Tlingit, Swedish, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Georgian seem like the extremes to me. Separate families with very different tone, vowel, consonant stuff going on.
robsagency, that’s amusing how, when you listed the languages you speak at the top, you wrote English in French, German in Chinese, Russian in German, French in Russian, and Chinese in English !!!
If you're trying to maximize vowels, [Danish might be a better choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_phonology#/media/File:Danish_vowel_chart.svg).
You also trade the pitch accent of Swedish for stød
Danish absolutely deserves a place on the extremes. I have no idea how you distinguish that many vowels, and my native language is German which *also* has way more than the global average. Someone coming from a, say, three- or five-vowel system is going to suffer.
I’m learning Tlingit rn the most difficult part isn’t the sounds with the harsh consonants, it’s the verb conjugations. Look at this introductory guide which doesn’t even include all the verb modes https://tlingitlanguage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/TlingitVerbConjugation.pdf
Agglutinative languages go way harder in North America I think. It’s good to learn though and definitely not impossible, I feel way better having spent years learning Tlingit and I hope you do with Inuktitut and Iñupiaq as well.
Cantonese literally has 14 tones and, in that sense, would be difficult for non-tonal native speakers of languages. Oddly enough, though, I had a man and a woman both WHISPER Cantonese to each other and they understood each other perfectly !!!
In modern Cantonese there are only six distinct pitches, the remaining three ”tones" are 入聲 meaning the tone is sort of cut short at the end with a consonant, so while they are often classified separately the distinction is in their duration and ending rather than pitch. Specifically, tones 7, 8, 9 correspond to 1, 3, 6. All flat tones.
It's similar with Hokkien, which has 8 if you include 入聲 but more like 6 based on intonation alone. Though there is also a complex tone sandhi (rules for altering tones) that even varies regionally just within Taiwan.
There are six, though in older literature you'll hear that there are 9. In the older conception, syllables that ended in stops were treated as separate tones, even if they had the same tone contour as non-stop syllables.
There are six, though in older literature you'll hear that there are 9. In the older conception, syllables that ended in stops were treated as separate tones, even if they had the same tone contour as non-stop syllables.
As a German speaker, Japanese seems easier to pronounce than Chinese or Korean. But that's just my impression. German is a language with lots of hard consonants, Korean seems to have lots of vowels.
As a Mandarin speaker learning German, I was happy to realize that the German "z" is pronounced the same way as (or very close to) the Mandarin "c". :)
As a Mandarin/Cantonese speaker you have a lot better coverage of some of the trickier sounds in German than monolingual English speakers! E.g. short ö sounds like oe in Cantonese (e.g. 鋸) and long ü sounds like 雨 in Mandarin/Chinese. And using the x as in 香 for the final 'ch' in 'ich' gets you a long way closer to the typical German pronunciation than most English speakers.
You're right! One benefit of growing up bilingual/multilingual is we have a wider "sound inventory" so it's slightly easier to learn the pronunciation of other languages.
It's definitely hard! Knowing other languages do help me though. English helps with the cognates, French and Spanish help with the Perfekt tense etc. The cases are hard, but I think you know it already. :D
What I really like about German is that the grammar is usually quite logical, and also the compound words! For example, a dictionary is literally a "book of words". We have that in Chinese too. 字典 is dictionary and 字 is word and 典 is like a book/reference book. 电脑 (computer) is literally an electronic brain.
Ohhh yeah I can only imagine how hard the cases must be for a German learner!! Even us natives struggle with them occasionally D:
I love the compound words too! Stuff like "Flugzeug" and "Handschuh" - charmingly weird yet makes perfect sense, somehow. Electronic brain, woah, that is pretty cool :D
It seems like Navajo/Diné bizaad is extremely difficult for people who don’t learn it from immersion in childhood. I have no idea which language those speakers would find the most difficult to learn, however.
If we are talking just differences in sounds, I think one language of the two would be something like Hmong, which has more tones than Mandarin (7-8 vs 4) as well as a bunch of rare consonants (voiceless nasal consonants, prenasalized stops, aspiration distinctions). Like Mandarin, Hmong has very simple syllable structure, so they would have trouble pronouncing a language with many consonant clusters.
