A very difficult language to learn is navajo[1], in fact it was used during the WWII by americans to communicate and it was one of the few ciphers that wasn't broke by enemies.
Having no native teachers available increased the difficulty, and the WWII usage was against non-native English speakers. That said, the Native American languages that I know of are grammatically quite different from English.
In that specific case there were less than 30 people who knew that language in the US during WWII, and the navajo language was also completely different from other native languages.
UPDATE: I mean 30 people outside the navajo tribe.
I can attest that this language is very hard to learn. It is an incredibly fun language and very VERY descriptive. The hardest part is actually speaking the language itself, since we're not used to using some of the extra sounds that Navajo uses.
Also, single words literally translate into English phrases or sentences.
The language hasn't done much for me these past few years, until I started learning Chinese. It is freaky how similar the languages sound. And I don't mean linguistically, of course. Learning Chinese is thankfully easier for me since I can replicate the phonetics without trouble.
It seems like "Whorfism" is always making a come-back with Geeks. I think it appeals to a kind sci-fi imagination.
Chomsky's theory is usually presented as all languages work the same in the brain. I think the later versions of the Chomskian theory are more like, all languages allow one to accomplish the same thing - especially, all languages have recursion (despite the counter-claims around the Peraha, I think that's actually demonstrated pretty well).
Perhaps the hardest language studied by many
Anglophones is Latin.
When learning latin I was surprised at how similar the genative case is in Latin and English. It would be like making an assumption about a platform by using your knowledge of a separate and familiar platform, and then using inference, and getting it right first time - eerie.
The pronounciation in latin is also easy, and the spelling, and the vocab has similiarities that helps with learning.
I suspect part of what makes Latin more difficult to learn than some indo-European languages is that it's very disconnected from practical considerations. (see http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html) The ability to learn like that is a practical skill in its own right though.
I took four years of Latin in high school, and by far the hardest part compared to other languages I studied was the sheer number of things to memorize. Five noun declensions by five cases (more than that, really, but only five to memorize) by two numbers made fifty noun endings. Verbs were even more complex: four verb conjugations, four principal parts to memorize for each verb, three moods (that I can remember), plus the active/passive distinction. That's a hell of a lot of charts to memorize. There are patterns in these charts, but lots of exceptions to the patterns. Plus all the various ways the various moods and cases can be used. Here's a nice list of the ways the ablative case can be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin
Compared to all this memorization, getting the feel of the language, even though it was very alien to my mind, seemed easy.
I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.
It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages.
Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality.
By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.
Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.
If answering that question was necessary to speaking and understanding the language fluently, it wouldn't be so hard to answer the question. Mapping concepts between two languages is much, much harder than simply speaking and understanding both languages.
Right, and that's part of the problem. The whole culture and language are so alien to most people that it is incredibly hard to map concepts.
As far as I can tell the only non-native speaker who is actually fluent is Daniel Everett. Given that the language is the subject of a fair amount of linguistic interest because of its uniqueness, it's pretty amazing that he is the only one.
Not only that, but even with a natural aptitude for languages and desire to learn, it took him 7 years of living with them to get to that point.
I find this really interesting from the perspective of programming languages.
The languages that add on information not required in English reminds me of type declaration for variables versus languages where you don't have to declare a type, for instance.
What computer languages are the hardest to learn (for a C speaker?). How does the design of the language influence the thoughts one has or can easily express in that language? (We know it does matter, Whorf or no Whorf!)
> "The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds".
I remember that when I began speaking English coloquially my maxilar muscles and tongue would get very tired. That was when I realized that English is way more oral than my native nasal Portuguese.
> A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely.
Portuguese and Spanish have 2 different verbs to entail the meaning of the verb "to be"; they are the verbs "ser" and "estar", with very different meanings. Depending on where and how you use it can mean very different things. E.g.: "estar" sick means that you have a temporary desease like stomach sickness, a cold or a flu; "ser" sick means that you either have an incurable genetic desease or you are a psycopath.
Also, when it comes to the grammar I totally agree: English grammar is a blessing, a wonder of simplicity. Portuguese and Spanish have lots of tenses for past and future, each with a different verb conjugation.
This is an interesting article. It makes me want to share a little known fact about my own native tongue. It is actually the only language in the world that has a voice exclusively used for sarcasm.
