Having a different word order really doesn't make a language much more difficult. I think a language with tones and distinct phonemes would make more of a difference.
I'd argue this too, yes. As a Spaniard who learnt Japanese at a N2 level, learning that word order was SOV was easy, it was just learning one thing. The difficult part is learning new vocabulary, picking up the tones (vowels are easy for Spaniards but we don't have tones so that's pretty counterintuitive) and of course the writing system.
@@yaaeerrgghhh that question is tricky because I had been interested in Japanese for many years and learning random things before actually starting classes. But since I started classes (for a n5 level) I think it was less than 2 years.
I think something to consider as well is how pronunciations and sounds change across languages. For example, while trying to learn Korean I ran into a couple sounds that don't appear in English and were very difficult for me to replicate. This is really important especially in languages which use the nuance of pronunciation to change the meaning of a word or phrase and can make your language skills seem sloppy
Yes and these sounds are called phenomes.Each language has a specific set of phenomes. Non native speakers just straight up cannot hear or distinguish these. So yeah you are right.
Which is ironic because being a Spanish speaker I just pronounce every Korean word as if it were a Spanish word. I'll occasionally get complimented on my pronunciation.
There is a whole language family in Africa that uses sounds completely foreign to Indo-European speakers to convey not just intention and inflection, but sometimes entire words.
Great point. For instance, Spanish is closer to French than Norwegian, so Spaniards should have it easier to learn it. However, while Norwegian has 8+ vowels, Spanish has only 5. Both Norwegians and Spaniards can have an accent when speaking French, but Norwegians have it "easier" to pronounce vowels (their "u" is closer to French's for example).
I'm from Maracaibo, a city in Venezuela that has a very large wayuu (or guajiros as they're called in Spanish) population. I grew up in a part of the city where a lot of them live, but as far as I remember not a lot of them actually spoke Wayuu. I never knew a lot about the language because of that, only knowing some words (most of them being insults lol). Despite that, a lot of wayuu people from the more rural areas in the north do speak it, but they also speak Spanish as a second language, and to be honest that surprises me a lot, considering how incredibly different both languages are from each other. I never learned wayuu, I don't actually remember hearing anyone speaking wayuu fluently, but I still think it's important to keep alive such an important part of our regional identity. Also now that I moved to the US I guess I will never have the chance to learn it lol
@@diegoalejandroherranaragon8121guajiro is an iffy denonym, wayuu is preffered. also, guajiro is only supposed to be used for people who happen to be from la guajira, not to refer to wayuu ppl
@@gunslinger8781 and i'm also venezuelan and wayuu and im telling you that's incorrect lmao? guajiro refers to people who just inhabit la guajira, doesn't mean wayuu... you guys need to stop referring to us incorrectly
0:07 Cantonese and Mandarin are not "pretty similar". They grouped to different families of Chinese spoken languages and they are non-mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Toisanese, on the other hand, are grouped in the Yuet family of spoken languages and they are mutually intelligible to an extent.
Hi from Riohacha, capital of Colombian department of La Guajira. One of the territories where Wayuunaiki (which is the correct term to call the language in order to differentiate the language from the name of the indigenous tribe that is also present in Venezuela's Zulia State) official. There's another linguistic feature about Wayuunaiki and it is that is a agglutinative language, specially with nouns, where the suffixes must be gendered and those suffixes (being gendered as I said) may also work as particles that describe size, intensity... That's curious considering that they're some subtle differences among the Wayuunaiki variants in the 3 Guajiran regions (North, Middle and South: here in Colombia) vs Venezuelan Wayuunaiki. Otherwise that is mostly a spoken language, despite the fact that there're studies that propose proposals on how to standardize written Wayuunaiki.
as a colombian i felt the peninsula in the thumbnail was very familiar, but i wasn't able to figure out it was la guajira until you mentioned the wayuu language lol, the wayuus are a very prominent indigenous group around these parts and its pretty cool to see them mentioned
Firstly, English is an Indo-European language - not "PROTO-Indo-European". "Proto-Indo-European" is the forefather of all European languages. Secondly, word order is hardly the most important factor when determining language differences. Even for a language with very standardized word order like English, it is not difficult to get used to a different word order. Is understanding Yoda difficult? Is it hard speaking like Yoda? "English Yoda speaks" in OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language.
Thank you for your feedback. However, I disagree with some of your points. First off, you are right about English being an Indo-European language not a Proto-Indo European language. I will add a correction into the description. Thank you. Second, in English significant is word order. Difficult it to comprehend becomes sentences complex when become. In OSV speak Yoda does never in but chunks large. Speakers as English, brains our are sentence structure wired to connect meaning such as specific when as question a asking. You Wayuu to learn completely rewire your brain not connect to but regular sentences to specific meaning. Over and again over. Additionally, you yourself say that "OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language." You say it is unnatural while saying that it is not difficult? I'm sorry but Yoda's short simple sentences in OSV do not make this word order any easier. I think the real problem here is that we fundamentally disagree in how we think word order influences a languages difficultly. Also, OSV is arguably easier to learn as an English speaker due to it sharing the SV order as we have in English (SVO) whereas OVS does not share that similarity (which is Wayuu's base word order). Wayuu also sometimes uses VSO which, again, does not share this similarity.
@@LeafNyeThank you for replying. English uses word order to determine relationships between words. It doesn't mark subject, direct and indirect object. So I would argue that using complex English sentences with mixed up word order as a way of demonstrating the unnaturalness of an alternative word order is cheating. Indeed, if you change everything about the word order like start using prepositions as postpositions it would make it very difficult to understand without first figuring out the new word order. I would argue it would take very little practice to get reaccustomed to a different word order. At least much less so that it would take to get used to grammatical tones or tenseless verbs. Indeed, something as mundane as a radically different verb system with a bunch of irregularities would make a language much more difficult to learn than a different word order. Just to clarify, I indeed said that OSV is unnatural (hardly any language uses it for unmarked sentences), and despite being so unnatural it is still easy enough to get used to. My point is that even with the most unnatural (rare) word oder, getting used to it is not much of a problem.
This comes down to opinion unfortunately. In this video, I have taken an extremely subjective topic and have attempted to make it objective by adding criteria to how the most different language will be narrowed down and selected. I recognize that there are countless ways to rank language difficulty but taking all of them into account would be impossible unless I could somehow make a graph larger than three dimensions. Word order is, from my experience, one of the most significant things in making a language difficult. If you disagree you are entitled to that opinion.
@@LeafNyeIt definitely is subjective, but calling word order the most challenging part of learning a language comes off as a very limited perspective. Languages like Navajo, Georgian, Nuxalk, Piraha, !Xóõ, Tsez, and more push the boundaries of human language in ways that most English speakers would find unfathomable. Any lay person can understand the idea of "apple eat I", but good luck explaining to them Navajo verbs, !Xóõ phonology, Piraha culture, Georgian clusters/ergativity, Nuxalk phonotactics, or Tsez cases. Saying that Wayuu is harder than all of these just because of OSV word order is pretty questionable. Honestly, I bet the word order isn't even the hardest part of learning Wayuu. EDIT: Also, I skimmed that paper... isn't that talking about translation algorithms, not human understanding? The two really aren't similar. Humans are way better at finding patterns, figuring out stuff context, etc.. But even so, all they do is say that translation models perform better on foreign languages when they focus on stuff other than word order. Which like, yeah, makes sense, because use of word order varies dramatically crosslinguistically and even within a single language. It doesn't mean that word order is the most difficult part of learning a language, either for humans or even computers.
Thanks for the comment! I’ll quote a reply I gave to someone “There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary. I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.” Also, I think that resource was scuffed for this topic and I took it down. Again, this topic requires going all the way back to the drawing board and trying to patch holes will not work.
This is the most spoken pre-Columbian language in Colombia, however its native speakers are invisible, there are some references to this people in the movie Encanto
Hard to think that the Colombian government usually neglects these people to the north of our territory. TIL they also live in Venezuela outside of La Guajira (the department/region's name in Colombia). I consider myself highly proficient in English, so it's baffling that a language so close to my native Spanish (geographically, that is) could be overkill for me due to the way my brain is wired at this point.
Fun fact: This Wayuu land at the Northern most part of Venezuela and Colombia border is what gave Venezuela its name. Because, Venuzuela made of Venice (Italian city) and Uela (means small), since this part looks like the Adriatic sea, espically most Northern part of the Adriatic sea, where Vinece located and used to control the whole Adriatic Sea from it. But, in Venezuela (Wayuu), it is the opposite, where the boats enters from the North to South, instead of from South to North as in the Adriatic sea.
I think there are a lot of factors that are being ignored here when considering what makes a language hard to learn from a native English speaking perspective. The number of cases involved, the writing system, and sounds that just don't exist in English are just a few examples of many. This video was more about finding which language would be the least initially intuitive when first learning to speak it. Which doesn't translate to overall difficulty.
Correct. For Wayuunaiki (the correct name of the language, as Wayuu is the name of the tribe), while agglutinations and OVS word order makes it difficult to learn, the use of the latin alphabet and the fact that they only have 5 vowels with both short and long versions, doesn't make it as difficult to learn as other languages like Thai.
Agree, writing system and sounds are key. Chinese is one example of having a pretty simple grammar, mainly SVO, and according to the uploader's graph close to English in the isolating end of the spectrum. However, the different tones, and sounds that don't exist in English plus the writing system, makes it one of the hardest language to learn for an English speaker.
Also, regularity plays a great role. Some languages have a lot of cases, but if every in/from/to has a seperate case which is regular, I think it's easier to learn than if there are all sorts of exceptions.
@@hanesco219 There are officially 6 cases in the Russian language, unofficially 15 cases. There are officially 3 tenses in Russian, unofficially 15 tenses. 225 variants of the same sentence with different meanings. Russian is taught by parents from birth, if a child does not start speaking the official simplified Russian language at the age of 2, then he will not be able to communicate in the future and he will have problems at Russian School and University. Russian is the most difficult school subject in a Russian school, and not Mathematics, Mathematics is only in 2nd place in terms of complexity. If you are not born to speak Russian, you will never learn it the way Russians know it. Russian speakers, at the same time, automatically create complex constructions from the Russian language, going over several hundred answer options in their minds.
