according to the British Foreign Office is Hungarian which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). Therefore knowing Hungarian means you have skill. Discuss.
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Anonymous2006-12-30 6:09
Japanese has hundreds of counters, depending on what type of object you are counting. That's pretty hard if you ask me.
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Anonymous2006-12-30 9:50
Hogy vagy barátom? Megvagyok köszönöm. Nincs mit. En egy isten vagyok, nagy fúlu troll vagy. Nem magyar vagyok barátom. Hülye medve tehén boci csúnya köcsög igen igen igen igen
AM I SKILLED YET?
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Anonymous2006-12-30 9:51
SZERETLEK SZERETKEZNI
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Anonymous2006-12-30 16:54
Yeah langauges like Japanese may seem hard due to their how you say exoticness. But mostly due to their writing systems most people think they're hard. I didn't say Hungarian is the hardest language to learn alphabetwise. But grammarwise. Those Asian languages have not very complex grammar.
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Anonymous2006-12-30 18:48
el dialecto mexicano
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Anonymous2006-12-31 0:25
el vikingo siempre hablando extraño con muchos acentos son como trabalenguas es horrible nunca vi algo asi
Hungarian is probably the hardest language grammatically. There are many different categories on what makes a language hard. Languages like Chinese and Japanese would be the hardest languages alphabetically. Vietnamese with all of it's vowels, tones, and sounds would be the hardest language phonetically.
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Anonymous2007-01-03 20:35
So-called "cases" in languages like Hungarian or Finnish, even if you take vocalic harmony into account, are little more than glorified postpositions. Putting a word to the "elative case", say, is really nothing more involved than sticking the word "from" beside it. So I wouldn't call the grammar complicated just for that reason.
Like every other aspect of a language, the difficulty of learning Hungarian grammar, say, greatly depends on your previous lingustic background, of course. But even among people having the same mother tongue, what is deemed easy or hard about some particular language's grammar seems to vary greatly. I find the grammar of Japanese or German a lot less daunting than that of Mandarin Chinese and quite a few people I know would think otherwise.
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Anonymous2007-01-04 16:30
Well since there are no similar languages to Hungarian I would say it's the same difficulty for everyone. I've heard Finnish, Estonian, Khanty, and Vogul are similar but they only have a handful of similar words.
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Anonymous2007-01-04 20:35
The vocabulary is indeed quite different but the grammar is very similar. Generally speaking, a native speaker of an agglutinative language shouldn't have too much of a hard time getting the hang of Hungarian grammar.
As for vocabulary, a knowledge of Turkish might be of help, as many Hungarian words are actually loan words from Turkish (but I don't know anything about Turkish myself so I can't really tell).
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Anonymous2007-01-05 4:15
English is the hardest language. There are tons of rules, but there are at least 20 exceptions to every rule. On top of that, the flexibility of English makes it difficult for foreign listeners to understand what is meant at any given time, at least as far as slang and local expressions go. Also, some of the shit we say just doesn't make any sense at all, at least not logically.
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Anonymous2007-01-05 15:38
>13
true.
hey guys, try to guess what this below says:
>>17
Yes, let's not forget the lovely way English works in writing. Spelling anything in English makes French look easy as hell (then again, French isn't really difficult).
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Anonymous2007-01-07 3:11
35 cases? OMG... try learning this South American language, Piraha
Among other things, Piraha has 9 consonants and 4 vowels (women only use 8 consonants).
The Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. A single word, baíxi (pronounced [màíʔì]), is used for both mother and father, and they don't keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.
Pirahã is unusual among the world's languages today in having no numerals, although this appears to have been more common before the spread of modern trade and technology. There are apparently only three words that roughly describe quantity, somewhat akin to "a few", "some", and "many." There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns. There is little distinction between individuated quantities and mass quantities, although this to distinguish between one big fish and several small fish.
There are no words for colors, only dark and light.
There are 135 cases, the majority locative, for nouns, as well as three persons, fourteen tenses, one voice, and over seventy (mostly tonal) moods.
Two consonants not found in any other human language.
This part frightens me the most. Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music.
well go and inform the british of this and see what they think.
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Anonymous2007-01-07 17:07
_, ._
（；ﾟ Дﾟ）
Would anybody explain what ghoti means to me, please?
