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Comment by camccann | Hacker News Reader

Four out of five of the most difficult languages are east Asian; not too surprising there. The fifth, however, is Arabic, which I didn't anticipate.

Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Arabic compared to other languages which would seem (to me, at least) equally remote from English in terms of geography, syntax, phonology, and lexicography?

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The real hard part of Arabic is the morphology. It's "irregular", both in the human sense that there's all sorts of horrible exceptions to ridiculous numbers of rules, and in the compsci sense that you cannot recognise/produce the inflected forms of nouns and verbs using a finite state automaton/transducer. (Though, that's true for all the Afroasiatic languages including Amharic, Hebrew, and Hausa, but the FSI claims those are only "Level II" languages).

Also IMO Arabic phonology is a lot harder than either Chinese or Korean. (Chinese has tones, Korean has tensed versions of the same consonants we have in English, but Arabic has the pharyngeal and glottal consonants, completely unlike anything in English). On the other hand, Georgian's worse.

Finally, if you take Arabic in a school, they're going to teach you Modern Standard Arabic AKA fusha, which is basically in the same position that Latin was in 14th-century Europe: useful if you like to do nothing but read, useless if you actually want to understand what people are saying.

I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian, Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hakka. But what other languages did you have in mind that seemed to be rated as surprisingly easy by contrast with Arabic?

P.S. Being quite the language hobbyist, I have also self-studied a variety of other languages, including several more that are on the list included in the submitted article. Modern Standard Chinese is by far my strongest acquired language, but I would agree that it does not come easily for a native speaker of English--and arguably not for most native speakers of Sinitic languages.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

Disclaimer: I am almost completely uninformed about other languages beyond assorted superficial details about a handful. That said, I would have expected Arabic to be of no greater relative difficulty than, say, Hindi, Persian, Hebrew, Mongolian, or such.

I mostly expected Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese to be of greatest relative difficulty, from what little I know about those languages, and would have expected Arabic (and many other languages) to be in the second category.

Hindi and Persian are in the Indo-European language family, which provides a ton of similarities and possibilities for innate understanding of the underlying grammatical structure, which is not so much the case for Semitic languages (Arabic in particular)...

What's brutal about Chinese for a native speaker of English is phonemic tone for speech and lack of cognate vocabulary, coupled with a writing system that reflects a stage of development of writing from 2,000 years ago. But what is forgiving about Chinese is that the grammatical relationships are mostly shown by word order and function words, as in English, rather than by inflection of words. That, to me at least, makes speaking Chinese "easier" than speaking Russian, even though Russian is much more cognate with English.

Arabic may be especially difficult (even as compared to Hebrew, a language I have studied much more) because the standard form of the language is so divergent from the day by day vernacular forms, as noted by a more informed participant who has kindly posted another comment.

The United States federal government language proficiency rating system attempts to identify equal levels of real-world functional proficiency for ratings of interpreters and the like. When I was last tested, the rating scale went from 0 (with a readily apparent meaning) to 5 (a rating in principle reserved for educated NATIVE speakers of the language) in the functional domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. I was quite proud of my 4+ rating in speaking and listening to Modern Standard Chinese, but I took quite a few years out of my life to get to that level, as have most westerners I have ever met who have done the same.

Is the state of development of writing from 2000 years ago referring to the Chinese or Latin alphabet?

The Latin alphabet, or rather Phoenician, from which Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts are descended, is more like 3500 years old.

But both the specific letter forms of the Roman alphabet and, more relevantly, the general spelling patterns of English are much more recent than that (as they would have to be). But, yes, writing is more ancient in the Near East than it is in China, for sure. It's just that it has gone through more language-specific adaptations, especially in the direction of exhaustively spelling all speech sounds with a minimal number of writing characters, than writing in China has.

It's a reference to Chinese characters not having been further developed in the direction of sound-indicating writing (as was done later in Japan and Korea). Full historical details, based on quite recent archeology in China, can be found in the writings of William Boltz. I searched for some examples of his writings that are online and not behind a paywall, but didn't find any convenient examples. His observation is that Chinese almost went in the direction of explicit syllable-writing (as Japanese has had for several centuries in the katakana and hiragana writing systems) but development in that direction ceased during the Han dynasty.

P.S. I just found, by browsing, that the Wikipedia articles about Chinese writing still need a lot of clean-up. Too bad.

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