# "Difficult" Languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 29, 2011, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524 "2011-08-29T18:26:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ramira](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ramira/32/344_2.png) [@Ramira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ramira)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2011, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/41 "2011-08-31T17:01:28Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > How hard is it to learn Esperanto? Presumably a designed language would optimize the tradeoff of richness vs. difficulty. Esperanto is to me only a synthesis of European language. As me, it is no easier than other European languages if you do not already know one, if you come from a non european language. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2011, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/42 "2011-08-31T23:07:22Z")
> [@chiroptera](#): > > Besides the different cases, Hungarian/Magyar doesn’t have roots in any of the romance languages (I think that’s the correct term?), … I think you mean Magyar isn’t an Indo-European language; it’s Uralic and related to Finnish and various Turkish languages. Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and, I think, Baltic languages are all members of the IE group. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2011, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/43 "2011-08-31T23:21:36Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > You’re just talking about morphology. This is stuff any kid can master with a little determination. That is not what makes a language difficult. I agree with this, and like to express it by saying it’s not rocket science. On the other hand, as a foreign speaker of German I am still often confounded by the genders, particularly between masculine and neuter words which call for many of the same inflections of articles and adjectives; moreover, the masculine and neuter nouns, themselves, are generally similar to each other in many ways. I have less difficulty recognizing feminine nouns, because they are noticeably different in overall morphology from the other two genders. One thing you often hear from native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender is that they “learn the gender with the word.” But try as I might, as native speaker English I have a hard time making this work. A native speaker of German just somehow “knows” that _die Elbe_ (a river) is feminine; I know it too, but in many cases I have to remember that most rivers in German are feminine, except for the Rhein. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/44 "2011-09-01T00:28:20Z")
> [@Ramira](#): > > Esperanto is to me only a synthesis of European language. As me, it is no easier than other European languages if you do not already know one, if you come from a non european language. But it’s much simpler than most European languages, _ne_? No irregular verbs, no gender, no cases. As an English speaker, one of the most exasperating things to deal with in other European languages is gender. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/45 "2011-09-01T00:34:14Z")
How hard is it to learne Basque? ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/46 "2011-09-01T01:20:31Z")
> [@Ramira](#): > > Esperanto is to me only a synthesis of European language. As me, it is no easier than other European languages if you do not already know one, if you come from a non european language. The grammar, however, is not particularly Indo-European, and as **John Mace** mentions, the extreme regularity and the ease of creating words make it much easier to learn than national languages, even for non-Indo-European speakers. Actually, some of the most vigorous Esperanto-speaking communities are found in non-Indo-European-speaking areas, such as China, Japan, and even Hungary. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/47 "2011-09-01T11:06:20Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > How hard is it to learne Basque? Which Basque? The official version or one of the actual dialects? For the dialects, there’s no lessons: you learn them by speaking them. For the official version, foreigners don’t seem to find it any more difficult than any other language (people who already speak an actual dialect, on the other hand, do have serious problems passing exams to get a certificate saying they know the official version(1)), but what they learn is very limited. This has led to situations like what we had in Euskadi at the beginning of the summer, where the Chemistry section of the University Entrance Exam had been mistranslated leading to one of the problems being unsolvable (UEEs are created by each “university district”, generally region-level, so the other Basque-speaking region in Spain had a different exam). (1) if you’re not a native speaker and can’t find “the right word” during your exam, you don’t lose points for that - if you’re a native speaker and use a dialectal word or grammatical variation instead of the official one, you get flunked. I seriously think there’s more native speakers who hate the official version than ones who don’t, but it makes sense that they do: imagine if you weren’t considered a speaker of, say, English (picked because it’s the native language of most people in these boards) until you passed an exam in which you were required to speak Alabamian; most native speakers would have a serious problem there. ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2011, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/48 "2011-09-01T14:44:54Z")
> [@matt\_mcl](#): > > The grammar, however, is not particularly Indo-European People say that, but Esperanto has lots of grammatical features that are very European. For example, Esperanto has a definite article; many major languages don’t, and even those that do have one use it quite differently. Esperanto assigns double duty to who/which/what words, in European style (so you can use _who_, for example, as a question word and also in a quite different role as a relative pronoun, as in “the girl who lives here”). Other languages do not use the same word for both purposes. Esperanto has grammatical number (plurals); Chinese and Japanese don’t. Esperanto has prepositions; many non-Indo-European languages don’t. And so on. There are many aspects of the language that only seem natural if you happen to already speak a European language. ---