I cannot understand what >>17 and >>18 implied.
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Anonymous2007-01-07 18:33
>>21
In English, gh is pronouced /f/, as in "enough"; o is pronouced /i/ as in women; and ti is pronouced /sh/ as in action. Hence ghoti is pronouced /fish/, right? Well, maybe not, but that's how logical English spelling is.
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Geraldo2007-01-07 19:19
Swedish is also a bitch to learn, no matter however "logic" they say it to be.. Finnish is also a helluva hard language.
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212007-01-07 19:20
（*ﾟ ∀ﾟ）
I thank >>22 for your very careful comment. It was understandable even for me. I re-recongized the difficulty of English.
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Anonymous2007-01-08 12:21
>>23
yep, swedish is supposed to be difficult, from what I've heard. my gf thinks swedish is too difficult for her to learn... so she wants me to learn chinese instead :D
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Anonymous2007-01-08 13:36
I'm no native English speaker and I thought the language was very easy to learn when I started, but then, I was 10 then, and they say it's generally easy for kids to pick up new languages. I started French two years later and failed horribly, though.
As for Japanese, I think if you've actually sat down and learned the 2000 recommended Kanji, you've got the worst behind you. Japanese grammar is hella simple and I can see why they have trouble with a Western language like English that has DIFFERENT PAST TENSES.
>>26 >>27
MMOs require absolutely no skill, but it's idiots like you who devote youe entire life to it that are convinced that mindlessly doing the same task hundreds of times over takes talent. GTFO.
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Anonymous2007-01-12 4:23
lol, english is one of the simplest languages.
hardest ones I know are hungarian ja finnish.. japanese is rather easy, but memorizing kanji takes time.
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Anonymous2007-01-12 12:25
Like I said earlier, there are different categories on what makes a language hard. Finnish and Hungarian are probably the hardest grammatically. Chinese and Japanese are probably the hardest alphabetically due to all their hànzì and kanji. Vietnamese is probably the hardest language phonetically due to it's vast amount of vowels, diphthongs, consonants, and it's 6 tones.
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Anonymous2007-01-14 9:18
>>22
...
Wow. English is retarded. Glad I was born with it.
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Anonymous2007-01-16 12:36
english is a differcult language to learn! it has so much fucked up wordz due to its stealing of other languages so learning rules is crazy hard due to exceptions etc.
ps i am english which does i suppose give me a limited view but whatcha gonna do bout it :s
English is pretty difficult. Which is why it being your native tongue really makes you a shoe-in for learning more languages with a relative fluidity.
Especially Germanic tongues, given that English is, itself, a German-derived language.
It's a gorgeous language, though. Some of the most amazing human mental and physical experiences can be conveyed as near carbon copies in the form of English prose.
Sorry to divert from the original Hungarian thread focus, don't really know that much about it. Do they use a Cyrillic or Latin alphabet?
if you count exotic, out of the way languages, its gotta be "ǃXóõ". (i call it "that which cannot be named")
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Anonymous2007-01-20 9:59
40
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Anonymous2007-01-23 4:10
Just curious, anybody speak Indian languages (Punjabi is one, I think)? I heard it spoken once, and I don't think I could even pronounce half the syllables, let alone at the speeds they were speaking it at.
Japanese grammar is pretty easy; even it's pronunciation isn't that hard. It's Kanji is only a weaksauce version of Chinese characters anyways. I'm obviously biased, but I prefer English to Chinese and Japanese, since you don't need to memorize a bazillion characters to write. Not to mention it's a much better language to convey sarcasm.
>>41
<i>Not to mention it's a much better language to convey sarcasm.</i>
Yeah, right.
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Anonymous2007-01-23 22:59
English IS about memorization. Since the letters are nowhere near phonetical, it's about memorizing individual words. No different than memorizing pictures of kanji or hanzi.
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Anonymous2007-01-24 0:54
>>41
I speak Hindi. But I hate Hindi movies. Mushy, predictable, plotless pieces of shit.
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Anonymous2007-01-28 8:28
Ancient Egyptian.
No one alive has a fucking clue about how its properly pronounced, much less the exact proper gramatical rules.
