3 ms·

So I had this debate at a meetup. The issue here is how you define "hardest". Spoken Japanese is actually judged by linguists as easier than English. Written Ja

So I had this debate at a meetup. The issue here is how you define "hardest". Spoken Japanese is actually judged by linguists as easier than English. Written Japanese is harder because it takes years to learn all the kanji but a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English. So being "literate" (able to read and write) is different than being "fluent" (able to listen and speak) (not sure that's the definition of fluent, just pointing out there are more issues.)

yorwba 6y ago
> a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English. Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?
- greggman3 5y ago
  One example is Danish children take longer to get past tense correct than Iceland, Norwegian, Swedish, children. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish_difficult_to_acquire_Evidence_from_Nordic_past-tense_studies https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish... I'm sure it's hard to compare but if one child says "I can has cheeseburger?" and a different child says "May I have a cheeseburger?" we'd generally judge the second child to be more skilled in the language than the first. So, it's arguably not impossible to come up with some measure of when a child is speaking to some level of correctness and compare those across languages. If you want a blind test you'd just ask lots of kids at different ages to do something "ask for a cheeseburger", transcribe the results, have native speakers, who don't know where the answers came from, judge which answers are not making grammar/conjugation mistakes. Some languages children will stop making mistakes much earlier than other languages which would at least suggest that some languages are harder than others (I'm sure there are confounding factors)

3 ms·

So I had this debate at a meetup. The issue here is how you define "hardest". Spoken Japanese is actually judged by linguists as easier than English. Written Ja

by greggman3 6y ago

yorwba 6y ago
> a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English. Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?
- greggman3 5y ago
  One example is Danish children take longer to get past tense correct than Iceland, Norwegian, Swedish, children. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish_difficult_to_acquire_Evidence_from_Nordic_past-tense_studies https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish... I'm sure it's hard to compare but if one child says "I can has cheeseburger?" and a different child says "May I have a cheeseburger?" we'd generally judge the second child to be more skilled in the language than the first. So, it's arguably not impossible to come up with some measure of when a child is speaking to some level of correctness and compare those across languages. If you want a blind test you'd just ask lots of kids at different ages to do something "ask for a cheeseburger", transcribe the results, have native speakers, who don't know where the answers came from, judge which answers are not making grammar/conjugation mistakes. Some languages children will stop making mistakes much earlier than other languages which would at least suggest that some languages are harder than others (I'm sure there are confounding factors)