I'd like to add another variable: amount of resources. While languages like Japanese or Finnishare fairly different and foreign to English speakers, and have very different grammar, they also have a lot of media and courses to take to learn them, at least compared to more obscure languages with few speakers like say, Ket or Ainu.
This is very true. I remember starting to learn Scots Gaelic many years ago and the amount of material I could find was very scarce. Then after Outlander came out, I believe, there was a resurgence of interest. Even then it was more abundant than many languages I've tried to look into around the world.
You are right, I had to research a long time for english / german resources on the Javanese language even though there are ca. 100 Million speakers. I’ve found some books that are quite academic, expensive and lack audio, one is even in Dutch.
technically the hardest language to learn is the language spoken on north sentinel island, since you have to be the first one to fully translate it and not die.
A big part of language-learning difficulty in practical, logistical terms is just finding the resources to do it. Japanese or Turkish or Finnish are all pretty distant from English too, but you can find educational materials, entertainment media, and real people to communicate with fairly easily. Wayuu qualifies for being very difficult to learn in this way, too.
Similarly, Frisian is really similar to English and theoretically should be easy to learn, but instructional materials are sparse and you pretty much have to travel there and find a native speaker to converse with if you want to learn it.
That's such an excellent point. I've tried to learn Kannada and the resources are scant and often outdated, error ridden and irrelevant. Sorry, Kannadigas. Your language is utterly beautiful but very badly taught. Obviously, this opinion is just based on my personal experience.
I found the same problem when I had the interest to learn Fulani or Kanuri, quite common African languages with 38 and 9 million speakers, yet very few content in English and Spanish (NL), so in order to find material knowing French is the best option.
As a Venezuelan I consider this quite funny and curious, since the most different / difficult language in your opinion is one located in the Country I live. (The Wayuu people, also called as Guajiros are well kwown, specially in the state of Zulia)
@@mpforeverunlimited Did he ever mention the difficulty of Wayuu at all? No. He's a Venezuelan who lives near the Wayuu people. Your answer makes no semantic sense because the FACT that he lives somewhere does not hinder the argument that Wayuu is hard for English speakers.
En Colombia también hay tribus indígenas wayúu en la Guajira, una vez me llevaron a una especie de retiro escolar o jornada pedagógica en quinto de primaria. El colegio nos dejó con un Man que hablaba español y wayúu, era el líder o el "organizador" del retiro, y de lo que me acuerdo se veía jóven pero me sonaba como un sabio. Tristemente nunca lo oí hablar el idioma, y ni le pregunté si me podía decir algo en wayuunaki.
It's Google Translate jank. When you put "Chinese" into Google Translate, the 1st thing you see is "中国人". Technially not wrong, but not what we're searching for. Why is it the 1st thing that pops up?
I would actually like to see a fully- or, or at least moderately- (by the major languages we know) populated chart of the isolating polysynthetic / word order spectrum to get that full visual/conceptual picture of the stratum of human language.
it can only really get to overview level since the definition of the spectrum breaks down once you get more specific there's a distinction made between fusional and agglutinative languages, for example, where fusional languages have fewer affixes that convey more meaning each (i.e. French mang- (stem for 'eat') → mangeaient (they were eating: the 'they', past tense, and imperfect aspects are all conveyed in -aient, rather than separate affixes) agglutinative languages, on the other hand, use more suffixes but each one means closer to a single thing. turkish is a good example, but since I know some bengali I'll use that instead: dekh- (stem for 'see'), → dekh-ecchi-l-am (see-had-past tense-1st person → i had seen) the issue here is that: 1) are agglutinative or fusional languages going to be considered "more polysynthetic"? (we can pretty easily settle this by just saying agglutinative, I guess) and then 2) most languages mix them together! Bengali is mostly agglutinative in its verb, and kinda in the pronouns, but not in say, the definite marker (-gulo means "the" and plural and inanimate in one suffix), so in that way it's more fusional i have to admit though it would be really cool to see an overview kind of version of it i just wanted to explain why that doesnt really super exist
the part about language learning difficulty being dependent on languages you already know is only partially true. for me, as a polish native speaker, it was much easier to learn english than when i was trying to learn russian. vocabulary is only a one thing when trying to learn a language, and i think, languages can be objectively hard, when they have a lot of cases and inconsistent grammar rules. russian is similar enough to polish, to have a shit tone of cases for every word, but different enough, that those cases don't make intuitive sense for a polish speaker. so you basically have to learn all of them, no matter, which languages you already know.
You forgot about cases. If a language has a case system, then the words in a sentence may stand in any possible order: SVO, OVS, etc., because the endings show you the role of each word. So try to find a language with the biggest number of cases.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I think the hardest part for English speakers to learn Cantonese or any related Asian languages is the fact that in these Asian languages, you'd get very different words by raising and lowering the pitch and tone. Even shutting the sound vs. letting the sound last for longer time would result in very different words. On the other side, I think the hardest part for Cantonese speakers to learn English is the tenses. Chinese languages do not have the concept of tenses.
An interesting iteration on these criteria is to factor in learning resources. The methods by which you're taught a language are an important factor in how well you can learn it. But it would probably still be Wayuu because I doubt it ever will be put on Duolingo or something.
it won’t but enough knowledge, you can translate a lot of duolingo’s sentences and words into wayuunaiki (i have translated the whole of unit 1 from chapter 1, so it is possoble)
@@joselugo4536 it was because disease wiped out most taino and the descendants of the ruling and slave population displaced the ones who remained idk about the bahamas tho
This is not actually for sure. With only these dimensions represented, Hungarian can also fall in this category. there are way more dimensions. also the lack of resources is a very hard thing too
As a Cantonese speaker, I think there are 3 main factors that were not mentioned in this video that I think will heavily impact how many issues one faces in learning a language. Firstly, learning the writing system could be challenging - this could be anything from non-phonemic spelling to logograms like in Chinese languages(which I think many non-Chinese/Japanese learners struggle with). Secondly, the availability of resources to learn the language is important. This could be how many speakers one encounter, how many language courses or books there are, how much media in the language etc (this is also true for mostly spoken languages like Chinese languages). Lastly, as others have mentioned having a very different set of phonemic inventory, for example many different consonants, tones, articulations etc. could be challenging to a learner.
I would add a 4th criteria which is whether the language has been standardised or not. It's way easier to learn the national language of a country, because there are for certains many grammar books for it. Learning a language that has no written tradition, but it's primarily spoken would be a nightmare to learn.
@@J.o.s.h.u.a. For me that'd fall under writing system or resource availability; unstandardised languages could be hard to learn because the resources all point to something different, so the resource for what one wants would be a lot more limited.
Also as a Cantonese speaker, I would add a 5th criteria. Cantonese has a lot of unfamiliar and different sounds that make up the language compared to english
"Criteria" is the plural of "criterion". If you have five criteria, then they would be the first criterion, the second criterion, the third criterion, the fourth criterion, and the fifth criterion.
I hate to disagree. I’ve heard it explained this way before. Synthetic languages, like Finnish, are structured more like pyramids. Difficult at first, but they build so that the climb gets easier as you progress. English is like an upside down pyramid. So, you pick it up quick, but as you progress in learning it, the climb becomes almost impossible. While English sticks to SVO order firm enough, everything else about it is ridiculously flexible, and don’t get me started on the loan-words from Norman, German, Latin, old Norse but that doesn’t even include the modern ones that enter our vernacular on a daily basis! To this day I haven’t seen any language evolve as quickly as the radioactive-mutant that is English! I’d add more but this is already too long to read. Just some food for thought.
Hey there! I'm considering learning wayuunaiki, as language enthusiast and as I have some personal links to La Guajira peninsula. However, its polysynthetic nature scares me a lot. As a Spanish native, I appreciate the simple grammar of English or Mandarin, which I'm currently learning. I agree that for those languages, reaching fluency is quite challenging, but I've always assumed it's the same for all languages. My aim with languages is just to get to a conversational level (B2 CEFR or so)... Can you share some more of your experience with Finnish? Do you think Wayuunaiki will have a gentle learning curve for me compared to e.g English?
@@albertopatinosaucedo7888I‘ve studied a couple Uto-Aztecan languages, which I think are somewhere between agglutinative and polysynthetic, and I didn’t find them to be particularly harder than any other language I’ve studied. The only semi-difficult thing would be finding resources, but lots of Native American languages like Yucatec, Nahuatl, Guarani, and Quechua have lots of material available in Spanish and Portuguese. Something that I personally like about these languages is that there is a fixed number of affixes. Once you’ve learned them, constructing sentences is relatively simple. Also, a lot of Native American languages don’t have words for certain modern/academic concepts, so you could get away with just using the English/Spanish word. For context my native language Tagalog is also agglutinative, but the way it organizes thoughts is still pretty different cause it has symmetrical alignment. Anyways, I think you should try to learn Wayuu if you like it! Especially if you’re interested in the culture
What about *Hungarian* ? - Not Indo-European. (Our language is Uralic.) - It's polysynthetic. We can express so much with our prefixes and suffixes. (Some examples: [csinálni = to do], but [megcsinálni = to do something and finish it], [asztal = table], [asztalon = on the table], [asztalról = from the top of the table / about the table] .) - We have a strange word order. Our word order doesn't tell anything about the words' role in the sentences, so we can't speak about SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. We can know the words' role if we know, which suffix means what. For example, the object of a sentence alwas gets a "-t" ending, so if you see a noun ending with "-t", it's maybe the object. Our word order is... Topic-Focus-Verb-Rest? I think... I don't really know what does it mean. 😅 Thanks God, I'm a native speaker, so I don't have to learn this. I can use my language without knowing the grammar rules. So our word order is very different from other languages' word order. It's a different type. +3 factors that you haven't mentioned: - Tones. Some languages are tonal languages, as Mandarin for example. Learning the tones can make a language more difficult, I think. - Alphabet. Many languages have different alphabets. The characters can stand for sounds/letters, only for consonants, for syllables or for words. So what counts: how different the symbols are from latin alphabet, and what they mean. - The direction of writing. OK, it's not too hard to learn that some languages are written from right to left, but it can be a bit confusing. (At least, Hungarian is not a tonal language and it uses the latin alphabet. As I know, Hungarian is the _nightmare of language learners_ . If we used the old Hungarian runes and our language was tonal, Hungarian would be _The Nightmare of Nightmares_ . 😄 *Fun fact:* Old Hungarian runes are written from right to left, so it's 2 in 1.)