**Author:** ![aesop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f8ce5/32.png) [@aesop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aesop)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/49 "2011-09-03T09:02:16Z")
> [@chiroptera](#): > > 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 _extremel_y 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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1toralja%C3%BAjhely) and the locals didn’t even try to pronounce that - they called it “Sato.” Perhaps you meant they called it “Sáto **r** ”? Sátoraljaújhely parses to “tent-bottom-new-place”. Even calling it Sátor doesn’t really resonate, as Sátoraljaújhely is not difficult for a native speaker. They may have been shortening it in deference to him. Because it is an agglutinative language, Hungarian words can grow to alarming size rather quickly. igaz = just (true) igazság = justice igazságtalan = unjust igazságtalanság = injustice igazságtalanságaid = your (singular, familiar) injustices igazságtalanságaitok = your (plural, familiar) injustices igazságtalanságaitokat = objective form of the above That can’t be easy for a non-native trying to learn the language. Regarding the relationship between Hungarian and Finnish – knowing Hungarian will help you on the streets of Helsinki about as much as it will help on the streets of Beijing. The relationship exists on the academic level, not on any practical one. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/50 "2011-09-03T09:26:37Z")
> [@aesop](#): > > Perhaps you meant they called it “Sáto **r** ”? Sátoraljaújhely parses to “tent-bottom-new-place”. Even calling it Sátor doesn’t really resonate, as Sátoraljaújhely is not difficult for a native speaker. They may have been shortening it in deference to him. > > Because it is an agglutinative language, Hungarian words can grow to alarming size rather quickly. > > igaz = just (true) > igazság = justice > igazságtalan = unjust > igazságtalanság = injustice > igazságtalanságaid = your (singular, familiar) injustices > igazságtalanságaitok = your (plural, familiar) injustices > igazságtalanságaitokat = objective form of the above > > That can’t be easy for a non-native trying to learn the language. > > Regarding the relationship between Hungarian and Finnish – knowing Hungarian will help you on the streets of Helsinki about as much as it will help on the streets of Beijing. The relationship exists on the academic level, not on any practical one. Pretty much. I lived in Hungary for over five years and picked up a reasonable bit of the language. I agree that Sátoraljaújhely is nothing particularly complex for a native speaker–heck, it’s pretty easily parseable and speakable by me, and I’m not exactly fluent in the language. Hungarian is pretty tough, but it’s not _that_ bad. I’m not entirely sure Hungarian is harder for an English speaker than, say, Polish or Czech. They’re just harder in different ways. The first thing one needs to do when learning any of these languages is to just to stop trying to analyze the language in terms of English grammar. The English speakers who had the most problems with Hungarian were the ones who tried to form sentences in English and than go from that analytically into Hungarian. The ones who did the best simply mimicked what they heard, and figured out later (if at all), the grammatical technicalities. The best non-native Hungarian speaker I knew, who the locals could not believe was a foreigner as he had no discernable accent (except for an Eastern Hungarian accent), had no foreign language experience other than Hungarian. He just picked up the language naturally–nobody spoke fluent English where he was at, he went to bars and just slowly but steadily picked up the language by mimicking, with no real understanding of the hows and whys of the language. Basically, how a child learns a language. As for Finnish, I’ve always found it interesting. It kind of sounds like Hungarian when I hear it spoken, except I don’t understand a single word of it. It also kind of looks like Hungarian when written, except with all the letters transposed. The vocabulary is completely dissimilar, but the underlying grammar and sentence structure is recognizable if you know Hungarian. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/51 "2011-09-03T19:41:15Z")
> [@Ximenean](#): > > And so on. There are many aspects of the language that only seem natural if you happen to already speak a European language. Yes, but for the purposes of this thread and OP, (“difficulty” of languages), I contend that something like Esperanto (or any fabricated language) cannot really be compared to natural languages, because of larger issues. (And I say this fully aware that there are some families which have raised their children to be “native speakers” of Esperanto.) A language is derived of much more than its grammar, vocabulary, etc., and the boundaries which demarcate a language’s full expression extend beyond the home or immediate community. Meaning is constructed by larger contexts, and functional proficiency will always derive from facility that involves those larger contexts. No one will ever attain the kind of proficiency that a native speaker attains with his/her language, because that kind of proficiency simply doesn’t exist for Esperanto, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/52 "2011-09-03T19:58:33Z")
> [@guizot](#): > > A language is derived of much more than its grammar, vocabulary, etc., and the boundaries which demarcate a language’s full expression extend beyond the home or immediate community. Meaning is constructed by larger contexts, and functional proficiency will always derive from facility that involves those larger contexts. No one will ever attain the kind of proficiency that a native speaker attains with his/her language, because that kind of proficiency simply doesn’t exist for Esperanto, etc. Excuse me? Do you speak Esperanto? Esperanto has those larger contexts. It has slang, [music](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlFjXhFtIKc), theatre, in-jokes, profanity, bureaucracy, political movements, film festivals, scientific publications, and even religious proselytization. (I’d hoped to get away from that last one…) It may have started as one man’s construction, but other people grabbed on to it in sufficient numbers to _give_ it a life of its own. ---
**Author:** ![Electric\_Warrior](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ee7513/32.png) [@Electric\_Warrior](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Electric_Warrior)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/53 "2011-09-03T20:40:51Z")
Esperanto also has a handful of native speakers, who are completely fluent in it. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2011, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524/54 "2011-09-03T21:17:02Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > Esperanto has those larger contexts. It has slang, [music](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlFjXhFtIKc), theatre, in-jokes, profanity, bureaucracy, political movements, film festivals, scientific publications, and even religious proselytization. Yes, but those contexts essentially exist ad hoc–either Esperanto was _chosen_ as the language, or the events happen _because the people speak Esperanto_, right? I could be wrong, but as far as I know, there are no cities or towns where one has no choice but to speak Esperanto in order to use the post office, for example, or ask for directions when lost–are there? I’m talking about a town where such events happen _without design_, and no one _decides_ that Esperanto is the language to use. If such a community exists (and more than just for the sake of a temporary festival, etc., but _for generations_) then, yes, Esperanto will essentially become a natural language, and have that need. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/difficult-languages/594524.md?page=2)