What is the hardest language to learn?
- Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven cases, Seven genders and very difficult pronunciation. The average English speaker is fluent in their language at the age of 12, in contrast, the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age of 16.
- Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – The Ugric languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root word. However, anyone arguing Asian languages like Korean trump Uralic languages in complexity, really needs to hit the books and do more research.
- Simply Arduous: Ukrainian and Russian – Second language learners wrongly assume because these languages use a different script (Cyrillic) that it out ranks Polish. This is not objective, as an alphabet is only lets say 26 letters. It is really the pronunciation and how societies use the language that influences ranking. Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet, but easier pronunciation. (the Poles use a modified Latin alphabet which does not have a neat orthography fit to the sounds of their language). Slavic languages have sophisticated case and gender systems, also something that approximates a complex tense system with aspects of time-verb relationships.
- Challenging contender jockey for position: Arabic – Three baby cases which are like a walk in the park compared to the above, but the unusual pronunciation and flow of the language makes study laborious and requires cognitive diligence if you want to speak it.
- Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese – No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder, but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher in NYC that has even authored an the authoritative book on modern Mandarin says people meet Chinese very easy. This same teacher, if multilingual yet could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even one of the easiest language to learn. Despite prideful proclamations of armchair linguists, to verbalizes Asian languages in general are not top ranked by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.
- Average: French – lots of tenses, but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
- Easy: Spanish and Italian – People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
- Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.
- Some people cocooned in innocence, go around parroting linguistic relative difficulty ranks by looking at a list created in the ivory towers. This list might be based on the number of hours required to achieve a degree of fluency, or intermediate conversation in a language, in an academic environment of teaching, in contrast to most people in the real world. This simplistic one variable model is simply wrong. I suggest a more robust model.
The following is support for my argument.
The way you approach this is a simple equation that illustrates hypothetical rankings of variables importance.
Formula for difficulty in a language = O*(G+V+(w*.1)+(A*2.0)+S+V(1.5))
O= Openness of the society to communicate in their own language to a foreigner as opposed to English.
G = Grammar, specifically the number of exceptions in each cases
V= Verbs Conjugation complexity
P= Pronunciation and Phonology.
W=Complexity of the written language, including script and alphabet variation.
A=Average number of syllables in each word. Do not underestimate this as the working memory for the brain to hold bits of information in your brain is manifold more if you are considering a language with a long orthographical constructions.
S=Speed of the language.
V=Vocalness of the people speaking.
If you can assign an O factor as the major determinant variable then you have your answer. The openness of a society to transmit their language on a person to person, on the street level day-to-day experiences is what really makes communication hard to easy to absorb. I can attest to this after living in Europe for about a decade.
Are you a citizen of Stratos or trying to speak to you boyfriend or girlfriend?
What good is a theoretical understanding of a language, if in reality you can not practice it to fluency beyond the classroom. Lets separate the academics from real people, when trying to analysis the question.
This is not just a ranking of the hardest language to learn mind you, rather a ranking for realistic, practical people who are in the trenches of life and want to learn a new language for communication purposes. Not a ranking for academics who are living on Stratos, the city of clouds or lost in the labyrinth of the stacks in their university library.
I have not considered languages that have under one million native speakers. Even through humanistically important on equal par with all other languages, they are too remote or inaccessible for any real life learning. Patois dialects are excluded. These are important languages, just not for the average person. I also have not considered extinct or ancient languages which have even a more alien grammatical structure.
People write me and say hey Mark here is a language that has a hundred cases and sounds mostly like whistlers, and people often talk backwards, certainly this must be the most difficult. My reply how many people speak it? Similarly, you might say well there is a language spoken by some children on my block, they made it up. For me unless there are a million speakers does not pass the cut.
My reply to the FSI’s rank of the number of hours needed to learn a language -Anti-glottology at its best
There is an annoying mythology of language difficulty, that is perpetuated by Foreign Service institute. How many hours it takes to achieve various levels in a language after academic study. This is no valid. Unless you are 18-21 and a full-time student at a university and giving equal or greater weight to written language as compared to spoken, then that is bunk.
Who has the time to study in the ivory towers a language university or prepare like a diplomat except someone in some cushy government job? It is not the real world. Speaking is much more important than writing and reading.
Written language for the masses only came into significance in the last 100 years, in contrast to the 7 millions years of Homininae communication when there was first a divergence in our evolutionary tree and changes in our heterochrony gave us the capacity for prolonged language acquisition. Further the written language is in the process of a strange de-evolution with rise of texting messages and ADD. Lets be honest here, few people can study like an egghead, rather they want to just communicate.
Example of how people learn in Africa and the Middle East
When I was in North Africa (several times) I was amazed people could talk in the open market in several languages with little effort. They never opened a book or wrote in a foreign language. Language is about speaking. It is about communication not something you learn in a book. How long was it like that? The first one million years of human evolution from Primates until about 1950 when world illiteracy went from less than 1% to over 50%. So for tens of thousands of years for most humans, language was about the speaking, that is it. For a few thousand the landed elite and first estate class has some form of written language but this was not most people. Lets be real language has nothing to do with a book, only the tongue and ear. Therefore when FSI or any other person assets Chinese or Asian languages are hard, they are not if you strip away the crazy characters to a non-Asian person.
The worst thing about the modern communication
It irritates me that one person will state something on the web and it is recycled by every content mill blogger ad infinitum. People take ideas for fact without looking at them objectively. I call this the flat earth syndrome of language learning. Just because an expert says it does not mean it is true.
Aristotle believed the heart was the center of human cognition and the brain was an organ of minor importance. For centuries people took this as fact.
That does not mean the academics are wrong, and Asian languages are not more difficult for an English native speaker to achieve a level of mastery, but look at this objectively.
Modern linguistic snake oil salesman
Also when someone says on the web, you can learn a language in three hours or even three months, and they are trying to sell you something, I would say, ‘I have some swap land in Florida to sell you that will appreciate in value any day now’. I would like to personally like to call them up and test their fluency in Polish. My point is the web is a great place but discern sensation seekers and academics from someone like myself who is linguistically challenged, yet has dedicated his life abroad to learning foreign languages.
How linguistic science is different from physical science
Despite my quantification above, there is no way you can objectively measure linguistic ranking or difficulty like the hard sciences like physics or chemistry measure a phenomenon in a vacuum. Even in physics things are tested, regression are run and retested. There is debate and paradigms are challenged every few decades.
So are you telling me, that in not a social science but a humanities like Language that because some government organization for a very specific program makes a statement fifty years ago, everyone including people on the Internet take it as fact and recycle it ad nauseam?