Try Rossel (or Yella) Island language. Only in the last 10 years have they worked out how to write it. Rossel Islanders use to learn Missima language to write. Rossel is a Island the last in the chain of islands (on the way to the Solomon Islands) of the Papuan coast.
I think the Hungarian language is the most difficult, because it can be SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VOS, and VSO. But it also has 44 letters like ö, ű, á, é, dzs, etc... And this language is very polysynthetic, and because of this, each verb has at least 16 different forms. But it get's better because also it has 150 thousand plain words without any modifications. And I didn't even talk about the grammar... Also as a native speaker, I can confirm that this language is brain killer to natives as foreigners well. And there is no other language like ours. Everyone says it's similar to Finnish, but it's very different. So Hungarian is the most difficult.
@@ywgmb35 Reading Hungarian is very easy, but writing it is more difficult. (There are situations when it has to be written differently, or when there are exceptions that have no logic.) So, reading Hungarian is the only thing that is an advantage compared to other languages. Maybe the 3 verb tense is better and easier, but nothing else (maybe) ;)
Hahaha, no, you guys still don't have tones. Your language also doesn't require learning 3000+ ideograms to understand written documents like Chinese does.
I speak Chuukese. We use SVO like English and a few loanwords come from English after WWII. (Most of our loanwords are Japanese.) I've watched a few language videos, but the languages that are just too difficult for me to get the grasp of is the languages with clicks in it (example: the Khoisan languages).
Hold the phone, Isolate & isolating shows that English isn't an isolating language, because we are changing the ending right. (Isolate, isolating, isolation, isolations, isolator, isolated, isolates.......)
interesting video although I gotta disagree with your critera. Word order can be a little weird but is so minor compared to other stuff. Plus, you left off a lot of wild stuff that makes languages tough. I would point to: a) not being indo-european or heavily influenced by indo-european. b) phonology & phonotactics (unlikely to be _too_ important but is a real problem if you're learning a caucasian or salishan lang) c) ergativity, because morphosyntactic alignment breaks people d) polypersonal agreement & double marking, because more morphology = more mental overhead. e) irregularities in grammar and writing. f) grammatical gender and systems like it g) cultural differences enshrined in the language (see Korean) h) language-specific nonsense Looking at this, my vote is Navajo. Highly irregular, animacy hierarchy which fucks with word order, polysynthesis, polypersonal agreement, five modes, seven aspects, every word is irregular, evidentiality, categorizational affixes, little IE influence, plus tones, ejectives, and three lateral affricates. Georgian (and other caucasian langs) is another strong contender but the IE influence in the caucuses is too strong. There's probably some salishan lang that's harder tho bc salishan langs are messed up
Thank you for your comment! There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary. I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.
I think that word order shouldn't be much of a factor when considering about how hard that other languages are to learn, 'cause word order's very easy to get used to, as long as that's consistent within those languages. Some languages have word orders that're different in some circumstances(many Germanic languages, for example).
And in some languages the word order doesn't even matter in the same way, anyway. Like in Finnish, word order is (mostly) free because all the information is loaded on the endings. The order can be used to imply what is important in the sentence instead. This is makes fundamendal difference in understanding as demonstrated by this video, since the creator is focusing on the word order as an important thing in the first place
honestly, what about the piraha language, part of the mura language family 1. women and men pronounce words differently at times 2. no recusive sentences 3. no abstract color words other then for light and dark 4. no numbers, only words for small and large amount 5. very agglutinative 6. no distinction between singular and plural, not even in pronouns all extremely different then english
That first point is not entirely true. Firstly, they don't write. Traditionally, pirahã don't have writing. Secondly, it isn't a rule that men and women must talk differently, there just simply is a different in speech affectation between men and women. Which is true in all languages that I've learned anyway. It's just that in the case of pirahã, that results in the 's' sound tending to be pronounced in such a way that it's very weak is basically H. Occasionally you can hear women pronounce the s sound, and sometimes hear men pronounce S like an H. Also, children pronounce S like H because of being around their mother all the time. And if they're boys, they eventually learn to speak like the men through exposure. But it's not a rule as far as I'm aware.
Try learning Navajo. It will blow your mind on the difficulty scale. You also have to keep your lips from moving, as much as possible, as well as grunt a specific way, with each sentence, at the same time.
I heard Basq is so hard to learn that it is impossible to learn it as a foreign language. Also, supposingly, there is no related language since it is the only language in Europe that is not Indo-European.
It's not the most different language possible, just the most different language which we have documentation of. Thracian could've been more different. I think that Wayuu could be made more different by including a complex tonal system and click consonants. Sign languages also count as languages too
YOOOOOOO LETS GOOOO dude its so cool to hear people talk about wayuunaiki, like, ever. its soo underrated. by far my favorite indigenous south american language
Theres a language in southern india called Telugu where you can flip the SOV order into any form just by adding and subtracting required prepositions, and they all make sense most of the times. There is no legal order but people mostly dont mind it. I guess its a convenient thing to have in a a language haha
Also depends on what one focuses on. In Swedish for example, newcomers just can't learn pitch accent well. It's a dead giveaway that someone is not native. You need to learn Swedish from before 12 years old to have no noticeable pitch accidents (!), or be one of the very rare geniuses who can break through that.
oh hey, Wayuunaiki is spoken in my hometown! I'm not a speaker myself, but i was offered free lessons and ive met a lot of people who spoke it. Never thought id see anyone even acknowledge it outside my home
I am a graduate of Japanese (Univ. of Shizuoka). Although I am partly Italian as a native speaker, my mother is German and in fact, I consider myself bilingual. My English is purely the result of my studies. However, I studied and graduated for the second time in Japan. Compared to European languages, Japanese is characterized by great vagueness. To give an example, in Japanese there are neither genders nor numbers regarding words. Accordingly, "友達" which generically means "friend", can mean "male friend, female friend, male friends, female friends". The verbs are almost all regular although I had some difficulty with the "pitch" which is not a tonic accent but rather a raising or lowering of the voice (and it changes from region to region). from a morphological point of view, it appears to be an easy language; from the syntactic point, the structure follows the subject, various complements (movement, possession etc), object complement and finally verb. An SCV structure. I'll give a simple example: 松の木は丘の上にあります Matsunoki wa oka no ue ni arimasu. Matsunoki = the pine tree oka = hill/hill no = of ue = top/upper part ni (place complement) on arimasu = is located/is If translated literally it becomes: pine tree top hill on stand. That is, the pine tree is on top of the hill. I found it very difficult at the beginning. Once one has achieved a certain familiarity with the grammar, the problem of the 3 writing systems remains. Of these 3 systems, only one represents a real challenge: the Kanji
as a Japanese, most difficult part of learning english is articles(a,the) and prural form like car, a car, the car, cars, the cars because that sort of function is nothing in japanese grammar
I watched this entire video and only after that saw how little views it had and honestly if I had to guess I'd say it had at least a few hundred thousand, keep up the good work, amazing!
@@LeafNye In the Russian language you can use any method: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV etc. корова ест траву траву ест корова ест траву корова ест корова траву корова траву ест траву корова ест
Actually, this might be surprisingly easy to learn. Because it's much easier to throw everything you have learned out of the window than to keep some things in. The only thing you need to learn is to dislearn everything you know on the subject, be a blank sheet, and build up from there. When other considerations, from other languages, come in to play, that would make it much more difficult, because they never mean or work the same.
That explains why one of my college friends had such a hard time in English class(in Venezuela). His first language was Wayuunaiki and his second language was Spanish.
4:18 I think it's kind of strange to use a sentence in passive voice (which reverses subject and object) to show a difference in word order between the 2 languages.
This is an amazing amazing video!!! Currently learning Hawaiian so I had a frame for reference. I watch a lot of your UA-cam inspos as well, and I appreciate already your uniquer presentation style. I'm excited to watch the channel grow, it's inevitable!!! Keep it up!
What about the spirit? Languages also have a spirit, which affects how speakers think and see the world around them. English is very analytic---indeed, it assumes that a word is only a word when you can look it up in a dictionary . Whereas Russian is more expressive, and a Russian speaker can invent a word when he cannot think of the right one.
that’s kinda useless to determine which language is the hardest by it’s sentence structure, because in slavic languages there are absolutely no structure and you can say it in any way you want
Title said the actual hardest language to learn, so I thought you were going to go into technical things like: irregularities, cases, multiple plurals, inconsistencies. But no, this is just "hardest language for English speakers to learn". I want to know what the actual hardest language to learn is. No bias from any previously known language.
Its Russian and Chinese. Russian simply has far too complex grammar which makes it so you would never perfectly learn it unless you're doing so since childhood and constantly meet native speakers. Cyrillic and cursed cursive as a cherry on a caje. Chinese is, well, Chinese. Tones, sounds, characters (please - at least go for mandarin) - everything is foreign, nothing is easy. Dialects only make the matter worse, given different usage of characters. However, speaking a close-to-native Chinese is more than possible, even if you start learning it pretty late without living in China, unlike Russian. The main obstacle you'll meet in Chinese would be characters (especially if you want to visit Taiwan or HK), but don't let it discourage you - no one knows all of them. And unlike a slightly more eastern country, there's an actual system in Chinese to help you to understand character's pronunciation. In Russian you would have to care about gender, time, amount, case, if there's some special grammar inside on top of a regular stress. While byou can f up everything and people would still understand you, that hardly means that you would understand them, especially with a completely random word orders. Unless you speak Slavic language - just save your nerves.
