hardest language in the world

[sammy]

Yeah, Finnish - it's the hardest language in the world innit... spoken it 30 years meself, man and boy :lol:



No but seriously I think you can't really give any objective answers to the question in this thread... the degree of difficulty involved in learning any particular (foreign) language is a subjective matter and depends on various factors (your motivation, your native language, the learning environment, and so on)...

However what never ceases to amaze me is the ability of young kids to learn a foreign language without really trying at all (or at least it seems that way). Many many years ago a neigbour married a Norwegian, she had one daughter from an earlier marriage, maybe something like 5 - 6 years old when they moved to Finland. A couple of years of exposure and the girl's Finnish was so perfect you could barely tell her native language was Norwegian.

Alas it's tougher for us older people - I'd love to learn Russian or Portuguese for example, but it appears a really daunting task in all respects. Quite possibly the batteries of my Language Acquisition Device are running low!

[Coren]

Finnish is known to be the hardest modern language to learn, Dutch being the second or third.

The hardest ever language to learn is some African language, which is based almost completely on gutturals. It contains over 100 differend gutturals... if I remember right.

[Hank W.]

Well, people squirming with the suffixes could try Diné bizaad.

• A verb doesn't have one single form (like to walk), but might have half a dozen shapes depending on whether the meaning is an action completed, incomplete, in progress, repeated, habitual, one-time-only, instantaneous, or wished.

• Some things about verbs are even more alien to us than that. When you want to talk about various ways of handling an object, you first need to choose the appropriate verb depending on the shape and consistency of that object. Look back at the literal translation of `key' above, and notice that it uses the verb stem that is appropriate to `slender stiff' objects. If I want to say I `pick up' or `lift up' something, I have to use ndideesh- for this particular meaning, and attach the verb stem appropriate to the consistency. The resulting verbs meaning `I pick/lift up the -' will look like this:

ndideeshtiil slender stiff object (key, pole)
ndideeshleel slender flexible object (branch, rope)
ndideesh'aal roundish or bulky object (bottle, rock)
ndideeshgheel compact and heavy (bundle, pack)
ndideeshjol non-compact or diffuse (wool, hay)
ndideeshteel something animate (child, dog)
ndideeshnil a few small objects (a couple of berries, nuts)
ndideeshjih a large number of small objects (a pile of berries, nuts)
ndideeshtsos something flexible and flat (blanket, piece of paper)
ndideeshjil something I carry on my back
ndideeshkaal anything in a vessel
ndideeshtloh mushy matter (mud)

`Pick up' is only one way of handling objects of these twelve different consistencies. We might also want to say `bring', `take', `hang up', `keep', `carry around', `turn over', some 28 of them in all, which multiplied by the above twelve choices makes well over 300 different verbs for handling things!

[Argan]

Finnish is known to be the hardest modern language to learn, Dutch being the second or third.

What? Finnish a modern language? According to the swedes, it's an uncivilised tribal language.

[Hank W.]

I think the definition is "still spoken today at home"

[sammy]

Curiously enough, because Finnish is such an ugly language to hear, at home most of our day-to-day conversations are carried through by using either Morse code or semaphor.

[sputnick]

the hardest languages to learn are those without teaching materials in the form of books, novels, movies, etc. since there seems to be lots of stuff for finnish, such as this very nice forum, i doubt finnish can be that hard.

you guys ought to try cebuano, which is inordinately hard because it is hardly ever written down, and the spelling and vocabulary hasn't been standardized yet, so you don't even know what you're supposed to be learning.

hopefully the internet will change all that. already we have a cebuano wikipedia, which is great even though it is full of mistakes...

anyway, my point is, languages with official status such as finnish are not hard to learn, it's just a question of shoving your nose to the grindstone, elbow grease, buckling down, and more english idioms i can't think of right now.

nick

[muhaha]

I spent quite a long time in a pub in Budapest with some "friendly" Hungarians,
The bad news is it took so long and we drunk so much Hungarian wine..that I cant remember more that that...

Are you sure you did not all end up speaking Norwegian... or Dutch?

Double Dutch...But since my last post I called one of the "hungarians".. He works at Nokia...and asked if he could remember..

Like me he said it was "fishing or fish..."
Best guess:

In wintertime living fish swim under the ice...

His list of words..

Hungarian..
Jeg = Ice= Jää
Alatt = under = alla.
Telen = at winter = talvi (talvella winter time)
Elevek = alive = elevät
Halak = fish = kalat..
note...case end.. k = t in both above..


See also the case end rule "k" = "t"
uszkálnak = swiming = uiskentelevat.

Jég alatt télen eleven halak uszkálnak.
Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.

But Finns can't understand that.

