<p>Actually, Japanese kanji are in many ways more difficult to use in practice than Chinese hanzi. For one, the Japanese only simplified a very limited number of characters-- Mainland characters are by far more simplified on average. Furthermore, Japanese still requires that fluent speakers know upwards of 2500-3000 characters, with 2000 as a minimum. However, the difficulty in usage is not a feature of numbers needed, but how they are actually used in practice. There are both Chinese compounds and native Japanese vocabulary. The rules for Chinese compounds are not always hard and fast, however, and oftentimes more than one pair can be acceptable. The number of homophones (no tones in Japanese) means that even natives will sometimes forget which character is used for a particular word.</p>
<p>Chinese also lacks the multiple readings per character that Japanese has.</p>
<p>Not that I'm saying that Chinese is easy, but I don't know whether it's the case that it's easier than Japanese.</p>
<p>In college I hope to take course in Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish. I've been taking French for 5 years and have been able to read Hebrew (read, not understand) for 10 years and can say one or two phrases. Is my language plan basically suicide?-should I wait until summers to do language courses?</p>
<p>^ i think spanish will be a breeze for u, my friend. but keep in mind that spanish has more conjugations than spanish is different from english/french grammatical structure in that the former places much more emphasis on conjugation endings while the latter two languages are more compund (passe compose). i think italian will be easier for a person who learned french because the vocabulary is so similar. it's not even funny. mandarin might be manageable if u have a background of korean or japanese or perhaps vietnamese and few others since vocabulary is so similar (zhoong (middle) guo (country)) for arabic, i think it will be a little difficult because it has no relation with indo-european. also, arabic and hebrew is kind of weird because even though the script is simple, they are all consonants.</p>
<p>generally, i think u should learn all the languages that u would ever want to learn simultaneously because older u get, the more difficult. and it takes couple years to be fluent in an language.</p>
Actually, Japanese kanji are in many ways more difficult to use in practice than Chinese hanzi. For one, the Japanese only simplified a very limited number of characters-- Mainland characters are by far more simplified on average. Furthermore, Japanese still requires that fluent speakers know upwards of 2500-3000 characters, with 2000 as a minimum. However, the difficulty in usage is not a feature of numbers needed, but how they are actually used in practice. There are both Chinese compounds and native Japanese vocabulary. The rules for Chinese compounds are not always hard and fast, however, and oftentimes more than one pair can be acceptable. The number of homophones (no tones in Japanese) means that even natives will sometimes forget which character is used for a particular word.</p>
<p>Chinese also lacks the multiple readings per character that Japanese has.</p>
<p>Not that I'm saying that Chinese is easy, but I don't know whether it's the case that it's easier than Japanese.
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<p>I've found Japanese to be harder than Chinese, but that's easily explained by the fact that I'm a native speaker. When comparing the two, you have both easy and hard parts of both languages and I think it's really hard to say which is harder and which is not.</p>
<p>I understand the raging desire to learn languages. I really do. However, I think you would be best served if you focus on perhaps two of those languages in college. If I were you, I would choose either Mandarin or Arabic, Spanish, and work on Hebrew in my free time. Mandarin/Arabic alone is more than enough to keep you occupied for four years in a quest to achieve fluency. Spanish is a relatively easy language which you could learn probably learn three times over in the time it takes you to master Mandarin or Arabic to the same level. Considering you already have a good basis in Hebrew, it might be best to pursue the language in a study program tailored specifically to your needs.</p>
<p>Regardless, to achieve fluency in any language, you'll have to put in a ton of out-of-class beyond-getting-an-A effort. Keep in mind that your ability to learn languages (or anything else for that matter) is not going to suddenly disappear after you get out of college.</p>
<p>I can't let this topic die! Even if there's nothing left to say, for the sake of the OP's original title I must keep the thread alive by pulling it in new directions. Here goes:</p>
<p>What's the ugliest language? Now Vietmanize sounds really ugly, it goes up and down like someones going to puke and sounds annoying to listen to...There are a bunch of guys who speak it during one of my classes and I think it has a much more nasal sound than Mandrin and is also less flat and consistant than Chinese. Listening to it is like having something "<em>drilled slowly into your mind...</em>"</p>
<p>i'm glad that some countries in africa are unified by languages like french. it makes travelling much easier right? if i'm not mistaken west africa sort of have common currency. sort of like the euro.</p>
<p>Former French parts of West Africa do have a common currency, but while the governments all use English or French, you'll still have to get lucky to find someone in a common market who speaks those fluently.</p>
<p>My University has a strong African languages program, actually my advisor is the professor of Zulu here, which seems to be interesting though not very useful unless one went to southeast and east South Africa. </p>
<p>Also, in terms of African languages, it seems that Swahili is the best to take because it is used as a lingua franca throughout East Africa, a status no other African tongue has. It also has a good grammar system, though nouns are tricky. I know this from a friend who takes it.</p>
<p>I also have a friend who takes Twi, spoken in Ghana, but its not widespread, not even in Ghana.</p>
<p>so, what kind of script does swalii and zulu use? i know that some african languages use arabic script (like the iranians) which is totally understandable considering the fact that arabic and hebrew come from ethiopia (not to mention the heavy influence of islam)</p>
<p>Swahili used to use the Arabic alphabet but they use the Latin one now. By the way, Farsi (Persian) isn't an African language or a Semitic language. It's Indo European, like English.</p>
<p>In general, most if not all Bantu languages (Central and Southern Africa) use the Latin script because they weren't literate before the missionaries came around.</p>
<p>I see...it's a shame how many ancient scripts (mongolian) have been replaced by Latin ones... I wonder if there are any Zulu speaking famillies in the US. It'd be really surprising to bump into one, especially if you had taken the language. I wonder what'd you say...(Maybe I'd shout at them from euphoria since the language is so rare here...)</p>
<p>So the guy next to me joked today that you could walk up to a Vietmanize speaker and say gibberish, and he might reply "Oh! Cao gao rang phu du....?" (Made that up) Or some gibberish sounding response. I wonder if this language is taught at Universities?</p>
<p>Anyways I read about Arabic and the alphabet sounds very complicated. Perhaps harder to write and type than Katakana and Hiragana in Japanese. The keyboard looks complex, (actually all foreign language keyboard layouts differing from the QWERTY seem to be) and you'd have to learn cursive to write anything. I read on wikipedia that the Arabic writing system is on the decline, on a country-per-country basis. In the past hundred or so years, numerous countries have moved over to other scripts like Latin and Crylic...I don't have any statistics on new countries (in new regions) taking up the Arabic script, so I presume there are none. By any case, it makes since that alphabets would be preferred over the Arabic writing system with it's complexities if a new writing system was proposed for an existing language.</p>
<p>^That was years ago, following WW1 and before the creation of the EU. Turkey seems to have long desired to become a European nation. I guess since they were once home to the former Byzantine Empire they're an exception from the Arab world. </p>
<p>Lately when I try to read languages like Japanese, the second that I pick up a page I feel like I'm looking at a page of text with no spaces. There are no breaks between either words or sentences and my eyes blur. </p>
<p>Whether I'm reading Japanese online or on a page, the result is the same. Unless the font is both extremely legible (I'm including that it's large) and there are spaces between the lines (single-spaced increases my claustrophobia), my eyes just want to skip to the end of the page while my hands itch to crumple the ugly scribbles and throw them away!</p>
<p>My point is, reading Japanese gives me a greater eye-strain than when I'm working with English. Furthermore, the eye-strain makes this language harder to study than a language such as French.</p>