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[Rich!]

As in, you wouldn't even know where to begin with understanding it.

I'm going to avoid the standard answer of Chinese and instead go with Welsh. It should make at least some sense to me as it's using the standard western alphabet, but whenever I look at it, it's just....like someone has been mashing at a keyboard.

Example from BBC News:

Mae teulu wedi rhoi teyrnged i gyfeilydd ac athrawes cerdd fu farw mewn gwrthdrawiad yn Llanelli nos Sadwrn.

Fe wnaeth teulu Jean Hywel Williams gadarnhau ei bod hi wedi marw yn y ddamwain, ar ôl iddi hi a'i gŵr, John, fod mewn cyngerdd yn Eglwys Sant Elli.

Dywedodd Heddlu Dyfed-Powys bod y ddamwain wedi digwydd ar Heol Vaughan nos Sadwrn.

Wrth roi teyrnged, dywedodd mab Mrs Williams, Jeremy: "Fel teulu, rydyn ni mewn sioc wedi'r drasiedi.

"Rydyn ni'n dal i geisio deall beth ddigwyddodd."

Roedd Mrs Williams yn amlwg iawn ym myd cerddoriaeth yn lleol fel cyfeilydd i nifer o gorau, a dywedodd Jeremy Williams bod ei fam yn "ysbrydoliaeth".

I mean..whaaaa. At least with other european languages I can make sense of it and common words are shared, but welsh is just insane

 

[Two Words]

Russian looks like post-apocalyptic English where people couldn't figure out which ways the letters went.

 

[Brakke]

Cyrillic script for me. Chinese it's easy to just say "whatever! this is nothing" Cyrillic tho I keep *thinking* I can understand it but I Absolutely Cannot.

 

[BocoDragon]

How about any of the ones that aren't in Roman characters.

Or Chinese (aka Japanese or old Korean) because I actually do recognize some of the characters and get how they work.

Let's go with Arabic. Shit's cray. They write backwards.

 

[daviyoung]

Russian looks like post-apocalyptic English where people couldn't figure out which ways the letters went.

Arabic is like this. Except with music notes instead of letters.

 

[Arksy]

All major languages are or were spoken by large groups of people who don't seem to have a lot of trouble understanding their own language. All languages have to in essence be easy enough to be useful. The different scripts can be scary at first appearance but you would be shocked at how quickly you could learn them.

 

[Naughty_Doge]

Arabic. Shit looks unreadable, but oh so fancy.

 

[Salsa]

I mean there's a certain point where there's a shit ton of languages I equally don't understand

I understand Chinese just as much as I understand Arabic, which is none

 

[Necromanti]

Let's go with Arabic. Shit's cray. They write backwards.

The Arabic alphabet is actually really easy to remember (and read) once you've learned it once, even if you never practice reading or using it. (Unless we're talking about scriptural Arabic like in the Qur'an.) I learned it once at 6 years old and haven't forgotten it since. Understanding it is a different matter, though.

 

[Charles Foster Kane]

Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, all these and more are impossible for me to understand, but Russian is the one that might give me a headache for some reason.

 

[StoneFox]

Navajo is pretty crazy to look at.

 

[BocoDragon]

The Arabic alphabet is actually really easy to remember (and read) once you've learned it once, even if you never practice reading or using it. (Unless we're talking about scriptural Arabic like in the Qur'an.) I learned it once at 6 years old and haven't forgotten it since. Understanding it is a different matter, though.

Probably true of most syllabary writing. I guess by that measure, only logographic writing is really that hard to comprehend.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

I'm going to go out in left field and say made up languages.

Chinese? At least people speak that. You see it in real life. Elvish is lost on me and probably 99.9% of the human population.

 

[Valhelm]

Chinese is the standard answer for a reason. The vast majority of alphabets on earth -- from Latin to Greek to Arabic to Thai -- are indirectly derived from the Persian model, meaning that every letter corresponds to a sound. This means that after several days of intense study, you can verbalize any word in the language. Once you can do this, you can pick up cognates, more easily perceive patterns, and pretty quickly begin to understand the main idea of every paragraph.

Logographic languages are completely different. You can be a native speaker but still come across words you don't know, without even an idea of how to pronounce them. And after so many centuries of evolution, most pictographic languages are largely non-iconic, meaning that they don't look like the thing they represent.

 

[Chichikov]

The Arabic alphabet is actually really easy to remember (and read) once you've learned it once, even if you never practice reading or using it. (Unless we're talking about scriptural Arabic like in the Qur'an.) I learned it once at 6 years old and haven't forgotten it since. Understanding it is a different matter, though.

