Will Sign Language be the world's most difficult language?

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ndokuo

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I am sure na sooooooo:cool2:
 
nah. as long as if you are around with asl users all the time then you will have no problem.
 
Try this..


The Chaos

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

.... until the last verse...

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
Click to expand...

The author of The Chaos was a Dutchman, the writer and traveller Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité. Born in 1870, he studied classics, then law, then political science at the University of Utrecht, but without graduating (his Doctorate came later, in 1901). From 1894 he was for a while a private teacher in California, where he taught the sons of the Netherlands Consul-General. From 1901 to 1918 he worked as a schoolteacher in Haarlem, and published several schoolbooks in English and French, as well as a study of the Dutch constitution. From 1909 until his death in 1946 he wrote frequently for an Amsterdam weekly paper, with a linguistic column under the pseudonym Charivarius.

​

The whole poem below...
Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, 1870-1946

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
Click to expand...
 
Grayma said:
English is tough, but I think Chinese is harder. Unless you are Chinese.
Click to expand...

Kind of strange to say that when I could say the same thing that English is hard unless it's your native language as an American. Is there anything out there that have rated the complexity and difficulty of a language without bias, and the reason why one is more difficult than another language?
 
This Chinese one is why some perceive some asian languages as difficult, especially if they use hanzi characters rather than a standardized alphabet.
Since the characters are completely relied on from memory with no correlation to how they look or what they mean, it's what makes it difficult.

6Znl7.jpg

communicationwise (outside of print) I'd say it is no different than any other language though. I would imagine each and every language have their own niches.
 
naisho said:
This Chinese one is why some perceive some asian languages as difficult, especially if they use hanzi characters rather than a standardized alphabet.
Since the characters are completely relied on from memory with no correlation to how they look or what they mean, it's what makes it difficult.

6Znl7.jpg

communicationwise (outside of print) I'd say it is no different than any other language though. I would imagine each and every language have their own niches.
Click to expand...
Add a bunch of T's and you've got a whole lot of swearing! ;)
 
I agree chinese is really hard as those little marks on top of the letters totally change the meaning and you need super sharp hearing to hear the difference when its spoken. My partner is vietnamese and they have those same little marks on top of the letters, my partner tried to teach me but i just cant hear the difference in the words and i get myself confused.
 
That is why we need sign language like ASL or any other countries for sign language to understand without trying to lipread and fail to hear the sounds that we can not make out. A lot of hearing people expect us to hear them with no problem when we have hearing aids or CIs.

If you think that sign language is difficult to comprehend trying to make language understood, then you really need to practice with ASL users so that you won't have a problem with understanding them. If you don't understand what the ASL user said, then ask politely what that signs means to you and you will get use to that person's signs. We, Deaf people, really depend on them very much than English for spoken language which is hard for us to hear and to speak the right sentences.
 
Waterboy said:
Nope. English is the world's most difficult language.
Click to expand...


My father was born in Mexico and didn't learn English until he moved here when he was 18, and according to him English is a very hard language to learn due to having so many words with more than 1 meaning, as well as English grammar being quite complex.

I can't put much input as I am a native English user, but I'd agree with some of the above posts that Chinese and most East Asian languages seem incredibly difficult to learn.
 
Actually it depends. (Pardon the use of the word "hear" in this post. I use it to refer to the intake of language whether it is hearing spoken words or seeing signed words, or I suppose feeling tactile signing)

All language is acquired through "repetitive, comprehensible input". That means you hear (see) language over and over and it seeps into your subconscious and becomes second nature. As you grow, you experience more and more complex language, and that seeps in and your own language skills grow. If you only hear a word once, it is likely you won't really internalize it.

This is why native speakers of English don't have to really think if they should say "he walk" or "he walks". It's been acquired fully and the language is just there. This works for EVERY language, and the process is equally simple no matter what the language is. Heck, by the time the average kid is 6, that kid has had like 10,000 hours of input of language! That's a lot of soaking in!

Where the difficulty comes in is when language teachers like me don't understand this principle. There are ways to teach a language that mimic, as much as possible in a classroom, this natural language process. Language teacher feel that language actually has to be TAUGHT. So we start making worksheets and explaining rules. That is NOT how language is acquired. A small part (about 4%) of the world CAN actually learn languages that way and actually access that academic part of their brain fast enough that they can be pretty fluent. The problem? We grow up to be language teachers, then wonder why kids don't get it, it is so easy. Really, we're asking brains to function in ways that they were never meant to function. We 4%'ers just have abnormal brains.

I have had "lessons" (focused on that repetitive, comprehensible input) in German, Russian, and Chinese. These were brief lessons. I can still tell you, in that language, the story I learned. After 9 hours of Russian, I actually demonstrate this style of instruction IN RUSSIAN. It really makes that much of a difference.

So, if you try to teach RULES, English, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic are 4 of the absolutely hardest languages to learn as a second language.

If you provide a learner with repetitive language that they can understand, gradually bumping up the complexity of the language, all languages are pretty much equal, and there is not really as significant a difference in difficulty. At least until people are experienced enough to begin academic study of the language. (Y'know the stuff we do in school in like 3rd grade and beyond...after we have 10+ years of experience in the language, use it fluently, and THEN we still have trouble with the grammar work! How can we expect people just starting a language to understand it!?!)
 
riobravo said:
My father was born in Mexico and didn't learn English until he moved here when he was 18, and according to him English is a very hard language to learn due to having so many words with more than 1 meaning, as well as English grammar being quite complex.

I can't put much input as I am a native English user, but I'd agree with some of the above posts that Chinese and most East Asian languages seem incredibly difficult to learn.
Click to expand...

Maybe it would be better to say that English is the most confusing language to learn.
 
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