I was trying to learn different languages, and one I found difficult wasn't because of the order, it was because I had no idea how to reproduce the sounds. I was trying Icelandic, and it has sounds that are so different to me, I can't even begin to pronounce them. It's the closest language to ancient Nordic (Viking), but there were sounds I had no idea how to copy.
Wow! You really understand languages. This is so interesting to me. I moved to Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines and cannot grasp their language Waray Waray. It is similar to Tagalog which I know a little bit about. Have you ever examined or evaluated Waray Waray? It is the 5th most spoken language in the Philippines.
Do you understand the linguistic term, ergarivity? Or what agglutinative languages are? It doesn't make any sense to not include languages like Finnish/Hungarian or Georgian. Please tell me you researched Georgian for your hard languages presentation.
As an English speaker who knew a good amount of Spanish, I found German slightly challenging but kind of similar to English. Norwegian is like a bridge between English and German
Absolutely agree. Although a (especially dutch/flemish/friesisch/swiss german, not so much high german) would definitively understand more than a native english speaker, not everything, but as a swiss I can usually follow, not word for word, but the topic of a conversation when spoken slowly in Norsk. Dansh would be just as understandable, they just shifted their pronounciation so far back their throats, it became ununderstandable... reading bokmal and danish is equally difficult for me (cant say anything about Nynorsk, never seen/heard that varietie)
As a Turkish, actually Turkish can be opposite of English. We use SOV but the Turkish has sentence flexibility so if I want I can use OVS or VSO or SVO etc. For example: Normal variant (SOV) Ben okula gidiyorum. (I'm going to school.) Flexible variants: OVS -> Okula gidiyorum ben. SVO -> Ben gidiyorum okula. VSO -> Gidiyorum okula ben. It will go everywhere you want. The Turkish is one of synthetic languages because of agglutination. We use too many suffixes. Because of that we can go to eternal with one word. For example: Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından is longest surname in the Turkish. So if we really want we can say "Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarındangillersizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir." This word is accepted as the longest meaningful and probable word in Turkish with 117 letters and it means 'As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından family'. In addition, there is no principled grammatical reason for not being able to make a Turkish word indefinitely long, as there are suffixes that can act recursively on a word stem. In practice, however, such words would become unintelligible after a few cycles of recursion.
For me I have a lot of trouble with highly analytic languages. Especially if they're monosyllabic. This would include chinese, Vietnamese and a few others. I got to around b2 (HSK4) in chinese and it was quite hard. Now I'm studying Thai and it's perhaps even harder
aside from these three a fourth would be tonal languages. yes i suppose mandarin is isolating (although im not sure where the way modifiers are used in chinese would fall into this), but tonal languages are difficult to learn for native nontonal language speakers and vice versa. additionally tonal languages tend to be quite homophonic, which is where the stereotypical "chingchong bingbong" typecast comes from. without learning it all sounds like repeated gibberish.
The premise of this video is basically wrong. A language can be totally different from English and still be relatively easy to learn. Indonesian is a good example. Although like English it's basically SVO, pretty much everything else about it is very different from English. Yet you can make progress in it quickly, even as an English speaker.
As a person who speaks Spanish and English, in the top of my list are Basque and Finnish. Yes, Chinese can be hard, also arabic, but Basque and FInnish are beasts. They work on a similar way, they take a word, and start adding stuff to it, so the word becames insanly big. Also grammar, I just know basic Finnish verbs, but Basque verbs are impossible, even native Basque speakers dont quite understand how verbs work, while Chinese verbs are farely easy. So agree to disagree.
People are mentioning phonemic inventories and tones but I think you should have looked at kind of accent (tone, pitch, stress) and prosody. Both are extremely difficult for non-native speakers to replicate. For example english speakers are abysmal at learning japanese pitch (many failing to even notice it exists despite achieving a very high level in the language otherwise) and it's mora timing (rather than english's syllable stress based system) is also very unnatural for english speakers. Try listening to ESL speakers coming from languages without stress, even if they can pronounce every vowel and consonant and nail their grammar, they almost always still struggle with stress and sound distinctly foreign. It seems almost impossible to learn to perfection whereas you can relatively easily memorize thousands of (non-cognate) words from an unrelated language or adjust to different word order.
"and then we have Mandarin" at 1:50 or so yeah 中国人 means "Chinese", yes, but literally "Chinese person". The Chinese language would be 中文 (at least in written form; spoken is 汉语), and Mandarin specifically is 普通话 It's complicated, so it's an understandable rookie mistake if you don't know the language too well lol
would be even more difficult if it used some of the rarest sounds and had a lot of very long words and used writing system like pinyin or kanji, this would be truly a nightmare language
I've always thought the most difficult language for most people to learn as a second language would be the click languages of southern Africa. It's hard for me to imagine anyone mastering the various click sounds unless they grew up with them.
You forgotten writing. Language isnt just how you speak but its also how you write. In my opinion the hardest language is a language that is hard to write and master from it like Arabic (I'm from Indonesia and a muslim and i still can't write it properly), Mandarin (Due to the amount of Chinese characters you need to know and some have really really hard to write on paper) , Japanese (So many writing systems), etc
I find that English speakers are far more hung up on word order than speakers of most other languages are. The fact is, word order is unusually strict in English. This colors their views of other languages. Many languages, like Ukrainian, have extremely fluid word order. This is NOT as basic a characteristic of languages as English speakers like to think.
Greenlandic is one of the most difficult languages in the world.. Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language belonging to the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages. There is an immense number of suffixes that are added to root words which can be many syllables long and complex enough to serve as an entire sentence. There are also at least three sounds in Greenlandic that don’t exist in English. There are three Greenlandic languages, West Coast Greenlandic, East Coast Greenlandic and Inughuit, the language of the people in the most northern part of Greenland.
The hardest language I have ever seen is Sochiapam Chinantec of Mexico. The phonetics are so difficult, that grammatical and syntactical differences with English pale into insignificance. Check it out.
Ah this reminds me of that index of the world's language features yielding the top 10 most unique/weird languages and the top 10 languages with the most common language features. Cantonese, for example, is in the latter camp, while English is in the former (among languages like Kutenai, Zoue, Mixtec, Nenets, Mandarin etc.).
I think the most difficult language is the language the most isolated from the rest . In that case it might be hungarian since it has minimal connection to languages inside it's family tree , or greenlandic idk .
Word order is such a strange metric for difficulty, especially since you already used another grammar concept, degree of synthesis. New, diffucult sounds or complicated phonotactics have got to be one of the biggest barriers to language learning yet you didn't mention it.
mandarin and cantonese actually are both from middle chinese, as are all the rest of the chinese dialects/languages, except for min, which diverged much earlier
Why do you think order matters? My native language is SOV and I have no problems with learning VSO Tagalog. I think it doesn't matter, you just get used to it really fast.
Having a different word order really doesn't make a language much more difficult. I think a language with tones and distinct phonemes would make more of a difference.
I'd argue this too, yes. As a Spaniard who learnt Japanese at a N2 level, learning that word order was SOV was easy, it was just learning one thing. The difficult part is learning new vocabulary, picking up the tones (vowels are easy for Spaniards but we don't have tones so that's pretty counterintuitive) and of course the writing system.
@@ShiruSama1how long did that take?
@@ShiruSama1but japanese doesn't have tones
@@danielenimri9773 it does have tonal accents (I don't know if that's the exact term either)
@@yaaeerrgghhh that question is tricky because I had been interested in Japanese for many years and learning random things before actually starting classes. But since I started classes (for a n5 level) I think it was less than 2 years.
I think something to consider as well is how pronunciations and sounds change across languages. For example, while trying to learn Korean I ran into a couple sounds that don't appear in English and were very difficult for me to replicate. This is really important especially in languages which use the nuance of pronunciation to change the meaning of a word or phrase and can make your language skills seem sloppy
Yes and these sounds are called phenomes.Each language has a specific set of phenomes. Non native speakers just straight up cannot hear or distinguish these. So yeah you are right.
Which is ironic because being a Spanish speaker I just pronounce every Korean word as if it were a Spanish word. I'll occasionally get complimented on my pronunciation.
Indeed, if we don't take pronunciation into account, Mandarin actually wouldn't be that hard for English speakers.
There is a whole language family in Africa that uses sounds completely foreign to Indo-European speakers to convey not just intention and inflection, but sometimes entire words.
Great point. For instance, Spanish is closer to French than Norwegian, so Spaniards should have it easier to learn it. However, while Norwegian has 8+ vowels, Spanish has only 5. Both Norwegians and Spaniards can have an accent when speaking French, but Norwegians have it "easier" to pronounce vowels (their "u" is closer to French's for example).
Me a Slav: wtf is a fixed word order... 😅
So relatable 🇧🇾
On other hand, we pay for it with lots of different word forms, just to know which role every word plays in the sentence
@@dmytrorekechynsky totally worth it
Same in Uralic languages.
Although, in Finnish, we use different word orders to put emphasis on words.
@@jopeteus same in Russian
I'm from Maracaibo, a city in Venezuela that has a very large wayuu (or guajiros as they're called in Spanish) population. I grew up in a part of the city where a lot of them live, but as far as I remember not a lot of them actually spoke Wayuu. I never knew a lot about the language because of that, only knowing some words (most of them being insults lol).
Despite that, a lot of wayuu people from the more rural areas in the north do speak it, but they also speak Spanish as a second language, and to be honest that surprises me a lot, considering how incredibly different both languages are from each other. I never learned wayuu, I don't actually remember hearing anyone speaking wayuu fluently, but I still think it's important to keep alive such an important part of our regional identity.
Also now that I moved to the US I guess I will never have the chance to learn it lol
Guajiros aren’t wayuus. Wayuu is an indigenous tribe located in La Guajira department.
@@josef3588 Guajiros is just another name to refer to them, But Wayuu is the autonomous name and guajiros is a more generic one.
@@diegoalejandroherranaragon8121guajiro is an iffy denonym, wayuu is preffered. also, guajiro is only supposed to be used for people who happen to be from la guajira, not to refer to wayuu ppl
In Venezuela, we call them guajiros. That is a fact.
