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What written language is the most difficult to comprehend for you?
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franbatista123
Member
How can some people say english is hard to learn? It's one of the easiest languages. Currently know Portuguese (Mother Tongue), English, a bit of Spanish and French and i'm learning German. The key to learning a language is working on it every week otherwise you start forgetting the language. Native English speakers are particulary lazy in this regard.
runningjoke
Member
English is only easy because it's so ubiquitous. Grammar and spelling is completely bullshit
Lord Thrappleper The 49th
Member
Welsh, by far. Nothing but gibberish.
clay_ghost
Member
gonna say Vietnamese is up there for me
I recognise some Chinese character inside lol.
enanogrande
Member
Reading a newspaper in Japan is (apparently) a College-age feat, and from what Ive dabbled in the language I can understand why.
Languages like Welsh or Arabic might look unintelligible to a non-speaker, but the fact that theyre based on alphabets means that a few months of learning should be enough for anyone to read it (i.e., recite a word phonetically, not necessarily know the meaning). Logographic languages like Japanese and Chinese however have such a huge amount of characters that even being able to read a word, let alone understand what it means, that even a native speaker with years of study might come across characters they have no idea how to pronounce, let alone understand.
Languages like Welsh or Arabic might look unintelligible to a non-speaker, but the fact that theyre based on alphabets means that a few months of learning should be enough for anyone to read it (i.e., recite a word phonetically, not necessarily know the meaning). Logographic languages like Japanese and Chinese however have such a huge amount of characters that even being able to read a word, let alone understand what it means, that even a native speaker with years of study might come across characters they have no idea how to pronounce, let alone understand.
eot
Banned
That's one of my favourite scripts. It's not that hard to learn either.
Octavianus
Banned
I think counting and numbers is the hardest part in Japanese. Different ways to count different things and the name of the numbers changing based on what you are counting or how high you count. And then there are counter suffixes for any number of things you gotta remember. A counter to remember for small square items, a counter to remember for cylindric items, for flat items, etc, etc, etc. It is much more migraine inducing than remembering katakana and hiragana. In fact the hardest part of those for me is the kana for katakanas 'so, tsu, and shi,' other than that those two alphabets are quite easy. Yes, kanjj can be quite daunting because of there sheer amount of characters you have to remember but it is probably easier to learn the kanji than if you forgot all the english words you knew and had to relearn them.
As for Chinese, it is impossible for me. I cant make correct tones and the apparent lack of any grammar blows my mind. I just cant deal.
Sinfamy
Member
What'd you say about my mother?
Its not that difficult. There are a few symbols that look the same but mean sonething different. But once you got over that, reading kyrillian letters is as easy as your usual ones. Grammar is where things get jiffy.
Coriolanus
Banned
Reading that bit of welsh, i now understand where Lovecrat sought inspiration for r'lyeh.
srsly
srsly
They usually type in pinyin (Latin letters) and the computer comes up with guesses that they choose.
Russian is simple when you get the hang of в being v, р being r etc. and memorize the contractions. Both are similar to Greek which it was based on.
Theonik
Member
The Welsh don't use the same alphabet which is what trips you up.
This might help you:
http://www.madog.org/dysgwyr/gramadeg/gramadeg1.html
Edit: Also, Welsh is of Celtic origin whereas many western languages like the English language are combinations of Germanic, Latin, Frank, and Greek which is why they are easy to jump between.
SliceSabre
Banned
Japanese, Arabic, Chinese.
Can't even guess what the hell they're saying.
Can't even guess what the hell they're saying.
Stereogatari
Banned
Georgian and Armenian. Every character looks the same.
With Arabic, Japanese and Chinese I can actually discern the distinct nature of different characters. But Georgian and Armenian look uniform.
Here's Georgian script:
With Arabic, Japanese and Chinese I can actually discern the distinct nature of different characters. But Georgian and Armenian look uniform.
Here's Georgian script:
Exactly!
freakzilla149
Banned
These should not be too difficult actually. Russian has a few extra characters in addition to Latin alphabet (different pronunciation too).
Gujrati is also quite simple as it has a few dozen letters, a few more that English, instead of writing the vowels you often use a sort of diacritical mark. Being distantly related to English, it also has few shared words, for example: name == naam.
Korean is actually quite modern, it was invented by some king as a easier to learn alternative to Chinese characters, it has a reputation for being easy.
Vigilant Walrus
Member
The thing about Japanese and Korean I find so difficult is that everything we know of our own Germanic and Latin languages don't apply.
When I want to learn another language like Spanish, Italian or Portuguese (which is horrendously complicated to speak) I can still use the same sort of formula. I. Want. To. Eat. It still applies to most levels in most of these languages, but then when you do Korean or Japanese it doesn't even work that. It's more like "Me Eat" or "Myself Hunger".
For me... Japanese used to be about just the weeabo experience, but it has since transformed into something else. Same with Korean. I really want to master these two. And I am actually thinking of trying to go with Hangul first, as I've been told that it is much easier to understand. There is a logical order to things, and some people have told me, that if you know Hangul, it is much easier to make the jump to Japanese.
