Hardest Language for Anglos

I want a challenge, Sup Forums. What is the hardest language for an English speaker to become fluent in?

No Klingon or shit like that.

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elvish

any pictorial language. Shits backwards af

>still using pagodas to show the word for house in 2016

Followed by new alphabets, Russian, Arabic etc

They've got some redeeming qualities.

卍 is actually a Chinese character, "wan". Every typed swastika you see online is because of the chinks.

English, apparently (at least from my experience)

Arabic

Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian are all known to be quite hard. You could also try something non-indoeuropran, like Finnish, Hungarian, or maybe an American Indian language. See what appeals to you most, any of those will be really challenging. I'm working on Arabic now.

>I want a challenge, Sup Forums. What is the hardest language for an English speaker to become fluent in?

High Fingolic-Solutrean is pretty tough.

Almost certainly mandarin.

This is in big part because the meaning of words depends on the inflection in your voice as you say them. Your natural instinct to inflict your words on emphasis, emotion or type of statement (question, interjection, etc.) will literally give you the wrong words in Chinese. Plus an entirely non-romantic alphabet and totally foreign ching chong culture make it really hard to learn.

Which one? Aren't there like 50 varieties?

>tfw there's zero usage of any New World languages as Indians are all mouthwash guzzlers who don't learn their own languages
Euros will never know this feel.

Cherokee is pretty funny. They couldn't be bothered to make their own script so they stole their favorite looking English shapes.

Pic related.

Grammar is a big plus. Super easy.

Japanese is the ultimate "fuck off whitey" language.
Photographic writing, SOV order, and conjugation that's dependent on "politeness level" because fuck you.

Can confirm, Sequoyah Elementary School Alum here.

Arabic would be fairly hard.

Chinese, Korean, Japanese are all pretty hard to read but very easy to hear and speak.

Arabic is a bit complex and a beautiful language.

I speak Persian and it has its own beauties.

For example, "baazee" or بازی means "to play".

"Sar" or سر means head.

Take the "ee" off "baazee" and put "sar" in front.

You have..."sarbaaz". سرباز. In english you would think "oh. head play?" Close. Actually, what does it mean to play with your head? sounds dangerous, right? You could lose it or have it damaged. سرباز or "sarbaaz" actually means soldier. If you were a soldier, you're essentially playing with your head. You could die any day.

Another example. instead of "sar", add "pesar" in front. That means boy. What is a پسرباز or "pesarbaaz"? Someone who plays with boys? IT'S A PEDOPHILE

Persians have excellent taste and a sense of humor. (until you add in the Muslim invasion and Arab influence into Persian culture) Learning languages helps you unlock a barrier that you would have never experienced.


Downside to learning Arabic: every other country has a somewhat suitable place to visit...except Arabic. Even for men. Where are you going to practice your Arabic? Jordan? Lebanon? Kuwait? Saudi Arabia? Those places are not too appetizing.

I would rather learn Russian and visit Russia. Or Hebrew and visit Israel.

Yeah there's a bunch. I'm interested in Levantine; Egyptian is the most common since Arabic media mostly comes from Egypt. There's also Modern Standard Arabic which is academic and universal. The idea is educated Arabs can speak and read it to communicate, whatever their dialect is. It's closely based on koranic Arabic. Most writing in Arabic will be in MSA

> pesarbaaz
> pesar
> pizza

Pizzagate confirmed.

Meant to reply to you

မြန်မာဘာသာစကား

Qûë?

>I speak Persian
Iranian diaspora? Also, I felt Egypt to be a good place to travel but idk what is it like after Arab Springs

Chinese has easy grammar and is easy to speak

BUT

The 4 tones thing also makes it pretty impenetrable to be good at. People will understand you a good chunk of the time if they know the context, but without knowing the tones, it's quite hard to clear up a word they can't guess. You have to fucking explain the word and even then there seems to be a bit of a mental gap because you got the tone wrong.

Also makes sudden topic changes harder.

1. mandarin
2. japanese
3. korean
4. arabic
5. cantonese

good luck

Russian and greek may seem difficult to read at first because the Latin alphabet repeats some characters with different sounds. But I already got used to Russian so it can't be that hard

>Question ¿How do you Ruskys know when to pronunce a rolled R and when to pronounce the other one?

Icelandic.

Its not terribly hard, just the crushing disparity that you can only use it with 300,000 other people trapped on a desolate rock.

intermediate russian learner here. First language is English. Russian really isn't as difficult as some would make it out to be, it uses a slightly different alphabet but still falls under the indo-european category of languages. I would say that Mandarin/Cantonese SEEMS the most difficult because of the inflection system.

That is truly the mission peso question my mexican bro

>¿How[...]?
Fuck, I did not noticed

Greek American here who also took five years of Japanese courses.

Anyone who says Japanese or Greek are absolutely undoubtedly RETARDED RETARDED.

These languages are fucking EASY.

The ONLY hard part about japenese is Kanji. For me at least.

To be considered an educated adult you have to know around 20,000 different Kanji.

But there IS a method to the madness. So it isn't as hard as it sounds but for me it was/is difficult.

