Source originale : https://unfilter.ca/the-most-difficult-language-to-learn/
It’s a question of point of view!
When asked to state which language is the most difficult to learn, we will all be subject to our personal biases. One of the greatest biases you will encounter is closely tied to which language you learned to speak first as a child.
As a native English speaker the most difficult language to learn, according to the Foreign Service Institute, would be Japanese. They state that this would be followed by Korean, Arabic, Polish, Georgian, Mandarin (and its companion, but not mutually comprehensible language, Yue/Cantonese), followed by Hungarian, Thai, Mongolian, and Finnish.
The most commonly spoken native language in the world is Mandarin Chinese, at about 14.5% of the world’s population. Next most common is Spanish (6%), and in third place English (5.1%).
So, while Japanese might be the most difficult language for English speakers, for someone who speaks Mandarin or Cantonese, the fact that Kanji (the system created for Japanese writing, which uses Chinese characters) would make it much simpler for such a speaker to master that language, since they have the mindset for character-thinking rather than letter-thinking ingrained. The reverse would also be true.
The next most utilised is Hindustani (4.4%), often defined by linguists as two distinct languages, Hindi, and Urdu, which are mutually intelligible. Someone that speaks Hindi can learn Urdu with ease; it would not be much more difficult than British English speakers learning the United States, Canadian, or Australian variants of English. But for that Hindi speaker Korean might be the most difficult, because the latter is an “isolate”, or a language that is spoken by very few, which has no linguistic cousins.
Finishing out the Top 10 most popular languages are Arabic (4.2%) , Portuguese (3.1%, which includes both the traditional and the Brazilian dialect), Bengali (2.9%), Russian (2.2%), Japanese (1.8%), and Punjabi (1.5%).
Consider Arabic, a Semitic language, for example. It is like nothing English speakers have seen before. It consists of roots composed of three consonant sounds, which generally define a neutral verb.
According to The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It (Nicholas_Awde/Putros_Samano, pp. 15,16), a root such as K-T-B will have vowels interspersed, and then be equipped with prefixes or suffixes to alter its meaning, but retaining an aspect of the original meaning.
Specifically the root K-T-B addresses the idea of “writing”. In its simplest form as a word this root could be written kataba which means “to write”. By adding an extra “T” in the middle, (kattaba) it means “to cause someone to write”. By changing the first “A” to an “I” and moving the last “A” inside the word, you form kitaab which means “book”. Adding a prefix “mi” creates miktaba, which means “typewriter”.
In some ways it resembles German, in that you can add and subtract bits to create whole new words, but it avoids the problem of horrendously elongated compound-words such as:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling)
However the variations in Arabic can be regional, too. In many cases dialects of Arabic are almost incomprehensible to a different Arabic dialect.
To the vast majority of people around the world the most complex language to learn is English! It has often been described as the unlikely child of German and French, which resulted when the Normans and the Gauls decided to cohabit in Britain.
English is not a language of rules so much as it is a language of “exceptions to the rule“. One of the classic examples is “I before E, except after C or whenever the word is weird”. Having derived from two separate languages, with disparate rules, makes English particularly difficult to master for non-English speakers.
On the other hand it provides a language that is more explicit and nuanced than any other language in the world. You do not need to settle for the everyday, banal, jejune, ordinary, pedestrian, plain, unremarkable, normal, dull, pedantic, conventional, common, or boring word that everybody else uses. The subtlety available in English is unmatched by any other language in the world.
And that is further enhanced because English freely borrows from any other languages. We have loanwords which have very obscure origins. For example: the word “window“. Where does that come from?
In Spanish the word is Ventana; in Russian it is Окно; in French it is Fenêtre; in German it is Fenster. It leaves us with a bit of a mystery! Where did English manage to steal the word “window” from?
It turns out that is an Old Norse word, which comes to us from Norwegian and Danish and other Nordic languages. In ancient times tall stone towers were built along the coasts so that sentries could see the masts of sailing vessels long before they could be seen from ground level. Masts almost always signaled an invasion force coming to plunder a settlement. The extra time afforded by a high observer could allow them to prepare to repel the invader.
Of course these were very cold lands, and so the sentries did not sit outside exposed, but rather within the walls of the tower, peering out through a small hole called a “vindu” or “wind-eye”. The history of adopting words into the English vocabulary has gone on like this since the very beginning.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED, second edition) has more than 170,000 discrete English words listed, with an additional 50,000 obsolete words, and another 10,000 derivative words included. People who successfully learn to communicate in English need a core of 3,000 words to understand 90% of the conversations that occur around them.
Native English speakers generally possess a vocabulary of 40,000 words, of which they regularly use 20,000. Bear in mind that this is from a selection of a quarter of million words. But in truth, if we count words such as dog (the animal), and dog (the act of following persistently) individually, the total leaps up to three quarters of a million words in English.
Why not learn a few new words today? Try a free vocabulary builder website and see just how extensive your knowledge actually is!
Bibliography
Nicholas_Awde/Putros_Samano. (1986). The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It. New York: Kensington Publishing.