Evolution of phraseology and variance from linguistic universals as a measure of difficulty.
Departure from universal grammar and linguistic universals and structures is that are natural constructs of the human brain could be a measure of difficulty with some objectivity, however, how you measure it I have no idea how you would do this. Typological universals and other measures are left for future research.
Why Asian languages are not hard – Palaver about Asian foreign language acquisition
No grammar to speak of, no cases, not complex plurals, short words. People argue they have tones but these are subtle pronunciation differences and in my experience I am understood when I speak Mandarin for example with poor pronunciation easier in comparison with Polish. I know author and teacher of Chinese in NYC and he says most of the people who walk in off he street learn Chinese pretty fast. He has a book called Easy Mandarin. It is only the written language that is hard.
Errors and omissions statement
Yes I know in the image I typed Finish and Hinidi, need to fix this, when I get my computer back from Amishland. I am writing an Amish language program. Also the scope of this article can not be comprehensive because the proliferation of languages, for example, I need a follow up to cover, Turkish, Greek, Armenia, Georgian etc. When writing you have to make choices to make a point rather than cover ever detail, however, these are worthy for discussion in the comment area.
Back to Polish – the trophy winner
When you speak of Phonology, sound approximation from the native language to the target Polish ranks near the top as the tongue twisting, multi-syllabic mixing of consonants and vowels are unmatched by any shorter Asian word, even with tones. I stated at the top that the average Polish learner is not fluent until the age of sixteen. It sounds like a bold statement but read on.
Yes Poles can communicate before that, but subjectively, for such an intelligent population of people (and Poles are highly intelligent and educated) proportionally I have seen an inordinate amount of Polish youngsters struggle with their own orthography, pronunciation, grammar at disproportionate levels compared to say English speakers.
Factor out any genetic differences by comparing Polish Americans who are identical genetically to Poles in Poland, yet learn English as their native language at a different rate than Polish as a native language. My daughter who is bilingual finds English much easier than Polish. There are differences in the rates humans learn languages based on the complexity of the language, and this is seen in native speaker language acquisition.
Examples and references that back up my theory of modern of linguistics that give a better understanding of how people acquire a second language:
- In social linguistic acculturation Model or SLA, was proposed by John Schumann and focused on how an individual interacts with the society. Some societies more easily transmit culture.
- Gardner’s socio-educational model – Similar to above and deals with the inter-group model of “ethnolinguistic vitality”.
- Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky developed a theory of zone of proximal development.
I want to know your feedback and research so they may benefit second language learners.
I’m from Tunisia, in the school we learn 3 language Arabic, French( because Tunisia is a francophone country) and English.
even that we speak it daily arabic is the hardest, it is the hardest language ever (I’m arabic saying that so how about other) there is some word, and even sentences that even an arabic teacher can’t explain it the arabic has 28 letter(some letters you don’t find it in other languages) you will face a big difficulty to prononce some worlds correctly, and as my brother from egypt said the grammar is so hard and words has many explanation.
and even if you learnt arabic if you go to an arabic country belive me you won’t understand anything because we don’t use classic arabic.
but it is a very beautiful language, if you learn it you will enjoy reading lot of amazing books and stories.
Sorry if my English was not good that’s because we don’t use it a lot here in Tunisia our basic languages are arabic and French.
“the arabic has 28 letter”, polish has… 32 and 7 doublets spelleed very similar to single letters.
You forgot the Armenian language (first Christians in the world), the basque language comes from the Armenian language and its the hardest in the world. Հայոց լէզուն աշխարի ամենա բարդ լէզուն է. Իմ սիրէլի հայրենակիցնէր եկէք սովորենք հայերէն:
Armenian is not a hard language. I spent 11 months in that country and many foreigners learned armenian very easily. The alphabet looks like a lot of squares but is not so difficult as well. Armenians they feel they have the best language, the most hardest and difficult…. but is part of their way of be that they feel they are the best for everything (as they call themselves the first christians when they are orthodox and not christians but they don’t want to be call orthodox as well)
It is ridiculous to say Poles are not fluent until age 16! I have never heard such rubbish. And English speakers only fluent at age 12? Give me a break. Unless you define ‘fluent’ as understanding everything, up to and beyond university level. A Polish child of 8 understands all cases/genders by that age, obviously has a perfect accent and can function marvellously in most all situations. The intuitive grasp of as-yet unlearned words is present, since much of language learning is dependent on cultural understanding, which a child of 8 has. I would like to know who set age 16 for Polish fluency? Far-fetched.
Since I lived in Poland and know Polish and my family is Polish, I know what I am talking about. Poland has a complex case based grammar system and to master Polish at a high level, not a street level, you need to study the language. Polish kids as teens start to approach a comfort with the language that is achieved by their American counterparts earlier as English is Idiomatically based while Polish is rule based.
Polish is 100 times harder than English – this is a direct quote from a professor at University of Jagiellon linguistics.
“100 times harder than English”…sounds like true hyperbole if I ever heard it. Do you truly, truly believe Polish is literally one hundred times more difficult than English? Just ridiculous. Who invented that scale by the way?
Polish might be difficult for English speakers to meet, but it’s certainly not “the” hardest. Especially if you already speak another Slavic language. Case in Point: My father speaks Polish (his relatives immigrated to the US in 1906) rather well due to his childhood family life with 1st and 2nd generation Polish speakers in the US, and he can fairly easily communicate with Russians and other Slavs. All of which is to say that he could meet Russian or Czech very quickly. And likely vice versa.
So this whole notion of ‘most difficult language’ to learn is purely subjective. Since YOU know Polish/lived in Poland that’s your reference point. Ergo you’re convinced it’s gotta be Polish that’s the hardest.
I lived in Iceland for 10 years and picked up the language very quickly. Nevertheless, I’ve seen television programmes claiming Icelandic is the hardest language to learn. Usually the claim is made by Icelanders! Talk about insularity in thinking!
I’ve been a professional Icelandic translator since 1986. I didn’t find Icelandic’s many declensions troublesome since I already spoke German and English and could find many similarities from the two latter tongues to help me understand. If you can meet patterns well you can learn languages well, regardless of which one it is.
So you see, my frame of reference – my own stew of native/second languages – prompt me to draw conclusions about what is difficult or not. BTW, Icelandic is considered the tenth most difficult language to learn by the State Department, with Polish only coming in at number 9.
Here’s a quote from them about the most difficult languages to learn:
FSI website believes something different.
So we should put this to rest, the most difficult language is likely simply the one whose pronunciation/cultural norms is/are the most alien to what you already speak.