I am wondering if those Whorfianist theories are correct and that feature of the language makes me and my co-patriots especially sarcastic.
The language is Bulgarian, and I was referring to the re-narrative mood. Although I did overstate it a bit, the re-narrative mood can also be used to express extreme doubt in what you are saying or that you have obtained the information very indirectly. But I would say that most of the time it is used to express sarcasm at least up to some extent.
(That and the very basic greetings are the only Bulgarian I retain - I will have to go and investigate the "re-narrative" in my copious free time. Thanks.)
For some reason the article chose to use Estonian as an example of Finno-Ugric languages, which have all been traditionally considered difficult for English speakers.
I am hungarian and I met several people in Hungary coming from all over the world, who somehow fell in love with the country or the language and did learn the language quite well.
So it can definitely be done (as with any other language), although you need strong motivation and a bit love of the language. But I think there are not many people in the world who has the motivation for learning an obscure language that is only spoken in one Eastern European country.
I started learning it about 6 months ago, and was in Hungary from July - September. The language immersion helped me a lot....no one speaks English in Magyarorszag :).
A very interesting article. I appreciate the submission, but wonder why you replaced the original title "Tongue twisters:
In search of the world’s hardest language," as I see that in the submitted article?
I’m not convinced there’s any absolute scale for how hard a language is. If a native English speaker would beat his or her head against the wall trying to learn Japanese, then a native Japanese speaker with comparable intelligence in comparable circumstances would be just as frustrated trying to learn English.
There are some language features that are just easier than their alternatives -- for example, written Finnish is phonetic. Compared to English, his has massive advantages both when first learning to read and when learning Finnish as a second language -- to learn to correctly pronounce Finnish, you need to learn 29 phonemes and their corresponding letters (One lacks a letter and is marked by ng/nk instead -- the guy who defined the written language missed it.), and the length of their long forms. After you've learned them, to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word.
That's not to say Finnish is an easier language than English -- even if our writing system is strictly superior, as a fenno-ugric language we've got boatloads of other crap that drags us down :).
There's plenty of interesting history in how Finnish got this way. In a nutshell, the protestant reformation hit Finland before there was a written Finnish language. Since everyone being able to read the bible on their own was kind of important for the Lutherans, this posed a problem for the clergy. So, to fix it, one particularly active scribe named Michael Agricola went and defined the basic form of written Finnish on his own. He wanted to make it easy to learn to read, and so made it very simple. However, as spoken Finnish was an old language, much of it didn't fit in the straightjacket of a language he had created. His solution? By then he had become the bishop of Turku, and could pretty much dictate anything church-related in Finland. He chose to simply ignore the parts of the language that didn't fit, and in a few decades spoken Finnish shed the features that couldn't be represented in writing. The end result is probably the simplest writing system anyone anywhere uses as their first language.
"to correctly pronounce any Finnish word you just string together the sounds of the letters of the word."
This is a lie-to-children that I too was taught in school, but it's not even remotely true. Consider:
herne(k)keitto
leu(v)an
rei(j)än
isän (=m)maa
sydäm(m)en
You'd sound like a robot if you just pronounced them "as written". Computer phonetic analysis of the language reveals even more patterns where the written language indisputably deviates from the spoken one, but these at least should be easy to verify without specialist knowledge or equipment.
I am a Turk who learned Finnish as an adult. A striking similar between Turks and Finns is that both think their language is phonetic/read-as-written. While Finnish performs definitely better than Turkish in this aspect, both are far from being perfectly phonetic.
As the other comment mentioned Finnish isn't that phonetic at all. Even the simple "tervetuloa" is actually pronounced as "tÄrvetuloa".
But out of all languages I've learned/tried to learn, Finnish definitely is relatively more rule-abiding. And it has a huge bonus of being very obscure as to be used as a secret language :)
There's relative difficulty, which is often a function of distance within the linguistic tree, e.g. Germanic to Sino-Tibetan, but there definitely is a character of language difficulty which is absolute.
For example, comparing English and German:
- English has simple plurals. In regular cases you add an s or es, and the number of exceptions is limited. Chair, chairs. Book, books. Jacket, jackets. In German plurals are, for all practical purposes, completely irregular: Stuhl, Stühle. Buch, Bücher. Jacke, Jacken.
- English does not generally have gendered nouns, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- English does not have cases, nor an equivalently complex replacement.
