Job Discussion Forums

[rusmeister]

It's important to separate the written language from spoken, and Shuize's post touches on that. English spelling, Chinese characters and Kanji, etc, are not expected of babies, who learn an oral language for several years before beginning writing.

I dabbled in Chinese and was surprised to find the easiest grammar I had ever seen. Japanese didn't seem so difficult, either, in that respect. I got the impression that people look at the difficulty of the writing system and equate that with the difficulty of the language, which itself has varying levels of difficulty in grammar, phonetics, morphology and syntax.

Also, Shuize is right in that most people, who do not study and compare a number of foreign languages like many of us TEFLers, tend to pronounce their own language as the most difficult, seeing difficulties in their own language and being unaware of the difficulties of others. I've been around, and in every country I've been to I've heard people saying "(My language) is the hardest language in the world.", even in Italy. Russians are always affirming this, and I have to gently disabuse them of the notion. The ones who seriously study foreign languages tend to stop saying that.

Maybe a more objective test would be determining what language requires babies the longest to begin speaking (if there is any difference) and to speak reasonably well?

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

Japanese is actually a pretty easy language to speak because there aren't many irregularities, it has an easy phonemic structure and tone isn't really an issue. Reading it and writing it is hard, especially because writing it includes stroke orders etc.

These kinds of surveys group make reading and writing equivalent in importance to speaking and listening, but reading and writing are not equivalent in importance to speaking and listening for the majority of people.

Plus, there is the issue of the other culture's ideals. German is close to English, and learning it is no harder than learning French (I 'learned' both in that I took courses and did alright in both and have used both with native speakers in the past) but if you make even a small mistake in German, many, many native German speakers almost automatically say 'Nope! Your German is crap!' although they expect the same standard to not be applied when they speak English.

[jonniboy]

To the original list could be added Catalan which has more speakers than Danish after all. I'd say it's easier than French for a native speaker to master. Romanian is significantly harder than the other Romance languages due to having grammatical features long since dropped in the others - neuter gender, 5 declensions, various plural forms and various noun endings in lieu of a definite article.

Russians are always telling me that their language is the most difficult to learn, but from what I've seen Latvian and Lithuanian are even harder, not to mention other world languages. Similarly, uninformed people say that Russian must be difficult to learn to read - which of course it's not after you've learned the alphabet. Irish, with it's inconsistent sounds (similar to English) is much more difficult to learn to read.

People also tend to miss the obvious fact that a languages difficulty is related to their L1. Structurally English and Spanish work in similar ways, same as Latvian/Russian despite being in different indo-European language groups.

[Venti]

[MamaOaxaca]

I have some experience learning Japanese, I didn't find it difficult, BUT. I didn't feel the need to learn Kanji I didn't feel the need to learn to use honorific language I didn't feel the need to learn to talk about abstract ideas
I totally adminer people who have attained a high level of Japanese. If you just want to get on the right train and comment on the beauty of the local shrine and answer questions about your family. You can learn that in about 4 weeks. I did.
I already had years experience learning Spanish and living in Spanish speaking enviroments when I went to Japan. It was quiet an experience to suddenly find myself illiterate, because even if I didn't know what words ment in a Spanish sign I could still read it. Not so with Japanese.

[Deicide]

I was doing Scandinavian studies for a while; Icelandic is quite tough but it's cool...800 years after the fact and the language has changed so little that a native Icelander can read Old Icelandic sagas as if written yesterday...

[cangringo]

I am surprised to see Zulu in the 2nd category. After 6 weeks in South Africa I learned a few words (only remember one) and I found it extremely difficult to produce the clicking sounds in the middle of the words. I admit I am not good at languages anyway and I'm finding Spanish grammar rather difficult - pronunciation is easy for the most part - but Zulu was very difficult. Of course I didn't got to any classes or anything so I have no idea what the grammatical structure is.

I guess it depends on how talented your tongue is.

[Jizzo T. Clown]

Lest we forget that learning to read Japanese is much easier than Chinese. I studied both and found that if you know the kana, you won't have many problems getting around.

It's been my experience that native Japanese speakers are much more tolerant of gaijin's pronunciation (i.e. they could understand me). Definitely not so in China, where if the laowai's pronunciation isn't perfect, the Chinese would make no effort to understand him. Of course this is because one is a tonal language and the other is not.

But then, the desire to understand a foreign speaker of your language / tolerance for ambiguity could be cultural.

[gaijinalways]

[Deconstructor]

I don't know exactly what method the State Department used to categorize which language is difficult and which is not, but to me it's a question of individual abilty. The list is totally arbitrary. I speak four languages and 3 of them fluently simply because I am verbal and for some reason language comes easy to me. I'm sure you know some students who pick up English fast and those who couldn't pick it up in 10000 years.

[BedTiger]

I am surprised by the Japanese comment, yes the writing system is ridiculous but I found it personally easy to pick-up day to day.

Now I am learning Vietnamese and the opposite is true. Easy to learn the reading and writing but the pronunciation is impossible !! 6 tone markers ...wow

[movinaround]

[movinaround]

[Venti]

[gaijinalways]

Hasn't been my experience, have found most Chinese and Japanese native speakers to be about the same (as far as willing to guess, dealing with linguistic ambiguity), though I did have a speaker correcting my forms today, but then I was unsure if she got my intial takeaway counter order . But we managed and my stomach was full later.