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[Yamauchi]

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

Heh, that's a good one. Looks very strange indeed. Cyrillic is honestly not that hard. It's just a matter of memorizing the different characters. After a while, your mind doesn't get the characters confused with the Latin alphabet anymore.

I have studied Cyrillic, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, but the one writing system that has given me the most hell in something called Hanacaraka, or old Javanese script:

You can read about it on Wikipedia. This thing is a mess, and it sucks because I really want to learn it.

 

[Shmuppers]

That fucking gnommish language from the Artemis Fowl novels.

 

[GTP_Daverytimes]

Heh, that's a good one. Looks very strange indeed. Cyrillic is honestly not that hard. It's just a matter of memorizing the different characters. After a while, your mind doesn't get the characters confused with the Latin alphabet anymore.

I have studied Cyrillic, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, but the one writing system that has given me the most hell in something called Hanacaraka, or old Javanese script:

You can read about it on Wikipedia. This thing is a mess, and it sucks because I really want to learn it.

Man, looking at it is even giving me a headache, looks like a bunch of A's, M's and N's going on and on repeatedly.

 

[Bko]

Well, Georgian and Armenian look intriguing but there is no base of knowledge for me to understand a thing :/

 

[Darkangel]

How do they do "alphabetical order" in a logographic language like Chinese?

 

[David Incorporated Esq.]

Looking at all of these unfamiliar alphabets is really interesting. The knowledge that they'd be perfectly natural to a native reader just can't jive with my own sense of literacy. It provides this very disconcerting sense of illiteracy--I can't imagine going through life with this feeling as some people must.

 

[clem84]

I would argue Chinese and Japanese, simply because of the sheer number of different symbols you have to learn the meaning and pronunciation of.

 

[Bko]

How do they do "alphabetical order" in a logographic language like Chinese?

They simply don't. The alphabetical order is only applied in dictionaries and there it is only for Pinyin, a phonetic system to transcribe with Latin letters. Vice versa if you want to look up what a Chinese character actually means and what its pronunciation is you have to go by the character's radical (a part of the whole character itself) and then count the amount of strokes, which eventually will lead to a separate list of the aforementioned radical and its combination.

 

[djplaeskool]

Despite being phonetic, the look of written Tagalog confounds me.

 

[David Incorporated Esq.]

They simply don't

Well now that's strange. How do you deal with a list of names? How do you sort it?

 

[Kansoku]

Japanese is not that hard people. Hiragana is very easy, Katakana, while the same, has something that makes it harder, and Kanji is actually really simple.
http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts
Seriously. Learning the vocab is a little harder, and grammar while it's actually not hard (Counters and keigo aside), it's so different from western languages that it takes a LONG time to get used to it.

Anyway, Russian, Cyrillic, Greek, and similar, seems easy to "understand", but they look like a pain to write There's no flow between characters.
Those with characters that look alike are really hard to discern tho.
And since prolog was mentioned, LISP. Jesus Christ, LISP is a mess.

Well now that's strange. How do you deal with a list of names? How do you sort it?

Japanese sort stuff by radicals. They can also sort stuff by the kana table order, or Iroha

 

[old]

Any language where every verb has 6 different conjugations and every noun has an arbitrarily assigned gender.

 

[Bko]

Well now that's strange. How do you deal with a list of names? How do you sort it?

Hmmm, that's a good question. Perhaps by taking the described system in the dictionary. Thus I have to revise my statement. ChinaGAF, assemble!

 

[SpacePirate Ridley]

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.

Im from Spain and its probably that but for me Portuguese is the most easy language without knowing it. Most of us actually understand nearly everything without even taking a protuguese class.
Italan goes after that in terms of easiness, then French (this one is easier if you know languages like Catalan or Valenciano).

English using the same alphabet is still bullshit though, the pronounciations are all up in the wazoo.

Theres a funny thing about japanese and latin based languages though. If you wrote japanese with latin alphabet, spain and france could pronounce perfectly nearly all the syllables without not even knowing japanese, becuase it sounds nearly the same (and thats why english is so bullshit). Of course for japanese is the real problem is of knowing its alphabets and the way they speak.
Thats what probably helped anime being so big in countries like france, spain and italy instead of the rest of the world and english speaking countries.

 

[bobbytkc]

How do they do "alphabetical order" in a logographic language like Chinese?