In any case it’s certainly not Polish, or Icelandic. It’s like Einstein said, it’s relative (to where you’re at linguistically).
Shalom
I guess my question is how many languages have you personally learned to the fluency level? You go off website’s (sorry I edited your comment to exclude quotes).
I mean the government believes in Keynesian economics but that does not mean it is right.
The State department is often the place where people in school who do not know how to make it in the real world hide out and collect money after they study something lame in college. I remember when I had an issue and they really did not help me until I wrote the higher ups.
So My point is get away from your book knowledge experience and start to learn languages and make your own determination. When you are fluent in Polish let me know and what you think.
If you think FSI is so great they have plenty of free downloads for language learning, try to learn from those lame things. They are pitiful. The people in the embassies do not use anything on those websites, they get private teachers and different material and the guys I know at the US embassy in Poland have not learned Polish.
Anyone can look something up on the web and be an expert but to have first hand experience over a lifetime is different.
Norman Davies who is an expert in Polish and Poland and married to a Polish wife, still says French is easier for him as Polish is such a crazy language. This is Norman Davies.
Since this is all subjective we can debate this until we are blue in the face but I tend you take other people’s book or website as gospel instead of learning languages yourself. I have taught at a University level and yet I am not an expert, I just think you need to master Polish and then you will see. I mean try to speak a few sentence in Polish and see if anyone will understand you.
English in contrast is universally understood even if pronunciation is way off as people’s brains are more ready for a wider variance in sounds. I can speak Chinese to people and they understand it but for Polish you have to be exact. So my challenge to you is learn some Polish and try to speak it and see if people have any idea what you are talking about. Then learn some Icelandic or whatever and do the same and you will see what I mean.
Your criticim: “I can speak Chinese to people and they understand it but for Polish you have to be exact.”
Chinese is notoriously difficult for Westerners to speak because of the slight tonal nuances. Claiming that your Chinese is understandable while Polish is *really* difficult…well, that’s just further nonsense from your side. If any language needs to be *exactly* pronounced it’s Chinese over Polish!
Your criticism: “….you take other people’s book or website as gospel instead of learning languages yourself. Then learn some Icelandic or whatever and do the same and you will see what I mean.”
Wow, talk about a bad listener. You’ve taught at university but you can’t substantively follow and respond to the points in a clear post.
I stated in my original post that I’ve been a professional translator for Icelandic since 1986, to which you reply that perhaps I should learn Icelandic (and other languages, even though I clearly stated in my original post that I also speak German) so I can see things for myself. BTW, I also speak Portuguese, as I live in Brazil (I translate German/Icelandic/Portuguese for a living).
You know, you’d be saying the same nonsense about Malay or Tagalog being the ‘most difficult’ if you’d learned those languages and lived in those countries.
You are obviously blinded by your influence from Poland, which I tried to get across in my original post. Polish is EASY for a speaker of another closely related Slavic language. It’s no more difficult than a Spanish speaker learning Portuguese or Italian or vice versa.
A Russian speaker commented to this effect on this very board. I see it first-hand between Slavs.
It’s time to stop rooting blindly for your own pet language.
And the comment about trying to learn a few sentences in Polish and see if anyone will understand me?
What a joke, I could easily learn 5 sentences a day in Polish and repeat them to a native Pole and he or she would understand me. What’s so hard about repeating what you hear? It’s called practice.
I am simply amazed that you think Polish borders on the impossible to learn. Truly, truly this is a case of everything being a nail to a hammer.
All foreign languages are difficult to the degree that they alien to one’s own native language.
Germans learn Dutch easily since the two languages are highly related.
Slavs learn Polish EASILY for the same reason.
Polish is not rocket science. I learned Icelandic extremely fluently in 4-5 years, I could do the same for Polish if I lived there and was in constant contact with Poles 24 x 7.
I’ve done it in 3 languages outside my native language, so what’s so special about Polish?
Feel free to test my knowledge of the languages I claim I speak.
Then try to learn and correctly say: GRZEGORZ
BRZĘCZYSZCZYKIEWICZ, CHRZĄSZCZYŻEWOSZYCE POWIAT ŁĘKOŁODY good luck
That not true. Russians can understand Polish and “get along” but they tend to never learn proper grammar.
You have written:
“Polish is not rocket science. I learned Icelandic extremely fluently in 4-5 years, I could do the same for Polish if I lived there and was in constant contact with Poles 24 x 7. ”
I am polish and I really doubt that. I know a large number of foreigners living in Poland for years (not 5, more like 15-20 years) and they still can’t speak polish in a correct way even though they speak polish at home and at work and people all around are helping them. I know slavic people from Russia or Lithuania which have polish parents and they also do not speak polish in a correct way. They have very close pronounciation, they do speak on an understandable level but foreign people NEVER get cases and genders correctly even after 30 years of living in the country. I can tell you more! I have some polish friends which spent their first 6-8 years of life in another country and trust me you can hear the difference because of that even after being graduated from polish university.
I do not want to argue about which language is the hardest to learn in general (IMO it is hungarian) and I hate to have to say this to you but saying that you can learn polish in 5 years is rubbish and you do not know what you are talking about. Honestly… after 5 years of HARD STUDY you would be able to speak polish at some level and most people would understand what you are talking about but this is far from speaking fluently.
Polish is a great world of exceptions and even our president fails on the language complexity from time to time which is quite funny 🙂
i to jest najlepsza odpowiedź odnośnie tematu. Koleś coś sobie napisał ale nie bardzo wie o czym pisze. 5 lat i płynny polski wolne żarty 😀
Przetłumacz dokładnie swój wpis na polski, cwaniaczku, ok?
I liked your artictle, it was pretty interesting, but in some points I totally agree with Frank. That a Pole is fluent in Polish only at the age of 16 is a complete nonsense. I don’t say Polish is easy to learn for a non-native speaker, but to state that for a native child it’s more difficult to learn Polish than any other language you would have to convey quite broad and serious research, which you haven’t done. That even an adult Pole makes mistakes is normal to the same extent all other nativ speakers make mistakes in their languages, which is evident in your own writing. Thorough knowledge of grammar is not essential for a nativ speaker to fluently speak a language.
What’s more, as Frank’s already mentioned, people find it relatively easy to learn other languages from the same family (e.g. Slavic, Germanic, Romance etc.). For a Czech to learn Polish is a piece of cake, for a Russian it’s a bit harder and yet harder for a Brit. But still for none of them them it’s impossible.