- As a result of those two, the English words a and an correspond in German to ein, eine, einen, einem, einer and eines.
- English has almost the same tenses as German, but let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run. In German, laufen: Ich laufe, du läufst, er läuft, wir laufen, ihr lauft. Rather then two forms, there are five.
- English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
English does not have formality encoded in its grammar.
No, instead it's in the vocabulary. ;)
Many of the most basic words of English exist in more formal and less formal versions. Compare horseman and equestrian, or eat and dine, or smell and fragrance, or hug and embrace.
Many of these apparent redundancies derive from the period when Britain was ruled by native French speakers, who tended to use a lot of French- or Latin-derived words.
I certainly wouldn't claim that spoken English doesn't encode plenty of formality:
*Sir, would you care for an aperitif?*
*No, I ain't hungry.*
Though American culture tends to be deliberately sloppy about who speaks formally to whom, especially compared to what I know of German culture.
This is so far my favorite feature of the English language. Formal forms in the grammar are a relict of feudal type of thinking and in modern times they are not only redundant but also harmful. Need to choose between formal 'you' and informal 'you' leads to lots of awkward social situations. If you apply informal 'you' to someone older and who you don't know well it is usually a conversation breaker. If you use formal 'you' when speaking with a coeval it may look like you're patronizing him. Women sometimes get offended because they think you consider them older than they really are, and so on.
Also, when you start addressing someone using formal forms it is very hard to switch to informal 'you'. Using these forms affect human thinking and after you have already addressed someone formally (because it was in a professional situation for instance) you are not likely to become friends. In some cultures there is a special complex social protocol for switching from formal 'you' to informal one. This ceremony is sometimes called using a German word 'Bruderschaft' and for some peculiar reason it often involves kissing and drinking alcohol. This, rather unfortunate, photo captures such situation: http://imgur.com/pmf57.jpg
As I find it significantly easier to develop social relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity of the English-speaking countries (and esp. the even less formal US).
> As I find it significantly easier to develop social
relationships in English, I often wonder whether this lack
of formal 'you' contributes to the economical prosperity
of the English-speaking countries
But then, the formal 'you' contributes to professional relationships. Think of it as a safeguard against overstepping an invisible line of proper conduct.
It is really more difficult to say "Sie Arschloch" than "Du Arschloch" because the formal 'you' clashes with vulgar language one would use around drinking buddies.
Do you know of any language where there are not formal and informal vocabularies? I don't.
The point is that in English the additional semantics do not require additional syntax. To make a programming analogy, this is like the difference between C++ having overloadable operators and Java using methods to achieve the same. C++'s grammar is more complicated than Java's, because C++ uses additional syntax to achieve the same semantic ends.
The dual French / Germanic roots to English vocabulary does however hint at one of its distinctively complicated features: English pronunciation and spelling is bewildering because of that lineage.
It's pretty hard to say that German isn't objectively harder than English.
I could say that in English and in Chinese, and with effort in German.
The participant here who submitted the article is dubious about any one language being harder than any other language. I was exposed to that doubt as part of the standard dogma of linguistics while studying linguistics, and I have observed difficult features in many of the languages I have studied.
and my educated guess would be that English (having spread around the world, and spoken in the country with the most native speakers, the United States, mostly by people whose traceable ancestors were NOT native speakers of English) might be a more koineized language than, say, Twi. So perhaps on a truly worldwide, pancultural basis, English is somewhat easier to learn to communicate with other speakers of English than most languages are to communicate with other speakers of those languages.
I've heard it argued that all Chinese dialects are in fact creoles, an artifact of the expanding and shrinking Chinese empire. ie, indigenous language + language of the court + several generations -> new dialect.
And if you can argue that for Chinese, you could argue it for the romance languages, for English after the Norman invasion, etc.
let's take the verb to run in the present tense: I run, you run, he runs, we run, they run
There’s also I do run, I did run, I will run, I shall run, I can run, I could run, I should run, I must run, I might run, I would run, I may run. And all their negations (“I shouldn’t run” is OK but “I mayn’t run” is not). And the special rules for conjugating them: the past tense of “I run” is “I ran”, but the past tense of “I can run” is “I could run”, not “I canned run” or “I can ran”.