Learning it from the rosetta stone is like trying to learn another language through one page of a fucking translated novel.
Anything you manage to get out of that pile of bs would, at best, let you infer and guess at the overall meaning.
I don't think any language would be more difficult to learn than a tongue that's been dead for over a thousand years :p
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Anonymous2007-01-28 9:32
>>43
clothing difference > easy
fukusou no sai > easy
服装の差異 > hard
vice-president > easy
fukusousai > easy
副総裁 > sounds almost the same... yet it's still hard
I agree you have to memorize individual words in both cases, but really until you memorise the basic kanji (these are all from elementary school but HS has like 950 more) it's a whole different ballpark of difficulty... middle school hard on gaijin!
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Anonymous2007-01-29 5:56
It really depends on your background. If you speak fluent Chinese, than the kanji part of Japanese would be the easiest part to learning Japanese... since its the same characters used in Chinese (for the most part.)
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Anonymous2007-05-20 23:01 ID:5sRF3uFB
Proto-Indo-European.
pwn'd.
or !Xoo. Try pronouncing fifty gazillion clicks.
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Anonymous2007-05-20 23:46 ID:TBwyVZ60
everyone is saying that japanese is not that hard of a language, but i would guess that those people have not studied it that much. japanese is very easy to learn at first, but once you get past dictionary form and get into desu-kei (which is not that hard) and kei-go (dear god my head explodes) it becomes very difficult. i'm not saying that it is the most difficult, but still. japanese people often say they have a hard time speaking kei-go. most don't even know how to properly use it themselves and if they are going to a high class reception job (hotel etc.) that they will have to go to class to learn kei-go. just saying, maybe not hardest but it's up there
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Anonymous2007-05-21 8:54 ID:v3SrdHC8
Swedish has two definite articles, but no rules for which one goes with which noun. You have to learn them all one by one.
so does danish, only difference is, you can't understand what we say even when you know the language! HAH!
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Anonymous2007-05-21 18:00 ID:Pzg1Y2zN
Everyone should learn 2 of the official languages of the United Nations
English
Français
Español
العربية
中文
Русский
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Anonymous2007-05-22 1:52 ID:cvcDrxEM
Being Polish myself i've never noticed until i started learning Japanese how, in fact, levels of politeness are present in Polish. Say, you want to talk about a person called "Piotr Nowak" and here are the different ways you can do it, each time with various implications:
Piotr Nowak - no implications whatsoever;
Pan Nowak - literally "Mr.Nowak", which is the standard polite form;
Pan Piotr Nowak - kind of weird, since people usually drop the first name while using the "Pan ..." pattern;
Nowak - without "Pan" it becomes kind of disdainful;
Nowaczek - dimmunutive of "Nowak": even more disdainful than plain "Nowak";
Pan Piotr - pretty informal and friendly (can be misinterpreted though);
Piotr - just the first name, used casually but still implies some distance;
Piotrek - the most commonly used diminutive: implies some amount of closeness;
Piotrus - diminutive, rather used for kids;
Piotreczek - yet another diminutive, same as above.
Peter Novak
Mr. Novak
Mr. Peter Novak
Novak
No standard English equivalent.
Mr. Peter (mostly used by children to a person in authority)
Peter
Pete
Petey
Peteykins
I think it's fairly usual for languages without explicit politeness forms to have a variety of implied politeness levels, or registers. Look at English: the polite way to tell people what to do is to phrase it as a question.
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Anonymous2010-01-12 0:39
Actually there was a study on how early kids of different nationalities learn to speak
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Anonymous2010-01-12 11:41
Adyg language is quite hard with 55 consonants.
Transliterated for cyrillics text looks like that:
schhxuxzkcmpaseyixplqux xpswoeiujlcv sdovizcujwlxcvy
north caucasian languages are the living wonders of how fucked up a language can be
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Anonymous2010-01-12 18:35
I had serious problems when I was trying to learn English because of those tenses. So I haven't learned grammar, end still use it without knowing anything about English grammar. This way it is quite easy.
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Anonymous2010-01-12 23:48
>>19
God, they must be dull.
They can't even describe shit???
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Anonymous2010-01-13 11:34
>>61 They can't even describe shit???
Where do you get that?