Are some languages more complex than others?

Question

I think Chomsky said somtehing about this but I can't find it anywhere.

Answer 1

Yes - usually the less developed languages are more complex than the more developed ones. Take English: no gender worries, no cases for noun and adjective & easy verb conjugations. Chinese is even more developed than English in the grammatical sense: no verb conjugations, noun genders, adjective concordances, etc.

But it depends on your starting point. Spanish speakers would find it easy to learn Italian and Portuguese, while Japanese speakers would find it much easier to learn Korean than we would.

Another respondent cited Russian. Yes - complex verb forms (perfective and imperfective), declension of nouns and adjectives, but I still reckon it depends on your starting point.

Who am I to argue with Chomsky? Although Chinese is 'easy', I bet you could learn German, French, Italian, Spanish & Romanian more quickly than you could learn Mandarin Chinese!

Answer 2

Umm Yes. In languages like German (the only other one I know) You get into masculine and feminine terms in which you would use different words with it. I.E. "Meine" (mine in english) is feminine while "Mein" is masculine. Also Er, Sie, und Es. All mean the same but one is formal, one is feminine and the other is masculine. It also changes the outcome of a sentence. If you screw it up most of the time it's no big deal and people will know what you're trying to say but it's not proper. Same goes with spanish. There are masculine and feminine such as llamas y llamo. (don't know too much spanish so pardon if I spelled wrong) English is by far the easier language to learn I've heard. Hope this helps :)

Answer 3

I have no idea all languages on this planet, so I are not able to deliver you an absolute reply, however from the languages I understand, I could say it rather will depend on the concern. I feel that each one languages have their strengths and their weaknesses. From my enjoy, relying on what I have to categorical, repeatedly, I consider extra secure pronouncing it in German, repeatedly in French and repeatedly in English. I have the threat to talk those 3 languages in my day-to-day existence, and rather, it relies WHAT I desire to mention. In a few circumstances, I'll want English over the opposite 2, however in a few others (if I have the choice to change backward and forward if the man or woman I'm speaking with is aware of the 3), I'll decide upon to precise myself in one of the vital 2 different languages. English is extra detailed in specific circumstances like for example with the phrase "complicated" within the sentence "This is complicated." In English, the phrase "complicated" is functional and effortless to pronounce. The German is handy too ("Es ist verwirrend."), but when this sentence used to be for use in French, we could not say "C'est confusant.", because this is not right French. We could have got to say "Cela prête à confusion", which may be very inconvenient to make use of. The equal factor occurs always, now not best on this case. Sometimes, German is extra handy, repeatedly, that is English however repeatedly additionally French.

Answer 4

Yes. Arabic is far more complicated than spanish which is far more complicated than Esperanto, which is so easy its stupid. So yeah there are. I would say the most complicated is chinese, they have four writting systems. and the most common has no connection to the sound of the word.

Answer 5

There is no doubt about it. Russians is one of the hardest languahges to learn.