Now, you quoted Norman Davis but then there’s a whole bunch of other academic celebrities who not only speak Polish but also write in Polish very well, like David Frick or Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski to begin with. I myself know at least 20 English, Americans, Czechs, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Germans and Italians who are more than fluent in Polish.
I am a Pole, I live and study in Poland, I lived and studied in UK, I am a trained philologist and translator, I graduated in Polish studies (nb. from the Jagiellonian University, not ‘University of Jagiellon’, for Christ’s sake), I speak 5 other languages, 2 of them fluently, learn the 6th and read in 2 more, so please don’t even attempt to tell me that I don’t know what I am talking about.
To back up some of your theses you refer to several scholars but the majority of what you wrote is not illustrated with any serious academic material and you should be aware of the fact that it is easily undermined by people of better learning in certain fields.
I would like to emphasise again that your entry makes an interesting reading, particularly for non-specialits. But it would gain a lot, if you didn’t form your opinions as matter-of-fact statements. Subjective points of view in this matter are also important, and yours would be really helpful for English speakers who think about taking up another language. But when when it comes to a serious discussion with linguistically educated people – just ease off.
First off, I am sorry if I repeat somebody’s earlier post since I really had not strength to go through it all, but I would like to add a bit to the discussion.
I think that what the author said about Poles getting fluent at age 16 meant not literally “fluent” in international sense of the word, but “fluent” according to Polish standards, which are all about norms and regulations. Sure, you would understand even a 10-year old perfectly, but mind that grammar and writing are parts of school curriculum even in later grades of secondary school (16+).
Some commenters claim that a language XXX is easy to learn because they learned it easily as native speakers, which is wrong. Humans are capable to learn and speak any language, the earlier they start, the easier it is. Bring a child in a home where mum speaks Chineese and Dad speaks Dutch, the child will master both of them, maybe with a tendency to use the one which is used outside home more frequently.
The issue of language difficulty is closely related to:
a) your personal language skills
b) your first language
c) point of reference – for Chineese the most difficult language may be Polish; for English -> Belarussian; for Polish -> Arabic and so on…
Polish may be very hard to be learned “properly, according to Polish language standards”, but it is not that hard to communicate. True, when a speaker does not use cases and mixes gender, it may be confusing, but communication is a two-way process. If a receiver does not try to understand the speaker = no communication. When speaker fails at grammar, but his/her receiver makes the efford to try and understand = they will succeed.
Language difficulty is abstract thing. For the author Polish is the most difficult, for Frank it may be Mandarinian, for me its French (all I can hear is running water:P) -> it’s up to your skills, will to learn and all the background (other languages, movie preferences, cultural issues).
Regards,
A.
>>> I am a Pole, I live and study in Poland, I lived and studied in UK, I am a trained philologist and translator, I graduated in Polish studies (nb. from the Jagiellonian University, not ‘University of Jagiellon’, for Christ’s sake), I speak 5 other languages, 2 of them fluently, learn the 6th and read in 2 more, so please don’t even attempt to tell me that I don’t know what I am talking about. <<<
Respect!
Proud, offensive towards author, and such well education that Mark should hide under a blanket and not dare to say a words back.
Having graduated from English studies I can tell you that I know a lot of native British people living and teaching at Polish universities who totally fail speaking Polish.
But then, you speak 6+ languages and you know better.
Regards.
I agree with this. The author clearly has a Polish bias. I speak Polish and don’t feel it was that difficult to learn as a child.
In fact, the most irritating mentality I come across from others when learning a language is that a language is harder/easier to learn. You’re just setting up barriers. Surely the right mentality is: “that person has learned the language, so can I.”
Don’t be defeatist about it, Mark! From all the things you can learn, learning languages is probably the most natural thing available. Our brains are built to grasp language quickly, unlike quantum mechanics for which they sadly are not.
I am Polish and my Norwegian boyfriend picks up Polish from me like there is no tomorrow. He even picks it up from my phone conversations with my family and then builds his own Polish words and very often correctly. I agree that Polish being so different from Norwegian would be difficult for him to be fluent in, or sound like a native, but by just looking at his effortless progress I don’t think Polish is that hard. I don’t have any scientific data though, just personal experience.
Ég fór á veraldarvefinn og fann hvergi manneskju sem héti Frank W. og þú skulir kalla þig atvinnumann í þýðingu það stór efa ég, ei skaltu halda því fram að þú haldir að íslenska sé létt tungumál.
“Ég fór á veraldarvefinn og fann hvergi manneskju sem héti Frank Wellbinder og þú skulir kalla þig atvinnumann í þýðingu það stór efa ég, ei skaltu halda því fram að þú haldir að íslenska sé létt tungumál.”
Ja, forstu a veraldarvefinn og fannst ekki nafnid mitt? Gaeti thad e.t.v. verid ad eg noti nafn sem eg bara bjo til upp ur thurru? eda hugsadir thu aldrei ut i thad, ad folk vilji vera i ro og naedi og thessvegna notar ekki faedingarnafnid a netinu?
en thvi til sonnunnar ad eg se thydandi, hvernig vaeri ad thu sendir mer eitthvert ‘erfitt’ efni a islensku og tha sendi eg thjer thydinguna aftur i snarhasti?
Sko eg bjo a Froni i ein tiu ar og gifti mig inn i samfelagid tharna an thess ad tala neitt i islensku, en laerdi undirstoduna a 6 manudum og var altalandi eftir 2-3 ar. Sjalfsagt ad thyskukunnatta min hjalpadi tharna ad…
Er til taks ef ad thu tharft ad thyda eitthvad ur islensku/thysku/portugolsku yfir a ensku.
Atvinnumadur i thydingum
ps gaman ad hitta islendinginn, thid erud vodalega faair og sjaldgaefir, eg hef ekki komist til landsins i meira en 10 ar, er ad drepast ur heimthra.
You confuse fluency with proficiency. To be fluent you don’t need to master the language. Someone who is fluent in a language doesn’t need to master all bits and pieces of grammar, that’s mastery and it’s completely different notion. Fluency in any mother tongue is achived pretty much at te same time in every language and society. Thus, you were wrong.
I don’t feel like you know what you are talking about. Take for example that there are only three genders in Polish and you write there are seven:
“The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation.”
That’s ridiculous. And I find it offensive that you think it takes a Pole 16 years to learn their own language. To what degree? Fluency should not be measured by the ability to write without errors. Look at your own piece of writing. It’s full of grammatical and punctual errors and you can’t seem to formulate full sentences, should I assume you haven’t mastered English yet?
