languages

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>i have a feeling that students don't learn much in foreign language class. students in my class are extremely dull and i think it has to do with the language dfficulty.</p>

<p>from what i heard and read here are some points to consider before u choose a foreign language:</p>

<p>in terms of english speakers...
spanish and portuguese are the easiest. hungarian is the hardest (at least for british ppl)</p>

<p>in general terms...finnish is the hardest european language. chinese, japanese and arabic is the hardest asian languages.</p>

<p>french is the hardest of all romance languages.</p>

<p>the closest language to french is italian.</p>

<p>the closet language to german is dutch.</p>

<p>difficulty of some languages learned by foreigners:</p>

<p>intensely difficult: finnish, latin, greek
difficult: chinese, japanese, arabic, hebrew
medium difficult: russian, german, french, thai, dutch, hindi
easy: italian, korean
extremely easy: spanish, portuguese, esperanto, english</p>

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<p>EVERY language is hard. In order to become fluent you need to be around it 24/7 not 3 hours a day two days a week or what ever.</p>

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<p>Every language is hard, but some languages are without a doubt harder to learn than others. </p>

<p>From a native English speaker's standpoint: Korean is not an easy language. Finnish, Latin, and Greek are certainly easier to learn than Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Hebrew. Finnish is the hardest European language, but European languages are not that hard in general. Latin and Greek are challenging languages, but generally you only need to be able to read them to be considered proficient, and reading is by far the easiest language skill to require, so I wouldn't consider learning them any harder than learning Spanish to a high level fluency. Romanian, to most learners of Romance languages, is harder than French. Why would Hungarian be the hardest? I would say Chinese is harder by far.</p>

<p>If I were to give have a scale, it would look like this:</p>

<p>Intensely difficult: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic (I know nothing of Hebrew)
- Large gap
Difficult: Russian, Finnish, Thai, Hungarian
Medium difficult: German, Romanian, Hindi
Easy: Other Romance languages, English, reading knowledge only of Latin and Greek
- Large gap
Extremely easy: Esperanto</p>

<p>Motivation and availability of materials and opportunities to practice are the greatest factors concerning whether one is successful in learning a language, however.</p>

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<p>As a native cantonese speaker, English should be up there with difficult languages. I'm just adding that because I am not sure if you are all native english speakers.</p>

<p>I've always wanted to learn esperanto since I heard of it, is it really that easy?</p>

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<p>Trima,</p>

<p>Have you ever studied Greek or Latin? The former, especially, is intensely difficult. True, reading may be considered the easiest language skill, but even if it is so, it still is terribly difficult with these languages. Have you seen the thickness of Greek dictionaries? One needs to know thousands of words to be able to read even the most basic Greek (the Bible, Xenophon, Plato) -- with the help of a dictionary and commentary. Don't get me started on the Greek lyric poets. That's a whole new ballgame, with variations of Greek specific to certain poets, along with set phrases and word meaning nuances. I swear I lived inside the LSJ (huge Greek dictionary) last quarter. </p>

<p>One quarter of third year Greek was enough for me. I am no longer a Classics major. Greek is ridiculously difficult.</p>

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<p>I'd definitely rank English as the most difficult for a non-English speaker, but I don't think that's the point of the thread (I could be wrong though).
I speak Finnish and English, and I guess the only thing I can add to the topic is that language is all relative. If you can speak Finnish, you can probably understand Estonian and Hungarian and other Uralic languages, just like if you speak English, you can probably understand Afrikaaners; but how useful is that at all?</p>

<p>Bottom line: Foreign languages aren't worth the time. Learn English and you'll be fine.</p>

<p>fakEDIT: This still doesn't change the fact that I want to teach Finnish someday to kids dumb enough to want to learn the language :p</p>

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<p>Pashto (speaken in areas of west Pakistan and most of Afghanistan is very diffucult to speak let alone write.)</p>

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<p>i took french for four years and hated it. this year (my senior year of high school) i decided to try out something new and take American Sign Language. To tell you the truth, it is really easy and fun at the same time. Plus you dont have to worry about speaking in accents like you do for every other language(that was always my least favorite part). i would highly recommend it. most colleges offer it too.</p>

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<p>To contribute to the conversation, the Defense Language Institute (US Gov) ranks languages by difficulty to English speakers. I disagree with some of it, but I'll post it.:</p>

<pre><code>* Category I language
</code></pre>

<p>(Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish)</p>

<pre><code>* Category II language
</code></pre>

<p>(German)</p>

<pre><code>* Category III language
</code></pre>

<p>(Belarusian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Polish, Russian, Croatian, Slovak, Tagalog, Thai, Turkic, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese)</p>

<pre><code>* Category IV language
</code></pre>

<p>(Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)</p>

<p>I'm really big on foreign languages: I study linguistics independently. I am nearly fluent in French and Arabic and I've studied bits of other languages here and there. I think that this, in general, is pretty accurate, but I have a few criticisms. Here are some of my thoughts in general:</p>

