That would be most probably because spanish is much more widespread not only in the US, but also worldwide, so much more people are familiar with it. After all, maybe romanian, the fourth major romance language is quite easy to learn too. But hardly anybody would know and could tell us.
If it’s the complete conjugation, I’d note that then, there’s only 4 four tenses, that could compensate the number of complicated declations. Compare it with the list of tenses given for spanish by another poster.
I did learn the damn thing. However, the fact that these tenses also exist in french probably helped and made the task easier. On the other hand, soms of these tenses have mostly dropped out of common use in french (though they’re still normally used in litterature), while they’re at the contrary frequently used in spanish,
Barring the already mentionned esperanto, I’m affraid there are probably very few languages without any drawback.
I haven’t had that much experience listening to Flemish but I have noticed that, for me, the further south I go in the Netherlands, the easier it is to pronounce the “g”. It is softer in the south.
And to Kimstu: No doubt Dutch is an almost worthless language to learn. There is little reason to do so. But the question at hand was what language is the easiest for English speakers to learn. I still say it’s Dutch. (Nederlands). Also: are you American kimstu? If so, are you legal to stay in Holland, and if so, how? (If I may ask)
**Gum-- ** thanks for saying it’s cool that I speak Dutch, but I really speak so little it hardly counts. I can read it OK, though.
Touché.
Well, I should clarify: it’s the complete list of simple conjugations. There’s a goodly number of compound tenses, and you can combine any one of those conjugations of “to be” (along with some other particles) with a form of a verb to change the meaning. There’s also the aspect distinction, which isn’t such a big deal with “to be”, but can make learning other verbs a headache. Unfortunately, I don’t have my big book of Slavonic grammar with me right now, or I could post a complete list of tenses and moods. There may well be less total tenses than Spanish, but there are other complications.
I’ve heard Tok Pisin is pretty easy to learn.
Romanian? Hmm. Think of Italian pronounced with a heavy Slavic accent.
All I’m saying is that Italian shouldn’t be ignored. Its importance for civilization looms greater than the number of its speakers or geographical distribution.
Outside Europe, I think Malay is the easiest of all. It has no genders, no cases, and no verb conjugations, no verb tenses. The only changes in verb form are for aspect, but those are simple and easily learned. The only challenge is learning how some initial letter of root words can shift depending on the prefix. But even that isn’t a big hurdle, because the rules are regular. All the phonetic sounds of Malay already exist in English, so that’s no problem either. (OK, the kh and gh fricatives are found in Arabic loanwords, but Malays just pronounce them colloquially as /k/ and /g/ stops, so again it’s easy for English speakers.) One feature of Malay that might seem a little strange is using numerical classifiers after numbers, but most of the Far Eastern languages use them. Again, it isn’t hard to get used to this.
I studied Malay up to the intermediate level. I translated texts from Malay and Indonesian into English, and I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of what hidden difficulties might lie in store. I haven’t found any serious obstacles. I really think Malay is one of the easiest languages on earth.
Persian is a language that’s deceptively simple and easy to the beginning learner. The nouns are as simple as in English, and the verb conjugations are even easier and simpler than in Italian. Being Indo-European, the Persian verb uses a passé composé just as in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. However, the simplicity of Persian grammar is deceptive. You can learn the basics quickly, but when you get to more advanced levels, the way the language is used is subtle and very hard for a foreigner to grasp. You have to develop a feel for understanding implied meanings that aren’t stated outright. It’s hard for me to explain, but I can tell you how disconcerting it feels to think you’ve parsed a Persian sentence correctly, and then have a native speaker show how you’ve misunderstood the whole point of it.
Nah, not even close to the nastiest language to learn out there. How about Tabasaran, a North Caucasian indigenous language with 36 cases?