Several ways.

Every chinese character is composed of smaller characters called radicals. The radicals are given an ordering, then the words with those radicals are ordered in terms of the number of strokes it takes to write them, if I remember correctly.

Nowadays, I think most people use phonetic systems. Chinese can be romanized pretty straightforwardly so you can look up words using english alphabets. Similar sounding words are typically ordered in terms of the number of strokes it takes to write them.

 

[Ganzlinger]

Non-roman alphabet: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Armenian.. pretty much everything. Cyrillic and Greek isn't that bad as people think.

Roman aplhabet: Vietnamese (seriously wtf) and Euskara (Basque Country)

 

[Currygan]

speaking of fictional languages, Cardassian looks like a bit of a fine mess

 

[numble]

How do they do "alphabetical order" in a logographic language like Chinese?

At the Olympic Opening Ceremony, the countries entered into the Olympic Stadium by stroke count of the first character of their name.

 

[Irminsul]

Theres a funny thing about japanese and latin based languages though. If you wrote japanese with latin alphabet, spain and france could pronounce perfectly nearly all the syllables without not even knowing japanese, becuase it sounds nearly the same (and thats why english is so bullshit). Of course for japanese is the real problem is of knowing its alphabets and the way they speak.

If that's the case, it's probably just English which is weird, as it's the same for a German native speaker. The only thing to remember is the "w" sound in syllables like "wa", as the "German" way of pronouncing it is close, but not quite the correct way and that "s" is always sharp. Oh, and to refrain from pronouncing two subsequent vowels as a German diphthong (especially "ei", as it's mostly the same as "ai" in German).

Btw., I don't know any Japanese, but one of the first thing anyone encounters in Germany when talking about Japanese is "It's Hokka'ido, not Hokkaido!" (as in: there's a distinct pause between the "a" and the "i"). Is that actually true? The pronunciation on the English Wikipedia page is definitely closer to the latter one.

 

[FonkyByNature]

For me it's probably Chinese or Japanese.

But i can understand how Arabic or Russian is hard but i learned these from my parents so there's that, but i would probably have had problems reading or understanding these two languages since their alphabet is not that easy to understand, especially for latin dialect people.

 

[Palmer_v1]

Wingdings

 

[Reversed]

Not hard because I haven't even tried, but Hebrew has a very interesting way to be read.

My only peeves with Japanese are the N ways to read a kanji, and boy I don't like how everything is writtenlikethis.Whywhywhy?

 

[massoluk]

Learning Chinese has become way easier with the introduction of Pinyin and simplified Chinese, it has become in someway moving away from pictograms origin. But still traditional Chinese languange is insane. You either remember a specific or you never ever gonna figure it out.

Concerning Thai, yeah. Our language is so unnecessary complicated. If you want to see how simplified Thai may look like, see Lao language. No unnecssary duplicated tone and alphabets.

Other than many different tones and vowels, we have Thai words to be used with priests, words that to be used with kings, words usually used among buddies, and words to be used in official documents. Yup, sometime there are 5-6 words for the exact same thing.

 

[kurisu_1974]

I just found out Arabic has no capital letters even if they tried to introduce them at one point.

http://s691.photobucket.com/user/egyptsurferdude/media/horoufeltag2.jpg.html

How do they abbreviate then I wonder?

 

[Theonik]

Not hard because I haven't even tried, but Hebrew has a very interesting way to be read.

My only peeves with Japanese are the N ways to read a kanji, and boy I don't like how everything is writtenlikethis.Whywhywhy?

You are touching on an interesting thing about language evolution there. Whitespace wouldn't benefit Japanese speakers but it benefits foreign speakers learning Japanese.
This might be strange but many languages lacked whitespace for centuries and people could read it. (the ones who could)
It is similar with intonation systems like the one adopted into Greek in the times of Alexander the Great. The intent was to enable easier learning for foreign subjects of the empire in Greek, but to the native Greek they were not needed because they intrinsically can deal without those extra clues. In fact, much of the information that is presented in writing is redundant.

 

[Tevious]

I don't know about most difficult, but I can say that Korean is one of the easiest. You can learn the written part of the language over a weekend. So anyone here listing Korean doesn't have any experience with it. It's a mostly phonic language. There's no such thing as a Korean spelling bee. They've adopted a lot of English words too, but some of them get butchered because they're missing letters, like F, R, V, W, Z and a couple vowel sounds.