No, because fluency is a broad and informal concept that has more to do with “getting by” with a language rather than being totally proficient. If that were the case, you’d be assailing every accent, dialect and local language variance in existence.
Do you really think Polish is the most difficult language? I am learning it now, I have only been studying it for 6 weeks but it doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Pronunciation is extremely logical once you figure out all the sounds, unlike English. The 7 cases are somewhat hard to identify but i think that will just come naturally after speaking it for a while. I speak it to my wife and she understands everything I say even though i mess up the endings. I just try to remember after z instrumental after w locative, for me dla mnie for you dla ciebie. I just try to remember which words come after which depending on how I am using it. I can’t imagine it being even close to as hard as Chinese Arabic or even Russian. Russian has the same grammar but a completely different alphabet
Once You learn Cyrylica, it’s not that hard. That is the fact that non-native speakers learning Polish are easy to spot even after decades of living here. They always make mistakes. With cases, prefixes, suffixes and pronunciation.
Those endings are what makes you a fluent speaking person. Without it you will be understood, but you won’t be seen as someone speaking polish, but as someone trying. Without it sentences sound as a group of words, not as a real sentence with a meaning. Everyone will understand what you mean, but it’s not the same. But don’t worry, even Poles mess up those endings in some cases. I really feel sorry for everyone who is trying to learn Polish.
Donte,
Russian, Polish, Belorussian and Ukrainian are all closely related.
Frank Wellbinder is correct to say they are easy to learn for speakers of the other languages.
The Cyrillic alphabet is just a minor hurdle. And it works very well for those Slavonic sounds. Polish could very easily be written in Cyrillic and would avoid all those complex sz, rz, szcz, combinations.
I am an American citizen. I was born and raised in the Cleveland Public school system. So I pretty much speak the American English. I’m in my mid 30s and over the years I’ve learned and understand several languages. Spanish, Russian, and Croatian. Those 3 languages were pretty easy to get a grip on. Russian can be considered difficult, but once I found the fundamentals of the language, it became most understandable to me.
I read that Polish is the hardest,that’s a personal opinion. It is difficult for me to try and learn it, but over time, I believe I could understand it. Same goes for Chinese and Arabic.
Personally, my friend introduced me to Icelandic. That language is a whole different level. And is in my opinion the most difficult.
Every once in a while you run across something truly ridiculous on the internet. There is no such thing as a more or less difficult language for a native speaker. Children learn every single language in the world at the same pace. Children begin speaking at the same time in every language. The only thing that “more difficult to learn” and “less difficult to learn” have to do with languages involves second languages. Then the only important factor is what the first language a person knows. If your native language is Russian, Polish is quite easy. If your native language is English, Spanish is quite easy. Furthermore, there is not even any way Polish could be the hardest language to learn for someone whose first language is English (much less, the ridiculous idea the Polish children learn Polish slower than children of other languages). Polish is an Indo-European language with no more cases than several other Indo-European languages. Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are Finno-Urgric languages, completely unrelated to Indo-European and they generally have far more complex grammar than Polish. Japanese, Arabic, Korean, the Finno-Urgic Languages: these are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker (though obviously a child raised in each culture learns the languages at the same speed).
Your full of theory no practical observation. I have a daughter and all my Polish and American and UK friends, their children make faster progress in English than in Polish. Even Polish kids have trouble with grammar and pronunciation as their language is like a series of tongue twisters and grammatical exceptions.
No, it is you who are wrong. 24 x 7 immersion in a language from birth clears up any ‘complex’ grammar issues immediately through constant exposure. Saying that Polish kids have trouble with pronunciation is just ridiculous. You clearly have a soft spot for Polish since that’s your second language, ergo it just must be the most difficult. Hogwash.
English spelling has tons and tons of exceptions in its spelling, yet virtually everyone catches on well enough. Just a matter of constant exposure.
Time to put this silly notion of the hardest language to rest. Polish it sure as heck ain’t. It’s only valid in the context of a second language.
Time to give up personal preferences and see things as they are.
And Polish is easy for speakers of other Slavic languages. Period.
I have taught kids in Poland have you? I know for a fact many Polish kids have pronunciation and grammar problems more than English speaking kids. It is a more complex language. Immersion from birth is the best, but it takes kids 5 years before simple sentences are formed, while adults can make faster progress. It does help but adults have the advantage of abstraction and understanding. Polish is eons harder than English and this is from every bilingual instructor I know.
Okay this has become a dull exercise in futility. YOU have taught kids in Poland, YOU have lived in Poland. Yep, I think we all get it now. Pure objective assessment. Regardless of all the great counterpoint brought up here. I wonder how many countries you have lived in and learned the language in order to make this grand pronouncement? I have lived in 4, and still don’t know (second) language is the hardest, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t – for English speakers – Arabic or Chinese or Korean due to the alien factor and the tones/cultural component. Polish isn’t even close.
No way Finnish, Basque, Twi with its glottal clicks, Icelandic, Estonian can be nearly as hard as the fabulously difficult Polish either, which Russians, Czechs and other Slavs can understand to a large degree without ever having studied it.
I wonder how they do that, since Polish is impossible to learn? And Polish has seven cases. Wow. In Icelandic there are 17 ways to say the numbers 1 through 4 and three different ways to say some first and last names. And Finnish has a purported 16 cases. How’s the old Polish stacking up now? Seven cases doesn’t seem too bad.
The final word, to repeat this ad nauseum, is that No (second) language is ‘the hardest’ per se, it all depends on what your first language is. You really need to stop defending your ego turf with Polish.
No more from me on this, it’s gotten too ridiculous.
And to answer your question on whether I’ve taught kids in Poland, no I haven’t, but I have taught in Iceland, the US, Germany and Brazil, and don’t claim to know it all.
Peace peaceniks
I delete your caps as it is not good form. We can agree to disagree, I would argue this all day, and no Asian languages are not that hard, the grammar is simple and tones are less complex. Writing is the only barrier but that is not speaking. OK So what makes you such an expert? How many language have you learned or have you taught at any University like I have? How many languages can you claim fluency in?
I do appreciate your comments even if I disagree with them. Languages are largely subjective in terms of what experience you are coming from.
Mark when I’m reading your words – I just can’t believe. Polish children have problems with their lang? Ridiculous!
And yeah – I’m Polish and I was fluent speaker at 5/6 years old. Ofc if we r speaking about reading poems or science magazines it goes up but it’s still smth about 12/14 y old.
Personally I think that we r all fluent in our lang at the same age and like Frank said – for me Russian, Ukrainian, Czech etc. are easy lang. and French is very hard, Chinese/Arabic/Icelanding are extremely hard.
