English is the most difficult language EVER!

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by FreeThinkers, Apr 19, 2007.

  1. FreeThinkers Registered Senior Member

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    I can understand how if you speak English the whole gender thing can be difficult, I'll give you that. But for someone who speaks a language already like that it's not too hard to learn another one. The problem with English is that it's different.

    The German words for please and thank you are the same, yes, but what's the problem with that? That just makes it even easier to learn.
     
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  3. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    english is easy to learn, i am learning korean at the moment, now thats a hard language.

    all of my korean friends learn english and say its so easy they are surprised i am learning korean so fast. i think its a myth how hard english is to learn, english and french are simple especialy to write, we have 26 letters in the alphabet, and only 9 numbers to learn how to write,

    try learning all of the japanese korean and chinese symbols for numbers and words haha, good luck.

    oriental written language is fucking hard for western people to master. but all of the chinese korean and japanese people i know say how easy and simple the english language is, they actualy laugh at its ease and simplicity.


    peace.
     
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  5. francois Schwat? Registered Senior Member

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    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA... good shit.
     
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  7. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    compared to korean chinese and japanese apparently it is very easy,

    those are the words of chinese korean and japanese people who are currently learning english,

    i am teaching english to korean students at the moment in exchange for them teaching me korean.

    do you know how many seperate symbols there are to learn in chinese japanese and the korean language?

    not tens not hundreds but thousands of seperate symbols, maybe even millions, oppose to 26 in english,

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    i am learning korean at this very moment and i agree with them, its alot harder to write. the verbal side i find about the same, but the written side is way harder,

    howcome the koreans are learning english way faster than i am learning korean then? and i learn quite fast (so they say)


    peace.
     
  8. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    english is so hard that you seem to speak it very well with ease.

    i will give a little example.


    this is how you say hello in english,

    hi

    this is how you say hello in korean

    an yung ha se yo



    peace.
     
  9. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    english is so hard that you seem to speak it very well with ease.

    i will give a little example.


    this is how you say hello in english,

    hi

    this is how you say hello in korean

    an yung ha se yo



    peace.
     
  10. fadeaway humper that way lies madness Registered Senior Member

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    311
    Dude, English is the easiest language evah.

    Indisputable evidence: I have a more or less decent command of it.

    Even more indisputable evidence: That hillbilly in the White House speaks it (when he concentrates real hard, anyway).

    Basically, English is watered down German.

    And seriously, Chinese. I read somewhere that even the fucking Chinese have a hard time learning it. Can't blame them. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the inhabitants of planet ··/E·%$$%$, at the other end of the universe, speak Chinese.

    Of course, the Chinese probably think the same of Spanish, for instance, but still...
     
  11. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    seriously oriental language is fucking hard to learn, the verbal side is not so bad, but the written side is freaking difficult,

    they have like a different symbol for every freakin word in chinese even a 40 year old chinese guy doesent know half of the symbols, and each family has there own symbols, and there are rare symbols that only certain people know,

    i know some chinese (a fare bit) i know very limited japanese, and i am currently "trying" to learn korean fluently, korean is like a mix between chinese and japanese symbols, actualy no its not, its more like japanese with alot of circles and squares, oh and zig zaggy type lines,

    its hard thats all im saying i have just learned 1 set of numbers from 1-10 then i find out there is a complete different set of numbers from 1-10 what the hell man!,

    and i have learned some phrases for basic communication then i find out that i cannot use those phrases when talking to an "elder" and that i have to use a different phrase,

    peace.
     
  12. fadeaway humper that way lies madness Registered Senior Member

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    Like I said, totally fucked up language.

    Also: Nihao!
     
  13. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    nihao ma.


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    peace.
     
  14. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Seriously guys, English is not even in the top 10 as difficulty goes...

    By the way, let's apply objectivity:

    http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/hardest-language.php

    "There is no single answer to this question; it depends on so many factors. However, the British Foreign Office has looked at the languages that diplomats and other embassy staff have to learn and has worked out which they find the most difficult to learn. The second hardest is Japanese, which probably comes as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most difficult to learn is Hungarian, which has 35 cases (forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). This does not mean that Hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everybody, but it causes British diplomatic staff, who are used to learning languages, the most difficulty. However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases, so it would probably cause more difficulty if British diplomats had to learn it.

