Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2009/12/17/tongue-twisters

by footest • 5 years ago

62 49 5 years ago

sbehlasp2• 5 years ago

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

Loic• 5 years ago

It also depends on the number of languages you already know and use, and way more important, if you are forced to use it or not.

If you are native Finnish speaker left alone in a village where the only practiced language is Arabic, you are going to speak Arabic pretty fast! If you speak 20 different languages and as soon as you try to speak Danish the person in front of you answers in English, you will have hard time learning it.

danjac4• 5 years ago

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech. Arabic is probably easier if you know another Semitic language such as Hebrew, or at least another language written in the Arabic alphabet, such as Farsi or Urdu.

Also "hard" is difficult to quantify. Humans are odd and quirky, and so are the languages they create (with perhaps the exception of conlangs like Esperanto or computer languages, but even those inherit the idiosyncrasies of their creators - Perl is a good example). Every language has its weird and difficult aspects, some more than others.

Japanese is "hard" because it has a complex writing system, but (for an English speaker) the pronunciation and grammar aren't particularly difficult: in fact I'd argue that Japanese is probably easier to learn to pronounce for an Anglophone than, say, French, and the verbs are considerably easier too. And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. Having once taught English, I'd say it's no cakewalk either, even for speakers of other Germanic languages: the spelling system barely deserves the name "system" and English verbal phrases are downright weird (put up with == "tolerate"? How?).

Toutouxc3• 5 years ago

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech

For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure.

Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

geraneum• 5 years ago

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

FabHK4• 5 years ago

The linguist John DeFrancis (author of the insightful and somewhat controversial The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) opines (in that book, IIRC) that among character-based writing systems, Japanese is the worst, and among alphabetic ones, English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...

gnoll_of_gozag2• 5 years ago

And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese

and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences

Clewza313• 5 years ago

The US Foreign Service has a scale of how difficult languages are for a native English speaker:

https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang...

Category V, requiring 2200 hours of study, has "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and consists of Arabic, *Japanese, Korean, Cantonese (Chinese) and Mandarin (Chinese), with the asterisk indicating that Japanese is considered the hardest of the lot.

Obvious caveat: the Foreign Service only teaches languages useful for diplomats, meaning that obscure regional languages won't make the cut.

Tor3• 5 years ago

The only reason Japanese is on that list must be because of the writing system. I can't imagine it would be on the list if it were only about learning grammar and pronunciation. And when that's said - the writing system isn't actually hard, it's just that it takes time to learn it. There's nothing there that's difficult to wrap your head around.

Teracotage• 5 years ago

It all depends on immersion and motivation, if you desperately need to learn a language you will work hard to get there. Immersion will expose your listening skill to recognize unique sounds in the target language. That is not to say it makes it easier for you to utter them, it just helps with the early comprehension. I met an Urdu speaking taxi driver who spoke English and Arabic as if he was a native speaker of both, after 6 months of merely listening to the radio in his car.

sbehlasp2• 5 years ago

some interesting facts [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-number-of-languages-s...]

Aengeuad• 5 years ago

Those are some of the hardest languages to learn but that's only really true for a monolingual English speaker.

When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.

For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.

yosito2• 5 years ago

There is a Hungarian tongue twister that is a good example of why Hungarian is on this list:

"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese"

But this is not a representative example of what Hungarian is like.

Toutouxc3• 5 years ago

Sounds like Morse code to me. :)

Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing.

Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk).

Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).

ajb• 5 years ago

That's like the one in Chinese: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ (and so on for 94 syllables) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

escalt• 5 years ago

As far as I know Chinese (Mandarin) is actually very easy to talk/understand since it has very simple grammar. The reading/writing on the other hand takes a lot of dedication. At least that's what someone learning Mandarin told me

lormayna2• 5 years ago

I have been study a bit of Mandarin and the tones are hard, but when you get rid of them it's not so hard. The main difficult for me in spoken Chinese is to learn the huge number of homophones and some idiomatic phrases. On the counterpart, there is almost no grammar. Reading is hard (a normal educated person know around 10/12k ideograms, people with high level education are over 20k), writing is even harder because you need to know the exact order of the traits. I know that also overseas chineses frequently forgot how to write in ideograms.

yorwba3• 5 years ago

The grammar is not that simple. I think that misconception is caused by people noticing that they don't have to memorize conjugation tables like when learning fusional languages, but then they fail to realize that the complexity has not disappeared, it's just encoded in word order and choice of grammatical particles instead.

There's actually an NLP shared task challenging researchers to automatically detect grammar errors learners make when writing Chinese: http://www.cged.tech/

FabHK4• 5 years ago

I'd venture to claim that many of the hardest languages are fairly small ones that most people will never have heard of (as Tuyuca mentioned in the article).

greggman32• 5 years ago

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.)

yorwba3• 5 years ago

a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English.

Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?

bradrn• 5 years ago

Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish

Why all well-known Eurasian languages? Lesser-known languages have difficult features galore, especially for European speakers. (The first example which comes to mind is the Papuan language Kalam, which has only ~100 verbs, but uses these to build up precise descriptions of complex actions in a way which is quite difficult for the European speaker to master; but there of course many more examples of difficult-to-learn features like this.)

nielsbot• 5 years ago

I just finished reading this very interesting article about Pirahã which seems nearly impossible for non-native speakers to learn. The article is about how it may lack recursion, which Chomsky originally proposed as the key unique feature of human language which now seems to be the generally accepted view.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...]

(I am not a linguist) (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868259)

bloak• 5 years ago

Hausa is a strong candidate for the hardest language to learn, and perhaps Indonesian for the easiest.

b0rsuk• 5 years ago

Lies are free, but truth is paywalled.

gnoll_of_gozag2• 5 years ago

econonist's is js-based

f12, ctrl+shift+p, type disable js, reload

FabHK4• 5 years ago

If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy the fascinating course "Language families of the world" by the excellent John McWhorter. He elaborates on many of the aspects mentioned in the article. (It's quite expensive though, unless you resort to a pirated version.)

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/language-families-of-the...

jrd259• 5 years ago

I express my dismay that you would even suggest using a pirated edition. Do you deny that McWhorter (and/or his publisher) is entitled to sell his work?

maininformer• 5 years ago

Don't.

Piracy has its awesome use-cases if not abused.

I grew up in Iran where we have access to very little. Had it not been for piratebay, I could not educate myself on so, so many topics. Even Udacity was blocked there cause their videos are hosted on Youtube!

So if someone reads HN and they need to pirate it, I'm pretty sure McWhorter would be okay, he's a chill dude.

I believe the problem lies with people who can buy it but decide to not; in which case it becomes abusive.

So I wouldn't express dismay just at the suggestion of piracy. It's more nuanced imho.

notslow• 5 years ago

I have always enjoyed this light-hearted "formal" analysis of the hardest languages https://people.cs.umass.edu/~rsnbrg/hardest.pdf

marchidesrty• 5 years ago

The sixth sheik's sixth sheep's sick.

Or so I hear.

Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

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