I’m Polish and I would’t want to take a stand in the debate about the hardest language in the world but generally I would say that fusional languages are harder to learn than agglutinative langugages. If Finnish 17 cases are done by adding a suffix to an unchanging stem then it’s nothing like Slavic cases where the suffix twists the entire root of the word to a degree that it’s often not recognizable if you know only the infinitive (like pies nominative in plural becomes psy – and then many forms like psu psom psach. Or deszcz becomes dżdżu in an archaic but still used literaly form). Hence the discussion about numbers of cases is irrelevant if you don’t study how they work in reality. I remember from a grammar schoolbook that Polish linguistics can’t really agree how many declension and conjugation tables there are. Polish is built on exceptions.
Honestly I suspect that other Slavic languages have the same level of complicacy but they all have an easier pronounciation for English speakers. After all, of all the languages mentioned in the discussion above it has the highest consonant-vowel ratio.
I also think that the argument about mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages is invalid. It is true that I can understand a Serb or, even better, a Slovak but it doesn’t say anything about their difficulty for an English speaker.
Frank, I agree with all that you have said – spot on! I particularly liked this sentence: ‘Polish is 100 times harder than English – this is a direct quote from a professor at University of Jagiellon linguistics’. Not only because it’s ridiculous per se but because it is considered by the author as a true scientific fact stated by a no-name authority. Love it! 😀
Hi,
I am from Poland, I’ve known Polish all my life, I am from C1 to C2 in English and German and now I am learning Russian (I’ve been learning it for past 1,5 years) so I believe I’m allowed to have something to say about your theories.
First of all: I am not challenging Icelandic nor do I believe Polish is harder than Icelandic. Mainly because I have never tried learning it.
Secondly: Poles themselves have difficulties in cases, they mix two of them (I spare you the knowledge which two, it’s not important here I suppose) and create mistakes. They are even able to separate one word into two and write a total nonsense. It’s not about “which is the hardest here”, but to legitimate the fact that people, adults, native-speakers make ridiculous mistakes all the time, hurting the language and turning it into a monster. My personal highly emotional opinion. Notorious mistakes among educated people are the fact, though.
Thirdly: Yes, Russian is easy to understand and to pronounce (imho: apart of “L” sound which can be either hardly spoken or softly spoken, for me the soft “L” is kinda hard to achieve – in Polish the soft sound has developed into a separate letter), because words are often the same, though spoken with a different accent. However not all of them! And there are a lot of exceptions, that’s why Russian is treacherous for Poles. You never take words for granted here, though it’s easy to get in ease with this language. With Czech the situation is opposite, most of the words are treacherous and simply sound funny for Poles and you cannot guess what’s the real meaning behind them, while only a few correspond with each other in both languages. Czechs have it easier with Poles rather than the opposite. I had it easier in Slovakia than in Czech Republic.
Lastly: I cannot notice how proud of learning Icelandic you are. I admit, I’d admire myself for it also. But you make your assumptions about Polish based on a completely different language. This is simply silly. I am an anthropologist and I cannot imagine making an assumption on Finnish culture basing it on our history (Finns had been under occupation for a quite a few centuries – not existing on maps etc., we had been under occupation for 123 years or so) yeah, so I will base my opinion on our history and decide why Finns are the way they are now. Want to judge Polish? Listen to it. Try to speak it. Try to get a hold of the grammar. My Korean friend could speak simple Polish, supporting herself with English when she wanted to share some more abstract thoughts, after 3 years of living in Poland. After 9 years of living in Poland she never became completely fluent with it. Oh, and one last thing – Polish is very easy for me, so this is just observation.
Hi Frank,
I am Polish, I have lived three years in Iceland and I have managed to learn Icelandic quite fluent. Well I still make a mistakes using wrong endings, but still after my 4 years being out of Iceland this summer I came back for a holidays and I haven’t used English at all. I was perfectly understandable and I understood the others with no problem. After all I can tell you one thing – Iceland is difficult language – that’s true – but as a native Polish I can easily confirm, Polish is way more difficult. 7 cases, not 4 – and way more difficult pronounciation and grammar.
BTW, could you be so nice and give me all that 17 ways of saying numbers from 1-4 – I know they differ but 17 is too much in my opinion.
Mbkv,
Seweryn
Regarding 17 ways to say the numbers 1-4 in Icelandic:
ONE einn, ein, eitt, einum, einni, einu, einnar, eins
TWO tveir, tvaer, tvö, tveimur, tveggja, tvistur, tvenna, tvennar, tvenn
THREE þrir, þrjár, þrjú, þrjá, þremur, þriggja, þristur, þrennar, þrenna, þrenn
FOUR fjórir, fjórar, fjögur, (fjaggra), fjöggura, fjórum, fjarki
SOME NUMBERS WHEN PLAYING CARDS fimma, friendshipa, sjöa, nía, tía
…and I wouldn’t be surprised if I left out a few here and there.
I’m not proud of having learned Icelandic, I’m merely saying it can be done to a near-native level, much like the vaunted, on-so-impossible-to-learn Polish.
Well, in Polish there are some more, because declension is based on gender (there are five, quoting wikipedia: “personal masculine, animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter) and case. After wiritng down all the different declensions and taking into account collective numerals, I came up with 46 different ways to say the numbers 1-4. But mind you! In Polish all numerals fall to the declination… And these are also only basic numerals, not counting the orders (like first, second and so on)…
1:
jeden
jedna
jedną
jedne
jednego
jednej
jednemu
jedni
jedno
jednych
jednym
jednymi
2:
dwaj
dwie
dwoje
dwojga
dwojgiem
dwojgu
dwoma
dwiema
dwóch
dwóm
dwu
3:
troje
trojga
trojgiem
trojgu
trzech
trzej
trzem
trzema
trzy
4:
czterech
czterej
czterem
czterema
cztery
czworga
czworgiem
czworgu
czworo
You wrote: “I have taught kids in Poland have you? I know for a fact many Polish kids have pronunciation and grammar problems more than English speaking kids. ”
My response: Did you ever stop to consider maybe you just aren’t that good of a teacher and that’s why your students struggled? Besides, if you knew English as well as you think you do (A lot of what you’ve written is nearly incomprehensible, not to mention incorrect.), you’d know that “many” does not equal “all”; it doesn’t even necessarily mean “half” or any amount that would be accepted in a real scientific study. Your experiences are merely anecdotal and cannot be considered scientific by any means. Everything you have written is nothing but pure speculation.
You wrote: “I mean the government believes in Keynesian economics but that does not mean it is right.”
