"Difficult" Languages

When people are considering learning or discussing foreign languages, there are frequently assessments made that such-and-such language is an easy language to learn versus such-and-such other language being harder. My question is whether the difficult languages are inherently difficult, or if they’re just more difficult for people whose language thought process is already conditioned to organize things differently. Possibly it’s some combination of both factors.

One test would be whether children first learning to speak learn at different rates in different languages.

I’ve always heard from linguists that the difficulty level is really an expression of “how far” (in grammar and vocabulary) the language is from one’s native language(s). Thus, English to French, not far, not hard. Chinese (whatever form), very far (different), very hard. But for a Chinese speaker, a closely related to Chinese langauge would be easier, normally, than English (which would be hard).

Now that I think about it, another test might be if it’s equally difficult for speakers of Language A to learn Language B as it is for speakers of Language B to learn Language A. If it’s not, that might suggest that one of the languages is harder than the other.

But not necessarily. I believe it’s a lot easier for English speakers to learn Spanish than it is for Spanish speakers to learn English. But that’s probably because English is a combination of a Germanic and Romance language, while Spanish is primarily a Romance language. So Spanish would be more familiar to English speakers than English is to Spanish speakers.

By the logic of common sense, Chinese to English would also be very hard, although it’s obviously not so difficult as to prevent millions of Chinese expatriates from learning English well enough to communicate. It must be possible to learn any foreign language, no matter how different from your own, if you work hard enough at it.

I think that you have hit on some important considerations already, that “difficulty” of a language is going to be subjective for each native speaker learning a new language. However, there are some objective things that most people would agree make certain languages inherently more difficult than others, even for a new-born child assimilating the language.

  1. The written form. Any language that does not use an alphabet (or use one very regularly) is going to require a LOT more time and memorization to learn growing up, if you are concerned with being literate. I am not a speaker of a pictographic language, but I have read many anecdotes about how difficult it can be to learn the thousands of pictographs for certain languages, and that school children spend tons and tons of time learning them compared to languages that do not use them.

  2. Languages that are “tonal” are inherently difficult, even for native speakers in certain aspects. Sometimes context can make up for this, but in many circumstances, whispering and singing can greatly obfuscate the meaning of spoken language. My boyfriend, who considers Cantonese his first language (although he cannot read/write it, he speaks it with his family regularly), says that he often has a difficult time understanding songs being sung in Cantonese. And when I asked him about whispering, he said it can be difficult without the tones, but sometimes you can figure it out from context.

I am no expert though, so perhaps I am mistaken on these points. Feel free to correct me if you disagree, but be nice pweese!

Nitpick: You probably mean ideographic languages, not pictographic. In a pictographic writing system, the symbol for “eye” would be a picture of an eye. All the symbols are pictures of recognizable objects (though not necessarily quite precisely the object represented by the symbol). I don’t think there are any such writing systems in common use today.

An ideographic writing system, like that used in China, has each symbol representing some concept (possibly a full word, or a word might be composed of 2-3 such symbols), but the symbols used aren’t representational art. They developed from pictographs, and some of them sort of look vaguely like the thing they represent if you squint at them, but they’re not just pictures of the things.

There is an additional burden for people whose native tongues are not full declension. It is allegedly easier to learn languages that are less “picky” about endings. Russian is “difficult” for English speakers because of the need to memorize all the case, gender, and number endings. Failure to get these exactly right is a grammatical error that may or may not be fatal to understanding, but is noticeable immediately to a native speaker. One multi-lingual authority who wrote a book on languages (Mario Pei) said he was constantly corrected even by rural peasants.

Err, yes that is what I said.

In general, there are not spoken languages that are intrinsically way more difficult than other languages for the native speakers of those languages. There are some aspects of certain languages that children may find harder to get than others; so for example, Japanese and Korean honorifics, which are quite complex, are grasped a little bit later by native Japanese and Korean children than other parts of the language. But in general, all languages are equally easy for infant native speakers. (Written languages are totally different, and nobody will argue with you that it’s way easier to learn to read and write Spanish or Finnish than Chinese or Japanese.)

For an adult second-language learner, of course, it’s all about how different it is from your primary language as wmfellows says above. A speaker of Thai will pick up Lao way faster than she will pick up Portuguese, and vice versa.

I’m skeptical about the claim that tonal languages are inherently more difficult (they are, of course, often very difficult for second-language learners who don’t have a tonal language as their mother tongue.) I am a native speaker of Mandarin and English, and while I totally agree that it is often difficult to understand Mandarin lyrics (as tone is completely disregarded), singing is not a normal form of spoken communication; it’s an art form*. Also, I have trouble understanding a large proportion of English sung lyrics as well, and I imagine that much of Italian opera is similarly challenging to understand. I know less about whispering, but while whispers cannot technically carry tone, studies have shown that speakers compensate in other ways for the lack of tone; and again, I often have trouble understanding whispers in English, too.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s totally legitimate that singing and whispering are difficult to understand, but that these are common problems to all spoken languages and not just tonal languages in particular.