Don't forget different pronunciation of kanji depending of context (with aditional sets for names) and specific counters for animals, cars, people and weird ass categories like "long and thin objects".

Chinese also has measure words. Every possible category has one. Fucking hate it.

Are there actually significant differences with Tajik and Dari?

Also, how close are the other languages spoken in Iran (Luri, Mazandarani, Kurdish) to Farsi Persian?

Pheonecian, Abyssarian, Hungarian, Sanskrit, !kung.

Aside from the most common counters, seems that Japanese youth nowadays just use "ko" to count everything, and all animals seem to become "hiki" nowadays.

>20,000 kanji

If you include compound kanji... You only need to know about 6,000 individual kanji to read just about everything tho

The fact that you can fall back to 个 for counters when you don't know them, and not sound too retarded, is nice though.

I also doubt that most 20-somethings can write even the Joyo kanji, though they can recognize about 6000.
Older people can write a scary amount of kanji though.

Japanese is pretty ez

Chinese or Japanese. Both have their own difficult aspects.
Chinese
>tones
>pronunciation
>slang and dialects
>large vocab
>chinese characters
Japanese
>complex writing system, however once you get it, you get it
>lots of grammar shit
>particles and conjugation
>chinese characters
Both are difficult in their own ways.

True, but overuse of 个 makes you stick out like a sore thumb.

The worst is that some don't even make sense. Why are 张and片 different?

尽可能靠近你鲁克玛

I tried learning mandarin, all it got me was a shit keyboard software

your word combination example is nice but it isn't particularly foreign to english, we have quite a few combination words as well even if they aren't immediately obvious.

percent
backspace
microwave

etc.

a lot of them are modern, but you have to take into consideration that pre-modern english had a lot of influence from other languages like german, french, and especially latin, so a lot of combination words mix from them.

I think most 20-somethings could probably write almost all of the joyo kanji, although probably with incorrect stroke order. tbqh I'm not even learning to write the kanji, it's not like I hand write in English as it is...

Actually, I was going through my room the other day and found a scrap of paper with handwriting I didn't recognize. For a moment I was really confused and I was like 'wtf how did this get here?'. After looking at it for a couple more seconds I figured out it was my own hand writing lmao

Japanese is a piece of cake compared to Chinese writing / Mandarin.

Japanese is somewhat similar to western languages - you write according to what you say.

Chinese however is primarily a written language (so the opposite), which is quite intelligent, if you ask me.

And then there are simply ways to speak those symbols out loud. Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.

The good thing: when you can read Chinese, you can also read books, that are 10.000 years old.

The bad thing: when you can read / write Chinese, you have still no idea how to speak it.

Don't you dare criticize Sougou, user.
Spoken Mandarin is easier than written, t-b-h kamarad. You can be a very good conversationalist in Mandarin, but to become truly literate in Chinese requires extra effort.

underrated

Not sure.Moved to Norway, learned Norwegian. Was pretty easy tbqh. Also resembles German in sentence structure, made that easier. Currently learning Spanish and I have to say, what a wank language it is considering it's Latin heritage.

As far as asian languages go,
Chinese probably, because of the whole tones and chinkrunes

Japanese is easier to speak/understand and as far as writing goes it has less use of chinkrunes. The grammar is pretty simple too.

Korean's probably the easiest out of those three since they revised their whole writing system (and dropped chinkrunes completely) a while ago to make it easier to read/write and they also dropped Chinese's tonal bullshit.

A tonal language is hard for English speakers to learn because we don't have tones in English. Many asian languages have tones, chinese, vietnamese, etc.
Native american languages are also hard for English speakers because they are polysynthetic, meaning that what we have as separate words in English they have all on one word as prefixes and suffixes. They also have things like case distinction based on animacy, which doesn't always have clear boundaries.

Just to aff, Hebrew is incredibly difficult. They have tenses that are not present in any other language making it distinct in a way only Jews can understand. They have like 12 words for "sleep" depending on posture, comfort, time of day, if you were alone, how well you slept etc. The majot pro there is there is no way to misinterpret someone's intention or explanation. Very concise language.

Wtf, I want to leen Hebrew now

>Spanish (Done)
>English (Done)
>German (Currently learning in a language school)
>Russian (Learning by my own)
>Hebrew (Sooooon)

I've always wanted to move to Iceland after America gets completely run over by the libtards but the language seems impossible, and I don't want to be a degenerate mooch like the shitskins I'd be leaving because of

God speed. Language learning is quite an interesting and enjoyable hobby. Shame I don't like people, otherwise I might have found use for my skills.

Japanese really isn't that bad. Aside from the kanji its very simple and easy to learn and use.

There is no sentence order besides verb last. Makes it very easy to speak as a beginner because you simply focus on remembering the subject/object/verb you want to say and add the particles, you don't have to remember to order them any which way.

Politeness levels are pretty easy and quite understandable in how they translate to English politeness. I'm not sure why everyone makes such a big deal of it, if anything its nicely structured which appeals to autists like me.

