hi friends!
Which is the easiest language of the world, as many people say that Chinese is the most difficult and Arabic is the easiest one.
There is no answer to that question.
Actually, though, I’ve always been told that Arabic is a very difficult language to learn. And I’m studying Chinese, and while it’s not easy, aside from learning how to write it (which is really a different issue), it’s not terribly difficult either.
Which languages are hardest to learn well depends mostly on what languages you speak to start out with. For an English speaker, it’s easier to learn other languages in the same language family, like German, or Spanish, or Italian, or Hindi. It’s much harder for an English speaker to learn an unrelated language like Arabic or Japanese. But for someone who grew up speaking Hebrew, it’s easy to learn Arabic.
It’s a complex question. For instance, people who speak Chinese or Japanese often have very heavy accents when they learn English, even if they speak English pretty well. This is because both Chinese and Japanese have very different sounds from English, and they don’t usually have consonants at the ends of syllables, or two consonants in a row, while English often does.
There really is no easy answer. Learning any language really well is not easy, though.
Esperanto is one of the easiest languages; I have heard it said that it is four times easie than French for an English-speaker to learn. Based on my experience with both languages, this seems possible. (I speak fluent Esperanto, and I can muddle my way through a French newscast, but I don’t speak French very well),
Let me add to my reply that “easier” is only comparative. Learning Esaperanto was and is a heck of a lot of work. And I expect French to be a challenge that will last the rest of my life.
I’ve done some searching for you since you can’t. This question has been debated here many times before. A few of the many threads:
All languages are equally difficult and equally easy to learn. There is no such language as Chinese, but instead several different Chinese languages, such as Mandarin, Hakka/Hokkien, Cantonese, Chiu Chow, and so on. I suspect you mean Mandarin.
If Mandarin was harder to learn than Arabic, then you would expect children in Mandarin-speaking families to start speaking Mandarin later than Arab children speak Arabic. This does not happen, and children raised in Mandarin and Arabic language environments learn their respective languages at exactly the same pace.
Yes, adult English speakers, for example, might have more trouble learning to speak Mandarin than Spanish, but that is because Spanish is more similar to English than Mandarin is. For people who have no language base (i.e., children), English and Mandarin are equally difficult to learn. Different languages are more difficult to learn for different adults starting from different language bases, but it’s all the same to children.
To reiterate: There is no such thing as “the easiest language of the world” or “the most difficult”. There is no hierarchy of language difficulty.
Now, if you were to ask which languages are the hardest and the easiest to learn for adult English speakers, for example, then you would get definite answers (though they might be a bit subjective).
I’d have to vote for Indonesian. When I lived in Jakarta, I took an 8 week conversational Indonesian class, twice a week for 4 hours a night. At the end of the course, I could carry on a decent conversation in Indonesian. Granted, I was probably speaking at the level of a 6 or 7 year old, and I was still learning various nuances of the language when I came back home, but I had little difficulty in learning the grammar and syntax. As always, it was the vocabulary and the social distinctions that got me.
As an example, I once referred to my friend’s aunt as her “amah”. Amah literally translates to aunt, but the social distinction is that an amah is a maid. I got some funny looks on that and then hilarity ensued. It actually turned out to be a great icebreaker because everyone was absolutely blown away that I had taken the time to try to learn their language.
Nitpick: Hakka and Hokkien (or Fujianese) are not the same, though IIRC there is a substantial Hakka population in Hokkien/Fujian.
You make a good point that I should have mentioned - children learn their first languages at the same pace (on average - individual children may learn slower or faster than others, but on the whole, Russian children, Chinese children, American children, and so on all learn their languages at the same pace), and that includes languages with lots of inflection and other traits that appear more difficult. I assumed that the OP was asking about second language learning, though.
I think it’s perhaps valid to say that achieving enough proficiency in a language to get around is perhaps easier in some languages than others. Clothahump used Indonesian as an example, and Indonesian (like all the Malayo-Polynesian languages) has very little inflection - no endings to memorize on nouns and verbs. That means that learning a few words to string together sentences may be much easier.
However, he illustrates an example of how his language skills failed. The cultural implications of words, the subtle distinctions you make in your speech - these things are incredibly complex in any language used within the context of a real society. It’s no easier to learn all the linguistic and cultural subtleties of a language like that than any other, and it takes years to really learn them. You’ll stick out as a foreigner if you lack understanding of the connotations of the words you use. So even if you can learn enough to get a hotel room in one language pretty easily, it takes a much longer time to really master it. And often, a language with simple morphology like Indonesian makes up for it with more complicated syntax. The Chinese languages are like this - the grammar appears easy except that the rules of word order are much more complex. Using wrong word order in English is likely to make you sound funny, or add emphasis to a word you didn’t want. Using wrong word order in Mandarin might make the sentence’s meaning substantially different.
Another vote for Indonesian - at least the variant of Indonesian spoken in Bali . Two weeks there, no lessons, and I could hold a simple conversation. The grammar is very straightforward, there’s no verb endings to get mixed up, and everything is actually pronounced just like it looks.
The trickiest part? Names. Only children have personal names, and parents lose their names when they have children! I simply couldn’t figure the naming system out, but *everyone *who worked at our hotels seemed to be named Wayat.