    Different cultures and individuals from those cultures will find different languages more difficult. In the case of Hungarian for British learners, it is not a question of the writing system, which is alphabetic, but the grammatical complexity,..."
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2007
  15. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    i know im finding it hard to imagine english as "hard" i am not fluent in every language but i dabble in more than a few, and english seems to be the easyest apart from french wich to me seems basicaly the same in difficulty status. i would say eastern language is harder than western as a general rule, obviously exceptions are present.




    i would say anybody who thinks english is so hard, try learning korean japanese or chinese. cantonese is actualy harder than mandarin oppose to what many people "think" simply because cantonese actualy has 9 tones oppose to mandarin having 4-5.


    chinese language is based on tone, people from 1 side of china cant understand people from the other side or even from the next village alot of the time,

    the one thing that connects all chinese speakers is the symbols wich are the same as a universal rule in general, but how you pronounce those symbols is different in each how can i put it, "village dialect".

    and most likely people from all of the villages cant understand me

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    peace
     
  16. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Last edited: Apr 20, 2007
  17. Oxygen One Hissy Kitty Registered Senior Member

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    OneRaven
    LOL! That made my morning!
     
  18. francois Schwat? Registered Senior Member

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    2,515
    English has so many more rules and exceptions to those rules than Mandarin. Mandarin uses extremely simple and intuitive syntax. They don't even conjugate their verbs! How many languages are there that don't even require you to conjugate verbs? In some ways it's like German. Many of the words are compounds. When you analyze words with more complex meanings, you can see how it makes sense when you break the word up into its constituent parts.

    But, you're right about the kanji. I've heard that learning Mandarin kanji is extremely difficult and very few Chinese people learn to master it. However, I'm talking about being able to converse in Chinese and learning conversational word syntax. It's much simpler than English. By far.
     
  19. kenworth dude...**** it,lets go bowling Registered Senior Member

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    written korean is like the made up language in futurama..
     
  20. grover Registered Senior Member

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    That is written from the perspective of people that already speak english. The point is that if you aren't a native speaker of english it is very difficult relative to other languages.
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Some of us do.
    Well then you obviously haven't studied French, which is unutterably worse. French "spelling" is a complete joke that should have been reformed 200 years ago. The trick to reading French is to leave half of the letters silent and to pronounce the remaining half wrong.

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    But you're complaining about the writing system. That's hardly the totality of a language.
    That's not a rule. It's just a general guide.
    It's not an exception. All Greek words ending in A are apparently masculine. Latin retained the gender and so does Spanish. Programa, artista, diagrama... the list is endless and they're all masculine. English has the same problem: you'll make a big mistake with a lot of words if you don't know the language of origin. Focus, alumna, and vertex are Latin, and the plurals are foci, alumnae and vertices. Hypothesis is Greek and the plural is hypotheses.
    There is no "reasoning"! These things evolved over centuries, some of them over millennia. Why is die Sonne feminine in German and el sol masculine in Spanish, since they are merely phonetic evolutions of the same Indo-European word?

    If you want illogic in English:
    • Sweden: Swedish
    • Norway: Norwegian
    • Switzerland: Swiss
    • Germany: German
    • Spain: Spanish
    • Iraq: Iraqi
    • Greece: Greek
    • Poland: Polish
    • Denmark: Danish
    • France: French
    • Portugal: Portuguese
    • Argentina: Argentine
    • Thailand: Thai
    • England: English
    • Lebanon: Lebanese
    • Peru: Peruvian
    • and last but not least, Holland: Dutch
    But your friend is.

