Re Hardness: I don't speak fluent Hungarian, but rather have some knowledge
of it. When I decided to learn it, I found the very strangeness was itself
an aid to remembering. Many of the paradigms are regular, and there is no
gender to worry about. A language like Old English or German I found to be
much harder, because of the large amount of irregularity in the gender/case
endings, irregular verbs and so on. The "cases" encountered in Hungarian are
basically just suffixed prepositions (Hungarian grammars call them
'postpositions').
Mike Poxon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Raymond Brown" <ray.brown@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2001 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: Rating Languages
> At 10:00 pm -0400 21/9/01, Colin Halverson wrote:
> >Hey, I was wondering what you people think is the hardest language to
learn
> >(of the languages you know).
>
> One can't give a simple answer. Basically, the closer a language is in
> structure to one's own, the easier it is to learn. If there's a good deal
> of shared vocabulary then life is even easier. It means the Romance &
> Germanic languages will normally feel easier to English speakers then
other
> languages. Structurally the Celtic languages are not so different but
> there is less obvious shared vocabulary. The Slav languages are also IE
> and, therefore, not so different structurally as non-IE languages, but
> anglophones generally find the noun and adjective declensions tricky
> (except for Bulgarian & Macedonian).
>
> >I've heard Hungarian is hard (of course I don't
> >know any one who speaks Hungarian)? Of course I would be wondering from
an
> >English point of view.
>
> Hungarian is not IE origin and will generally be found harder than most
> other European langages for English speakers. But on the global scale,
> there are plenty of languages one is likely to find much harder.
>
> >Also- are Chinese languages hard?
>
> If you want to learn them in order to speak them, they are not so hard;
but
> if you want to read & write them in their traditional form, then they get
> hard because there are so many characters to learn.
>
> >Are there many similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin?
>
> Yes.
>
> >And some-what on the same topic, are East Indian
> >languages hard or similar. I know some Indians and they all know about
four
> >Indian languages (Bengali, Panjabi, Telugu and Hindi I think) who say
they
> >are different, but when I hear them the words sound similar to me-
>
> Telegu is quite different from the other three. Bangali. Punjabi & Hindi
> are of IE derivation and have become comparatively analytic over the ages;
> they shouldn't be too difficult for English speakers to learn. But
Telegu
> belongs to the southern Indian Dravidian family of languages which
includes
> Tamil; these languages are quite different in structure and will be harder
> to learn.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9:26 pm -0700 21/9/01, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
> >Well I'm a native Hungarian speaker so it's easy for me, but surprisingly
> >difficult was Estonian and Votian. Somali was difficult to the point that
> >I gave up on it, but more so due to inarticulatable phonology than
> >grammar...
>
> Yep - the phonology can make a language which would otherwise not seem so
> difficult a 'hard' language to learn. The Nguni languages (e.g. Zulu &
> Xhosa) will not be so bad if you merely want to read them; but people
often
> find mastering all the many c;ick consonants quite tricky.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 4:55 am -0400 22/9/01, Amber Adams wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >Japanese is commonly thought of as a hard language, but I find it fairly
> >easy. Obviously, the vocabulary is nothing like English, but that's not
> >really a big shock. The grammar is all messed up, but after a while,
> >you get a feel for it. It's trivial to pronounce :)
>
> Unlike the Nguni languages I mentioned above, the phonology of Japanese is
> quite simple; it's quite easy to pronounce. And I agree it's not so
> difficult to learn to speak (and hear). But what makes it hard IMO is its
> complicated written system with its two sets of syllabaries (kana) and the
> few thousand kanji (Chinese characters).
>
>
> =========================================
> A mind which thinks at its own expense
> will always interfere with language.
> [J.G. Hamann 1760]
> =========================================