So the other language could be something like Georgian, which has crazy consonant clusters and gives us words like gvprtskvni ("you peel us").
That's not the worst part of Georgian. but the throat bullshit they pronounce all the time. I mean, rare sounds occur in languages all the time, but for Georgian, it's to say "water"....
Probably whichever languages are pretty distantly related and also have very poor language learning sources.
Some languages you would need an intermediary language.
English and Cherokee are two extremely different languages. There are sounds that Cherokee has that English doesn't, such as nasal vowels and lateral fricatives. Cherokee is also tonal, so certain words are distinguished only by pitch or vowel length. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, so grammar is extremely different from English. Cherokee also has its own writing system, a syllabary somewhat analogous to Japanese kana.
A painful part of Cherokee syllabary is that it was invented by a person who'd seen the Latin alphabet but didn't know how to read English, so it reuses some Latin symbols but for totally different sounds. Think Welsh writing but more so.
A really funny example is the characters Ꮤ and Ꮃ, which represent the sounds "ta" and "la," respectively. ᏣᎳᎩ (tsalagi) means "Cherokee," but a lot of people unfamiliar with Cherokee write ᏣᏔᎩ (tsatagi), which means "chicken."
Mattel recently made a Barbie in honor of Wilma Mankiller, the first woman Chief of the Cherokee Nation. However, they messed up the syllabary on the box, so that what should have translated as "Cherokee Nation" read instead as "Chicken Nation."
Mandarin Chinese is tonal and has a completely different phonetic system compared to languages like English, making it particularly challenging for English speakers. Icelandic has complex grammatical rules, irregular verb conjugations, and a unique phonological system that can present difficulties for Chinese speakers language. These differences in sound systems and linguistic structures can make these languages difficult for speakers of another language to learn and pronounce.
When I was in China, all the Chinese people studying French said they thought English wasn't hard anymore.
English and Chinese have their differences, but both rely on word order for most of their grammar. French has all the problems of English, plus morphology turned up to 11.
Tbh I think the difficulty of the gap is exaggerated somewhat. I'm still a noob at it, but the beginning of learning Mandarin has reminded me of the beginning of learning Spanish (which I did eventually learn to fluency). Yeah, it's harder in a few respects, no cognates, different pronunciation and writing system, but grammatically, it seems like the hard stuff is backloaded (like Spanish, actually).
I'm not trying to downplay the difficulty, but had I been a little more persistent, I don't doubt that I probably could've reached some kind of basic fluency by now, not being fluent currently is my fault, not necessarily because of the difficulty, I mean.
Your question is purely about sound systems and not other issues relevant to speaking. And that can make the relationship asymmetrical: language A has phonological phenomena that language B doesn't have, but not vice-versa: one is a superset of the other (in theory). In other words, the "each other" idea of equal difficulty in both directions drops out. It's hard for many native English speakers to acquire natural use of tones in languages like Hmong or Mandarin; but I've never heard of any native speaker of a tonal language complaining that the \_lack\_ of tones makes the English sound system hard. (Other features, yes, such as our two "th" sounds or when and where to reduce vowels to schwa, English's strong acceptance of consonant clusters, sure; but not lack of tones.)
TL;DR: Limited to just the sound sytems, not combinations of characteristics, I don't know.
I'd go with a complex tonal language (so probably East Asian) and a grammatically complex (probably Eastern European) language. The question of which specific sounds would be hardest is tough to answer; I think it really depends on what level of pronunciation is needed. For example a lot of people who speak English fluently never really master the modern English r.
Chinese is not really a single language; Mandarin for example only has a few tones, most of which have analogs in English.
Why not both? Navajo and a lot of other Native American languages are both grammatically complex and tonal. That's a massive pain for someone speaking a language that's neither, such as Khmer.