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    "Beer" is spelled phonetically in the kana syllabary as bi-i-ru. In schoolbook romanization it would either be "biiru" or "biru" with a macron over the I (which I don't have in my character set) to indicate a long vowel. No Japanese would ever confuse the two, and a student of the language would pick up the distinction rather quickly. It's about the same as the difference as between a long í and a short i in Czech. Once your ears get calibrated there is absolutely no confusion. Speakers of Spanish have the same problem with "pick" and "peak" in English; there is only one series of vowels in Spanish so their ears are not calibrated to recognize that difference as phonemic.
    Oh heck, greetings and other social words are almost totally meaningless and evolve and change rather rapidly. You can't put much stock into those that any language happens to have at the moment. Bitten is the German cognate of "bid" and means "to ask [for something]." So bitte literally means "I ask [for whatever makes sense in this context, you figure it out]." The first time you're asking me for some object or favor, the second time I'm asking you to feel free to request anything you need because it's an honor to provide it. Look at the etymology of the English word "please;" it doesn't make any more sense. A fragment of "If it please you." How about "goodbye," a contraction of "God be with ye," something that the irreligious can hardly utter with sincerity.
    I disagree. I think Chinese is remarkably easy. There is no singular/plural, no present/past/future, no masculine/feminine. If it's important to make it clear that two dogs ate three fish you just say "two dog yesterday eat three fish," otherwise it's "dog eat fish." There's no utterly worthless paradigm of around twenty prepositions left over from the Stone Age that's supposed to describe every conceivable relationship between two nouns... at, of, in, by... yeah right. You express relationships with your choice of thousands of nouns and verbs and you do it with whatever nuance and precision you need. Not, "The dog is in the house," rather, "dog occupy house interior," except those words don't take up as many syllables in Chinese.

    The hardest part of spoken Chinese is the fact that tone is phonemic. You don't get to express how you feel by changing the tone of your words. You have to actually be an articulate master of your native language and just say it!
    Yes, I'll make the appropriate inquiries on the Moderators forum.
    Yes, but the up side of that is that you can be partially literate by knowing a small set of words. That was probably a tremendous advantage in the era before universal education. I'm sure in the days when 99% of Europeans couldn't write their own name, most Chinese probably knew a few dozen han zi for the words they used most often in their work.
    These days any Chinese with a high school education knows something like 2000 han zi which gives him the ability to read a number of compounds equivalent to the vocabulary of a university-educated anglophone
    Someone is either pulling your leg or referring to some awfully ancient traditions. There is a standard set of about 5000 han zi used in everyday typography. I've got the dictionary, it's called the Fenn 5000.
    Sure, scholars in arcane specialties. Don't you wonder what reason there could be for knowing a word that nobody else knows, given that the whole purpose of language is communication?

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    Somebody is really putting you on. If you want to read the original writings of the ancient philosophers you have to learn some words that are not used any more... but so what? If you want to read the original writings of Plato you have to learn Ancient Greek. That doesn't stop most of us from being sufficiently familiar with them in modern translations.
    You haven't learned much about these writing systems. Chinese is han zi (more familiar in its Japanese pronunciation, kanji). Each elementary morpheme has its own character. (I'm hesitant to call them "words" because Chinese is just not put together like an Indo-European language.)

    Japanese uses kanji for the thousands of words it borrowed from Chinese, and just to make it harder (must be some zen value in that) it has a parallel series of pronunciations for each one, for the more-or-less equivalent native Japanese word. You have to tell from context which way to read it of course, more zen. And then for all the words that didn't come from Chinese and have no Chinese equivalents, they use hiragana, those symbols that look like stylized kanji because that's what they are, each of which representing one spoken syllable. A KA SA TA NA HA MA YA RA WA, I KI SHI CHI NI HI MI null RI null, U KU SU TSU NU... well you get the picture, a lot more zen in there with the phonetic vagaries of the language superimposed over the symbols. And little diacritical marks to distinguish TA from DA and HA from PA or BA. And the second vowel in a long vowel is written real tiny, and the second consonant in a double consonant is a real tiny TSU... more zen. Wait I'm not done. Then there is katakana, a complete second set of the same syllables in a much squarer style that is used for transcribing foreign words. That is if you consider rokido as a "transcription" of "Lockheed."