My response: This is what we call a straw man fallacy. Keynesian economics and what anyone thinks about it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, language difficulty. People typically resort to using this when they realize they have no real facts (your anecdotal evidence does not equate to facts) to back up their claims.
Hi, I am a Pole living in Poland. I do not know if Polish is the most difficult – for me it’s Chechen but I could observe my children speaking Polish and this is truth that they make many mistakes, they mix the endings. It looks like they speak ancient Polish, it’s so funny! At age about 10 they start to manage all cases but still there might be some minor mistakes. But again – for my second son who has three languages at home – Polish seems to be the most difficult even if it’s the most often used language as we live in Poland. But he is only 5, we will see how it goes.
On the other hand I think that learning Polish on the basic communication level it’s not easy at all. We are very open and when someone even try to speak our language we do everything to understand it 🙂 The fluent level – it’s the other story but it’s also very individual matter. One person will learn it quick, the other one will need a lot of time.
I also know Polish people who have many problems with learning English, it’ s too difficult for them.
One more thing – Russian IS NOT similar to Polish. It sounds similar but it’s different! And it takes some time to learn it even for Poles – we have to be very careful not to mix tour grammar with Russian grammar, and to use Polish words with Russian accent. 🙂
First, I would like to point out, that I do not share Mark’s statement about Polish being the hardest language. I guess Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are slightly more difficult to learn.
Second: Frank, you are wrong in so many of your statements. And you offer absolutely no evidence, just your ass-derived convictions. Examples:
“Saying that Polish kids have trouble with pronunciation is just ridiculous.”
Evidence? I have lived in Poland my whole life and everything Mark wrote about Polish children is absolutely true. Especially learning grammar (correct usage of cases etc) seems to be the problem even for many late teenagers. Some Poles even claim, that most of our adults do not know the language well enough to communicate properly with others.
“Just a matter of constant exposure.”
Again, no evidence offered. My wife is Armenian by origin, she has lived in Poland for 14 years, received Polish education, passed all exams in Polish, has no foreign accent whatsoever, yet… she still makes mistakes in her everyday speech. Your claims are typical for people who never had to learn Polish and are confident that the process is similar to all other languages they heard.
“And Polish is easy for speakers of other Slavic languages. Period.”
Completely untrue. Your “evidence” seems to be the fact that Slavs understand each other. This is true, but it does not mean that, for example, Russians can easily learn how to SPEAK Polish properly. Understanding is easy due to similarity in nouns and verbs in a base form. But the whole grammar structure of Polish language is insane even for Czechs, Ukrainians etc.
Btw, my grandmother is of Russian descent. And she knows very well that it’s almost impossible for Russians to learn Polish, but it’s fairly easy the other way round.
Sounds terrible. Judging by your last name you are at least part-polish. If you lived in Poland (by the Uni I think it was Krakow) you’ve either met really dumb people or you are not telling the truth. I was in USSR (yes, long ago) when I was 7, now I’m 32 and still can speak a little Russian. Recently I’ve met a guy who was born in Kazahstan (Borat! 🙂 ) from the Russian family, moved to Latvia when he was 6. Now in UK he speaks Polish, Latvian, Russian with no problem at all.
To sum it all up – families of languages are similar at all levels (speaking, gramar, difficulty to learn)
Hi,
I really liked your article. I am a linguist myself and I was wondering how you would rate Latin in terms of its complexity and difficulty to learn. What do you think?
Olga
Good question, I have always been fond of Latin and with a few start and stop attempts never really learned it. I would say one rank lower than the Ugric languages like Hungarian (harder). The reason Latin has cases and is old fashion grammar system that other Indo-European languages evolved away from when they had to become more flexible with mixing and blending (like English).
However, it is harder than most because it is not a spoken language and you can not easily turn on Youtube and listen to songs or watch some attractive weather broadcaster in Latin or at least not readily. You can not visit a place where you hear it, except the Vatican, where you can speak it on the street. Therefore, it is less accessible. I love Latin as I am Catholic and love Gregorian Chants but to learn it from a book rather than a person, well, it creates a barrier other languages do not face.
I mean lets be honest after a lot of self study I learned Polish from my wife who is Polish. I know people would love to have a ‘Latin lover’, but if you take that literally that means you might be dating a theology or classics student and maybe derail him from the seminary.
Just wanted to quickly say I really liked your post. Especially with the pictures and the map. Clearly structured and actually, it reflects how I feel about the majority of languages too. I speak fluent German and English, have learned 8 years of Mandarin and 5 of Japanese, Polish on and off, and at some time or another Cantonese, Afrikaans, Latin, ancient Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Maori and I even looked at Finnish for a couple of months.
Maybe I would say though, that you actually mean “complicated” instead of “hard” and “simple” instead of “easy”. Whether Polish is or isn’t hard to learn, its grammar is far more complicated than Mandarin. And I don’t see how anyone could deny that. And although Mandarin (of the languages I know) has the simplest grammar, (my opinion, although Maori has a pretty simple one too) you still make the odd mistake here and there. But nothing like Polish.
Whether a language is hard or easy though, I think depends on the individual (as well as on your first language). Both my mother and my aunty learned both French and German and from the same teachers too. My mother always found German a lot easier, whereas my aunty found French easier and they both have English as their first language.
Ok, I’ve read some of the comments, and got angry with some… I’ve not met a person who learned to speak polish to the same level I speak english. Polish is my first language, I had only 4 years of english in school, and years later moved to London. After 3 months (!!!!) people would not belive english is not my first language!!! I got into ‘cockney’ (for real…) and still can’t get rid off ‘tha mate’ and other things… 8 years later 😛 I moved to Poland (Warsaw) less then 2 years ago, and I have problems speaking polish!! And writing………….. I am making very stupid mistakes, and can’t remember grammar and stuff… I actually had to go for some lessons!!! Also, I speak Russian, Italian and French, have BASIC knowledge of Japanese and can do medical related Latin. And you know what? English was nothing compared to Russian!!! FOR REAL!! Maybe Polish is not the hardest to learn, but damn it’s complicated!! And if you want to speak native-like it’s almost impossible to anyone who is not eastern-europe based.
I am Polish and Polish is my first language; I agree it is all a matter of comparison with what you already know. For me all Slavic languages are easy – Japanese is easy too, as the pronounciation of vowels is the same as in Polish. Anyway, the notion that Polish is so difficult even Poles struggle to learn it is complete bs, and I have no idea where it came from. I observe children in my family in both England and Poland and see no differences in language acquisition except the usual class/social difference.
