<p>Grammatically, chinese is similar to english in many circumstances.</p>
<p>I agree that a language difficulty depends 100% on the person. Also, If I were a native English speak that fluently spoke Italian, then french would not be as hard. Everything depends. Every language has the same difficulty in my opinion.</p>
<p>I thought english was derived from german, with a bits and pieces of romance languages peppered in along the way.</p>
<p>like this:</p>
<p>low german---high german---old english---some latin phrases---middle english---some more latin phrases added---modern english.</p>
<p>Yeah i also agree that language difficulty depends on the person (and their mother tongue, i guess)</p>
<p>I mean UCLAri and I both seem to know korean and japanese to certain extent and we are disagreeing upon which one's more difficult, so. (i think we are opposite, like I'm fluent in korean and can understand japanese to certain extent while she's the otherway around.)</p>
<p>Oh, and hangul IS simple once you learn it. That's the beauty of it. But don't try to learn it letter by letter (there are 11,172 combinations ("letters") in all... or least on the computer) because it's a totally different system. Like UCLAri said, the hard part for english speaker to learn korean/japanese is the grammar... Order is totally different from English.</p>
<p>I do think English is difficult to learn at first. its one of those languages that if you didn't learn when you were small, you are screwed kinda thing, i guess. I heard some foreigners speaking korean (they started learning it when they were 20 something) and they could speak it very well with few accents... but that would take alot of practice. I haven't seen too many foreign people who are able to speak english perfectly if they got here after they were 20 or something... but there's always exceptions so don't take my word too seriously. That's just my thought after talking to bunch of adults.</p>
<p>Well English was my 2nd language. XP</p>
<p>
I do think English is difficult to learn at first. its one of those languages that if you didn't learn when you were small, you are screwed kinda thing.
English is my third language, but I didn't think it was too difficult to learn, probably because I'd already learned French in elementary school. My first language, Swedish, is another one of those "useless" languages that no one really has a reason to learn unless they live in Sweden. :p</p>
<p>uyulove,</p>
<p>She? Err... :(</p>
<p>Hangul, like kana, are wonderful because they're a good relatively (key word) foundation for starting the language. Chinese doesn't even give you that! It's straight to hanzi if you take Chinese!</p>
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My first language, Swedish, is another one of those "useless" languages that no one really has a reason to learn unless they live in Sweden.
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<p>I've always wanted to try to pick up Swedish because if I'm ever in Finland, it's just good to know, but - again - if you know English you're fine. I just think learning foreign languages just for the sake of learning them without a purpose is pointless. I've met a total of three other people here who speak Finnish and I'm still waiting for knowing the language to pay off :p</p>
<p>Now if only I could get higher than a C in Latin. . .</p>
<p>EDIT: Dammit, space limit. Gonna have to double post.</p>
<p>For me, it depends on mindset. I simply do not enjoy the Spanish language. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, I just personally don't like it. Because of that, it makes no sense to me. Latin, on the other hand, I am passionate about, and always have been. Because of that, Latin is 10 times easier for me than Spanish. I'll get new Latin vocab from anywhere I can get my hands on.</p>
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<p>Look, lang definitely depends on the person. But you can't deny languages are easier or harder depending on what you already know (French is obviously easier for someone who already knows Italian, as opposed to, say, Swahili).</p>
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<p>Ur I agree. Chinese looks psychotic. I would want to learn it but it would take me forever. I only read Hiragana atm anyway, because I focused more on listening, haha. ^_^</p>
<p>i speak french, spanish, and english (learned english/spanish concurrently, was taught to speak english only, learned french, than re-learned spanish)... french is much easier for me than spanish. but the vast majority of people feel the opposite way. in my opinion they are both easy though. i took mandarin for a while and holy @^$%! much harder.</p>
<p>Its interesting that german is supposed to be harder than french. I believe english and german are closer related as english is a germanic language.</p>
<p>i'm a native speaker and i've studied german and spanish for 10 years and french for 5, plus arabic intensely last summer and here are my thoughts:</p>
<p>spanish is by far easier than french in the beginning, but when you reach the upper levels it is a lot more complicated because of the ridiculous amount of verb tenses, etc. whereas french is pretty simple. </p>
<p>although german and english share a lot of words, the sentence structure of german as well as the cases and strange verb tenses (some conjugate, others just add words as we do with "i will" and "i would") do not come naturally to an english speaker and are definitely harder to pick up. i still struggle a LOT.</p>
<p>arabic is extremely challenging and i wouldn't place it any lower than the highest level of difficulty for native english speakers. eeeeeeek.</p>
<p>anyone who speaks french or spanish (or both) can usually understand portuguese and italian, and although i cannot speak either and i can read them fairly fluently and understand a high level too. gotta love the romance languages.</p>
<p>sooooooo those were just my thoughts.</p>
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<p>I've also found/seen that in regards to French/Spanish, french is hard at the beginning but gets easier whereas spanish continues to get complicated. Mainly because, like the above user said, spanish has so many more weird verb tenses and such, whereas french you reach a certain point where you just start combining old tenses. Easy. </p>
<p>I also went to a russian language course this summer in St. Petersburg and although it was a pain to learn the alphabet (although not that hard) and some of the words were like uuugh (ever tried to say dorm, blah), it wasn't that bad. It probably gets worse, but the thing I found suprising is that Russian is a lot easier to understand from a native speaker than say french, mainly because I think Russians speak a lot slower whereas french speakerssortoftalklikethiswithnotalotofpauses. O-o; then again, so do english speakers, but still...</p>
<p>So yes, that's my experience. I also think the more language exposure you've had as a kid helps whether you can pick up other languages easier...</p>
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<p>english is much much more similar to french than to german. something like half of english vocab. is derived from french. also, english pronuciation is quite similar to french in that last vowel following the last consonant is not pronounced. another similarity is that they are both illogical: they are filled with exceptions and idoms. also, even though french is phonetic. it has some irregularities.</p>
<p>i looked at german and it seemed so different from english. why is english a germanic language anyway? england used to be a roman colony.</p>
<p>i think french is quite simple to learn, if u learn it through the "functional approach." </p>
<p>spanish was pretty easy for me until it got to subjunctives.</p>
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I've also found/seen that in regards to French/Spanish, french is hard at the beginning but gets easier whereas spanish continues to get complicated.