@@gunslinger8781 and i'm also venezuelan and wayuu and im telling you that's incorrect lmao? guajiro refers to people who just inhabit la guajira, doesn't mean wayuu... you guys need to stop referring to us incorrectly
0:07 Cantonese and Mandarin are not "pretty similar". They grouped to different families of Chinese spoken languages and they are non-mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Toisanese, on the other hand, are grouped in the Yuet family of spoken languages and they are mutually intelligible to an extent.
Hi from Riohacha, capital of Colombian department of La Guajira. One of the territories where Wayuunaiki (which is the correct term to call the language in order to differentiate the language from the name of the indigenous tribe that is also present in Venezuela's Zulia State) official. There's another linguistic feature about Wayuunaiki and it is that is a agglutinative language, specially with nouns, where the suffixes must be gendered and those suffixes (being gendered as I said) may also work as particles that describe size, intensity... That's curious considering that they're some subtle differences among the Wayuunaiki variants in the 3 Guajiran regions (North, Middle and South: here in Colombia) vs Venezuelan Wayuunaiki. Otherwise that is mostly a spoken language, despite the fact that there're studies that propose proposals on how to standardize written Wayuunaiki.
Ta potente el idioma
@@axelfalcon7189 sí, aglutina mucho
@@AvyBuecelHi, can you speak Guajiro? If you can, would you say that Garifuna and Arawak (Lokono) are mutually intelligible with Guajiro?
@@nicks0aliveI know some Lokono, it doesn't look like Wayuu
as a colombian i felt the peninsula in the thumbnail was very familiar, but i wasn't able to figure out it was la guajira until you mentioned the wayuu language lol, the wayuus are a very prominent indigenous group around these parts and its pretty cool to see them mentioned
como no vas a reconocer a la guajira 😤😤
Maestra, póngale cero en geografía.
I agree with the other comment, how as a Colombian you are not able to easily recognise the Guajira peninsula...
confirmo, pongale cero, literal la razon por la que este video resalto en mi feed de youtube fue por que literalmente vi la cabecita de la guajira :V
Firstly, English is an Indo-European language - not "PROTO-Indo-European". "Proto-Indo-European" is the forefather of all European languages.
Secondly, word order is hardly the most important factor when determining language differences. Even for a language with very standardized word order like English, it is not difficult to get used to a different word order. Is understanding Yoda difficult? Is it hard speaking like Yoda? "English Yoda speaks" in OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language.
Thank you for your feedback. However, I disagree with some of your points.
First off, you are right about English being an Indo-European language not a Proto-Indo European language. I will add a correction into the description. Thank you.
Second, in English significant is word order. Difficult it to comprehend becomes sentences complex when become. In OSV speak Yoda does never in but chunks large. Speakers as English, brains our are sentence structure wired to connect meaning such as specific when as question a asking. You Wayuu to learn completely rewire your brain not connect to but regular sentences to specific meaning. Over and again over.
Additionally, you yourself say that "OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language." You say it is unnatural while saying that it is not difficult? I'm sorry but Yoda's short simple sentences in OSV do not make this word order any easier.
I think the real problem here is that we fundamentally disagree in how we think word order influences a languages difficultly.
Also, OSV is arguably easier to learn as an English speaker due to it sharing the SV order as we have in English (SVO) whereas OVS does not share that similarity (which is Wayuu's base word order). Wayuu also sometimes uses VSO which, again, does not share this similarity.
@@LeafNyeThank you for replying. English uses word order to determine relationships between words. It doesn't mark subject, direct and indirect object. So I would argue that using complex English sentences with mixed up word order as a way of demonstrating the unnaturalness of an alternative word order is cheating. Indeed, if you change everything about the word order like start using prepositions as postpositions it would make it very difficult to understand without first figuring out the new word order. I would argue it would take very little practice to get reaccustomed to a different word order. At least much less so that it would take to get used to grammatical tones or tenseless verbs.
Indeed, something as mundane as a radically different verb system with a bunch of irregularities would make a language much more difficult to learn than a different word order.
Just to clarify, I indeed said that OSV is unnatural (hardly any language uses it for unmarked sentences), and despite being so unnatural it is still easy enough to get used to. My point is that even with the most unnatural (rare) word oder, getting used to it is not much of a problem.
This comes down to opinion unfortunately. In this video, I have taken an extremely subjective topic and have attempted to make it objective by adding criteria to how the most different language will be narrowed down and selected. I recognize that there are countless ways to rank language difficulty but taking all of them into account would be impossible unless I could somehow make a graph larger than three dimensions.
Word order is, from my experience, one of the most significant things in making a language difficult. If you disagree you are entitled to that opinion.
@@LeafNyeIt definitely is subjective, but calling word order the most challenging part of learning a language comes off as a very limited perspective.
Languages like Navajo, Georgian, Nuxalk, Piraha, !Xóõ, Tsez, and more push the boundaries of human language in ways that most English speakers would find unfathomable. Any lay person can understand the idea of "apple eat I", but good luck explaining to them Navajo verbs, !Xóõ phonology, Piraha culture, Georgian clusters/ergativity, Nuxalk phonotactics, or Tsez cases.
Saying that Wayuu is harder than all of these just because of OSV word order is pretty questionable. Honestly, I bet the word order isn't even the hardest part of learning Wayuu.
EDIT: Also, I skimmed that paper... isn't that talking about translation algorithms, not human understanding? The two really aren't similar. Humans are way better at finding patterns, figuring out stuff context, etc.. But even so, all they do is say that translation models perform better on foreign languages when they focus on stuff other than word order. Which like, yeah, makes sense, because use of word order varies dramatically crosslinguistically and even within a single language. It doesn't mean that word order is the most difficult part of learning a language, either for humans or even computers.
Thanks for the comment! I’ll quote a reply I gave to someone “There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary.
I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.”
Also, I think that resource was scuffed for this topic and I took it down. Again, this topic requires going all the way back to the drawing board and trying to patch holes will not work.
This is the most spoken pre-Columbian language in Colombia, however its native speakers are invisible, there are some references to this people in the movie Encanto
Hard to think that the Colombian government usually neglects these people to the north of our territory. TIL they also live in Venezuela outside of La Guajira (the department/region's name in Colombia).
I consider myself highly proficient in English, so it's baffling that a language so close to my native Spanish (geographically, that is) could be overkill for me due to the way my brain is wired at this point.
Fun fact: This Wayuu land at the Northern most part of Venezuela and Colombia border is what gave Venezuela its name.
Because, Venuzuela made of Venice (Italian city) and Uela (means small), since this part looks like the Adriatic sea, espically most Northern part of the Adriatic sea, where Vinece located and used to control the whole Adriatic Sea from it. But, in Venezuela (Wayuu), it is the opposite, where the boats enters from the North to South, instead of from South to North as in the Adriatic sea.
I think there are a lot of factors that are being ignored here when considering what makes a language hard to learn from a native English speaking perspective. The number of cases involved, the writing system, and sounds that just don't exist in English are just a few examples of many. This video was more about finding which language would be the least initially intuitive when first learning to speak it. Which doesn't translate to overall difficulty.
Excellent points.
Correct. For Wayuunaiki (the correct name of the language, as Wayuu is the name of the tribe), while agglutinations and OVS word order makes it difficult to learn, the use of the latin alphabet and the fact that they only have 5 vowels with both short and long versions, doesn't make it as difficult to learn as other languages like Thai.
Agree, writing system and sounds are key. Chinese is one example of having a pretty simple grammar, mainly SVO, and according to the uploader's graph close to English in the isolating end of the spectrum.
However, the different tones, and sounds that don't exist in English plus the writing system, makes it one of the hardest language to learn for an English speaker.
Also, regularity plays a great role. Some languages have a lot of cases, but if every in/from/to has a seperate case which is regular, I think it's easier to learn than if there are all sorts of exceptions.
@@hanesco219 There are officially 6 cases in the Russian language, unofficially 15 cases. There are officially 3 tenses in Russian, unofficially 15 tenses. 225 variants of the same sentence with different meanings. Russian is taught by parents from birth, if a child does not start speaking the official simplified Russian language at the age of 2, then he will not be able to communicate in the future and he will have problems at Russian School and University. Russian is the most difficult school subject in a Russian school, and not Mathematics, Mathematics is only in 2nd place in terms of complexity. If you are not born to speak Russian, you will never learn it the way Russians know it. Russian speakers, at the same time, automatically create complex constructions from the Russian language, going over several hundred answer options in their minds.
I'd like to add another variable: amount of resources. While languages like Japanese or Finnishare fairly different and foreign to English speakers, and have very different grammar, they also have a lot of media and courses to take to learn them, at least compared to more obscure languages with few speakers like say, Ket or Ainu.
This is very true. I remember starting to learn Scots Gaelic many years ago and the amount of material I could find was very scarce. Then after Outlander came out, I believe, there was a resurgence of interest. Even then it was more abundant than many languages I've tried to look into around the world.
You are right, I had to research a long time for english / german resources on the Javanese language even though there are ca. 100 Million speakers. I’ve found some books that are quite academic, expensive and lack audio, one is even in Dutch.
technically the hardest language to learn is the language spoken on north sentinel island, since you have to be the first one to fully translate it and not die.
Lol
A big part of language-learning difficulty in practical, logistical terms is just finding the resources to do it. Japanese or Turkish or Finnish are all pretty distant from English too, but you can find educational materials, entertainment media, and real people to communicate with fairly easily.
Wayuu qualifies for being very difficult to learn in this way, too.
Similarly, Frisian is really similar to English and theoretically should be easy to learn, but instructional materials are sparse and you pretty much have to travel there and find a native speaker to converse with if you want to learn it.
That's such an excellent point. I've tried to learn Kannada and the resources are scant and often outdated, error ridden and irrelevant. Sorry, Kannadigas. Your language is utterly beautiful but very badly taught. Obviously, this opinion is just based on my personal experience.
I found the same problem when I had the interest to learn Fulani or Kanuri, quite common African languages with 38 and 9 million speakers, yet very few content in English and Spanish (NL), so in order to find material knowing French is the best option.
