Asia
When I was 7, my parents decided to put me in a Chinese language program class – so I could get in touch with my roots, I guess.
Which is a little weird considering that my parents don’t speak any Chinese at all.
At that time, learning Chinese (or anything Chinese related) was forbidden so we had to sneak around. Instead of Chinese books my little backpack was stuffed with English books instead. Just incase I got stopped on the streets (never happened).
Soon afterwards, I noticed that I was different. While the other kids were conversing happily with their teachers in Chinese, I was walking around muttering “This is a horse”, “That is a pig”.
2 years of seeing me struggling with the Chinese words for farm animals, my parents decided that enough was enough and pulled me out of the class.
Needless to say, because of this I thought for the longest time that Chinese was quite probably the most difficult language to learn. I mean, I’m Chinese – I have the genes for it. And I got zilch to show after 2 years of learning? Yeah, it’s that hard.
Then my brother and I traveled around South East Asia and we came across some seriously bizarre letters. The kind that get you cross eyed looking at them.
Seriously? It makes Chinese characters look straightforward by comparison.
Burma/Myanmar
Burmese/Myanmar letters look like little bacterias strung together. Cute!
Cambodia
My favorite is probably the Cambodian alphabets though. I mean, just look at them and imagine how fun it is to try to write them.
Thailand
Thai alphabets look like a bunch of ‘n’ and ‘m’ strung together at first glance. Upon closer look they still look like a bunch of ‘n’ and ‘m’. Lovely people, the Thai people – with alphabets to match. This is a menu at a restaurant at Mae Salong. Or we think it was. We pointed at pink and we got food.
Do you know that Thai language doesn’t use spaces between words? Bangkok (in Thai) is the longest name of a place in the world (even though it actually consists of a number of words – but since Thai doesn’t have any spaces between them…)
Bangkok = “Krungthepmahanakonbowornratanakosinmahintarayudyayamahadiloponoparatanarajthaniburiromudomrajniwe – smahasatarnamornpimarnavatarsatitsakattiyavisanukamphrasit”
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add commentI love Thai, but that’s mainly because my boyfriend keeps calling it ‘Elvish’. So now everytime I see something in Thai I laugh.
Angela recently posted..Understanding China: individuality VS. unity in Chinese culture
As an expat living in China – I can attest that Chinese is one of the hardest language to learn. I’ve been living here for almost 10 years and I’m still struggling – and not from lack of trying either.
I’ve never even tried to get in touch with the Chinese or Mandarine or some other of its subkinds, but you just rocked my world with the name of Bangkok, that sure looks to be longest one!! I never knew that something can be that long, for such a short name:) But the hardest language I personally have come across is Hungarian, prob cuz Iam trying to learn it now, because moved to live there with my husband and am having soo hard time:)
I have never seen/heard Hungarian – would be curious to know what it’s like. If it’s tonal, I’d have no chance.
“Irish monks introduced spacing between words in the 7th century. This facilitated reading, as these monks tended to be less familiar with Latin.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
So actually all books that were written before the 7th century in Latin, the prevalent Mediaeval lingua franca of Europe, were completely space-less!
I remember the first time I saw Quechua written down – it was a jumble of ‘k’ and ‘q’. They use the Latin alphabet, but I couldn’t pronounce any of it!
It all looks like Greek to me!!
I’m fully aware of the complexity of languages such as Thai, Hindi and others that don’t use letters, but after a year studying Mandarin, I have no doubts it’s the hardest one. There is no other SE Asian language that has 5000 characters like Mandarin, some of which of incredible difficulty, not to mention that now they are using simplified characters! And of course, not to mention the pronunciation part, the four tones that sound basically the same to me, the fact that you pronounce the same character in different ways and different characters in the same way, but that’s a whole new chapter
Hilarious. I studied Mandarin in Taiwan, though. Some characters had over 25 strokes. Just brute memorization. I still find it hard!
I love the look of Burmese! It’s so cute! Is it wrong that that picture alone has kind of made me want to visit the country even more?