Or Lezgian, more commonly referred to as Lezgin?
http://www.geocities.com/lezgian/chal.html
(Wikipedia actually refers to Tabasaran as a dialect of Lezgin, which I believe is incorrect - or at least that the peoples involved would protest. There has been woefully little work done in terms of cataloguing, studying, and creating learning materials for North Caucasian languages.)
There’s lots mor fun in the Caucasus where that came from.
Thirty-six cases? Wow. To be mention a less obscure language, Hungarian has 20 cases (it ranges from 16-24 depending on whom you ask.) I assume Finnish and Estonian also have such an elaborate case system. However, speaking as someone who speaks Polish and basic Hungarian, the Polish case system with its seven cases is much more complicated and involved than the Hungarian case system, partly because you have to decline nouns according to gender, a feature not included in Hungarian.
Just mentioning this because the number of cases in a language is not necessarily a good sign of its difficulty. Hungarian is extremely difficult, but when it comes to cases, I find the Slavic system much more difficult.
How nasty are Hungarian verbs? Cases are one thing, but it’s generally not a matter of preference which gender/case you choose (at least in Russian, the Slavic language I speak). But verbs, particularly verbs of motion? That was always much more painful to decide properly.
Want to pick a translation for “to go”? Well, are you going and coming straight back, wandering aimlessly, going in some sort of vehicle, stopping by, or being led by someone else? Is it something you do habitually, or will you only do it this one time? If you are going in some sort of conveyance, what kind? Aaaargh!
I looked up the precise taxonomy in A Guide to the World’s Languages by Merrit Ruhlen. I see now where the confusion might have come from.
“Lezgian” is not a language, but a group of languages in the Dagestan branch of Northeast Caucasian. (The other groups within the Dagestan branch being Avaro-Andi-Dido and Lak-Dargwa.)
Within the Lezgian Proper subgroup, Tabarasan is one language. Lezgi is another language at the same taxonomic level. Others in the Lezgian Proper subgroup include Agul, Rutul, Tsaxur, Kryts, Budux, and Udi.
Eva Luna, I tried to translate something into Russian once, and choosing which verbs of motion to use hung me up for at least an hour while I paged back and forth through the Russian grammar book and dictionary! The rest was easy by comparison.
pulykamell, here is the reason why Hungarian cases are easier than Polish. It isn’t the number of cases that matters so much. It’s the complexity of memorizing them. Polish is an Indo-European language with synthetic grammar, so you have to memorize each case ending for each gender and number separately. Hungarian is a Uralic language with agglutinative grammar, so each case ending is nothing but a suffix that you simply plug onto the end of a word like a Lego block. The vowels might shift due to vowel harmony, but at least it’s the same suffix every time, no matter what. Heh. I see people try to impress and scare each other with Uralic languages like Finnish and Hungarian, saying “they have a kajillion noun cases!” but in reality it’s just like using English prepositions, except that you stick them the end on. 
Although in Finnish the suffixes sometimes deform the ends of the words a bit, making for more complex morphological stuff to memorize. It looks as though Finnish may be on the way to fusing suffixes, which is how synthetic case endings had originally evolved in Proto-Indo-European, theoretically.
As for the 36 cases in Tabarasan, tell us more, Eva Luna. I’ve heard that the North Caucasian languages are not only synthetic, they’re even polysynthetic like some American Indian languages. Sounds like a nightmare of complexity.
Lezgi outta here!
Yes, that is exactly it. I was kinda inelegantly alluding to that when I mentioned declining Polish nouns according to case and gender. Hungarian case endings are basically postpositions and require far less memorization.
That said, Finno-Ugric grammar is still a bitch for many other reasons.
Hungarian verbs can get tricky, but verbs of motion are fairly straightforward. See, I grew up speaking Polish, and it wasn’t until high school that I even realized nouns declined. It had been something I learned naturally, completely unaware that my noun endings changed depending on grammatical case. Same with verbs of motion. It’s just instinctual, and I couldn’t even tell you how or when or why they change.