As a Venezuelan I consider this quite funny and curious, since the most different / difficult language in your opinion is one located in the Country I live. (The Wayuu people, also called as Guajiros are well kwown, specially in the state of Zulia)
English isn't your first language though, so it doesn't quite apply to you
@@mpforeverunlimited Did he ever mention the difficulty of Wayuu at all? No. He's a Venezuelan who lives near the Wayuu people. Your answer makes no semantic sense because the FACT that he lives somewhere does not hinder the argument that Wayuu is hard for English speakers.
En Colombia también hay tribus indígenas wayúu en la Guajira, una vez me llevaron a una especie de retiro escolar o jornada pedagógica en quinto de primaria. El colegio nos dejó con un Man que hablaba español y wayúu, era el líder o el "organizador" del retiro, y de lo que me acuerdo se veía jóven pero me sonaba como un sabio. Tristemente nunca lo oí hablar el idioma, y ni le pregunté si me podía decir algo en wayuunaki.
@@mpforeverunlimited that doesn't change anything though? 😭
@@philswiftreligioussect9619obvio que si bro son de nuestro territorio…. Sino estoy mal diomedes Díaz es de ese origen…
Correction: at 1:52, you put 中国人 which literally means ‘Chinese person’ instead of 中文 or 汉语 which means Chinese language.
汉语 too
It's Google Translate jank.
When you put "Chinese" into Google Translate, the 1st thing you see is "中国人".
Technially not wrong, but not what we're searching for. Why is it the 1st thing that pops up?
In Japanese, it is spelled “中国語”. We understand the word “中文”but cannot pronounce it correctly.
I would actually like to see a fully- or, or at least moderately- (by the major languages we know) populated chart of the isolating polysynthetic / word order spectrum to get that full visual/conceptual picture of the stratum of human language.
it can only really get to overview level since the definition of the spectrum breaks down once you get more specific
there's a distinction made between fusional and agglutinative languages, for example, where fusional languages have fewer affixes that convey more meaning each (i.e. French mang- (stem for 'eat') → mangeaient (they were eating: the 'they', past tense, and imperfect aspects are all conveyed in -aient, rather than separate affixes)
agglutinative languages, on the other hand, use more suffixes but each one means closer to a single thing. turkish is a good example, but since I know some bengali I'll use that instead: dekh- (stem for 'see'), → dekh-ecchi-l-am (see-had-past tense-1st person → i had seen)
the issue here is that: 1) are agglutinative or fusional languages going to be considered "more polysynthetic"? (we can pretty easily settle this by just saying agglutinative, I guess) and then 2) most languages mix them together! Bengali is mostly agglutinative in its verb, and kinda in the pronouns, but not in say, the definite marker (-gulo means "the" and plural and inanimate in one suffix), so in that way it's more fusional
i have to admit though it would be really cool to see an overview kind of version of it i just wanted to explain why that doesnt really super exist
the part about language learning difficulty being dependent on languages you already know is only partially true. for me, as a polish native speaker, it was much easier to learn english than when i was trying to learn russian. vocabulary is only a one thing when trying to learn a language, and i think, languages can be objectively hard, when they have a lot of cases and inconsistent grammar rules.
russian is similar enough to polish, to have a shit tone of cases for every word, but different enough, that those cases don't make intuitive sense for a polish speaker. so you basically have to learn all of them, no matter, which languages you already know.
Saya suka Polandia. 🇮🇩😂 from Indonesian
Yeah, i speak english and Spanish, so the romance languages are easier to learn. For example Portuguese is the most similar to spanish.
@@SpartanChief2277 it's easy to learn, because they are simple languages
@@carkawalakhatulistiwaYou can flip the flag of one country to get the other.
@@alexzhukovsky8361 all languages are equally hard. there is no "simple" language
Greetings from Colombia, these are really good facts to know!
You forgot about cases. If a language has a case system, then the words in a sentence may stand in any possible order: SVO, OVS, etc., because the endings show you the role of each word. So try to find a language with the biggest number of cases.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I think the hardest part for English speakers to learn Cantonese or any related Asian languages is the fact that in these Asian languages, you'd get very different words by raising and lowering the pitch and tone. Even shutting the sound vs. letting the sound last for longer time would result in very different words. On the other side, I think the hardest part for Cantonese speakers to learn English is the tenses. Chinese languages do not have the concept of tenses.
An interesting iteration on these criteria is to factor in learning resources. The methods by which you're taught a language are an important factor in how well you can learn it. But it would probably still be Wayuu because I doubt it ever will be put on Duolingo or something.
it won’t but enough knowledge, you can translate a lot of duolingo’s sentences and words into wayuunaiki (i have translated the whole of unit 1 from chapter 1, so it is possoble)
At 2:07 you write 中国人 which means Chinese person, not the Chinese language which would be 中文
Thank you for telling me, I realized this too but unfortunately the video was already published so I couldn't change it :/
Any language you don't understand is hard
this is about difficulty to learn though, your statement provides no value
@@osuplaeyurreallygood
Your comment has no value.
I love how UA-cam subtitles wrote "Wayuu" as "Why you"
Funny to think that an ARAWAKAN language is so opposite to English.
how is it funny? I’ve never heard anything about arawak languages being englishy
@@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543 Perhaps that's the reason in the Bahamas and Jamaica the Arawak's legacy was so throughly erased.
@@joselugo4536 it was because disease wiped out most taino and the descendants of the ruling and slave population displaced the ones who remained
idk about the bahamas tho
@@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543 Well now, there's more Arawakan DNA in the Spanish Speaking Caribbean than in 1491!
How so? Explain!
This is not actually for sure.
With only these dimensions represented, Hungarian can also fall in this category.
there are way more dimensions.
also the lack of resources is a very hard thing too
As a Cantonese speaker, I think there are 3 main factors that were not mentioned in this video that I think will heavily impact how many issues one faces in learning a language. Firstly, learning the writing system could be challenging - this could be anything from non-phonemic spelling to logograms like in Chinese languages(which I think many non-Chinese/Japanese learners struggle with). Secondly, the availability of resources to learn the language is important. This could be how many speakers one encounter, how many language courses or books there are, how much media in the language etc (this is also true for mostly spoken languages like Chinese languages). Lastly, as others have mentioned having a very different set of phonemic inventory, for example many different consonants, tones, articulations etc. could be challenging to a learner.
I would add a 4th criteria which is whether the language has been standardised or not. It's way easier to learn the national language of a country, because there are for certains many grammar books for it. Learning a language that has no written tradition, but it's primarily spoken would be a nightmare to learn.
@@J.o.s.h.u.a. For me that'd fall under writing system or resource availability; unstandardised languages could be hard to learn because the resources all point to something different, so the resource for what one wants would be a lot more limited.
Also as a Cantonese speaker, I would add a 5th criteria. Cantonese has a lot of unfamiliar and different sounds that make up the language compared to english
"Criteria" is the plural of "criterion". If you have five criteria, then they would be the first criterion, the second criterion, the third criterion, the fourth criterion, and the fifth criterion.
I hate to disagree. I’ve heard it explained this way before. Synthetic languages, like Finnish, are structured more like pyramids. Difficult at first, but they build so that the climb gets easier as you progress. English is like an upside down pyramid. So, you pick it up quick, but as you progress in learning it, the climb becomes almost impossible.
While English sticks to SVO order firm enough, everything else about it is ridiculously flexible, and don’t get me started on the loan-words from Norman, German, Latin, old Norse but that doesn’t even include the modern ones that enter our vernacular on a daily basis! To this day I haven’t seen any language evolve as quickly as the radioactive-mutant that is English!
I’d add more but this is already too long to read. Just some food for thought.
English is changing and some rules are being ignored. I guess it also has to do with all the various English speaking countries.
Hey there! I'm considering learning wayuunaiki, as language enthusiast and as I have some personal links to La Guajira peninsula. However, its polysynthetic nature scares me a lot. As a Spanish native, I appreciate the simple grammar of English or Mandarin, which I'm currently learning. I agree that for those languages, reaching fluency is quite challenging, but I've always assumed it's the same for all languages. My aim with languages is just to get to a conversational level (B2 CEFR or so)... Can you share some more of your experience with Finnish? Do you think Wayuunaiki will have a gentle learning curve for me compared to e.g English?
@@albertopatinosaucedo7888I‘ve studied a couple Uto-Aztecan languages, which I think are somewhere between agglutinative and polysynthetic, and I didn’t find them to be particularly harder than any other language I’ve studied. The only semi-difficult thing would be finding resources, but lots of Native American languages like Yucatec, Nahuatl, Guarani, and Quechua have lots of material available in Spanish and Portuguese. Something that I personally like about these languages is that there is a fixed number of affixes. Once you’ve learned them, constructing sentences is relatively simple. Also, a lot of Native American languages don’t have words for certain modern/academic concepts, so you could get away with just using the English/Spanish word. For context my native language Tagalog is also agglutinative, but the way it organizes thoughts is still pretty different cause it has symmetrical alignment. Anyways, I think you should try to learn Wayuu if you like it! Especially if you’re interested in the culture
What about *Hungarian* ?
- Not Indo-European. (Our language is Uralic.)
- It's polysynthetic. We can express so much with our prefixes and suffixes. (Some examples: [csinálni = to do], but [megcsinálni = to do something and finish it], [asztal = table], [asztalon = on the table], [asztalról = from the top of the table / about the table] .)
- We have a strange word order. Our word order doesn't tell anything about the words' role in the sentences, so we can't speak about SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. We can know the words' role if we know, which suffix means what. For example, the object of a sentence alwas gets a "-t" ending, so if you see a noun ending with "-t", it's maybe the object. Our word order is... Topic-Focus-Verb-Rest? I think... I don't really know what does it mean. 😅 Thanks God, I'm a native speaker, so I don't have to learn this. I can use my language without knowing the grammar rules. So our word order is very different from other languages' word order. It's a different type.
+3 factors that you haven't mentioned:
- Tones. Some languages are tonal languages, as Mandarin for example. Learning the tones can make a language more difficult, I think.
