voxy.com/blog/2011/03/hardest-la … fographic/
Why would Hebrew and Arabic belong to different difficulty levels? Both writing systems are based on the Phoenician script, and rely heavily on the use of diacritics. Both are semitic languages. What makes Arabic more difficult to learn?
“Arabic has very few words that resemble those of European languages” is not a very compelling reason.
Yeah, those reasons are a bit dopey. I would say Turkish is harder than Chinese - it’s a completely alien language structure for Romance language speakers. Japanese is hard for much the same reason. Personally I’d say Arabic is hard because their writing system is pointlessly complex and has too many characters that look the same, and there are far too many variants of the language which might be mutually intelligible for native speakers, but probably aren’t for novices. They also have a lot of phonemes that Europeans would struggle with.
Icelandic has many cognates with English for obvious reasons. It’s fcking hard, though.
One of the difficulties involved in learning Arabic, as I understand it, is that like Chinese the writing system is used across the Arabic world, but each regional variation pronounces the same words in different ways. That’s why reports on anything in the Middle East will have radically different spellings for the same person, place, or thing. Some spell based on the written script, some based on the local pronunciation.
Hebrew is only spoken in Israel, so there is less variation.
That’s my understanding.
From my own personal experience:
6 years of Spanish: Can read simple texts, but oh so slowly. Can’t speak to save my life.
5 years of Japanese: Can guess most things with a lot of Chinese characters. Can ask for directions, maybe will be able to understand response.
5 years of Chinese plus living in Taiwan for 5 years: Can read, write, speak, and listen at a very advanced but not native level.
So what does this tell us? It’s all about how hard you try. I didn’t try at all in Spanish, which should be easy, leaving me totally inept in the language despite spending half of middle school and all of high school on it. I had only a passing interest in Japanese and didn’t try very hard there, either. I worked my butt off to learn Chinese, though, and I think it shows.
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]One of the difficulties involved in learning Arabic, as I understand it, is that like Chinese the writing system is used across the Arabic world, but each regional variation pronounces the same words in different ways. That’s why reports on anything in the Middle East will have radically different spellings for the same person, place, or thing. Some spell based on the written script, some based on the local pronunciation.
Hebrew is only spoken in Israel, so there is less variation.
That’s my understanding.[/quote]
Yeah, used to teach classes with Arabic-speaking students from all over the Arab world and they often spoke about the differences between their languages. There do seem to be sub-regional lingua francas, though. The Libyans explained to me that although Egyptian Arabic was different from Libyan, everyone in North Africa was fine with it because of the film industry.
Me:
Ancient Greek: rock hard but I was a lazy kid.
Latin: fine.
French, easy but I CAN’T speak it because I never got over my affective filter of having a shite accent. Can read novels and watch films.
Spanish and Italian: Understand it, speak functionally. Never formally learned it, have horrible grammar and worse pronunciation.
German: can read it. Easy enough to understand. Can’t speak it or write it at all: to lazy to learn the grammar properly.
Icelandic. Hard.
Thai: consonants fuck me up but I’m fine as long as you don’t want to discuss philosophy. Learning to read is a ballache.
Chinese: very easy to get to an upper intermediate level, harder to blast through the vocab and characters for ninja levels.
Wu: Jesus.
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]
Hebrew is only spoken in Israel, so there is less variation.
That’s my understanding.[/quote]
Benefit of Modern Hebrew being a revived language (linguistic miracle).
before that I thought there were also plenty of variations when Hebrew was mostly just a liturgical language.
I am very interested in where they get the 1.2 billion native speakers. That means that pretty much every person living in the Mainland is a native speaker. Oh unless they consider Cantonese, Mandarin, Min Nan Hua/Taiwanese, Shanghainese and all those to be Chinese.
Yes! And they say 20.4 million Thai speakers, but I think the population of Thailand is about 70 million. Not ALL of them speak Thai, but it’s surely more than 30 percent.
And I can’t believe 6 years of Spanish didn’t get you (Hokwongwei) more than 5 years of Chinese. There are so many cognates, and you can read the damn words without figuring out all that chicken scratchin’.
[quote=“zender”]Yes! And they say 20.4 million Thai speakers, but I think the population of Thailand is about 70 million. Not ALL of them speak Thai, but it’s surely more than 30 percent.
And I can’t believe 6 years of Spanish didn’t get you (Hokwongwei) more than 5 years of Chinese. There are so many cognates, and you can read the damn words without figuring out all that chicken scratchin’.[/quote]
That’s exactly my point. I had teachers who just drilled us on conjugation and completely failed to make us interested in the culture of Spanish-speaking countries. I was bored because I couldn’t draw a connection between what I was learning and how I would use it in real life. I learned exactly as much as I needed to know for exams and got good marks but forgot it almost immediately afterward. On top of that, it’s been more than 10 yaers since I last touched the language, so it’s basically all gone.
My Chinese teacher, on the other hand, did a great job of making me fascinated in China, and the rest is history.
The easiest language to “learn” is the one you can get reasonable comprehensible input in.
The Chinese writing system is a bitch…if you want to write by hand from memory. But I have kids in high school who read everything they can say, and we’ve never taught them characters and they’ve never copied characters. AND they are able to write about 50% of those characters by hand from memory (I was curious to see how many they could write). So much of the hype about the difficulty of Chinese is due to myths. One (or several) more that John Ross might want to add to the 2nd volume of his book about “You Don’t Know China”.