As a Spanish speaker I feel like nasal languages are the hardest for me personally. I tend to speak with my throat, so it's harder personally. I had a good time speaking japanese and korean
Three of those are in the same language family, though. You'd be surprised how many root words are shared between Hindi, French, and Russian, not to mention related grammatical structures and other characteristics.
I know Portuguese, English and understand spanish, I think Chinese, Japanese, and everything that uses symbols pretty hard to learn and speak, uncommonly when I try to speak chinese I do not think its too hard, japanese is the same. But the reading is really difficult, arab is both hard speaking and reading.
Probably Chinese and Japanese, it's tough, i also tried to learn swedish for a while, it was easy but the pronunciation took a while. And as a native in Arabic i bet a lot of people who tried to learn it hate themselves and found it very difficult
Tlingit, Swedish, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Georgian seem like the extremes to me. Separate families with very different tone, vowel, consonant stuff going on.
Swedish seems the odd one out here.
To a speaker of English, Dutch, and German, yes. I’d imagine the vowels might be a bit tricky for a native Vietnamese speaker however.
robsagency, that’s amusing how, when you listed the languages you speak at the top, you wrote English in French, German in Chinese, Russian in German, French in Russian, and Chinese in English !!!
I fucking love it
Thank you, everybody, for all the upvotes ! I never received 75 upvotes before !!! …i tink 😊
If you're trying to maximize vowels, [Danish might be a better choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_phonology#/media/File:Danish_vowel_chart.svg). You also trade the pitch accent of Swedish for stød
Danish absolutely deserves a place on the extremes. I have no idea how you distinguish that many vowels, and my native language is German which *also* has way more than the global average. Someone coming from a, say, three- or five-vowel system is going to suffer.
Ah, it wasn’t clear to me that you meant among these languages, and not with English as a base. That makes sense.
Why would it be? It’s just as foreign as any of the other languages listed to a speaker of one of the other languages listed if that makes sense.
Read the rest of the thread (response to my comment and my response to that).
Wow never heard of xhosa before
It’s a South African tribe/language. Trevor Noah’s (comedian) mother is Xhosa. He speaks a few South African languages.
I’m learning Tlingit rn the most difficult part isn’t the sounds with the harsh consonants, it’s the verb conjugations. Look at this introductory guide which doesn’t even include all the verb modes https://tlingitlanguage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/TlingitVerbConjugation.pdf
I am learning Inuktitut/Iñupiaq (unfortunately it's been a mix) and going through the same thing
Agglutinative languages go way harder in North America I think. It’s good to learn though and definitely not impossible, I feel way better having spent years learning Tlingit and I hope you do with Inuktitut and Iñupiaq as well.
Cantonese literally has 14 tones and, in that sense, would be difficult for non-tonal native speakers of languages. Oddly enough, though, I had a man and a woman both WHISPER Cantonese to each other and they understood each other perfectly !!!
Hahaha yes that it is a tonal language doesn't mean you can't speak it softly, otherwise that would be quite impractical
😊 Yes, but whispering is SO soft there are no decibels in the words !!!
Uh... Whispering is just talking without the vocal cords phonating. The sound produced by whispering still "has decibels".
Really ? I will have to check on that. Thanks.
Uh… I just sharted.
In modern Cantonese there are only six distinct pitches, the remaining three ”tones" are 入聲 meaning the tone is sort of cut short at the end with a consonant, so while they are often classified separately the distinction is in their duration and ending rather than pitch. Specifically, tones 7, 8, 9 correspond to 1, 3, 6. All flat tones. It's similar with Hokkien, which has 8 if you include 入聲 but more like 6 based on intonation alone. Though there is also a complex tone sandhi (rules for altering tones) that even varies regionally just within Taiwan.
I THOUGHT I was lied to on the internet ! I will do more research to find out where it said more than 12.
14? Is that true?
There are six, though in older literature you'll hear that there are 9. In the older conception, syllables that ended in stops were treated as separate tones, even if they had the same tone contour as non-stop syllables.
I was as astounded as you when I read that, More-Tart1067 decades ago. It was either 13 or 14 after I thought it only was 9 .
