When we were in France this last summer, Mr. Pug and I met a pleasant Dutch gentleman (Coldy, that wasn’t you, was it?) at the “Cafe de Lyon” in Beaune. He spoke perfect English, and we all shared some Paulaners, watched the European soccer cup and talked about languages. I mentioned to him the difficulty I was having learning French, never before having been exposed to the whole gender and verb conjugation thing. He assured us that Dutch was WAY harder, the hardest possible language for foreigners to learn. He said he had heard it called “the devil’s tongue.”
What about it? What language has the reputation as being the biggest bitch? And was that Coldfire disguised as a mild-mannered bar-hopper, pulling the legs of gullible American tourists?
I’ve heard Basque, with the rationale of its being unrelated to any other surviving language. Not having learned any language beyond a bit o’ Spanish, though, I’m not qualified to say.
I think Anglophiles have enough trouble with their own language.
Try an experiment like this:
Put a Texan, a Yorkshireman, an Irishman, A Scott and a South African in a room for a simple conversation. Talk about people separated by a common language.
It wasn’t me, Puglover. Does that mean you like Pugs (English insider slang term for Peugeots) by any chance
But I often hear that Dutch is incredibly hard to learn for Anglophones, or anyone other than Germans or Scandinavians. I wouldn’t say it’s the hardest: that would depend on your own preferences/talents, I suppose. But here are a few reasons:
Dutch is a Germanic language. However: German grammar is one million rules with 2 exceptions, whereas Dutch is 2 rules with one million exceptions, so to speak. You can LEARN German correctly, but you have to FEEL Dutch to speak it fluently. Whitch is pretty much impossible, unless you’re exposed to it on a daily basis for many years.
We have some pretty hard to pronounce sounds, like the “G” which usually results in Anglophones either gagging or spitting their coffee. Nobody can do it in Europe, except the Spanish and Portuguese. Also, we combine vowels into new sounds, like “eu”, “ui” and “ou”. Too tough to explain here, really.
We all speak English. Well, 95% of all people do. I have many English/American/Australian/Whatever friends and colleagues living here. They’ll do their damn best to order a loaf of bread in Dutch, but as soon as even the lowest employed store clerk hears a foreign accent, they smile politely and switch to English.
Great for tourists, but maddening if you really WANT to learn it
My boss, an Englishman, has lived here for about 7 years. He understands most Dutch, and can read paper headlines and such. But as far as speaking it goes, he still hasn’t gone passed “Can I have a coffee with milk” and “Enjoy the weekend!”. And believe me, he WANTS to.
His 13 year old daughter, being in school, speaks the language fluently of course. But in the working world, there’s no way to learn it besides taking a course.
Ever try Lett, the Latvian language? I correspond with a guy in Riga and once bought a language book, thinking I would suprise him with a short note sometime. AAgh. I learned Korean in the Army and that was simple compared to Lett. I gave up.
The more tonal languages are generally considered to be some of the most difficult. You can manage to deeply insult someone instead of wishing them a good day…
To elaborate, several languages operate on low-middle-high tonal sounds. Basically, weather someone’s voice goes up, down, or stays neutral changes the meaning. Very complex.
I’m going to have to go with Xhosa on this one, though. It’s the infamous “African click language.” If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, the tribe spoke an easier derivation of Xhosa.
I’d definitely agree with you about the tonal languages, at least as far as learning how to speak it.
In terms of Romance languages, I’d definitely have to say French, at least in my experience. I had the head start of going to French school from pre-school to grade 5 and living in Montreal, but it wasn’t until this year that I really felt fluent. Also, my written could still use some work. My friend James says that French has “fractal grammar.”
Conversely, I learned Esperanto in about a month and was speaking and writing it fluently within a year of casual studies.[/shameless plug]
All languages are hard for me to learn, but then again, I’m one of the dumber Dopers. I can read German fairly well, but speaking it (or even just writing it) is a chore. In theory, I know how to conjugate the verbs, get the gender stuff right, ect. but in practice it takes so much effort to compose a sentence that I want to cry. I can understand spoken German, but complicated sentences can get me tangled up, as they never put the verb where I think it should go.
I have found that when I’ve traveled to The Netherlands and Denmark, that I can read the language (not perfectly but enough to understand menus and signs) based on the English and German I know.
We’ve decided to put TinyTot in German school, theory being that if he learns one language fluently, it should become progressively easier for him to learn others (at least languages in the same family). In my experience the vocabulary is easy to pick up, it’s going smoothly between two different grammars that is difficult. Esp. if you are like me, and don’t have a firm grasp of your own language’s grammar.
Tater, you are so right. I’ve sat through a fair number of language classes, and it’s damn-near impossible to introduce a concept like verb conjugation if the little sprats don’t even know what a verb is - a distressingly frequent occurrence.
BTW, it’s my goal to be heptilingual when I graduate from university. So far I’ve got English, French, Esperanto, and Spanish. I start ASL courses on Tuesday, and will be taking German next year and Italian the year after that, as well as finishing my minor in Hispanic studies (read: getting fluent in Spanish.) I think I have a knack for learning languages, and I intend to exploit it.