These are not complex to native English speakers because we learned most of them without being formally taught, but an adult learning English as a foreign language is not so lucky.
(I see from Googling that German also has modal verbs; I don’t know if the whole set is easier or harder to learn than the English set, from the point of view of someone who knows neither.)
German's use of modal verbs is almost identical to English's, in fact most of its verb usage is, with the notable exception that English prominently features a romance-language-like gerund: "I am running."
The funny bit with your example? Despite the similar usage, German complicates things further by splitting the primary and auxiliary verbs, with the primary being transported to the end of the clause:
Ich sollte nach Hause laufen.
Literally:
I should to home run.
This is no coincidence, since English grammar is basically a simplified version of German grammar. There's a clear continuum from German to English via Frisian and Dutch where the grammar is continually simplified relative to its Germanic root. You can see the same sort of progression in the Romance languages. Modern Italian is pretty much uncontroversially simpler than Latin.
From what I understand peoples problem learning English relates to it lacking fixed rules for most issues. Spelling being the most obvious example. A Spelling Bee would be a far more trivial exercise in Spanish or German. Granted the 988,968 words in English http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/ have something to do with that. Although the total number of words in German is larger (In the modern scientific German vocabulary data base in Leipzig (since 1.7.2003) there are 9 million words) the core vocabulary is fairly small and consistent by comparison. EX: "glove" as "hand-shoe (Handschuh)
Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
Interesting thoughts, but you shouldn't editorialize titles. The title of the article in this case, given by the author, is actually more accurate than the one you chose.
You shouldn't editorialize, but you are allowed to change titles.
The author specifically says he is talking about hard for english speakers, so the new title is correct.
Specifically:
"Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall."
and
"A truly boggling language is one that requires English speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely."
I'm not sure if there's an absolute scale, but you can't deny that some languages have more complex grammar than others. Conjugating verbs is a good example: coming from a Latin language, English verbs are almost trivial, but I doubt that the reverse is true. If you wanted, you could put together a list of criteria, such as complexity of grammar rules, how common exceptions are (very common in English, for example), whether the writing is phonetic or not, etc. etc., which should give a rough basis to compare languages.
English has a comparatively simple grammar (at least in terms of things like verb tenses), but then is complex in other ways (size of vocabulary, modal verbs, noun affixes, idioms). We notice the complexity of other languages’ grammars because that’s the thing that stands out when we try to learn them, but people coming from other languages to learn English will be tripped up in other ways.
English is not my native language, and I agree completely - it's easy to pick up the basics (in terms of grammar and basic vocabulary, at least) but difficult to master (irregular pronunciation, idioms).
On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down - I don't know enough languages to give an example, but it seems plausible.
So, yes, you'd likely get different results if you're comparing languages at different proficiency levels, but a rough comparison should still be possible.
"On the other hand, you might have a language with difficult basics, but relatively simple mastery once you have the basics down"
My impression, as a native English speaker who has learned German, is that German is much more like this than English. You have to know quite a bit to say fairly simple sentences. But once you know the basics, there are only a couple of advanced concepts to get you to mastery.
I'm not convinced by this. If you're just aiming to communicate in German, you can ignore noun gender, valency, many tenses, etc. It's all stuff you'll need to come back and learn later.
[maybe this depends on how you learn. My approach was, roughly, first learn to communicate, then learn to communicate correctly]
That's not the point. The point is that in order to communicate simple things correctly in German, you need to learn a lot more than to communicate simple things correctly in English. But to have correct mastery of German, it's not a large jump from there.
It seems like you're saying, once you've gone through 90% of the effort to learn a language, you've only got 10% left (as opposed to 10% for basics then 90% to master).
Yes, that's right, except for the important part. I'm sure the percentages are off, but here's the basic idea:
To correctly form simple German sentences you need to learn 90% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 10%.
To correctly form simple English sentences you need to learn 10% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 90%.
Sure you can deny it. You picked the classic example of something that seems hard to you because of your native speaker bias. What some languages resolve with conjugations and declensions, others resolve with combinations of prepositions and word order. English verb-preposition combinations are so brutally hard for foreign speakers to master that they publish "collocation dictionaries" to help. Latin's case system is much more predictable and regular, in some ways it's easier to learn.
Ranking human language complexity is a much more difficult task than you might imagine.
My native speaker bias for which language? :) I'm not a native English speaker, although I did learn it young, which I'm sure helped.
