What are the most complicated languages, in your view? How so?

Question

Do you consider that your mother tongue is a very complicated language too? How so?

Answer 1

It depends on what kind of complexity you are talking about. The Archi language of the Caucasus has the most complex verbs on the planet. Each verb root in Archi has 1.5 MILLION different forms depending on tense, mood, aspect, evidentiality, person, number, gender, etc. The !Xõó language of southern Africa has 126 different consonants, over half of which are click sounds. The English language has very complex word order and lexical resources. Different languages are complex in different ways, but, ultimately all languages are about equally complex overall because no matter what language they are learning, children take 10-12 years to learn it to basic adult competency.

Answer 2

My native tongue, English, has always been easy to me. Spanish, pretty easy to pick up as a second language. But I have struggled and struggled with Russian, so I would say that Russian is one of the most complicated. I once started studying a Native American language, Mohawk, and that was even more complicated than Russian! I gave it up, but I still struggle with Russian and hope that it will some day be my third language.

Answer 3

I've heard that some of the African dialects can be murder for Westerners, because of the "click" sounds. There's also an old saying that "When God wanted to punish Satan, He made the Devil learn Basque". Judging from what that language looks like in its written form.....wow.....I can feel sympathy for the Devil!

But overall? I'll give a strong vote to my mother tongue, American Standard English. It's "easy" in some ways--- extensive borrowing of words from other languages, lack of specific gender (never understood WHY the gender of a chair should make a difference), and inflections will not necessarily change a meaning (unlike many Chinese dialects).

But the idioms?---try explaining why "overlook" means to miss something, but why a "scenic overlook" is a great place to stop off and HAVE a great view of things....

Answer 4

I would say Hungarian. I have learned Spanish (easy), Russian (difficult), and am learning Chinese (lots of memorization, but the grammar is really easy). Hungarian however, has over 35 different forms for each noun, and the ending of the noun depends on the "vowel harmony." There are two present tenses, and the difference between the two is very slight. In addition, because of the endings of the nouns, you can say the words in the sentance in any order. One could say, "They are with dogs the men in house", or "In house they are the men with dogs", and it still means the same "The men are in the house with the dogs." The only way you would know is by the endings. Plus, Hungarian is only very distantly related to any other language (Finnish) so there are almsot no words that sound almost the same.

Answer 5

English, which is my mother tongue, is considered a difficult language because it has many origins and some weird rules of grammar. Japanese, Chinese, Greek, all to me, seem difficult because they don't have the alphabet the English language does.

I have studied 5 different languages and found Greek to be too difficult for me (it was the only one that did not use the alphabet).

Answer 6

Khmer, the language they speak in Cambodia, seems really complicated. I've been trying to learn Japanese and it's really difficult for a native English speaker to learn, but it seems like it wouldn't be terribly complicated to learn if it was my native language. It's just sooo different from English that it seems really difficult.

Answer 7

English because unlike most languages its rules of usage, syntax, endings, etc. are flexible and not easily understood. In order to speak fluent english one must understand how to use thousands of words in many different contexts. For instance, two words that are really similiar 'ran' and 'tan.' The forms change differently depending on usage. "I RAN" "I TANNED" (past tense singular), "HE RUNS" "HE TANS" (present tense third person). Virtually every word in the english language follows no rule just like these two. The rules must be learned for every individual word. Also the number of foreign words adopted from other languages, adds to the confusion especially since you must understand the rules for those words as well.

Answer 8

Hi,

I'm from South Africa, I speak Afrikaans which I hear is very difficult to learn. We've got words written the same, with different meanings, or sounding the same, but is written differently (confusing I know) example: fiets: (the ie is pronounced like in fix): It means you have a nice body, or the second meaning is a bicycle.

Or like the words "maar" and "maer" (pronounced as in "bar" in English): the meaning of the first word is "but" as in "I love you BUT (maar) I want to be just friends. The other word is as in: She is skinny (maer).

The people in South Africa do not really speak afrikaans. They've got difficulty pronouncing the words.

Answer 9

icelandic is widely considered the hardest language to learn to speak, for people whose first language is english, because of the 32 letters and 4 diffrent ways to use each letter, similar to english's long and short vowels the close, near close, open mid and Open, the nouns have female male and nueter tenses, ans well as four diffrent ways of expressing the same noun nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.

Answer 10

I am english and though people say that it is quite hard, i found it quite easy. I'm also fluent at Italian, French, Spanish and German. Those were all Easy compared to the languages i am now attempting to learn, Japanese and Chinese. Even for me they are difficult.