- Alphabet. Many languages have different alphabets. The characters can stand for sounds/letters, only for consonants, for syllables or for words. So what counts: how different the symbols are from latin alphabet, and what they mean.
- The direction of writing. OK, it's not too hard to learn that some languages are written from right to left, but it can be a bit confusing.
(At least, Hungarian is not a tonal language and it uses the latin alphabet. As I know, Hungarian is the _nightmare of language learners_ . If we used the old Hungarian runes and our language was tonal, Hungarian would be _The Nightmare of Nightmares_ . 😄
*Fun fact:* Old Hungarian runes are written from right to left, so it's 2 in 1.)
Try Rossel (or Yella) Island language. Only in the last 10 years have they worked out how to write it. Rossel Islanders use to learn Missima language to write. Rossel is a Island the last in the chain of islands (on the way to the Solomon Islands) of the Papuan coast.
I think the Hungarian language is the most difficult, because it can be SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VOS, and VSO. But it also has 44 letters like ö, ű, á, é, dzs, etc... And this language is very polysynthetic, and because of this, each verb has at least 16 different forms. But it get's better because also it has 150 thousand plain words without any modifications. And I didn't even talk about the grammar... Also as a native speaker, I can confirm that this language is brain killer to natives as foreigners well. And there is no other language like ours. Everyone says it's similar to Finnish, but it's very different. So Hungarian is the most difficult.
No, Inuktitut and Greenlandic are MUCH harder than Hungarian!
@@Noradory Hungarian is much easier to read and write, though. That also makes a huge difference.
@@ywgmb35 Reading Hungarian is very easy, but writing it is more difficult. (There are situations when it has to be written differently, or when there are exceptions that have no logic.) So, reading Hungarian is the only thing that is an advantage compared to other languages. Maybe the 3 verb tense is better and easier, but nothing else (maybe) ;)
Hahaha, no, you guys still don't have tones. Your language also doesn't require learning 3000+ ideograms to understand written documents like Chinese does.
I speak Chuukese. We use SVO like English and a few loanwords come from English after WWII. (Most of our loanwords are Japanese.) I've watched a few language videos, but the languages that are just too difficult for me to get the grasp of is the languages with clicks in it (example: the Khoisan languages).
Hold the phone, Isolate & isolating shows that English isn't an isolating language, because we are changing the ending right. (Isolate, isolating, isolation, isolations, isolator, isolated, isolates.......)
interesting video although I gotta disagree with your critera. Word order can be a little weird but is so minor compared to other stuff. Plus, you left off a lot of wild stuff that makes languages tough.
I would point to:
a) not being indo-european or heavily influenced by indo-european.
b) phonology & phonotactics (unlikely to be _too_ important but is a real problem if you're learning a caucasian or salishan lang)
c) ergativity, because morphosyntactic alignment breaks people
d) polypersonal agreement & double marking, because more morphology = more mental overhead.
e) irregularities in grammar and writing.
f) grammatical gender and systems like it
g) cultural differences enshrined in the language (see Korean)
h) language-specific nonsense
Looking at this, my vote is Navajo. Highly irregular, animacy hierarchy which fucks with word order, polysynthesis, polypersonal agreement, five modes, seven aspects, every word is irregular, evidentiality, categorizational affixes, little IE influence, plus tones, ejectives, and three lateral affricates. Georgian (and other caucasian langs) is another strong contender but the IE influence in the caucuses is too strong. There's probably some salishan lang that's harder tho bc salishan langs are messed up
Thank you for your comment! There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary.
I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.
@@LeafNyetelugu is similar in this regard. Could you cover it?
I’m pretty sure Navajo is hard for almost everyone. There’s a reason Japan couldn’t crack US communications during WWII.
I think that word order shouldn't be much of a factor when considering about how hard that other languages are to learn, 'cause word order's very easy to get used to, as long as that's consistent within those languages. Some languages have word orders that're different in some circumstances(many Germanic languages, for example).
And in some languages the word order doesn't even matter in the same way, anyway. Like in Finnish, word order is (mostly) free because all the information is loaded on the endings. The order can be used to imply what is important in the sentence instead.
This is makes fundamendal difference in understanding as demonstrated by this video, since the creator is focusing on the word order as an important thing in the first place
honestly, what about the piraha language, part of the mura language family
1. women and men pronounce words differently at times
2. no recusive sentences
3. no abstract color words other then for light and dark
4. no numbers, only words for small and large amount
5. very agglutinative
6. no distinction between singular and plural, not even in pronouns
all extremely different then english
Transgenders just be incorrect Ig
That first point is not entirely true. Firstly, they don't write. Traditionally, pirahã don't have writing.
Secondly, it isn't a rule that men and women must talk differently, there just simply is a different in speech affectation between men and women. Which is true in all languages that I've learned anyway. It's just that in the case of pirahã, that results in the 's' sound tending to be pronounced in such a way that it's very weak is basically H.
Occasionally you can hear women pronounce the s sound, and sometimes hear men pronounce S like an H. Also, children pronounce S like H because of being around their mother all the time. And if they're boys, they eventually learn to speak like the men through exposure.
But it's not a rule as far as I'm aware.
@@ComradeGiru oh, thanks. i was just going off memory when i made the post. ill edit it later to fix.
isn't it a language isolate tho?
@@Woistwahrheit What do trans people have to do with anything
Try learning Navajo. It will blow your mind on the difficulty scale. You also have to keep your lips from moving, as much as possible, as well as grunt a specific way, with each sentence, at the same time.
I heard Basq is so hard to learn that it is impossible to learn it as a foreign language. Also, supposingly, there is no related language since it is the only language in Europe that is not Indo-European.
It's not the most different language possible, just the most different language which we have documentation of. Thracian could've been more different. I think that Wayuu could be made more different by including a complex tonal system and click consonants. Sign languages also count as languages too
YOOOOOOO
LETS GOOOO
dude its so cool to hear people talk about wayuunaiki, like, ever. its soo underrated. by far my favorite indigenous south american language
its my tribe’s language and im learning it, and yeah its really hard 😭
@@ap0llo. How do you learn it ?
Wonder where Xhosa falls on your chart? One thing for sure, it may be one of the hardest to speak!
Theres a language in southern india called Telugu where you can flip the SOV order into any form just by adding and subtracting required prepositions, and they all make sense most of the times. There is no legal order but people mostly dont mind it. I guess its a convenient thing to have in a a language haha
Also depends on what one focuses on. In Swedish for example, newcomers just can't learn pitch accent well. It's a dead giveaway that someone is not native. You need to learn Swedish from before 12 years old to have no noticeable pitch accidents (!), or be one of the very rare geniuses who can break through that.
oh hey, Wayuunaiki is spoken in my hometown! I'm not a speaker myself, but i was offered free lessons and ive met a lot of people who spoke it. Never thought id see anyone even acknowledge it outside my home
Languages can be quite different on some places
I am a graduate of Japanese (Univ. of Shizuoka). Although I am partly Italian as a native speaker, my mother is German and in fact, I consider myself bilingual.
My English is purely the result of my studies.
However, I studied and graduated for the second time in Japan. Compared to European languages, Japanese is characterized by great vagueness. To give an example, in Japanese there are neither genders nor numbers regarding words. Accordingly, "友達" which generically means "friend", can mean "male friend, female friend, male friends, female friends". The verbs are almost all regular although I had some difficulty with the "pitch" which is not a tonic accent but rather a raising or lowering of the voice (and it changes from region to region). from a morphological point of view, it appears to be an easy language; from the syntactic point, the structure follows the subject, various complements (movement, possession etc), object complement and finally verb. An SCV structure.
I'll give a simple example:
松の木は丘の上にあります
Matsunoki wa oka no ue ni arimasu.
Matsunoki = the pine tree
oka = hill/hill
no = of
ue = top/upper part
ni (place complement) on
arimasu = is located/is
If translated literally it becomes:
pine tree top hill on stand. That is, the pine tree is on top of the hill.
I found it very difficult at the beginning.
Once one has achieved a certain familiarity with the grammar, the problem of the 3 writing systems remains. Of these 3 systems, only one represents a real challenge: the Kanji
Ubykh language had 82 consonants. Whatever your hardest language was, it cant deal with that.
I think head-initial vs hear-final would be a lot more indicative of difficulty than word order.
as a Japanese, most difficult part of learning english is articles(a,the) and prural form
like car, a car, the car, cars, the cars
because that sort of function is nothing in japanese grammar
I watched this entire video and only after that saw how little views it had and honestly if I had to guess I'd say it had at least a few hundred thousand, keep up the good work, amazing!
Thanks for the comment! I do plan on keeping up the work!
@@LeafNye In the Russian language you can use any method: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV etc.
корова ест траву
траву ест корова
ест траву корова
ест корова траву
корова траву ест
траву корова ест
Hmmmmmmm if we were to include conlangs, what about ithkuil?
As a greek i have to say having a VOS, SOV, VOS and other patterns is a crazy skill issue.
Actually, this might be surprisingly easy to learn. Because it's much easier to throw everything you have learned out of the window than to keep some things in. The only thing you need to learn is to dislearn everything you know on the subject, be a blank sheet, and build up from there. When other considerations, from other languages, come in to play, that would make it much more difficult, because they never mean or work the same.
That explains why one of my college friends had such a hard time in English class(in Venezuela). His first language was Wayuunaiki and his second language was Spanish.
4:18 I think it's kind of strange to use a sentence in passive voice (which reverses subject and object) to show a difference in word order between the 2 languages.
This is an amazing amazing video!!! Currently learning Hawaiian so I had a frame for reference. I watch a lot of your UA-cam inspos as well, and I appreciate already your uniquer presentation style. I'm excited to watch the channel grow, it's inevitable!!! Keep it up!
Thanks for the support! I really appreciate it!