Same.
I have not practice in ages, my ability to speak had gone to shit but I can still read with very little problems.
It's fun as hell to write too.

 

[RELAYER]

All major languages are or were spoken by large groups of people who don't seem to have a lot of trouble understanding their own language. All languages have to in essence be easy enough to be useful. The different scripts can be scary at first appearance but you would be shocked at how quickly you could learn them.

Eh, been trying to learn German for like 3 years.
Still can't really understand anything beyond like 2nd grade level.
Shit's impossible.

 

[Ayato Kanzaki]

I'm only getting stared on japanese, but I can start seeing how difficult it's going to be. Two alphabets of 46 caracters (Hiragana for inner language, Katakana for "outside" terms like week-end and the like), then kanji for verbs, numbers, names and so on, which should be about 2250 caracters. And, if what I read is correct, some of those kanji will change meaning according to what other caracter if before or behind it. It's going to be Hell.

And it seems chinese is even worse.

 

[LOLDSFAN]

Arabic. Shit looks unreadable, but oh so fancy.

It's pretty much backwards cursive.

 

[Powdered Toastman]

Armenian is pretty, but looks very difficult to read, all the letters look so alike

 

[Ayato Kanzaki]

Whoa, it give to Wall of Text a whole new meaning.

 

[Wreck-It Ralph]

Armenian is pretty, but looks very difficult to read, all the letters look so alike

mnuwmnu wmunwm unw mnuwm nwmnmw nmnuw mnuwmnwm

 

[Rentahamster]

Comedic prose written in English on the internet.

 

[comedian]

Southeast Asian languages look indecipherable (Thai below)

 

[Rex Griswold]

Russian for me. Mostly because a lot of those characters are associated with sounds in English, yet in Russian, the sounds are completely different.

 

[Wreck-It Ralph]

I wonder if Russians look at English the same way we look at Russian.

 

[Strax]

People often say to me that Icelandic looks awful but...

... mér er alveg sama. Það sem skiptir mestu máli þegar einstaklingur tekur þátt i álíka umræðu að hann viti nokkurnveginn hvað hann, eða hún, er að tala um. Vandamálið er hins vegar að það er í fæstum tilfellum þannig.

PS. Orðið öðruvísi finnst mér vera yfirgenglega stórkostlegt orð, hugsanlega það allra best sem finnst í íslensku máli.

 

[PreFire]

Anything Asian.

I wouldn't even know what letter the symbol would start with lol

 

[Transhuman]

I don't want to sounds racist, but Black Speech looks like gibberish to me.

Come again Sauron?

 

[GameAddict411]

Arabic. Shit looks unreadable, but oh so fancy.

Arabic alphabet is just like English. The problem is you have to know each form of the letter, because they look different depending on the position inside a word. We do write backwards compared to English, but it's no big deal lol. Try studying math in Arabic! I couldn't lol.

 

[way more]

Other Asian languages say Thai.

An excess of letters!
With 42 consonants, the Thai alphabet has many more than it needs: there are four different ways to write ‘s’ and six for ‘t’.
This abundance of letters reflects the Indian origin of the alphabet and the very different sound system for which it was originally designed.
Many letters are hardly used and confined only to words that have been borrowed from foreign languages, such as Sanskrit, the classical language of India.
In the early 1940s, a government attempt to reduce the number of letters proved unpopular.

And speaking it seems just as crazy. Every character has 4 ways to tone it.

Same character, many many tones.


Korean is pretty easy I learn the text because they took time and invented it in the past centuries. They chose to make it logical instead of stupid grammar rules.


I hear

 

[LeroyPantwether]

I will get laughed at, but Katakana has always been tough for me to read. Often the Japanese use embellished fonts that make all the symbols look the same. That, combined with the fact that I find their system of using foreign words to be unintuitive (excessive portmanteaus, atypical vernacularity/diction) = reading nightmares.

 

[Azalean]

Any asian language. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, can't understand a lick of it.

 

[Mabufu]

Gallifreyan for me

 

[jamsy]

Armenian is pretty, but looks very difficult to read, all the letters look so alike

Ha, Armenian is actually pretty easy. And Russian is a piece of cake.

Arabic always looked hard to me because it all looks like one long squiggle. It looks very difficult to see the separate letters (for someone who can't read it).

 

[fawaz]

Lol at english speakers calling arabic difficult. A 10 year old slacker can spell every word in the Arabic language. While in English it take some sort of prodigy.