<sidenote>
Even Bigger Nitpick: The Chinese writing system is neither wholly ideographic or pictographic: it is a logographic system. A logogram is a written character that represents a spoken word or morpheme, while an ideograph represents ideas directly (and alphabets theoretically are representations of sound, although of course in languages like English and French there is quite a complex association between the written and spoken word.)

Strictly speaking, it isn’t even completely purely logographic. The word for ‘awkward’ is 尷尬 gān’gà, but this can’t be further divided into two separate morphemes of gān and . Contrast 民主 mínzhǔ ‘democracy’, which is made of the morphemes mín ‘people’ and zhǔ ‘center, control.’
</sidenote>

*I wrote my senior thesis on the correlation between tone and pitch in song in Chinese languages. In traditional Cantonese music, tone is often taken into account, either by very minuscule changes in pitch at the beginning of a sung note to mimic the tonal movement of a syllable in spoken language or re-wording the lyrics to match the pitch/tonal movement. In modern Mandarin and Cantopop this is often totally ignored, but I think this still underlines the point that these are art forms, not methods of normal communication. Films like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg aside.

My father taught ESL for over 40 years, lived and worked on several continents and had a really good “ear” for picking up new languages, and when he was living and teaching in Hungary he declared it extremely difficult. I visited him there and had a terrible time figuring out the basics. Also there were many words and place names that had a ridiculously cumbersome amount of syllables, which didn’t help. He was living in Satoraljoujhely and the locals didn’t even try to pronounce that - they called it “Sato.”

According tothis site (and many others) Hungarian and Chinese seem tied for the top two most difficult.

Besides the different cases, Hungarian/Magyar doesn’t have roots in any of the romance languages (I think that’s the correct term?), so none of the words are familiar at all to people whose native language is English/Spanish/Dutch/French or Italian.

As far as I know, all children learn to speak their first language at the same rate, no matter what the language. Whispering, etc. in a tonal language is obviously an atypical situation–that is, not normal speech–from which you can’t draw an general conclusions about Cantonese, etc. Humans have evolved with brains and motor-physical capabilities so that at birth a normal child can discern and produce any and all sounds of any system. As the child grows, the brain plasticity for language starts to limit itself around the sounds of whatever language or languages are used in the child’s environment. Likewise, whatever grammar those languages have is transparently learned. Writing is a totally different thing, however, since it’s artificial.

Does anybody know where Latin would fall on that type of difficulty spectrum?

I would think different languages are difficult in different ways.

Thai has a very simple grammar (no inflections, markings are non-obligatory) and a very easy-to-remember vocabulary (e.g., ice, cruel, patient, generous, sincere, fickle are the simple compound words: water-hard, heart-black, heart-cold, heart-good, true-heart, many-heart).

However Thai has several sounds not present in English which are therefore hard to hear and hard to say. Tones are hard to hear and remember. Pronouns have unclear social meanings. And, with 60+ symbols, the Thai alphabet is difficult, especially since many symbols are identical except for minor serif-like features.

From what I’ve heard, Hungarian isn’t particularly closely related to any Earthly language, so it’d be a “distant” language even for someone who knows many other languages.

As for Latin, I’d say that it’s relatively simple, at least from the perspective of an English speaker. Word order is irrelevant and spelling is one-to-one, so neither of those is a point of difficulty. The biggest challenges are that it uses different endings for different grammatical forms, and for some nouns (especially those in the third declension) there’s no particular relationship between the nominative singular form and the other forms (though the other forms are all related to each other).

Nitpick on your nitpick: Chinese is not an ideographic writing system. Although some symbols are ideograms, the writing system includes many phonetic components, and thus can’t be read without also understanding the spoken language.

Some linguists argue there are no true ideographic writing systems, other than limited artificial ones.

This article about learning Chinese while living in China is very informative an dfunny.

I am not a linguist, but it’s my understanding that linguists generally agree that all ordinary human languages are equally difficult to learn as a first language. Children do master their first language at the same rate regardless of what that language is, which isn’t what we’d expect if some languages were inherently harder than others. To put it another way, there’s no language so difficult that a very small child can’t pick it up. Any language you learn after childhood is going to be far more difficult, but the more it varies from the language(s) you already know the more difficult it will be.

Particular aspects of a language might be simple relative to other language – IIRC the Hawaiian language has fewer phonemes than any other language – but a language that was too simple would be insufficient for normal human communication. A language that was far more complex than necessary for normal human communication would be tedious even for native speakers.

Hungarian is a Ugric language, with related languages in Siberia. It’s not very closely related to those other languages, but it is not a language isolate (like Basque).

Hungarian is part of the Uralic family. The most well known of the languages in this family is Finnish:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1109-16

Is it really the consensus among linguists that Finnish and Hungarian are related? I could be wrong, but I thought that was at least somewhat controversial.