Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Tongue Twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language (2009)

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If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy the fascinating course "Language families of the world" by the excellent John McWhorter. He elaborates on many of the aspects mentioned in the article. (It's quite expensive though, unless you resort to a pirated version.)

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/language-families-of-the...

I express my dismay that you would even suggest using a pirated edition. Do you deny that McWhorter (and/or his publisher) is entitled to sell his work?

Don't.

Piracy has its awesome use-cases if not abused.

I grew up in Iran where we have access to very little. Had it not been for piratebay, I could not educate myself on so, so many topics. Even Udacity was blocked there cause their videos are hosted on Youtube!

So if someone reads HN and they need to pirate it, I'm pretty sure McWhorter would be okay, he's a chill dude.

I believe the problem lies with people who can buy it but decide to not; in which case it becomes abusive.

So I wouldn't express dismay just at the suggestion of piracy. It's more nuanced imho.

some of the known hardest languages are - Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish...but i feel it all depends on your mother tongue and/or probably any other language you know apart from your mother tongue, that how quickly one learn new language.

It also depends on the number of languages you already know and use, and way more important, if you are forced to use it or not.

If you are native Finnish speaker left alone in a village where the only practiced language is Arabic, you are going to speak Arabic pretty fast! If you speak 20 different languages and as soon as you try to speak Danish the person in front of you answers in English, you will have hard time learning it.

Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech. Arabic is probably easier if you know another Semitic language such as Hebrew, or at least another language written in the Arabic alphabet, such as Farsi or Urdu.

Also "hard" is difficult to quantify. Humans are odd and quirky, and so are the languages they create (with perhaps the exception of conlangs like Esperanto or computer languages, but even those inherit the idiosyncrasies of their creators - Perl is a good example). Every language has its weird and difficult aspects, some more than others.

Japanese is "hard" because it has a complex writing system, but (for an English speaker) the pronunciation and grammar aren't particularly difficult: in fact I'd argue that Japanese is probably easier to learn to pronounce for an Anglophone than, say, French, and the verbs are considerably easier too. And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. Having once taught English, I'd say it's no cakewalk either, even for speakers of other Germanic languages: the spelling system barely deserves the name "system" and English verbal phrases are downright weird (put up with == "tolerate"? How?).

> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech

For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure.

Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)

I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything.

[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

Interslavic is like 95 % intelligible for me, a Czech, and has a strong southern (ex-yugoslavian) vibe. I wonder what Poles think of it.

Same. It takes a little effort to read but it's understandable and it does feel Croatian or thereabouts. On a somewhat funny note, Chrome decided to translate the page in Interslavic from Czech to Polish and did a passable job.

What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest).

* the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.

> I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other.

i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand

say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.

There is a saying that both Poles and Czechs perceive the other language as if small kids were speaking. From a Czech perspective, this seems to be true. And the resulting cuteness is a major source of fun :)

Sorry that sentence wasn't clear: Finnish is easy if you know Estonian, and Polish is easy if you know Czech.

The grammatical differences between Finnish and Estonian are largely systematic, except in the declining of nouns (where Estonian is kind of chaotic). Fully 35% of Estonian word stock is Germanic, so knowing some German would help.

Yes: I noticed in Tallinn the police cars were called "Politsei" (from German Polizei) in contrast to Finnish "Poliisi" (from Swedish Polis).

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

Sure: the point is that every language has its own set of difficulties and hurdles, and your existing knowledge of other languages may remove or lessen some of those hurdles. So a Farsi speaker will not need to learn the Arabic alphabet from scratch, but (other than loanwords) the languages' vocabularies are different. On the other hand, a Maltese speaker will need to learn the Arabic alphabet, but will find Arabic vocabulary familiar as both Maltese and Arabic are Semitic languages.

The linguist John DeFrancis (author of the insightful and somewhat controversial The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) opines (in that book, IIRC) that among character-based writing systems, Japanese is the worst, and among alphabetic ones, English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...

> And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese

and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences

That the nice thing about Japanese. It's pretty easy to guess the meaning of a word by only knowing the kanji. For example, the word 配信, meaning "stream" or "broadcast", is made up of the kanji that generally indicate "distribution" and "signal". Conversely, English doesn't have as much of that benefit for unknown words.

After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice.

The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.

The US Foreign Service has a scale of how difficult languages are for a native English speaker:

https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang...

Category V, requiring 2200 hours of study, has "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and consists of Arabic, *Japanese, Korean, Cantonese (Chinese) and Mandarin (Chinese), with the asterisk indicating that Japanese is considered the hardest of the lot.

Obvious caveat: the Foreign Service only teaches languages useful for diplomats, meaning that obscure regional languages won't make the cut.

The only reason Japanese is on that list must be because of the writing system. I can't imagine it would be on the list if it were only about learning grammar and pronunciation. And when that's said - the writing system isn't actually hard, it's just that it takes time to learn it. There's nothing there that's difficult to wrap your head around.