People have said that Hiragana/Katakana is easy. I don't think it is easy at all because I never even understood how to combine words. Remembering the kanji is just a memory game. That is not the skill level that bothers me. With Hiragana and Katakana it's how you combine words into sentences and how words become other things depending on how you say them.
I am waiting for Duolingos Japanese program. It's been in beta for years, but it's exactly the kind of app I think I need to really get further along. I got more out Duolingo Spanish than I did in years of Spanish community college.
When I want to learn another language like Spanish, Italian or Portuguese (which is horrendously complicated to speak) I can still use the same sort of formula. I. Want. To. Eat. It still applies to most levels in most of these languages, but then when you do Korean or Japanese it doesn't even work that. It's more like "Me Eat" or "Myself Hunger".
For me... Japanese used to be about just the weeabo experience, but it has since transformed into something else. Same with Korean. I really want to master these two. And I am actually thinking of trying to go with Hangul first, as I've been told that it is much easier to understand. There is a logical order to things, and some people have told me, that if you know Hangul, it is much easier to make the jump to Japanese.
People have said that Hiragana/Katakana is easy. I don't think it is easy at all because I never even understood how to combine words. Remembering the kanji is just a memory game. That is not the skill level that bothers me. With Hiragana and Katakana it's how you combine words into sentences and how words become other things depending on how you say them.
I am waiting for Duolingos Japanese program. It's been in beta for years, but it's exactly the kind of app I think I need to really get further along. I got more out Duolingo Spanish than I did in years of Spanish community college.
Stereogatari
Banned
Same with Turkish, which some unaccepted theories going as far as to suggest is related to Japanese and Korean.
It makes me feel privileged to have grown up bilingual in English and Turkish, 2 totally unrelated language families. On top of that these languages have diverse sets of vocabularly; English has loads of Latin/French/Greek loanwords and Turkish has loads of Persian/Arabic loanwords.
Alx
Member
Georgian and Armenian. Every character looks the same.
With Arabic, Japanese and Chinese I can actually discern the distinct nature of different characters. But Georgian and Armenian look uniform.
Here's Georgian script:
Exactly!
I suppose it's more a matter of style than real alphabet/typography. If you look at some uses of latin alphabet in the past you could believe that "all characters look the same" too :
It's also a matter of habit I guess. My mother once told me that as a child she had some of her text books written in gothic types, and had no issue reading it even now. While when she showed me the book she was reading, I needed to decypher each word one by one.
Chinese. I'm learning Japanese but Chinese just boggles my mind because it's just kanjis everywhere. At least in Japanese I can easily get the structure of a sentence thanks to hiraganas/katakanas. But Chinese... And the kanjis aren't always the same, they often have more strokes/different ones.
Seems impossible to speak, too.
Seems impossible to speak, too.
Stereogatari
Banned
I suppose it's more a matter of style than real alphabet/typography. If you look at some uses of latin alphabet in the past you could believe that "all characters look the same" too :
It's also a matter of habit I guess. My mother once told me that as a child she had some of her text books written in gothic types, and had no issue reading it even now. While when she showed me the book she was reading, I needed to decypher each word one by one.
Daaamn. That actually could explain why Arabic looks strange to some. If you took the "joining up" part of the Arabic alphabet and made every character single like in Latin, then perhaps it wouldn't look at confusing.
I'm gonna keep close to the Latin alphabet since it's evident or obvious that everything written with unknown symbols would make it uncomprehensible, so...
i was gonna answer anything scandinavian, but OP opened a new world of wtfuckery
i mean
"Mae hwn yn dir niwtral lle y ffeithiau a thystiolaeth, a gyflwynwyd o fewn ffiniau, disgwrs cynhwysol sifil, ennill y dydd trwy safoni gofalus"
what in the hell
i was gonna answer anything scandinavian, but OP opened a new world of wtfuckery
i mean
"Mae hwn yn dir niwtral lle y ffeithiau a thystiolaeth, a gyflwynwyd o fewn ffiniau, disgwrs cynhwysol sifil, ennill y dydd trwy safoni gofalus"
what in the hell
Theonik
Member
I have also been learning Japanese, actually I like the Chinese writing, divergence and memorisation aside, decoupling the writing from the language is a pretty great thing, in languages where the characters are largely untouched, you can derive meaning from text without knowing the language as long as you know the characters. For instance I know some Chinese friends of mine can read some Japanese in virtue of the Kanji, but the readings are completely different.
What's cool is that say everyone transitioned to a common writing system like that in the future, it would be possible to write information in a way that could be read in any language you wished potentially with some sacrifices.
Edit:
See my previous post on Welsh. It's not read as you think it is.
Not sure what you mean by combining words. If you're talking about the right hand side of the table, it's really just a matter of taking the sound of the first part and then substituting the vowel part with the small character. Harder is getting how to pronounce them right I guess.
