used for sarcasm. I am wondering if those Whorfianist theories are correct and that feature of the language makes me and my co-patriots especially sarcastic.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
I'd be interested to know what language that is so I can learn more about it. Thanks.
- hristov 17y ago
  The language is Bulgarian, and I was referring to the re-narrative mood. Although I did overstate it a bit, the re-narrative mood can also be used to express extreme doubt in what you are saying or that you have obtained the information very indirectly. But I would say that most of the time it is used to express sarcasm at least up to some extent.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Благодаря (That and the very basic greetings are the only Bulgarian I retain - I will have to go and investigate the "re-narrative" in my copious free time. Thanks.)

julio_the_squid 17y ago

I find this really interesting from the perspective of programming languages. The languages that add on information not required in English reminds me of type declaration for variables versus languages where you don't have to declare a type, for instance. What computer languages are the hardest to learn (for a C speaker?). How does the design of the language influence the thoughts one has or can easily express in that language? (We know it does matter, Whorf or no Whorf!)

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

>Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth. This makes sense, given the idea that there is only one truth ("the" truth) but any number of falsehoods (each being "a" falsehood).

astine 17y ago
Things get interesting when one tells a truth. Are we saying he lied through omission? Or is the truth actually ambiguous?

cturner 17y ago

Perhaps the hardest language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. When learning latin I was surprised at how similar the genative case is in Latin and English. It would be like making an assumption about a platform by using your knowledge of a separate and familiar platform, and then using inference, and getting it right first time - eerie. The pronounciation in latin is also easy, and the spelling, and the vocab has similiarities that helps with learning. I suspect part of what makes Latin more difficult to learn than some indo-European languages is that it's very disconnected from practical considerations. (see http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html) The ability to learn like that is a practical skill in its own right though.

dkarl 17y ago
I took four years of Latin in high school, and by far the hardest part compared to other languages I studied was the sheer number of things to memorize. Five noun declensions by five cases (more than that, really, but only five to memorize) by two numbers made fifty noun endings. Verbs were even more complex: four verb conjugations, four principal parts to memorize for each verb, three moods (that I can remember), plus the active/passive distinction. That's a hell of a lot of charts to memorize. There are patterns in these charts, but lots of exceptions to the patterns. Plus all the various ways the various moods and cases can be used. Here's a nice list of the ways the ablative case can be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin Compared to all this memorization, getting the feel of the language, even though it was very alien to my mind, seemed easy.
balding_n_tired 17y ago
Agreed. I think the regularity of Latin makes it straightforward.

nate 17y ago

A linguist once told me that Icelandic was the hardest. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hardest+language+icelandic http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...

Spikefu 17y ago

I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.

dkarl 17y ago
It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages. Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality. By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.
- Spikefu 17y ago
  Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.

genieyclo 17y ago

Strange Amharic wasn't mentioned, it has a unique script and long alphabet that is similiar to Indic ones, except for the various stress sounds and "clicks" you put on different letter sets. I'm betting that these stress sounds would be difficult for native English speakers to pick up

diego_moita 17y ago

> "The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds". I remember that when I began speaking English coloquially my maxilar muscles and tongue would get very tired. That was when I realized that English is way more oral than my native nasal Portuguese. > A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Portuguese and Spanish have 2 different verbs to entail the meaning of the verb "to be"; they are the verbs "ser" and "estar", with very different meanings. Depending on where and how you use it can mean very different things. E.g.: "estar" sick means that you have a temporary desease like stomach sickness, a cold or a flu; "ser" sick means that you either have an incurable genetic desease or you are a psycopath. Also, when it comes to the grammar I totally agree: English grammar is a blessing, a wonder of simplicity. Portuguese and Spanish have lots of tenses for past and future, each with a different verb conjugation.