MrMacphisto
Level of Lime Feather
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I've often wondered this and wished I was multilingual, but what do you think is the hardest language to learn?
My bet's on Chinese -- every dialect. My reasoning for this is that Chinese has an absurd number of characters (sort of like letters); I think it's somewhere around 80,000 in total, although only about 3,500 are used commonly. Another aspect of Chinese that is maddeningly difficult for outsiders is the tonal aspect of the language. Basically, one word can have several different meanings depending on how you pronounce it. To make matters more complicated, some dialects of Chinese have up to 9 different tones (pronounciations) for words.
I guess what makes all of this so ironic is that Chinese is one of the most spoken languages in the world.
Anyway, does anyone else have any candidates for "most difficult language" in the world?
My bet's on Chinese -- every dialect. My reasoning for this is that Chinese has an absurd number of characters (sort of like letters); I think it's somewhere around 80,000 in total, although only about 3,500 are used commonly. Another aspect of Chinese that is maddeningly difficult for outsiders is the tonal aspect of the language. Basically, one word can have several different meanings depending on how you pronounce it. To make matters more complicated, some dialects of Chinese have up to 9 different tones (pronounciations) for words.
I guess what makes all of this so ironic is that Chinese is one of the most spoken languages in the world.
Anyway, does anyone else have any candidates for "most difficult language" in the world?