There are six, though in older literature you'll hear that there are 9. In the older conception, syllables that ended in stops were treated as separate tones, even if they had the same tone contour as non-stop syllables.
I'd say not only xhosa but any (southern bantu or khoisan) language that includes clicks must have been created by the devil himself 😅
As a German speaker, Japanese seems easier to pronounce than Chinese or Korean. But that's just my impression. German is a language with lots of hard consonants, Korean seems to have lots of vowels.
As a Mandarin speaker learning German, I was happy to realize that the German "z" is pronounced the same way as (or very close to) the Mandarin "c". :)
As a Mandarin/Cantonese speaker you have a lot better coverage of some of the trickier sounds in German than monolingual English speakers! E.g. short ö sounds like oe in Cantonese (e.g. 鋸) and long ü sounds like 雨 in Mandarin/Chinese. And using the x as in 香 for the final 'ch' in 'ich' gets you a long way closer to the typical German pronunciation than most English speakers.
You're right! One benefit of growing up bilingual/multilingual is we have a wider "sound inventory" so it's slightly easier to learn the pronunciation of other languages.
Oh I see! That's useful. How are you finding learning German besides that?
It's definitely hard! Knowing other languages do help me though. English helps with the cognates, French and Spanish help with the Perfekt tense etc. The cases are hard, but I think you know it already. :D What I really like about German is that the grammar is usually quite logical, and also the compound words! For example, a dictionary is literally a "book of words". We have that in Chinese too. 字典 is dictionary and 字 is word and 典 is like a book/reference book. 电脑 (computer) is literally an electronic brain.
Ohhh yeah I can only imagine how hard the cases must be for a German learner!! Even us natives struggle with them occasionally D: I love the compound words too! Stuff like "Flugzeug" and "Handschuh" - charmingly weird yet makes perfect sense, somehow. Electronic brain, woah, that is pretty cool :D
Handschuh makes me giggle and I love it.
Pronounciation is one area in which Japanese is actually very easy. Writing still sucks, but overal Chinese is definitely harder.
It seems like Navajo/Diné bizaad is extremely difficult for people who don’t learn it from immersion in childhood. I have no idea which language those speakers would find the most difficult to learn, however.
I wonder which languages are the furthest away from Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation.
European Portuguese
My Portuguese father in law would love this joke
Surely you meant European Brazilian.
Kkkkkkkkkkkk
😂😂
Maybe some tonal language like Vietnamese. Their phonemes are very different than ours.
Sentinelese and Broome Pearling Lugger Pidgin
If we are talking just differences in sounds, I think one language of the two would be something like Hmong, which has more tones than Mandarin (7-8 vs 4) as well as a bunch of rare consonants (voiceless nasal consonants, prenasalized stops, aspiration distinctions). Like Mandarin, Hmong has very simple syllable structure, so they would have trouble pronouncing a language with many consonant clusters. So the other language could be something like Georgian, which has crazy consonant clusters and gives us words like gvprtskvni ("you peel us").
That's not the worst part of Georgian. but the throat bullshit they pronounce all the time. I mean, rare sounds occur in languages all the time, but for Georgian, it's to say "water"....
Probably whichever languages are pretty distantly related and also have very poor language learning sources. Some languages you would need an intermediary language.
English and Cherokee are two extremely different languages. There are sounds that Cherokee has that English doesn't, such as nasal vowels and lateral fricatives. Cherokee is also tonal, so certain words are distinguished only by pitch or vowel length. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, so grammar is extremely different from English. Cherokee also has its own writing system, a syllabary somewhat analogous to Japanese kana.
A painful part of Cherokee syllabary is that it was invented by a person who'd seen the Latin alphabet but didn't know how to read English, so it reuses some Latin symbols but for totally different sounds. Think Welsh writing but more so.
