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Learning Article : The 3 Hardest Languages To Learn (And Why You Should Learn Them)

Discuss the Article : The 3 Hardest Languages To Learn (And Why You Should Learn Them)

<a href='/article/1024/the-3-hardest-languages-to-learn-and-why-you-should-learn-them' target='_blank'>The 3 Hardest Languages To Learn (And Why You Should Learn Them)</a>

When mastering a language takes upward of 2,200 hours of classroom study, it's safe to say it's one of the world's toughest. Learn here what makes Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese so challenging, and how you can develop your brain to think in new ways by making the effort.

٤ مايو ٢٠١٧ ٠٠:٠٠
التعليقات · 25
14

Apparently you don't know any of those languages, that you are promoting. You make them look harder than they are and there are several mistakes in the article. I just pick one for every language.

Arabic: It isn't correct to say, that written Arabic doesn't have vowels. The letters aliph, waw and ya represent the long vowels. In books for children and learners the harakat (diacritics) are used to indicate short vowels.

Chinese: Once you figured out the system, it isn't that hard to look up Chinese characters and in the beginning Chinese learners first learn how to write Chinese with Pinyin, a transcription system with Roman letters.

Japanese doesn't use Arabic letters at all! Where does this information come from?


٤ مايو ٢٠١٧
7
I think "Emily Clear" is a fake account. Isn't it weird, that she sounds like she is an italki teacher but in fact, she only posted this discussion and then vanished for good? Recently italki started to post discussions as "Mrs Help" and I guess that this article was also written by the italki team.
٢ يوليو ٢٠١٧
7

2000 seems like an underestimate to me. I'm learning chinese, and recognize around 2400 characters, but I still often run into characters I don't recognize when I read newspapers. That said, I feel like you're overstating the difficulty here. Yeah, there's a lot of characters, but there's a logic to them, and it gets easier after you learn a few hundred. Also, in today's world, with technology, you can just copy+paste new characters, or write them: digital dictionaries have handwriting recognizers. There's no need to use a paper dictionary.

And while it's true that chinese is tonal, to suggest that you can't use voice tone expressively is, frankly, absurd. It's every bit as expressive as english is. Maybe not if you're a beginner in the language and are still struggling to produce the tones accurately, but once you've got the accuracy down, you can get a lot of mileage out of how emphatic you make your fourth tone, how much your voice dips on a third tone, how long your first tone is, when you pause, what you emphasize, etc. Tones are scary and hard at first, but they're not complicated, and the rules are really consistent: Once you get the basics,  it's just a matter of practice. 

Also, there's definitely things about chinese that are hard, but there's also so much about chinese that's easy, too. This article reads almost like you're trying to make it sound scarier than it really is. 

٢٠ مايو ٢٠١٧
6
@Jerry 

Meh. I don't think this stuff should be taken too seriously. Italki is a good place to find teachers. The rest is a lot less important (at least as far as I'm concerned). 
٢ يوليو ٢٠١٧
6

Chinese is really a challenging language, even for native speaker. Although I'd learnt Chinese for more than 20 years, still lots of words and idioms that I don't understand or not clear. Here's some examples/jokes from internet about how difficult is Chinese to understand. Hope you like it!

1.冬天,能穿多少穿多少;夏天,能穿多少穿多少。

2.剩女產生的原因有兩個:一是誰也看不上,而是誰也看不上。

3.單身人的由來:原來是喜歡一個人,現在是喜歡一個人。

4.阿呆給領導送紅包時,兩個人的對話頗有意思。

領導:你這是甚麼意思?

阿呆:沒甚麼意思,意思意思而已。

領導:你這就不夠意思了。

阿呆:小意思,小意思。

領導:你這人真有意思。

阿呆:其實也沒有別的意思。

領導:那我就不好意思了。

阿呆:是我不好意思。

٤ مايو ٢٠١٧
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italki
المهارات اللغوية
الصينية (المندرية), الإنجليزية, الفرنسية, الألمانية, الإيطالية, اليابانية, الكورية, الروسية, الإسبانية
لغة التعلّم
الإنجليزية, الفرنسية, الإيطالية, الروسية, الإسبانية