Currently the proud owner of a cluster of phrases of NZ Maori, which is a near relative of Hawai'ian. Good luck with it
What about the spirit? Languages also have a spirit, which affects how speakers think and see the world around them. English is very analytic---indeed, it assumes that a word is only a word when you can look it up in a dictionary . Whereas Russian is more expressive, and a Russian speaker can invent a word when he cannot think of the right one.
that’s kinda useless to determine which language is the hardest by it’s sentence structure, because in slavic languages there are absolutely no structure and you can say it in any way you want
Title said the actual hardest language to learn, so I thought you were going to go into technical things like: irregularities, cases, multiple plurals, inconsistencies.
But no, this is just "hardest language for English speakers to learn". I want to know what the actual hardest language to learn is. No bias from any previously known language.
Its Russian and Chinese.
Russian simply has far too complex grammar which makes it so you would never perfectly learn it unless you're doing so since childhood and constantly meet native speakers. Cyrillic and cursed cursive as a cherry on a caje.
Chinese is, well, Chinese. Tones, sounds, characters (please - at least go for mandarin) - everything is foreign, nothing is easy. Dialects only make the matter worse, given different usage of characters. However, speaking a close-to-native Chinese is more than possible, even if you start learning it pretty late without living in China, unlike Russian.
The main obstacle you'll meet in Chinese would be characters (especially if you want to visit Taiwan or HK), but don't let it discourage you - no one knows all of them. And unlike a slightly more eastern country, there's an actual system in Chinese to help you to understand character's pronunciation.
In Russian you would have to care about gender, time, amount, case, if there's some special grammar inside on top of a regular stress. While byou can f up everything and people would still understand you, that hardly means that you would understand them, especially with a completely random word orders. Unless you speak Slavic language - just save your nerves.
I was trying to learn different languages, and one I found difficult wasn't because of the order, it was because I had no idea how to reproduce the sounds. I was trying Icelandic, and it has sounds that are so different to me, I can't even begin to pronounce them. It's the closest language to ancient Nordic (Viking), but there were sounds I had no idea how to copy.
Title: what is the hardest language.
What video is actually about: what language is the most DIFFERENT from english, but not necessarily the hardest.
3:30Why you?
The hardest language to learn must be Sentinelese, since they don't let any strangers land on their island.
You are quite late. This joke has been used for years.
@@SeptemberChild1835 What's funny about it?
@@redplanetzeal1461 Exactly.
Wow! You really understand languages. This is so interesting to me. I moved to Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines and cannot grasp their language Waray Waray. It is similar to Tagalog which I know a little bit about. Have you ever examined or evaluated Waray Waray? It is the 5th most spoken language in the Philippines.
Do you understand the linguistic term, ergarivity? Or what agglutinative languages are? It doesn't make any sense to not include languages like Finnish/Hungarian or Georgian. Please tell me you researched Georgian for your hard languages presentation.
oh yes, La Guajira mentioned. Btw i just had a class of WayuuNaiki last week, what would be the odds
As an English speaker who knew a good amount of Spanish, I found German slightly challenging but kind of similar to English. Norwegian is like a bridge between English and German
Absolutely agree. Although a (especially dutch/flemish/friesisch/swiss german, not so much high german) would definitively understand more than a native english speaker, not everything, but as a swiss I can usually follow, not word for word, but the topic of a conversation when spoken slowly in Norsk. Dansh would be just as understandable, they just shifted their pronounciation so far back their throats, it became ununderstandable... reading bokmal and danish is equally difficult for me (cant say anything about Nynorsk, never seen/heard that varietie)
There's a new hypothesis that English is more closely related to Norwegian than German.
As a Turkish, actually Turkish can be opposite of English. We use SOV but the Turkish has sentence flexibility so if I want I can use OVS or VSO or SVO etc.
For example:
Normal variant (SOV) Ben okula gidiyorum. (I'm going to school.)
Flexible variants:
OVS -> Okula gidiyorum ben.
SVO -> Ben gidiyorum okula.
VSO -> Gidiyorum okula ben.
It will go everywhere you want.
The Turkish is one of synthetic languages because of agglutination. We use too many suffixes. Because of that we can go to eternal with one word.
For example: Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından is longest surname in the Turkish. So if we really want we can say "Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarındangillersizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir." This word is accepted as the longest meaningful and probable word in Turkish with 117 letters and it means 'As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından family'. In addition, there is no principled grammatical reason for not being able to make a Turkish word indefinitely long, as there are suffixes that can act recursively on a word stem. In practice, however, such words would become unintelligible after a few cycles of recursion.
For me I have a lot of trouble with highly analytic languages. Especially if they're monosyllabic. This would include chinese, Vietnamese and a few others. I got to around b2 (HSK4) in chinese and it was quite hard. Now I'm studying Thai and it's perhaps even harder
aside from these three a fourth would be tonal languages. yes i suppose mandarin is isolating (although im not sure where the way modifiers are used in chinese would fall into this), but tonal languages are difficult to learn for native nontonal language speakers and vice versa. additionally tonal languages tend to be quite homophonic, which is where the stereotypical "chingchong bingbong" typecast comes from. without learning it all sounds like repeated gibberish.
I think my vote would go to Lardil. Tense markings on *nouns* ?
And I raise you Damin...
the prerequisites are probably enough to turn almost everyone away
The premise of this video is basically wrong. A language can be totally different from English and still be relatively easy to learn. Indonesian is a good example. Although like English it's basically SVO, pretty much everything else about it is very different from English. Yet you can make progress in it quickly, even as an English speaker.
English reads left to right...Arab reads R to L.... Asian languages up, down, AND R to L.
As a person who speaks Spanish and English, in the top of my list are Basque and Finnish. Yes, Chinese can be hard, also arabic, but Basque and FInnish are beasts. They work on a similar way, they take a word, and start adding stuff to it, so the word becames insanly big. Also grammar, I just know basic Finnish verbs, but Basque verbs are impossible, even native Basque speakers dont quite understand how verbs work, while Chinese verbs are farely easy. So agree to disagree.
Interesting because my wife is Colombian. So I know a fair bit about the Wayuu already
People are mentioning phonemic inventories and tones but I think you should have looked at kind of accent (tone, pitch, stress) and prosody. Both are extremely difficult for non-native speakers to replicate. For example english speakers are abysmal at learning japanese pitch (many failing to even notice it exists despite achieving a very high level in the language otherwise) and it's mora timing (rather than english's syllable stress based system) is also very unnatural for english speakers.
Try listening to ESL speakers coming from languages without stress, even if they can pronounce every vowel and consonant and nail their grammar, they almost always still struggle with stress and sound distinctly foreign. It seems almost impossible to learn to perfection whereas you can relatively easily memorize thousands of (non-cognate) words from an unrelated language or adjust to different word order.
I struggled with Turkish really badly because of how polysynthetic it is, and because of the sentence structure. I just couldn't grasp it.
"and then we have Mandarin" at 1:50 or so
yeah 中国人 means "Chinese", yes, but literally "Chinese person". The Chinese language would be 中文 (at least in written form; spoken is 汉语), and Mandarin specifically is 普通话
It's complicated, so it's an understandable rookie mistake if you don't know the language too well lol
Sehr gut, looking foward for more videos for yours.
More to come! Thank you!
would be even more difficult if it used some of the rarest sounds and had a lot of very long words and used writing system like pinyin or kanji, this would be truly a nightmare language
Make a version of this in wayuu and say english is the hardest language for Wayuu speakers to learn.
I've always thought the most difficult language for most people to learn as a second language would be the click languages of southern Africa. It's hard for me to imagine anyone mastering the various click sounds unless they grew up with them.
I'm from Maracaibo and lived with a Wayuu person for most of my childhood so I knew *instantly* what this video was about lol, it's pretty good !!
Tone is important too, i have never in my life seen a non Vietnamese pronounce the word "Phở" correctly, both in Northern and Southern accent
So interesting! (And nice visuals to help us understand!). Thank you!
You forgotten writing. Language isnt just how you speak but its also how you write. In my opinion the hardest language is a language that is hard to write and master from it like Arabic (I'm from Indonesia and a muslim and i still can't write it properly), Mandarin (Due to the amount of Chinese characters you need to know and some have really really hard to write on paper) , Japanese (So many writing systems), etc
I find that English speakers are far more hung up on word order than speakers of most other languages are. The fact is, word order is unusually strict in English. This colors their views of other languages. Many languages, like Ukrainian, have extremely fluid word order. This is NOT as basic a characteristic of languages as English speakers like to think.
I think for SVO languages, the most difficult would be one where the object comes first and where the verb isn't in between so either OSV or VSO
Greenlandic is one of the most difficult languages in the world.. Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language belonging to the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages.
There is an immense number of suffixes that are added to root words which can be many syllables long and complex enough to serve as an entire sentence. There are also at least three sounds in Greenlandic that don’t exist in English. There are three Greenlandic languages, West Coast Greenlandic, East Coast Greenlandic and Inughuit, the language of the people in the most northern part of Greenland.
I think the term “Eskimo” is offensive. Try being more culturally sensitive.
That Wayuu sounds like a fantasy language in the Avatar movie but it is not weird at all it's beautiful. I would like to learn more about it.
The hardest language I have ever seen is Sochiapam Chinantec of Mexico. The phonetics are so difficult, that grammatical and syntactical differences with English pale into insignificance. Check it out.
To me the hardest language is Tibetan (if you are anything but Tibetan in my opinion)
Ah this reminds me of that index of the world's language features yielding the top 10 most unique/weird languages and the top 10 languages with the most common language features. Cantonese, for example, is in the latter camp, while English is in the former (among languages like Kutenai, Zoue, Mixtec, Nenets, Mandarin etc.).
I think the most difficult language is the language the most isolated from the rest . In that case it might be hungarian since it has minimal connection to languages inside it's family tree , or greenlandic idk .
Everybody gansta until Alien Language kicks by.
Word order is such a strange metric for difficulty, especially since you already used another grammar concept, degree of synthesis. New, diffucult sounds or complicated phonotactics have got to be one of the biggest barriers to language learning yet you didn't mention it.
mandarin and cantonese actually are both from middle chinese, as are all the rest of the chinese dialects/languages, except for min, which diverged much earlier
Why do you think order matters? My native language is SOV and I have no problems with learning VSO Tagalog. I think it doesn't matter, you just get used to it really fast.