I am shit at interacting, I am living with two germans and they do not even know that I am interested in learning the language when I should be practicing with them (Is it because I got some of my pronunciation from Hiler speeches, idk)

Russian is mostly augmented Greek. Don't be fooled by the upside down and backwards letters. Greek is not hard to learn if you're already fluent in English and know some Latin roots. In fact Greek is easier than English because less vowels and consonants.

I agree on Arabic tho. Friend of mine is learning it and he says there's little overlap.

Did Hitler speak German with an Austrian accent?

>is it because I got some of my pronunciation from Hiler speeches, idk

mah nigga

Japanese really isn't that bad except for kanji. And even then all you really need for that is some kind of flashcard deck to practice every day while you learn the grammar fast and start trying to actually read.

Russian is actually relatively easy to learn once you know what each letter sounds and looks like

I had a teacher from Munich and another from Frankfurt, they seemed to pronounce the "ch" differently

...

Extremely underrated, chuckled very sensibly.

This, the measure words make chinese kinda difficult for me to learn but its not that bad, its just a matter of memorizing them, btw i found that train's measure word is lie4 but my lessons and translate use liang4 , for a car. Which is proper for huoche (train)?

Not politics

Reported

i've heard germans say that he didn't really have an accent when he gave public speeches

>BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE
BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE
>BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE
BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE
>BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE
BORDERS, LANGUAGE, CULTURE

I hope I could learn Japanese one day. Currently learning Spanish as a second language and I'm slowing making progress. I'm currently around A1/A2. I think Spanish is a perfect "starter" secondary language for English speakers because of it's written the same way it's pronounced and it has a similar word order.

This is my daily Spanish learning routine on days I'm not lazy

>A few lessons on Duolingo for more vocab
>Listening to Spanish radio on my commute
>Couple minutes of reading random Spanish media like news, literature, etc.
>Having spanish news or soap operas on in the background

Even though Spanish and Japanese are compelety different languages, I'm guessing the language learning process is similar for both?

Swastikas go clockwise. This is like confusing "b" and "d".

...

...

Both like futas, I do not see that much of a diference

Navajo. Big advantage: there's a reservation full of Navajo speakers in Arizona. No need to leave the US to learn it.

Foreign Service Institute actually released a list of hardest languages for an English speaker to learn. They rate top 4 in difficulty as Arabic, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

They are all hard, but each is a bitch in different ways.

Writing: All have new writing systems, but Chinese and Japanese both require you to learn thousands of characters too.

Speaking: It's quite difficult to pronounce Arabic properly. Japanese pitch accent is a bit tricky but not essential (people will still understand you). Chinese, on the other hand, demands tones, and you will struggle for a long time to be consistent with them.

Listening: Again, Chinese has tones, and it's a major hurdle. Distinguishing Arabic consonants may give some trouble as well. J/K are relatively clear, but deciphering their autistic speech patterns in real time may be quite difficult.

Comprehension / sentence structure / grammar: From an English perspective, Korean and Japanese have very bizarre grammatical structures. Sentences are turned upside down and backwards. Chinese, on the other hand, is extremely efficient and is actually rather English-like. If you translate Chinese literally, the result is something like baby talk. Meanwhile, if you translate Japanese literally, the result is incoherent autistic rambling.

Resources: This matters. Chinese has the most people, so there's a lot of people to talk to. And Japanese has a metric fuckton of very advanced resources online to help you learn, and, as anyone browsing a mongolian image board should know, there's of native media, books, movies, dictionaries of all sorts, etc. to help you. Compare that to learning, say, Urdu, where there's like 2 Urdu-English dictionaries, and they both suck.

But I wanna learn Portugese.

>Chinese
>Easy to hear and speak
GTFO americuck

Japanese on the other hand, even mentally handicapped animu lovers can understand it after a while

Probably those African languages with all those clicks and derks

>if i just memorize 20,000 more squiggles i'll be good enough to find a gook girlfriend

>buddy of mine
>studied Japanese independently throughout high school
>majored in it in college
>landed a job in Tokyo teaching English to elementary aged kids right after graduating
>posts adorable shit on Facebook that his kids do, it's like they worship him
>appears to be making bank
>married to a qt as fug Japanese girl
>living the weeb dream in the land of anime and gaymen

I want a do-over.

youtube.com/watch?v=lrK-XVCwGnI

Until you need to get the Russian grammar right.

who is this qt?

がんばって user-chan.

>Compare that to learning, say, Urdu, where there's like 2 Urdu-English dictionaries, and they both suck.

That's because it's an IE language which adopted Arabic script, just to be different. Devanagari script is superior in every way.

Esperanto because there is no culture to be immersed in. Near fluent mandarin here, shits easy just move there for 2 years

some coal burner
nice trips

>Teachers
>Making bank
>Any country
I mean if he's doing good for himself then good for him, but I would assume he's doing some translation work on the side or something.

They make good cash in China and S.Korea, don't know about Japan though.

Basque. It has no lineage from sanskrit, it's pure stone age caveshit.

Fuck you Norway

I learn Mandarin, Russian and Spanish

The hardest is Mandarin, hands-down from those 3

Maybe Arabic or Hindi is harder though

Mandarin. Some countries like Taiwan use the traditional version instead of the simplified text too, which gets annoying.

Its Willie Komani

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