The "k" and "t" are both plural endings. They are not separate case endings, so you can't say Finnish case ending "t" matches with Hungarian "k".

[Rosamunda]

almost the same:

Elävä kala ui veden alla. Finnish.

Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt. Hungarian.

Probably as close as you can get; according to Estonian philologist, Mall Hallam, this is the only mutually comprehensible sentence! "the living fish swims in water".

[muhaha]

almost the same:

Elävä kala ui veden alla. Finnish.

Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt. Hungarian.

Probably as close as you can get; according to Estonian philologist, Mall Hallam, this is the only mutually comprehensible sentence! "the living fish swims in water".

Try saying this to a Finn who doesn't know the sentence. The words sound like:
hal -> hug "halata"
víz -> five "viis(i)"
úszkál -> dare "uskaltaa"

It is probably the closest sentence but it can't be understood.

[Pavlor]

I've just read this entire thread and NO ONE has taken into consideration the psycho-sociological aspects of learning a language. It is all good and well throwing around this and that is "the hardest language in the world to learn", but learning a language is not just about grammar, vocabulary and phonology.

I remember being in China for a few months where no one spoke English. I had to speak Chinese to be understood. The motivation was there to learn as if I wanted anything, I had to convey it in Chinese (btw I do not speak Chinese but I had to ask for stuff in it and had lesson etc.).

Hank gives us his wee pearl of wisdom that Finnish can't be that hard as kids as young as five can shout it fluently. Hmm... a very flawed argument and one that I've often heard. This is the learn/acquire argument plus kids don't normally have excess linguistic/life baggage which makes acquiring a language a whole lot easier. Hank, go learn this language with that argument. I spoke it at the age of three, mutations, word order "VSO" and all!

[Rosamunda]

almost the same:

Elävä kala ui veden alla. Finnish.

Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt. Hungarian.

Probably as close as you can get; according to Estonian philologist, Mall Hallam, this is the only mutually comprehensible sentence! "the living fish swims in water".

Try saying this to a Finn who doesn't know the sentence. The words sound like:
hal -> hug "halata"
víz -> five "viis(i)"
úszkál -> dare "uskaltaa"

It is probably the closest sentence but it can't be understood.

Which is precisely, I think, the point he was trying to make.

I lived in Budapest for two years, and so did my Finnish husband. He was working all day at the office and I was out drinking coffee with my ex-pat friends We both took survival lessons but, in spite of his fluent Finnish (English, Swedish French and German), I think my understanding of Hungarian improved quicker than his. As Pavlor suggests, I was the one buying the paradiscom from the market and dealing with the ticket inspectors in the metro and the people in the bank and the instructor at the swimming pool etc etc on a daily basis. He was in meetings all day, mostly in English.

[enk]

Hank gives us his wee pearl of wisdom that Finnish can't be that hard as kids as young as five can shout it fluently. Hmm... a very flawed argument and one that I've often heard. This is the learn/acquire argument plus kids don't normally have excess linguistic/life baggage which makes acquiring a language a whole lot easier. Hank, go learn this language with that argument. I spoke it at the age of three, mutations, word order "VSO" and all!

But you must remember the old (and bad) Finnish joke that Finnish
is so hard that 6% of the population can't speak it

-enk

[Timbeh]

Wanna learn the finnish inflections? Go here. (Warning: A long list which requires time to load)

[tankkarilainen]

I spent my previous year in Finland and what I noticed was that for those people with German, Latin, Slavic, etc. mother tongue looked much harder to learn Finnish than for me as a Hungarian. It's not because we have similar word, we don't or just very few. One thing, though is the pronunciation, which for me was very easy to learn except the difference between e and ä, Finnish r, and Finnish s which in Hungary would be considered as a logopedic problem.

For example putting the stress on the beginning of the words and sentences are natural for me. Suffixes we also use and mostly in the same cases as Finns do, however, except from some common ones like "i" as the sign of plural form in some cases (sarvillamme=szarvainkon) they are different (-ssa/-ssä=-ban/-ben, -sta/stä=-ból/-ből, etc.).
What most of the other foreigners found very hard is the importance of the lenght of the sounds (tili, tilli, tiili), because in most European languages it doesn't make any difference how long you pronounce a sound.

One other thing is the word order. I had to do some translating tasks from Finnish to English. And as I first had to think in Hungarian to understand the sentence I realized that if the task was translating to my mother tongue, I should only replace the Finnish words with the Hungarian ones (with very few modifying) to get the sentence with the same meaning, while translating to English requires a total mixing up the world order to get a meaningful sentence.

So I would say, that although it's still hard for me to study Finnish, it comes much more natural for met, than to someone who has mother tongue with totally different roots.

Despite these things I met some people who learned a quite good command of Finnish in less than one year.