 

[SpacePirate Ridley]

If that's the case, it's probably just English which is weird, as it's the same for a German native speaker. The only thing to remember is the "w" sound in syllables like "wa", as the "German" way of pronouncing it is close, but not quite the correct way and that "s" is always sharp. Oh, and to refrain from pronouncing two subsequent vowels as a German diphthong (especially "ei", as it's mostly the same as "ai" in German).

Btw., I don't know any Japanese, but one of the first thing anyone encounters in Germany when talking about Japanese is "It's Hokka'ido, not Hokkaido!" (as in: there's a distinct pause between the "a" and the "i"). Is that actually true? The pronunciation on the English Wikipedia page is definitely closer to the latter one.

Mmm, I think ive always said Hokka'ido, sbut never thought about if I was making a pause or not.

 

[Wasp]

I don't understand how a tiny little country like Wales that's stuck on the side of England can have such a vastly different language from England. I swear they do it just out of spite for the English.

 

[ImpalingNarwhal]

Cyrillic script is confusing to me.

 

[JulianImp]

I'd say Chinese way above Japanese, since you don't have the crutch that are hiragana and katanana. Even if the grammar may be a lot more complicated due to tenses and a whole lot of different ways you can make a sentence sound more or less polite, I can still read the hiragana and get the general structure of a sentence. Then there's also the problem that there's no easy-mode Chinese, unlike Japanese books for kids that use kana only, or stuff such as manga that use kanji but write their hiragana pronounciations next to them.

A big problem with Japanese that might make it harder to read than Chinese, however, is that many sentences are very context-sensitive, making it really easy for you to misunderstand something if you aren't paying attention (written Japanese is way easier to understand than spoken Japanese, but there still are some sentences which can have multiple meanings by themselves when written). Basically, Japanese has a way lower dificulty curve at first, but once you get to learning your kanji the complexity skyrockets compared to Chinese, since it adds lots of complexity from speech patterns and excessive polysemy in its spoken form.

For those who can't tell shi-tsu and n-so syllabes apart in katakana, make sure to check whether the short lines on the top-left are written mostly sideways (シ, ン = shi, n) or vertically (ツ, ソ: tsu, so).

 

[GTP_Daverytimes]

My own language is one of the hardest to speak and read (Igbo, from Southeastern Nigeria, some 40 million speakers), though the script is no longer is wide use (thanks to our colonial masters who tried hard to squash all of our culture) someone is working hard to bring it back. There are two forms of it, Nsibidi and Akagu (think Hiragana and Katakana).

 

[Tregard]

Cyrillic is nice to look at, even if it's incomprehensible.

Buhid is certainly...something

 

[Theonik]

My own language is one of the hardest to speak and read (Igbo, from Southeastern Nigeria, some 40 million speakers), though the script is no longer is wide use (thanks to our colonial masters who tried hard to squash all of our culture) someone is working hard to bring it back. There are two forms of it, Nsibidi and Akagu (think Hiragana and Katakana).

That looks like Wingdings. lol

 

[Hyperactivity]

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

Arabic's easy to at least recognize the letters once you get over right->left and learn what letters look like when they are the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

I don't know where to start with many East and SE Asian languages though. WTF

 

[GTP_Daverytimes]

That looks like Wingdings. lol

To me it looks like kanji and kana, but yea, from afar it might look like Wingdings.

 

[Septimus Prime]

Arabic

I once had to do a terminology check on a bunch of languages, including Arabic. With every other language that I can't read, I can at least look at the symbols displayed on the screen and see if they match up with the ones on the document. With Arabic, it just looked like squiggly lines, and I couldn't even tell where one symbol would end and the next would start.

Ultimately, I had to bank on first party not being able to read it, either, and that gamble paid off.

 

[MadraptorMan]

The correct answer is Japanese. They took the Chinese writing system and mashed it together with a language that had no relation to spoken Chinese, and so you get single characters with sometimes upwards of five different ways to read them. It is ridiculous, way worse than the original Chinese writing system.

People who are saying it is easy either haven't been exposed to it long enough or are written language prodigies. Or you're Japanese...but even then I'm sure you've got complaints.