<p>-- German is a different language family, but I would say it as difficult as a moderate romantic language (easier than French, harder than Spanish).
-- I would say the hardest European languages are Romanian and Finnish.
-- Among the Asian languages (though I hesitate to call Arabic an Asian language, I'll assume we're going by geographic), I would say Japanese is the hardest, followed by Korean, with a tie between Arabic and Chinese because they're total opposites in structure and even mindset. I think they're both hard, but it'd be a remarkable feat to know them both and be able to use them.
-- Hindu (India) and Urdu (Pakistan) are left out of this ranking, but I'd put them in the third category, with languages like Russian and Persian.</p>

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<p>A Hindu is someone who practices Hinduism. Not a language. You were probably thinking of Hindi ;)</p>

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<p>Language difficulty depends 100% on the person.</p>

<p>The hardest European languages are going to be the Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), Albanian, Basque, Armenian, and Georgian. The Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, etc) aren't too easy either. I don't know much about languages outside of Europe, so I won't bother with them.</p>

<p>Arabic is NOT an Asian language; it's an Afro-Asiatic language, whereas Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language, Japanese is Japonic, Korean is an isolate, etc. German, Dutch, and French are NOT at the same level of difficulty as Russian, Thai, and Hindi. Romanian is widely considered the most difficult romance language due to the (relatively strong) Slavic influence. </p>

<p>If you're fluent in English & want to learn an "easy" foreign language, check out Faroese.</p>

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<p>Hm, I would think Korean would be harder to learn than japanese. Japanese pronunciation is rather limited, and much easier to pronounce for English speakers. korean, on the other hand, have pretty MUCH MUCH more pronunciations (thanks to the korean alphabet, hangul) that are difficult to pronounce. (this is coming from a native korean speaker with understanding level of japanese) Korean and japanese is actually very closely related, but Japanese people have harder time learning korean than koreans learning japanese... why? because Japanese have harder time pronouncing Korean words... (listen to Cho Nan Kang)</p>

<p>Japanese might be a b!tch to write though, thanks to hiragana, katakana, and Kanji all jumbled in one. Korean hangul might be hard to learn @ first but once you learn it, it is realy simple. Koreans use some Hanja (kanji in japanese, chinese characters) but not all that much...</p>

<p>I think chinese would be really hard to learn. I can't even picture how its written in my head (I'm a visual learner..) but pronunciations seem fascinating to me because it seems I would be never able to pronounce them...</p>

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<p>Having learned some Korean and being fluent in Japanese, I have to say that Japanese is more difficult overall.</p>

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<p>Hah, I love how you all put Italian as an easier language. You can't try and tell me that :)</p>

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<p>Language difficulty depends 100% on the person.</p>

<p>But there already seems to be a general consensus that Finnish is the hardest. The language itself plays a pretty big role too in terms of how difficult it is.</p>

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<p>I agree language depends on the person. I was born and raised in Miami. If you spoke spanish to me I will look at you with a blank stare. But when I walked into the Japanese class and the sensei started speaking it immediately clicked. And I was able to read in hiragana, katakana, and some kanji with little difficulty. Its all about what language appeals to you. Spanish doesn't appeal to me at all.</p>

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<p>korean is not hard. the alphabet looks so simple.</p>

<p>i don't know about japanese being "japonic" language. never heard of that term. i did learn that japanese and korean are isolated languages</p>

<p>major language groups:</p>

<p>indo-european: english, romance languages, germanic, slavic, hindi</p>

<p>sino-tibetan: chinese, south asian languages</p>

<p>altaic: mongolian, possibly korean and japanese, finnish, hungarian, turkish, some native american/siberian languages</p>

<p>afro-asiatic: arabic, semitic languages</p>

<p>it's quite amazing how the far east can follow the same pattern as western europe. just as the main religion of the west came from somewhere far (israel), the main religion of the far east came from somewhere as distant as india. while in western europe the germanic invaders adopted the latin script along with its vocabulary, the altaic (central asian) invaders adopted chinese script with its vocabulary. english is latin vocabulary and germanic grammar just as korean or japanese is chinese vocabulary and altaic grammar.</p>

<p>despite this trends, all languages have their distinct charecteristics. nothing can be more different than korean and japanese. one language, however, absorbed at a huge scale: mongolian. they completely adopted a script made by a turk. mongolian script was eccentially joined arabic in verticle. of course today, mongols adopted the russian script. another artificially constructed script is vietnamese. some french jesuit priest incorporated vietnamese language in a weird latin script.</p>

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<p>french is the hardest of all romance languages.</p>

<p>That's news to me. My French 2 teacher progandized that Spanish has 17 conjugations and French only has 10 or something..</p>

<p>And Latin sucks.</p>

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<p>I am currently learning Vietnamese and knowing english first hand is really really helpful. Of course being able to produce tones with chinese first helps too. Otherwise yes, it is weird seeing it in a latin script with a million diacritic marks everywhere.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
korean is not hard. the alphabet looks so simple.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>It's not the writing system that makes Korean difficult, but the grammar and conjugation.</p>

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