Still, my native language is Romanian, and I found English verbs easier to learn than French conjugation, even though French is very similar to Romanian in the first place.
Ha, I would have thought you were a native speaker, your English is excellent. :-) I think you make the same generalizations about Latin that native English speakers often do, though, in assuming rich nominal case = complexity. The issue is much more complex than that.
Having studied several languages, I think the biggest difference in difficulty is in how long it takes to acquire basic proficiency. For English speakers, it's obviously easier to ramp up in Spanish or German than Chinese or Korean, because there is much more vocabulary and syntax in common.
However I think putting a number on the difficulty of becoming a fluent, capable speaker of any foreign language is much more difficult. I'm not sure if it's any easier for an English speaker to become an idiomatic, witty, eloquent speaker of German than Chinese.
"For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."
Strange Amharic wasn't mentioned, it has a unique script and long alphabet that is similiar to Indic ones, except for the various stress sounds and "clicks" you put on different letter sets. I'm betting that these stress sounds would be difficult for native English speakers to pick up
Farsi is Indo-European. Morphologically it's fairly simple (e.g. you have different verb forms for person and number, but not for gender) --- except that some people like to apply Arabic morphology to Arabic loanwords in certain cases (analogous to how some show-offs use obscure Greek plural paradigms like "metropolei" instead of "metropolises" when speaking English).
The writing system's a bit of a pain --- short vowels aren't indicated, and it preserves etymological spelling for Arabic loanwords even though a lot of these sound distinctions have been lost in speech. (Tajik --- the variant of Farsi spoken in Tajikistan, ex-USSR country --- largely eliminated that problem, though, by writing in Cyrillic instead of Arabic script).
Hebrew and Aramaic definitely get a special “so many frigging affixes that it takes half an hour to figure out the root before you can look up the frigging word in the dictionary” award in my book. I assume I would feel the same way about Arabic if I ever learned enough of it to even attempt to use an Arabic dictionary.
(I should note, though, that while Farsi and Arabic use the same writing system, they are from different language families.)
On the other hand, once you understand how to construct & deconstruct words, it's a lot easier to build your vocabulary.
You learn the word "read" & you immediately know all the verb tenses (read, reading), the nouns (food) the adjectives (written). Inconsistencies & exceptions make going from conversational to fluent a nightmare, but getting to conversational is not too bad.
Affixes, like an new alphabet are a bit of a hurdle, but once you're over it it's not hard any more.
Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house, and in the middle of trying to teach myself the language, I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn. My two main problems are: a) Many words are not actually written as one word, and so you might have 2 or 3 separated strings of letters that are meant to be read altogether as one, which is ridiculously confusing - and - B) Arabic is commonly written with the vowels omitted. Most Arabic words have a set of unique root consonants, usually 3 or 4 consonants, that help you identify the word you're reading. So they'll eliminate the vowels because the root consonants and modifiers should be sufficient for word recognition. This probably makes reading script faster as there's less to process, and I'm sure it does, but as a beginner, it's tough.
Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house...I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn.
You're not alone. The US Defense Language Institute teaches many languages, mostly to native English speakers. Of the languages they teach, Arabic takes the longest.
It's a shame the article didn't list the number of weeks the DLI spends on each of the languages. It "only" covers a few dozen languages, but course length would be an excellent proxy for language difficulty for English speakers.
As a data point, I attended DLI in 1991-1992 for Russian. At the time the basic Russian class lasted for 47 weeks..5 days a week, 8 hours a day. If I remember correctly, Arabic was 63 weeks.
DLI 'ranked' languages according to difficulty...categories (cats) I-V. Russian was a III. Arabic was cat IV. The only two cat V languages were English (for non-natives) and Japanese.
Also, Arabic calligraphy varies greatly, and just because you know one form doesn't enable you to read another. Perhaps cursive vs. print is similarly difficult for non-English speakers, but I feel as if Arabic's is especially difficult. After years of studying the language, I can hardly do anything with it.
Yeah, I should've included that as a third point. We get Arabic television stations at home that I'll watch to try to read headlines, etc, for practice, but the font changes so drastically from show to show that I often find some letters unrecognizable.
What about the fact that the standard written/literary form is not what people actually speak? Arabic speakers seem so strict about the language. I would imagine that makes things hard.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language