If you're looking for an amazing resource to learn kanji, I recommend Wanikani. It's a structured spaced repetition system that sorta turns learning Kanji into a game with levels. I've found that I've been able to remember Kanji using this a lot of effectively than my other attempts over the years.
It does require perseverance though because it'll take about a year and a half to get to level 50. But by that time you'll have learnt, 1680 Kanji and 5200 Words.
http://www.tofugu.com/resources/wanikani/
Laieon
Member
Hangul is so easy to learn that you can memorize every possible symbol in less than a day. It's supposed to be one of, if not the, easiest writing system in the world to learn.
Now, granted, that doesn't mean you'll be able to comprehend what you're reading, but you'll be able to point to a sign and say 'it says ____".
This is all you need to know: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/
Chinese is grammatically one of the simplest languages. One of the better parts of the language actually. There's no tenses, no male female forms, no polite impolite forms. Something is in the past because you say it is in the past. It is actually a very efficient, spoken form of language with very few exceptions and arbitrary rules. I remember reading somewhere that chinese is one of the most efficient languages in terms of information content conveyed.
What blows is the written language. I am from a chinese background, but learning chinese characters is a bitch. It is like grinding in an MMO.
I actually kind of wish the Chinese will, like the koreans, simply just stop one day and invent an efficient phonetic alphabet that still looks like Chinese script. They actually already have one, but they don't use it.
Schweinehund
Member
prolog
Georgian. It looks nice but it's like all letters are the same or they look very similar.
http://ka.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/+...2;_გვერდი
http://ka.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/+...2;_გვერდი
Laieon
Member
Funny, it sounds the exact opposite of Korean. The writing system is easy, but there's a bunch of different ways to conjugate verbs.
I really want to get a tattoo of my daughter's name in Gallifreyan but, like, it's so damn unreadable. It really is just a bunch of randomly drawn, but cool looking, circles.
Korean words still look alien, but you can find some English words written in it. I find cyrillic easier to read quickly because the structure is more similar to western languages. When you learn п is p, р is r, з is z, и is i, д is d and н is n it's easy to see that президент is prezident -> president. Add a 'ye' sound to all the e and you're done. Technically a palatalization is done to the consonant before the e, think el niño.
Many old forms of z look like 3, pi in greek is π, rho is ρ, и just has to be memorized, but н kinda looks like an N.
Edit: This should be here.
Russian and Cyrillics as far as the alphabet goes, is actually super easy to learn. The language itself is pretty tough.
It's easier if you're used to some Greek letters like phi.
Russian and Cyrillics as far as the alphabet goes, is actually super easy to learn. The language itself is pretty tough.
While I assume it´d be actually quite easy to learn, I could imagine it being quite a mind fuck at first.
I mean...
V looks like B
I looks like N (almost)
R looks like P
S looks like C
U looks like Y
" looks like b
Y looks like bl
etc...
Come on...!
How is this different from Anki? What i like about anki is that you can download different card decks to suit your needs. I have been learning Japanese for a few months, still painfully bad at it (mostly because I only have time/energy to read phrases/sentences on anki for an hour daily).
thesoapster
Member
My understanding is that Korean is a better form of Japanese in that they are grammatically similar, but the alphabet is way way easier to learn (I will never understand why the Japanese have 3 separate systems of writing, pretty much used concurrently). I am in Korea now actually for work. Haven't had time to learn korean beyond the alphabet a little bit because I started learning Japanese before I got the job in Korea, and I just know if I try to pick up another language, everything I studied in Japanese will be lost.
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
Theonik
Member
That's because it's not based on Latin but it's based on Greek (on which Latin was based on). The Cyrillic script was invented by Byzantine missionaries on orders to create a writing system for the Slavic nomads that had recently settled on their border. (and to subsequently translate their holy scriptures in that new writing)
It's from Greek. Latin script was also based on Greek and when it got created a bunch of mistakes were made like taking the wrong P so they had to mark the new P with a line. On the other hand Greek pronunciation shifted so B turned into V and today you'll hear them say "alfa veta" instead of "alpha beta".
The и is very common and easy to get used to. Ukrainian is easier because they use і for i sounds and и for y (vowel).
Laieon
Member
I'm living here too (teaching). I lived in Jeonju for the first 6 months I was here and picked up a fairly decent amount of survival Korean (I had quite a few Korean friends and went to a study group once a week). I didn't really learn anything on the grammar side though, mostly just vocab/phrases (and Hangul, obviously). Ended up having to relocate to another city and my progress has pretty much slowed to a crawl here. I still want to learn, but everyone I hang out with around here is a foreigner, and none of them are that interested in learning the language. I haven't found any study groups, and I've pretty much come to the conclusion that learning a language by yourself is not nearly as fun as learning it with others.
Se7enSword
Banned
About Gujarati, I know the words, heck my native tongue has similarities to it.
I've just seen newspapers of it and never attempted to learn it, but it's really alien to me. My father knows it quite well though.
As for the rest, well, I've had difficulty deciphering them, but never explored learning them. I could self-study, however I don't have the luxury for that.
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