It’s perhaps not as visually interesting as some of these, but a while back, I started reading about the Korean alphabet, Hangul and found it really fascinating. It looks so much like most Asian scripts (well, like some kind of Japanese, maybe) and yet it actually allows for phonetic reading much like English! It’s actually a remarkably clever language, with similar sounds being denoted by similar symbols… Pretty much, I’m kind of obsessed with it! If you’re at all interested in writing systems, you should read about Hangul. So cool.
Agreed, Hangul is pretty cool! I was especially glad to figure out that the Korean alphabet is so easy to learn for when I moved to Korea. It only takes a couple hours, I definitely recommend anyone visiting Korea to try and learn it (and at the very least then you can say you can read more than one alphabet!).
Fascinating trivia (i.e. “Bangkok”) Me? Shoot, I’m still trying to work up to two dozen Vietnamese words (and I’ve lived here now for more than 6 months!)
Still… at least Vietnamese uses the same alphabet as English, otherwise I’d REALLY be lost!
Wow, those are some crazy letters. Even in Cambodia, just the spelling of getting your teeth pulled looks painful!
As for toughest language, I have to go with Estonian. Many years ago, I sat down and learned some phrases when I was there. I was even told that it was one of the toughest languages in the world. I haven’t researched that but from people I knew trying to learn it, it was very difficult for them even though they used the western alphabet (and not Cyrillic like Russian).
I love looking at different alphabets. I really liked the lettering in Sri Lanka and bought a tote bag featuring the Tamil alphabet. I didn’t realize I was going to be the talk of the town when I went to the grocery store with it. Many of the men who pack your bags at check out are from Sri Lanka. They got so excited and started talking to each other. Finally one of them told me in English they were happy to see me with their letters and wanted to know where I got it. It was a really nice exchange!
Any language that doesn’t use the alphabet we use is completely impossible for me. I found Spanish easy because I already knew French and Italian is somewhat okay when traveling but in Asia I am completely lost.
You raise a valid point, that ease or difficulty depends on the first language of the learner as well. As you pointed out, it’s not fair to compare letters with pictograms. As much as Mandarin might use a gazillion of characters, the characters also have meaning to them. I get your point exactly, when after being fluent in Japanese, I tell my friends that I may not be able to speak Mandarin, but I can “read” it, since the characters mean something I know, even though I might not be able to pronounce it.
Surprised how different Burmese looks from Thai. Any of these languages look tricky to master as a native English speaker… at least in written form!
I’m sure you know that the ease or difficulty that comes with learning a language depends on more than just how it is written, right? But speaking of letters, not to nitpick, but actually, of the languages that you mentioned, Chinese is still the hardest.
The Burmese script has 33 letters indicating consonants, and four diacritics that indicate vowels, making a total of 132 possible combinations. The Khmer alphabet is similar, with 33 consonants. Thai on the other hand, has 44 consonants, 15 vowel symbols (which combine into 28 vowel forms), and 4 tone marks.
Mandarin Chinese on the other hand has at least 106,230 characters, at least according to “The Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form”, compiled by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. Given these numbers, if one’s simply basing ease or difficulty in how many letters a language uses, then Chinese is still rather difficult.
It doesn’t solely depend on how it is written, but when learning a language that doesn’t use the same alphabets as you’re used to, it adds to the complication of learning. If I can remember correctly, Chinese doesn’t really have “letters” per se, each character is more like a word, right? So maybe it’s hard to do a fair comparison between languages where one uses alphabets (like ‘abc’) and the other one is more like “pictograms” where by knowing a character, you learn the word (like Egyptian ‘letters’), whilst knowing “A”, a letter, doesn’t really get you anywhere. If that makes sense. On the other hand, Chinese (like Indonesian) doesn’t have conjugations (correct me if I’m wrong) – so in a way, it could be easier than mastering Spanish – or German for example.
For me, personally, anything that’s tonal in nature, is what makes a language harder to learn than anything else.
Then again, who am I to argue with a phD student in linguistic?
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