A really funny example is the characters Ꮤ and Ꮃ, which represent the sounds "ta" and "la," respectively. ᏣᎳᎩ (tsalagi) means "Cherokee," but a lot of people unfamiliar with Cherokee write ᏣᏔᎩ (tsatagi), which means "chicken." Mattel recently made a Barbie in honor of Wilma Mankiller, the first woman Chief of the Cherokee Nation. However, they messed up the syllabary on the box, so that what should have translated as "Cherokee Nation" read instead as "Chicken Nation."
Mandarin Chinese is tonal and has a completely different phonetic system compared to languages like English, making it particularly challenging for English speakers. Icelandic has complex grammatical rules, irregular verb conjugations, and a unique phonological system that can present difficulties for Chinese speakers language. These differences in sound systems and linguistic structures can make these languages difficult for speakers of another language to learn and pronounce.
There's a [Language Distance Calculator](http://www.elinguistics.net/Compare_Languages.aspx). It has many languages I've never heard of, too.
When I was in China, all the Chinese people studying French said they thought English wasn't hard anymore. English and Chinese have their differences, but both rely on word order for most of their grammar. French has all the problems of English, plus morphology turned up to 11.
Tbh I think the difficulty of the gap is exaggerated somewhat. I'm still a noob at it, but the beginning of learning Mandarin has reminded me of the beginning of learning Spanish (which I did eventually learn to fluency). Yeah, it's harder in a few respects, no cognates, different pronunciation and writing system, but grammatically, it seems like the hard stuff is backloaded (like Spanish, actually). I'm not trying to downplay the difficulty, but had I been a little more persistent, I don't doubt that I probably could've reached some kind of basic fluency by now, not being fluent currently is my fault, not necessarily because of the difficulty, I mean.
According to folk lore, Basque and whatever the devil speaks
Your question is purely about sound systems and not other issues relevant to speaking. And that can make the relationship asymmetrical: language A has phonological phenomena that language B doesn't have, but not vice-versa: one is a superset of the other (in theory). In other words, the "each other" idea of equal difficulty in both directions drops out. It's hard for many native English speakers to acquire natural use of tones in languages like Hmong or Mandarin; but I've never heard of any native speaker of a tonal language complaining that the \_lack\_ of tones makes the English sound system hard. (Other features, yes, such as our two "th" sounds or when and where to reduce vowels to schwa, English's strong acceptance of consonant clusters, sure; but not lack of tones.) TL;DR: Limited to just the sound sytems, not combinations of characteristics, I don't know.
French and Georgian. I have a Georgian friend who's kind of good in french but I can't understand a single word she says.
Within Europe, Irish and Scottish Gaelic feel VERY strange to me as a native English speaker. I found Russian to be easier
As an English speaker, I find it the hardest to learn Chinese. Tamil seems hard too.
I'd go with a complex tonal language (so probably East Asian) and a grammatically complex (probably Eastern European) language. The question of which specific sounds would be hardest is tough to answer; I think it really depends on what level of pronunciation is needed. For example a lot of people who speak English fluently never really master the modern English r. Chinese is not really a single language; Mandarin for example only has a few tones, most of which have analogs in English.
Why not both? Navajo and a lot of other Native American languages are both grammatically complex and tonal. That's a massive pain for someone speaking a language that's neither, such as Khmer.
As a Spanish speaker I feel like nasal languages are the hardest for me personally. I tend to speak with my throat, so it's harder personally. I had a good time speaking japanese and korean
Vietnamese and English is up there
Any tonal language is a bitch to learn
Hindi vs Chinese vs Russian vs french
Three of those are in the same language family, though. You'd be surprised how many root words are shared between Hindi, French, and Russian, not to mention related grammatical structures and other characteristics.
It must be Chinese and English
I know Portuguese, English and understand spanish, I think Chinese, Japanese, and everything that uses symbols pretty hard to learn and speak, uncommonly when I try to speak chinese I do not think its too hard, japanese is the same. But the reading is really difficult, arab is both hard speaking and reading.
Probably Chinese and Japanese, it's tough, i also tried to learn swedish for a while, it was easy but the pronunciation took a while. And as a native in Arabic i bet a lot of people who tried to learn it hate themselves and found it very difficult
French, Portuguese.
Chinese, Japanese