It all depends on immersion and motivation, if you desperately need to learn a language you will work hard to get there. Immersion will expose your listening skill to recognize unique sounds in the target language. That is not to say it makes it easier for you to utter them, it just helps with the early comprehension. I met an Urdu speaking taxi driver who spoke English and Arabic as if he was a native speaker of both, after 6 months of merely listening to the radio in his car.

some interesting facts [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-number-of-languages-s...]

Those are some of the hardest languages to learn but that's only really true for a monolingual English speaker.

When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.

For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.

There is a Hungarian tongue twister that is a good example of why Hungarian is on this list:

"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese"

But this is not a representative example of what Hungarian is like.

Sounds like Morse code to me. :)

Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing.

Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk).

Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).

In addition Czech has the sound ř, which is almost impossible to pronounce unless you learn it in childhood. I don't know of any other language with that sound. Tongue-twisters will almost by definition explore the weird sound combinations in any language, but Czech is a fruitful hunting ground for these!

Interestingly, the geographically close but linguistically unrelated Hungarian makes up for all the vowels that Czech eschews. They're almost polar opposites in vowel usage.

Phoible lists four phoneme inventories with the Czech <ř> ([r̝] in IPA), three of which are varieties of Czech and the fourth being Lyélé in Burkina Faso: https://phoible.org/parameters/1214D761CC44F5F017FD63EA26B45...

However, Phoible is not exactly complete. E.g. Wikipedia has a different list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_po...

It sounds very familiar to me, I am Slovenian and our sound Ž sounds similar to ř

I know that Czech also has Ž, but to my ears we pronounce it harder, so words like žrelo, or žrebiček ... it kind of comes close.

It sounds even more like Morse code when you realize that the double Ts are a longer sound than the single Ts. It really is like dots and dashes.

That's like the one in Chinese: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ (and so on for 94 syllables) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

As far as I know Chinese (Mandarin) is actually very easy to talk/understand since it has very simple grammar. The reading/writing on the other hand takes a lot of dedication. At least that's what someone learning Mandarin told me

I have been study a bit of Mandarin and the tones are hard, but when you get rid of them it's not so hard. The main difficult for me in spoken Chinese is to learn the huge number of homophones and some idiomatic phrases. On the counterpart, there is almost no grammar. Reading is hard (a normal educated person know around 10/12k ideograms, people with high level education are over 20k), writing is even harder because you need to know the exact order of the traits. I know that also overseas chineses frequently forgot how to write in ideograms.

The grammar is not that simple. I think that misconception is caused by people noticing that they don't have to memorize conjugation tables like when learning fusional languages, but then they fail to realize that the complexity has not disappeared, it's just encoded in word order and choice of grammatical particles instead.

There's actually an NLP shared task challenging researchers to automatically detect grammar errors learners make when writing Chinese: http://www.cged.tech/

I know that it's not so simple. But at least for a basic conversation, grammar it's not the biggest roadblock.

^ this. I find it a bit annoying when people tell me that Chinese "has no grammar" because it is not inflected.

I'd venture to claim that many of the hardest languages are fairly small ones that most people will never have heard of (as Tuyuca mentioned in the article).

So I had this debate at a meetup. The issue here is how you define "hardest". Spoken Japanese is actually judged by linguists as easier than English. Written Japanese is harder because it takes years to learn all the kanji but a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English.

So being "literate" (able to read and write) is different than being "fluent" (able to listen and speak) (not sure that's the definition of fluent, just pointing out there are more issues.)

> a child will become "fluent" in Japanese faster/easier than English.

Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?

One example is Danish children take longer to get past tense correct than Iceland, Norwegian, Swedish, children.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish...

I'm sure it's hard to compare but if one child says "I can has cheeseburger?" and a different child says "May I have a cheeseburger?" we'd generally judge the second child to be more skilled in the language than the first. So, it's arguably not impossible to come up with some measure of when a child is speaking to some level of correctness and compare those across languages.

If you want a blind test you'd just ask lots of kids at different ages to do something "ask for a cheeseburger", transcribe the results, have native speakers, who don't know where the answers came from, judge which answers are not making grammar/conjugation mistakes. Some languages children will stop making mistakes much earlier than other languages which would at least suggest that some languages are harder than others (I'm sure there are confounding factors)

> Chinese; Arabic; Japanese; Hungarian; Korean; Finnish; Polish

Why all well-known Eurasian languages? Lesser-known languages have difficult features galore, especially for European speakers. (The first example which comes to mind is the Papuan language Kalam, which has only ~100 verbs, but uses these to build up precise descriptions of complex actions in a way which is quite difficult for the European speaker to master; but there of course many more examples of difficult-to-learn features like this.)

I just finished reading this very interesting article about Pirahã which seems nearly impossible for non-native speakers to learn. The article is about how it may lack recursion, which Chomsky originally proposed as the key unique feature of human language which now seems to be the generally accepted view.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...]

(I am not a linguist) (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868259)

I have always enjoyed this light-hearted "formal" analysis of the hardest languages https://people.cs.umass.edu/~rsnbrg/hardest.pdf

The sixth sheik's sixth sheep's sick.

Or so I hear.

Hausa is a strong candidate for the hardest language to learn, and perhaps Indonesian for the easiest.

Lies are free, but truth is paywalled.

econonist's is js-based

f12, ctrl+shift+p, type disable js, reload

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