In Hungarian, you can add particles such as “be-” or “el-” or “ki-” or “fel-” or any of a slew to many verbs of motion, but they simply indicate direction. “Meg-” and “El-” (a different “el-” from the above) are aspect markers, which are always a source of confusion for English speakers.
Many verbs also have two sets of conjugations depending whether they take a definite or indefinite object. Some are straightforward to understand–“A beer” is indefinite and “the beer” is definite–but others are fairly arbitrary. Some personal pronouns are definite; others indefinite–you have to learn it by rote.
Then, like German, depending on the placement of the verb in a sentence, the verbal prefix can get split apart from the main verb. For example, “visszamegyek” (“I am going back”) can become “megyek vissza” depending on the structure of the sentence.
There’s plenty of other verbal pitfalls, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.
Well, there is probably additional confusion in the inconsistent translations from Russian of the names of each of these ethnic groups/languages, not to mention the overlapping ethnic categorizations over time due to divide-and-conquer Soviet ethnic policy, but that is well beyond the scope of this thread.
I wish I could tell you! I really don’t know a darn thing about any of these languages except a few anecdotal bits, and whatever is in my Chechen-English phrasebook at home. Plus multilingualism is so common in that neck of the woods, I imagine the switching back and forth from language to language cat get rather nightmarish, not to mention the borrowing of words between languages. That bit about Tabasaran comes from my ex, the native speaker – I was complaining about Russian grammar homework one day, and he mentioned how complex Tabasaran is. When I expressed my shock and amazement, and asked him if he actually knew all that grammar, he said, “Hell no! I just speak it.” Not surprising, since Tabasaran is not taught as a subject in schools in the Russian Federation according to my last information. (What’s more amazing is that 90%-plus of Tabasarans still consider it their native language.)
::groan::
Aye, I had forgotten about the mindbreaking complexity of most of the Caucasian languages. Surely Ubykh has to be up there in terms of difficulty, though, simply because of the huge number of phonemes (even though it can’t even compare with !Kung in that respect.)
Incidentally, I was wrong about the linked table for the Slavonic “to be” being complete. I checked my grammar textbook, and the complete list of tenses and moods for “byti” includes: indicative present, future, compound future, aorist imperfective, aorist perfective, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, all in singular, dual, and plural numbers; imperative, subjunctive, and optative in singular, dual, and plural; infinitive; short and full participles in present and past, and past participle in “L”, all declined in masculine, feminine, and neuter.
- blink *
She makes French sound easy! I can sorta get the names of the others, but what are ‘aorist’ and ‘optative’?
<ahem> I’m a he.
Aorist can serve different functions but is essentially saying something happened, without reference to time or duration. Optative is merged into subjunctive in a lot of other languages; it’s expressing a wish or desire that something will happen, as in the Lord’s prayer: “da svjatitsja imja Tvoje, da priidet tsarstvije Tvoje, da budet volja Tvoja”: “May Thy name be sanctified, may Thy kingdom come, may Thy will be (in existence)”.
For some more on Caucasian languages:
Brief overview of Ubykh
Less brief overview of Georgian
Some stuff on Lezgi
Just a thought – how did this thread morph into “which language is the most Godawful impossible to learn?”
Well, if we eliminate all the languages that are difficult to learn, then the ones that are left will be the easy ones.
For ease of reading and spelling, I nominate Korean. There’s only one way to pronounce any given combination of letters, it’s all broken up easily into single syllable chunks, and there aren’t that many combinations. Of course, the grammar is a bit backwards from English so that could be hard to get used to, but once you’ve got Korean it’s supposedly pretty easy to jump to Japanese. Plus if you learn the Chinese characters that are often used in Korean, they mean the same things in Japanese and Chinese (albeit with different pronunciations). If you just want to be able to read/write things in another language very quickly, Korean is the way to go.
But for speaking, I’d go with Spanish/Italian. I still manage a bit of Spanish after about 3 years of high school and none in the last 6 years or so.