    Korean has a totally phonetic alphabet. Three or four letters are arranged artistically into a square shape to form the symbol for a syllable, yes folks there's a bit of zen there too. Also they use kanji as well, but not as prolifically as the Japanese, mostly for proper names.

    You can spot printed Japanese in a second because so many of the syllabary symbols look brush-written. You can spot Korean in half a second because it's the only one with circles.
    One, two, three, four... then first, second, third, fourth. We have two series of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Chinese think that's pretty odd, since in Chinese it's yi, er, san, si... for cardinals and di yi, di er, di san, di si for ordinals.
    Many Indo-European languages have two forms for "you," one familiar and one former, and goddess help you if you use the wrong one. After staying in my Spanish friend's house for a week I accidentally called his mother and I got the cold shoulder for the rest of my stay. (In Mexico people are much less formal, even waiters call their customers .)
    There are regional dialects in Chinese as in most languages, but the definition of "dialect" is "mutually intelligible, perhaps with a little effort." For example, the speech of Sichuan is a dialect of Mandarin. The tones are different and there are some phonetic shifts, but after a few days a person from Cheng Du and a person from Bei Jing suddenly find their ears recalibrated and they start to understand each other. Cantonese, on the other hand, is a different language. There is no intercomprehensibility between Cantonese and Mandarin. Yes they use the same words in the same sequence, at least about 98%, but the phonetics have changed so much over the centuries that the similarity is lost. There's no "mapping" of Cantonese phonetics into Mandarin. Shang Hai, Fu Qian, and many other regions have distinct languages, rather than dialects. But they all use the same words in the same order, an interesting phenomenon due to the unifying influence of a non-phonetic writing system.
    Mandarin has a huge number of micro-rules. Like the "measure words" that go with numbers. One person is yi wei ren, one dog is yi tiao gou, one book is yi ben shu and one large flat thing like a table is yi jang juo zi. There are micro-rules for the way individual words fit together, each rule may only cover a few dozen words. Still, I agree that is easier than one macro-rule with lots of little exceptions.
    Chinese is what is called an analytic language and that is actually the engine for word formation in the language. There are only 1600 distinct syllables in Mandarin, meaning that every morpheme has quite a few homonyms, so most "words" must be compounds of multiple morphemes to be understandable. Most of the compounds make sense, but not all. For example dong xi, "east-west" means "thing."
    Universal education is one of the very few things that communism does right, and since the communists took over China literacy has become as universal as in America. Virtually every Chinese under the age of 40, except in the remote provinces, can read and write the couple of thousand kanji that comprise what we would call a high school vocabulary.
    I agree with you. I think it's also easier to learn since it generally takes fewer syllables to express a thought in Chinese than in English. As a result the language is spoken somewhat more slowly than English, and far more slowly than, say Italian. That's a real boon to a student, who has to parse every sentence in real time.
     
  22. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    i agree, the verbal conversation side to chinese is simple. but when it comes to actualy knowing the language its very hard, if you dont know how to write the symbols then you wont even be able to communicate with somebody who lives a few hundred miles down the road.


    and without beloved pinyin systems i garentee western people would struggle alot more,


    i am in the middle of creating my own pinyin system for korean, i have posted a small sample of it in my "learning korean thread"

    i was shocked that korean had no pinyin and i was finding it hard without such a system so i created one myself,

    salang hey pinyin,


    peace.
     
  23. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    wow fraggle you know lots, you can be my new shifu,

    seriously that was one hell of a long post when i scrolled past it i thought "wow i have to read all of that" then when i was quater of a way through i realised how much decent infomation it contained,

    i even read it through twice because i learned alot and didnt want to forget what i read, seriously thanks for that post man =,


    and yes i do have a whole lot to learn about the written sides to the languages. as i said before i find it very hard and i struggle quite alot, i have to learn most of what i know through my martial arts training, but i have a general interest in learning the languages for there own sake.


    i am still very bad i can hold a half convo in all 3 languages, but when it comes to writting i get lost fast.


    maybe one day soon i will get better hopefully.

    peace.
     

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