Originally posted by Nietzsche1844My guess is Mandarin chinese (probably mis-spelled). I have a
Of all the languages of the world and including our past languages, which one is the hardest language to learn....and how long it will take to learn such languge (speaking,reading,writing)
chinese friend who says cantonese chinese is easier to learn.
Any language with a non indo-european root script will be harder
because first you learn the script then convert to meaning.
If you take a look at spanish or french, the letters at least are the
same, so it would be much harder to learn Hebrew, Arabic or Thai
than Italian, Occitan, or German. Problem with chinese is the language
skill take both halves of the brain to master. This was recently shown
with the new fast petscan which shows bloodflow in the brain which is
a valuable technique to visualize which parts of the brain are being
activated during some examined activity.
Its being done with chessplayers also.
I remember on the BBC documentary "The Boy With The Incredible Brain" them mentioning that Icelandic is a very difficult language to learn. Hence it was the purpose for their experiment to test Daniel Tammet's amazin mental ability, who managed to learn the complete language within a week!
What made it difficult was its very unique and complex sentence structures and very hard to pronounce sounds.
http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/misc/danieltammet.html
Did a quick search though and another site mentions that Hungarian and Finnish appear to be the hardest:
http://nicologic.free.fr/Foreign_Language_Learning.htm
Originally posted by Nietzsche1844Zulu is fairly difficult, but as far as and English(American-English) speaker learning a language, Japanese is the most difficult... but English(American-English) is considered the most difficult for others... as far as learning speed goes, it really depends on your age... younger children can pick it up quicker then adults... thought the rare excemption, is one talented in that area...
Of all the languages of the world and including our past languages, which one is the hardest language to learn....and how long it will take to learn such languge (speaking,reading,writing)
Evidence is that children learn their native language at pretty much the same rate worldwide. (Bi- or multi-lingual children do tend to take longer getting started but that's a different question.) Regarding second-language acquisition, evidence suggests that it's mainly a matter of what one's first language is. That is, English is much harder for a native Chinese speaker than for a native German speaker and conversely, Chinese or Zulu is much harder for a native English speaker than for a Thai or Swahili speaker, respectively.
The writing systems are not quite irrelevant, but not really the critical thing, either.
Best Regards,
Paul
Originally posted by prnSo PRN is Physicians Registered Nurse?🙂
Evidence is that children learn their native language at pretty much the same rate worldwide. (Bi- or multi-lingual children do tend to take longer getting started but that's a different question.) Regarding second-language acquisition, evidence suggests that it's mainly a matter of what one's first language is. That is, English is much harder for a native Ch ...[text shortened]... ems are not quite irrelevant, but not really the critical thing, either.
Best Regards,
Paul
heard that
cantonese is harder to learn than mandarin, it has nine tones where mandarin has four.
takes about 2-3 years of study to learn enough written chinese to read the newspapers, around 5000 characters. scholars can read 60,000 characters, think that the everyday person can read around 8-10K.
kids grow out of being able to hear certain phonemes that are not in their native language, thus japanese not being able to distinguish between r and l, and so mixing it up when they speak english, etc.
spanish is easier to synthesize than english from text because the letters keep the same sounds, mostly (as opposed to "rough" vs. "cough"😉.