ndokuo

I am sure na sooooooo

Deafness

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Frisky Feline

nah. as long as if you are around with asl users all the time then you will have no problem.

Waterboy

Nope. English is the world's most difficult language.

Frisky Feline

^^^ true. I am told.

honey.toronto

It's like any language; if you don't practice, you won't remember!

Grayma

English is tough, but I think Chinese is harder. Unless you are Chinese.

Cloggy

Try this..

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...

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Waterboy

You have a point.

kokonut

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?

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naisho

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.


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.

VamPyroX

Add a bunch of T's and you've got a whole lot of swearing!

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Ausrider

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.

Bebonang

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.

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riobravo

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.

kellycat

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!?!)

Waterboy

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

CSign