Sennadar Forums

journeywoman wrote: One thing I can say is Kantonese has an advantage/disadvantage in only being an oral language.

How so? Cantonese and Mandarin are simply different dialects of the same language, which has a written component...

I finally found my password!  arg.. I couldn't comment for a while back.

But I have got to put my two cents in.

Mandarin and Cantonese are two separate spoken languages.  They were verbally developed long before the written language was used to unite the people in China by Emporer Qing Shihuang around 221 B.C.

Though they might share a same root as spoken languages go, as a Mandarin speaker who can't understand 95% of Cantonese, I must say Mandarin and Cantonese feels as different to me as English and German, or Spanish and Italian.  And I've had samplings of those languages.

As to how hard languages are, you have to break it down, there is a atleast three different parts to language that can have different difficulties.

How hard the grammar is.  (Mandarin is quite simple)
How hard the written language is (Chinese is quite hard)
How hard the language is to speak and understand (Mandarin is moderately hard)

So if you are listing languages in some order based on hardness, we all have to first agree what aspect of the language we are trying to order, and then we have to agree on what which language you are trying to place.

Like saying Chinese is hard may not reflect the different languages that are all part of chinese, like Cantonese, or Mandarin, or Taiwanese, or the other hundreds of different ones.  It's almost like trying to place how hard Germanic languages are (includes english and german and a few others).

forbidder wrote:I finally found my password! arg.. I couldn't comment for a while back.

Password recovery should be pretty easy, if you've entered a valid email address into your account details. From memory there should be a "forgotten password" link there.

You can also post as a guest too...

lol, yeah but if you're like me you have 40 different emails and you have no idea which one you put in for the registration, because at one time or another all of them had been your permanent one.  But services keep changing, free becomes pay, POP becomes non-POP.  and stuff like that.

And I have some wierd aversion to posting as guest.. I feel like I'm trying to impersonate myself...

I think it definately depends on what is your first language and also how old you are as to how difficult you find a language. Definately the same language group helps because for a Japanese person to learn Chinese they only have to learn grammar and pronounciation since they have learned the characters as part of Japanese. Or the Polynesian languages which share similar pronounciation and other things like similar sounding words of the same meaning and this alphabet, although they don't all use 26 letters. Also someone bought up from a young age with a language (1st or not) will also find it easier to learn than an adult, no matter what language.
I agree with Forbidder that to rate the difficulty of a language you have to take into account those aspects but rating how hard a language is to learn, which influences how people are likely to rate a language, must also be taken into account. This makes it challenging to judge the hardest language !

most difficult grammar top 3:
1 finnish
2 kantonise
3 swedish

Sounds about right. Dunno about the swedish, though. Maybe you rate it too high? It's still germanic language, so it bears more than just passing resemblance to spanish/english angle. In fact, from Finnish perspective there is very little difference...

I do not wish to insult anyone, especially all the swedes here (it seems I am outnumbered. Sigh.) but did you know that to Finnish ear swedish language sounds gay? Really. I mean homosexual kind of gay, not the original meaning of the word. It's positively disturbing for me to listen swedish language...  (shrug)

So, I am curious if any of you swedes here have heard Finnish, if so, how does it sound to your ears? I mean, it's a bit difficult for me to evaluate, isn't it?

journeywoman wrote: I think English and Mandarin must be up there though. English is difficult enough and I'm a native speaker. Mandarin (my latest challenge) is easy in some ways but the pronounciation and characters !
One thing I can say is Kantonese has an advantage/disadvantage in only being an oral language.

Chinese/Japanese/Ect. are one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak & write for westerners. Mostly because the odd sounds (they call it pronounciation, I call it making funny noises) and the odd characters that bear very little resemblance to western way of doing things.

However, where grammar goes Finnish leads.

NOTE: I am going to quote (loosely) the website I am going to give you a link in a second.

The most hardest part of finnish is the fact that Finnish language has about 14 or 15 noun cases. For example english has essentially about exactly two (nominative and genitive), we also have nice broad set of verb forms. To make it simple, finnish is synthethic language. We use suffixes to express grammatical relations and also to derive new words. To take a simple example, the single Finnish word (basic form: talo=house) talossanikin corresponds to the English phrase in my house, too. The suffix "-ssa" is the ending of the so-called inessive case, corresponding to the English preposition "in". The suffix "-ni" is a possessive one, corresponding to "my" in English. And the suffix -kin is an enclitic particle corresponding to the English word "too" (and the Latin enclitic -que).

An example of verb flexion is kirjoitettuasi, which requires an entire sentence when translated into English: after you had written.

Other problem that the language poses for ENGLISH speaking people; the length of vowels is extremely important and the length of the words can be sometimes rather intimidating, although Finnish doesn't usually have as long words as German. Unless we want to be difficult. You see, you can combine almost unlimited amount of finnish words together to form a new word. It is commong to combine two or three words in to one, but theoretically you can combine as many as you want (provided you follow certain rules).

Anyway, now an example of the important vowel length:

sataa = it rains
sata = hundred

95% of english speaking people can't tell the difference between those two words when pronounced by a finn but it puts the discussion a whole lot of different perspective to the finnish person.