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<p>Eh this might not help, but I heard the same thing from korean people learning Japanese and Chinese. Japanese seems simple at first but keeps on getting more and more complicated while Chinese gets simpler (although really tough at first.) but if you are a english speaker, both might be just as hard... (hanzi (although japanese does use kanji) once again seems harder to write)</p>
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<p>English is a 'germanic' mainly because of the Norwegians/Danes who invaded. English shouldn't be its own language, because yeah, it really is a combination. Fun fact!!! Most common words were germanic, ie Cow (see, it's icky sounding). BUT! When it became food on the table, it got a nice french name (Beef, or bouef...) yeees. </p>
<p>I don't know if that made any sense...</p>
<p>Hmm...maybe I shouldn't abandon my paltry high school French background after all.</p>
<p>Why didn't my teacher tell me that it gets easier? Why?</p>
<p>Anyway...</p>
<p>As a native speaker of Mandarin, I'll say that the character-based writing system is often misunderstood, especially since most of us are more familiar with alphabet-based writing systems.</p>
<p>If you only know 2,000-3,000 English words, even if they are the most common, your reading options will be limited, at best. I doubt you'd be able to read The New York Times, The King James Version of The Bible, or even a translation of Bleach.</p>
<p>Now, by contrast, if you know 2,000-3,000 of the most common Chinese characters, you can read almost anything. I'm confident that you'd be able to read reports from Xinhua, Xiyouji (Journey to the West), or translations of popular comics from Japan. No problems.</p>
<p>Also, it is not as if these 2,000-3,000 characters are 100% distinct from each other. A significant number can be grouped based on a "radical." Quite a few are combinations of existing characters. And, the overwhelming majority of characters are, believe it or not, actually based on SOUND.</p>
<p>I'm glad that my mom spoke in Chinese to me at home. It would suck if I suddenly had an interest to learn the language of my ancestors.</p>
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<p>I've studied 3 languages over the years. The first one was Spanish, which I took for 2 years in middle school. Looking back on it, it wasn't too bad grammatically and had a lot of cognates, but it was a good intro to language learning. I don't know much of it because I stopped early, but I sat in on a college spanish class when visiting and was surprised at how much I remembered.</p>
<p>I have studied Russian in high school for four years. The alphabet is really pretty easy and you get the hang of it pretty soon after learning it. There are a few unusual letters, like those denoting a hard or soft palatalization, but at first, you just memorize the words and then the sounds come naturally after listening to native speakers. The hardest part is the grammar, especially remembering the huge number of prefixes, suffixes, and case endings in the 4 gender forms. I haven't found this to be too awful because I tend to understand grammar structures pretty well anyway, but it takes a lot of practice and memorization.</p>
<p>I just started taking Mandarin Chinese this year and it is BY FAR the hardest language I have ever encountered. There are no cognates, which makes it hard to get by when listening and the characters, for me are killer. This year, I have really really appreciated the simplicity of an alphabet writing system because characters are so hard to learn, at least for a beginning student. I have been told it will get easier over time, as fabrizio's post seems to indicate, but so far it has been very frustrating. I have also found that the immense amount of memorization is problematic for a lot of people. There are a few people with incredibly good memories, but for me, the three things to memorize (the word/meaning, the tones on each syllable of the word, and the characters associated with the word) are too much for my poor brain and I forget words if I don't use them for longer than about 2 or 3 weeks. I spend hours studying it, too, so it feels even worse when I forget. Needless to say, I don't think it's a language that I will continue, but I admire those who can become fluent!</p>
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<p>From those languages that I was learning, from most difficult.
1. French -- tried to study by myself; it's a very difficult language: many abbreviations and it is spoken very, very fast.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Russian -- natively speaking it; I consider it hard because of variety of suffixes and modifications of the words.</p></li>
<li><p>Ukrainian -- learned in elementary; hard but not as much as Russian because of the "write-as-we-hear" principle.</p></li>
<li><p>German -- self-learning the language; logical, as much as English but damn, they like to use words like: Hundehutte -- 9 letters. For comparison:
English - doghouse, 8 letters; Russian -- будка, 5 letters.</p></li>
<li><p>English -- learned it in elementary as an international language; then, studied in practice at United States. Most logical and obvious language. However, Englishmen, you don't really need those 3 extra letters in word "through."</p></li>
</ol>