For myself, the order of difficulty of the languages I’ve played with over the years would probably be, from easiest to hardest:
Spanish (Lots of input via speech and reading, and did it 35 years ago so don’t really recall)
Japanese (had a TPRS teacher – lots of written and spoken input all comprehensible)
Hawaiian (had a sorta TPRS teacher – lots of good oral input and writing is all phonetic and Roman alphabet anyway)
Indonesian (little input, and never really got anywhere, but it seemed pretty easy)
Chinese (I’ve had the most input, the most reading, but also years without those things first)
French (lots of reading input but little speaking; my accent sucks)
German (same)
Russian (little CI, some reasonable reading; forgot most of it)
Tibetan (almost no CI, almost no reasonable reading; can’t do anything except a Wendy’s commercial from 1987)
Mohawk (no CI, no reasonable reading at all, materials of any kind difficult to find)
I hold Taiwanese and Cantonese separate because it’s hard to say how much advantage I had being fluent in Mandarin first.
I can limp along for a conversation (more or less basic, depending) except for Indonesian, Tibetan and Mohawk (Mohawk despite a 2-week immersion – hmmm…)
If Chinese were truly that much more “difficult” you’d expect to see Chinese kids not speaking until age 5.
there were Wendy’s in Tibet???
[quote=“zender”]
And I can’t believe 6 years of Spanish didn’t get you (Hokwongwei) more than 5 years of Chinese. There are so many cognates, and you can read the damn words without figuring out all that chicken scratchin’.[/quote]
I did ten years of French, and, yeah, I’m OK, but I was a kid when I did most of it, so it’s gone.
[quote=“hansioux”][quote=“ironlady”]
Tibetan (almost no CI, almost no reasonable reading; can’t do anything except a Wendy’s commercial from 1987)
[/quote]
there were Wendy’s in Tibet???[/quote]
In the late 80s, there was a Wendy’s commercial that had a stomach “talking”, and it happened that we’d learned the exact vocabulary that covered the stomach’s lines in the commercials (which were not extensive, to be sure…)
We never made it to Tibet – they started beating up on monks very publicly just before we were going to go, and it didn’t seem like a good idea.
Hello guys,
As an Arabic and French native speaker, learning english was really easy, dont even remember when i did that, that was before junior high and before any english class. In fact Arabic is quite easy to write, it has 26 characters that you use like Roman alphabet, so basicly, you can hear a word for the first time, and write it right away. but the grammar is fucking complex tough, and as mentioned earlier, the voyels come after you write the word, on top of it or under each letter, and like tones in Mandarin it can change the whole meaning and even the nature of the word (from verb to name per ex). As for the prononciation, there is many sounds that Europeans, Americans or even chinese speakers can’t prononce.
I’m really impressed by foreigners who can speak and write Mandarin, I’m moving to taiwan in a couple of weeks, and if I can achieve this in 2 or 3 years, i’ll feel very proud about myself. 
[quote=“Amine”]Hello guys,
As an Arabic and French native speaker, learning english was really easy, dont even remember when i did that, that was before junior high and before any english class. In fact Arabic is quite easy to write, it has 26 characters that you use like Roman alphabet, so basicly, you can hear a word for the first time, and write it right away. but the grammar is fucking complex tough, and as mentioned earlier, the voyels come after you write the word, on top of it or under each letter, and like tones in Mandarin it can change the whole meaning and even the nature of the word (from verb to name per ex). As for the prononciation, there is many sounds that Europeans, Americans or even chinese speakers can’t prononce.
I’m really impressed by foreigners who can speak and write Mandarin, I’m moving to Taiwan in a couple of weeks, and if I can achieve this in 2 or 3 years, I’ll feel very proud about myself. [/quote]
With Arabic, French, English, and Chinese, the world will be your oyster. Throw in a little bit of Spanish and you can basically do business anywhere. I’m envious.
Personally, I’d go with just English and Spanish. The total number of places that speak Arabic, French, or Chinese and are worth doing business in could be counted on the fingers of one hand, even if you’ve lost half your fingers in an unfortunate industrial accident. Spanish is only slightly more useful than those, but at least it’s easy for Europeans to pick up, at least to a modest level of fluency.
I’m always amazed to find most people learn English very easily (obvious exception: kids in Taiwanese buxibans). I would have thought it’s a pretty awkward language for anyone, on a par with Russian. I met a Turkish speaker once who had learned English, to native-proficiency level, in about 18 months. He was a bloody genius in other respects too, but I still thought that was impressive.
Well, Arabic might be usefull for trade or sales with all North Africa and the middle east, I think that’s why they asked me for an interview when I arrive Taipei. And if they already recruited someone i’ll just start chinese class and apply somewhere else where my language skills might be useful. Hope it works because I really want to learn Mandarin in Taiwan.
Still struggling with Mandarin and picking it up bit by bit. Today, however,I completely amazed some visitors with my Taiwanese…managed to use all my 100 words or so by engineering them into the conversation 
Strange that with 8 or so tones Taiwanese “should” be harder but I find it easier than Mandarin??
Falling into the trap of taking too long to get Mandarin sorted out. Must try harder.
French has never been useful for me in business really.