 

[marimorimo]

Lol at english speakers calling arabic difficult. A 10 year old slacker can spell every word in the Arabic language. While in English it take some sort of prodigy.

Yeah, while English doesn't look intimidating when written, the non-intuitive spelling and tons of borrowed words makes it a nightmare for non-native speakers. I'm SO glad I learned English at a young age. Give me kanji any time over English spelling.

 

[PKrockin]

Chinese is the standard answer for a reason. The vast majority of alphabets on earth -- from Latin to Greek to Arabic to Thai -- are indirectly derived from the Persian model, meaning that every letter corresponds to a sound. This means that after several days of intense study, you can verbalize any word in the language. Once you can do this, you can pick up cognates, more easily perceive patterns, and pretty quickly begin to understand the main idea of every paragraph.

Logographic languages are completely different. You can be a native speaker but still come across words you don't know, without even an idea of how to pronounce them. And after so many centuries of evolution, most pictographic languages are largely non-iconic, meaning that they don't look like the thing they represent.

On the other hand, as a native speaker of English, I can still come across words like syzygy and have no idea what it could possibly mean. In Japanese that word is apparently written 朔望, which I can at least recognize as probably having something to do with stars even with my limited Japanese. Recognizing radicals and component characters can go a long way to clue you in on and help you remember meanings, even if they don't always make sense (as with English).

 

[EUA]

I wonder if Russians look at English the same way we look at Russian.

some do. my mom (we are native russian speakers) thinks english is unbearable with its spelling and pronunciation. We have a saying about english too, "we spell manchester but we pronounce it as liverpool" or something like this. It indicates how difficult it is for some people to read english.

 

[electricboogaloo]

reading and writing arabic is not very hard once you memorize the letters but the fucked up thing with arabic is the grammar.still remember the nightmares form when i had qawa3ed tests.

 

[Crayolan]

Arabic just looks like random scribbles.

Since I know a decent bit of Japanese east asian alphabets don't look quite as foreign to me.

 

[NEO0MJ]

I'm surprised people are saying arabic, it's pretty simple when it comes to the words themselves, though correct grammer is an entirely different matter. So many rules and symbols.

For me it's probably Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Like, who thought it was a good idea to make words their own characters?

 

[Melon Husk]

Chinese. Cyrillic, unlike Chinese, has a finite number of symbols. Goes for Arabic too. You can learn to "read" Cyrillic in an afternoon.

 

[GinoBiru]

When I was in Russia I could actually make out words from Cyrillic, they were a lot like roman words. Finnish however. There's just so much about that language which is completely alien to me.

I'm Dutch btw

 

[BladeoftheImmortal]

Chinese. I've been studying for 2 years almost and still can't read more than. 1000 characters.

 

[Irminsul]

I'm surprised people are saying arabic, it's pretty simple when it comes to the words themselves, though correct grammer is an entirely different matter. So many rules and symbols.

For me it's probably Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Like, who thought it was a good idea to make words their own characters?

Well, people are probably saying "Arabic" for the same reason you're including Korean with Chinese and Japanese

Korean isn't a logographic language, but actually the symbols are built in a really logical way. The only thing you're doing in Korean is to combine two to three syllables into one "letter", so it looks like there's an abundance of different symbols when in reality there isn't.

Spoiler

At least I think that's what's being done.

 

[Skellig Gra]

I'd go with Arabic, I don't even know where to begin with deciphering that.

 

[Se7enSword]

Chinese, Russian, Gujarati, Korean. I find these the hardest and most difficult to comprehend.

I knew Mandarin as a kid, but forgot it after a year of no use. Now, It's just difficult.

I love Arabic! So beautiful. Its calligraphy is exquisite too.

 

[NEO0MJ]

Well, people are probably saying "Arabic" for the same reason you're including Korean with Chinese and Japanese

Korean isn't a logographic language, but actually the symbols are built in a really logical way. The only thing you're doing in Korean is to combine two to three syllables into one "letter", so it looks like there's an abundance of different symbols when in reality there isn't.

Spoiler

At least I think that's what's being done.

Oh didn't know that. I thought it worked the same was as the other two.

 

[SmartBase]

Logographic languages will always be difficult for me, ain't nobody got time for that rote learning nonsense.

 

[Impotaku]

Ancient mayan, it's so beautiful to look at but no idea where to start

I'm always intriged by non english language scripts they have a lovely visual appeal.

Arabic, sanskrit, hangul, Chinese/Japanese, ancient Egyptian, ancient Persian