(Says the translator/linguistics major/conlanger.)
matt, I am a sorry product of Honors English classes. To be fair, I changed schools a few times, but I can’t ever recall having an honest to goodness grammar class. I do know what a verb is, but beyond that it gets murky. All those cases and clauses. I really need to take a good, old fashioned remedial grammar class, as much as it will hurt my pride.
My goal is to become reasonably fluent in German, the problem is I’m just so damned lazy and all the Germans I know speak very good English. Another problem, is that I am so eager to get to know people, that we fall into speaking English, which they invariably speak better than I speak German.
Hey, do any of you remember the language thread I started a couple of months back? Remember how y’all told me to go ahead and speak German to people, that they would be understanding and patient? Well, the first time I did it, I’m trying my best to get my ideas across and HerrDude says “Speak English!”. How humiliating! Well, it turns out that everyone says he is a racist jerk, but still…
Don’t worry, though, I shan’t give up. I’m enrolled in the next German class at the Volkschule, and I’ll be getting a lot of practice with Nicholas’s classmates and their parents (who all seem to speak English, too).
I know that part, too. It’s a frustrating Montreal phenomenon for people who want to practice French to have their interlocutors constantly switching into English. I’ve even had it happen to me when I pause for thought. I was thrilled to discover that people will actually speak to me in French now. I also help it by speaking very fast and saying “euh…” whenever I need to pause.
My mom sort of smiles tolerantly and says “Je veux pratiquer.” How do you say that in German?
I understand that it is commonly accepted that the order of difficulty is:
Hungarian
Swahili
Finnish
As an Irish guy in Helsinki you better believe im gratful nearly everyone speaks english here. The panhandlers on the street would leave many ashamed of their skills in the language. Part of the reason is that very few movies or TV content is dubbed. It is rather subtitled (in finnish and swedish at the same time).I find that most helpful in my own study of Finnish.
Back when I was learning German (in my one-and-only year as a grad student at UCLA), there was this book called English Grammar for Students of German. It went over all the important concepts like cases, participles, the so-called “perfect” tenses, the subjunctive, etc., as they exist in English (and which you’re already using instinctively, even if you don’t know the names for them). All in preparation for applying those same concepts in German.
Be warned: German has more cases, and uses them a lot more often, than English does. And it has grammatical gender, i.e. each noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, and might be masculine or feminine even if it describes an inanimate object. (I always get a kick out of how “Platen,” a phonograph record, is feminine, while “Platenspieler,” a record player, is masculine. ) But at least German doesn’t have that God-awful “imperfect” tense like Spanish or Latin do.
I read a neurology study once that talked about the hard wiring in the brain regarding lanuages. You know how they say that it is considerably more difficult to learn a language fluently after age 10? It’s because that’s about the time when your language centers in the brain stop growing and changing. The scarey part is that the optimal time to start the multi-lanuage process is when the language centers are still developing, around age 1 or 2. Screw French class in high school, you need it while still an infant.
That being said, there are certain languages that a native English speaker who has not been exposed to other languages before the age of 10 will NEVER be able to speak without an accent. Chinese and Russian come to mind. The language centers are just too differently configured. French is also quite difficult to speak without an accent after age 10. And andygirl makes a good point about X’housa, I know I’ve personally tried learning a few phrases and I can’t get that damned click to sound un-nasaly.
Wish I could provide a cite, but it’s Saturday, I am lazy, and I read this about 2 years ago. Sorry.
Thanks for the suggestion, Tracer, I will look for that book.
Matt_mcl, I think you would say “Ich ube Deutsch” or “Ich lerne Deutsch”.
I do think that the US school system should start teaching foreign languages in elemetary school, because little children learn so much more rapidly and are much less self-conscious than older people. One of the things that disappoints me about the American school system here in Germany is that they don’t start any meaningful language instruction until middle school or high school. That is one of the many reasons we have elected to send TinyTot to German school.
Uhm, you’ve been misinformed there. Xhosa(pronounced [lateral-click]hosa is not really that dificult as far as languages are concerned. It’s very closely related to Zulu, the main difference being the inclusion of the lateral, frontal and whatever the one done with the tongue is called clicks. Many African languages contain these sounds, though the one with the most is probably the one spoken by the San tribesmen(see: The Gods Must Be Crazy).
Xhosa is, in fact, so closely related to Zulu that people fluent only in Zulu can converse with people fluent only in Xhosa without too much dificulty.
Most linguists will tell you that there are certain languages which tend to be particularly difficult for native English speakers to learn, but would draw the line at “ordering” those languages. It’s simply too subjective a process.
Chinese is another one that is often considered very difficult for English speakers.
I can read German fairly well, but speaking it (or even just writing it) is a chore. In theory, I know how to conjugate the verbs, get the gender stuff right, ect. but in practice it takes so much effort to compose a sentence that I want to cry. I can understand spoken German, but complicated sentences can get me tangled up, as they never put the verb where I think it should go.