If you want to know more about finnish language (perhaps you're curious, although it is a long shot) here's a good quick rundown:

http://www2.lysator.liu.se/nordic/scn/finlang.html

And slightly longer and more detailed page (it's still quite brief, though):

http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7Ejkorpela/Finnish.html

As for english... well... I am sad to say, Jorneywoman, that it is riduclously simple language to learn. Even though your grammar is positively alien to me (as a finn) and the lack of proper "forms" for the words makes me feel like I am talking in the eloquent "Me Tarzan, you Jane, me is big king!" style. Even though it IS the way that this damn language is supposed to be formed. Well.. mostly, my english still sucks . Not to mention the occassional mixup of english/australian/american spelling.

However, do not despair... English is frustrating language learn to pronounce. Why?

Because the language has been in written form so long that there seems to be virtually NO RULES AT ALL when it comes how to pronounce the damn words (not to mention that english language holds the record for most words in a language). It's like at some words you have to ingnore certain letters, at others they should be accented, and in some the letters are pronounced in a way that's completely against any logic.

So, obviously, I have a heavy accent. Heh

Ah well, I shall stop babbling. Hopefully you don't get all angry for me to posting such a huge post. I tend to get a tad (cough) longwinded (cough) when I get interested about something.

straechav wrote: As for english... well... I am sad to say, Jorneywoman, that it is riduclously simple language to learn. Even though your grammar is positively alien to me (as a finn) and the lack of proper "forms" for the words makes me feel like I am talking in the eloquent "Me Tarzan, you Jane, me is big king!" style. Even though it IS the way that this damn language is supposed to be formed. Well.. mostly, my english still sucks . Not to mention the occassional mixup of english/australian/american spelling.
However, do not despair... English is frustrating language learn to pronounce.

I suppose I'm taking my view from two points, one I have a lot to do with Asians and others who are learning English and I have spent endless hours helping them do so. Some of my usual sayings while doing so are: "That isn't the correct way to say that sentence, this is..." or "No, it isn't pronounced that way..." or especially "What? Could you please repeat that?" and other words along those lines. Teaching someone a language puts a new spin on how you view your own. As well as living in other countries. Such as in Singapore, they have a variation on English which my family calls Singlish, which is a mix of the languages, including not using the little words. A prime example was this, I was walking in the market one day and I came apon a person selling penuts. He was giving away free samples on the premise that if you don't like them then you don't have to buy them. He had a sign up saying this, but it read "Penuts no good, don't buy." I understand some difficulty comes from which is your first language but Singlish is an example of English left to it's own devices in Asia, and it thus is a reflection to some extent of the other languages which have influenced it (Singapore is a melting pot of many), so this particualar example highlights a problem area lots of Asians have in learning English. You being from Finnish means you have a different perspective and advantages over Asians.
The second view I'm coming from is the indepth study of English. Things like deciding what is an adverb or an abjective in "Dull brown boots." What is 'dull'? Dull could be describing the boots (adjective) or the colour (adverb). I just find it a bit more challenging when I've taken for granted the way a sentence is made up by how it 'sounds' and then turning round and having to write essays that include an indepth disection of sentences.

journeywoman wrote: I suppose I'm taking my view from two points, one I have a lot to do with Asians and others who are learning English and I have spent endless hours helping them do so. Some of my usual sayings while doing so are: "That isn't the correct way to say that sentence, this is..." or "No, it isn't pronounced that way..." or especially "What? Could you please repeat that?" and other words along those lines. Teaching someone a language puts a new spin on how you view your own. As well as living in other countries. Such as in Singapore, they have a variation on English which my family calls Singlish, which is a mix of the languages, including not using the little words. A prime example was this, I was walking in the market one day and I came apon a person selling penuts. He was giving away free samples on the premise that if you don't like them then you don't have to buy them. He had a sign up saying this, but it read "Penuts no good, don't buy." I understand some difficulty comes from which is your first language but Singlish is an example of English left to it's own devices in Asia, and it thus is a reflection to some extent of the other languages which have influenced it (Singapore is a melting pot of many), so this particualar example highlights a problem area lots of Asians have in learning English. You being from Finnish means you have a different perspective and advantages over Asians.
The second view I'm coming from is the indepth study of English. Things like deciding what is an adverb or an abjective in "Dull brown boots." What is 'dull'? Dull could be describing the boots (adjective) or the colour (adverb). I just find it a bit more challenging when I've taken for granted the way a sentence is made up by how it 'sounds' and then turning round and having to write essays that include an indepth disection of sentences.

Hmm... good to remind me that my Finnish perspective tends to make every language's grammar like child's play (Of course, this is assuming that I would have any aptitude for learning languages. Which I don't.)... well, more or less... Latin is actually easiest to learn of the languages I have studied, since it has 7 noun cases - it's like "Light" version of Finnish. Perhaps some early beta test? Hrm.

Then again, Latin has the damn feminine and masculine forms. "Say what?! You have feminine AND masculine versions of NUMBER two? Oh come on!" Yeah, finnish is completely independent from gender. We don't have "He" and "she" ... we have just "hn" which refers to a person. Neither we have any masculine or feminine forms of any words, so the concept is very odd to me. What's the point of having masculine and feminine versions of words? Heh.

You know what's the funniest thing about Finnish having advantage over asians in learning english? Well, we have advantage over english people in learning to speak kantonese and japanese. ... Finnish is non-indo european language, which means our pronounciation has very little to do with indo-european languages, but instead we can mimic the sounds of chinese/asian languages quite easily...

If this keeps on going we'll have advantage over everything. Hmh, perhaps not.