Well.. what can I say? I’m a polish native speaker, so it is pretty hard for me to say if polish is really ‘the hardest’ language to learn. I know English and Chinese at the university level and a bit of Japanese. In my opinion one of the hardest languages to learn is Irish (yes, I realize its a language with virtually no native speakers left). During my university years I was “forced” to learn Irish from an Irish native speaker. Well, nevermind that, what I am trying to say is, this Irish guy has a Polish wife and a child. He’s been living here for quite a few years and from what I remember he studied Russian philology in Dublin in his youth, and by no means he could really communicate in Polish after all the years he spent here. I mean he understood alot of Polish words, and could say some ungrammatical sentences, but his pronunciation was way off making it pretty hard to understand at times. He would probably say exactly same thing about me speaking Irish, so it’s really just a mater of preference and your learning capabilities. I don’t believe there is a “hardest” language. It’s just that some languages are easier to absorb and some require alot of practice. What’s more, people tend to be, let’s call it, “gifted” or “talanted” in learning certain languages, for instance, take a, what you would call “hard” language, but can’t totally learn what you call “easy” language. I believe it really comes down to our own personas, effort put in learning and maybe talent. P.S. I learnt russian for around 4years and it was worst experience of my life, I hate that language – thus I didn’t really want to learn it (and supposedly some of you say russian and polish are so similiar that you we can speak russian without learning it beforehand – what a load of crap). P.S.2 I am really sorry for all mistakes/typos etc. It’s 4am and I am hella tired. Gnite 🙂
I can tell this is totally legit, when they place Chinese and Japanese on the same level (that assertion alone tells me how qualified this author is to make these claims).
If that wasn’t enough, I suppose his mastery of the language he wrote the article in, solidifies his legitimacy like nothing else: “Finish”? And here I thought it was spelled “Finnish” all these years…
This guy is good. Really, really good.
I am Polish, so I almost feel a little pride in your ranking. But I think it is still flawed. I am sure that Polish is a hard language to learn but “the hardest” or even “hard” will depend on where you are coming from.
For example my wife is Malaysian and her pronunciation in Polish was good almost from the start. So for her the pronunciation in Polish would rank as easy. Similarly Malaysian (Malay and Iban) languages came to me fairly easily in pronunciation, while English was much tougher. In terms of spelling once she learned how to read each of the Polish letters she is unfamiliar with she could read aloud and even write words whose meaning she did not yet understand. For English speakers this is of course much more difficult but that is just it: for English speakers.
I learned Polish as a child so I can’t make much comment on how difficult it was to learn. But I can comment on English: difficult pronunciation, spelling which doesn’t reflect the way the words are actually supposed to sound and on the positive side, relatively easy structure.
I also speak Iban and Malay (reasonably well, not fluent yet), they have much easier structure (in fact almost no structure, like Chinese). The spelling is also very easy because they stick to the rules they made, once you know how to read all the sounds they stay the same always. Still both languages remain a bit difficult to start off because their words have no connection whatsoever to any other languages I may be familiar with. So again: because of my background they are difficult, though structurally very easy. And English speakers find the pronunciation of these languages very hard to master.
Now Chinese, here I have a major bone to pick. Firstly the words are not easy to learn, they are TOO SHORT, yes, one individual word is easier to learn when it is short. But I also need to be able to tell them apart and for that it helps if there is more room for differences. Gao, Dao, Tao…ok now which one was “cucumber” and which one was “path”? And the tones are crucial, because with the wrong tone you arent being unclear, you are saying a different word. The structure is easy (practically non existent) BUT the writing system is downright impossible. You give an example with English speakers reaching fluency by 12 and Polish kids by 16, I dont necessarily agree with it but let’s run with that. Chinese speakers NEVER reach full fluency. Most University professors know about 50% of the signs of their alphabet. Most people on the street know about 25% of the signs. To read a newspaper without a dictionary you need about 2000 – 6000 signs depending on whom you ask. Now sure, they have Pinyin, but no one uses it outside of language schools. And I have yet to meet 1 (one) westerner who has learned to read Chinese fluently. You can’t separate reading and writing from speaking, a language is a language to be fully functional you need both. it doesn’t do me much good to be able to ask someone about a bank, airport etc if I don’t actually know it when I get there because the sign is just squiggles to me. Chinese would perhaps be an easy language to learn if they adapted a phonetic alphabet but as is it isn’t just hard it is impossible…unless of course you come from a language with a similar background, which brings me back to the original point: it all depends on your background.
Proud to be Polish 🙂
“it takes kids 5 years before simple sentences are formed” -What??? I am a native speaker of Polish, and so are my children, my daughter was 1,5 years old when she started forming simple sentences and my son was 2. My son is 2,5 years old now and he already speaks fairly fluently for his age, uses tenses, forms sentences (even more complex ones), he does create interesting endings and verb forms as far as grammar is concerned, but it’s only natural at his age. My kids are not unusual exceptions. In general most kids by the age of 3 uses the language pretty fluently, with some grammar mistakes here and there. As for pronunciation I agree some sounds are difficult to learn, so small kids replace them with similar ones, for example the “sh” sound with “s”. By the age of 6 kids should generally master the more difficult sounds, but some don’t, and if they don’t, they go to a speech therapist.
In fact there’s very little Polish people (and probably no foreigners) who can fluently speak Polish and write in Polish. By fluently I mean making no mistakes.
I’d just like to know what makes Polish more troublesome than Russian (just for instance)
Another thought: If Polish is the hardest of Slavic languages… why is it that we Poles cannot understand other Slavic speakers and they can easily understand us? (best examples being: Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians)
It’s because Polish is older. New languages that branch from the stem understand the older, not the other way round.
No sir, please keep your facts straight, Czech is much older than Polish. And we can say through the middle ages Polish might have been considered as a branch grown from Czech stem (Czech based grammar, spelling, vocabulary).
Modern Czech is not older then Polish. The main difference is that however Polish language is different than that one used in medieval times but it was an evolution. We had literature all over that time. And what defines the language and its rules is literature. Czech was spoken by lower classes and in medieval times it was written but since the begining of XVII till the end of XIX there was no literature in Czech language so Czech linguists had to artificially revive this language in late XIX. In Poland it was not a case.
Yes, I found the answer on this example, that when Poland was latinized other Slavic countries where using Old Church Slavonic language, that is why you may find differecies between those languages. Poland was always more connected with western Europe (Germany, Italy) than other Slavonic countries (Ukraina was part of Russia, etc.)
So I find the difference in the language of the church and many writers of medival Europe…
Cześć kochani, prawda jest taka, że nasz ojczysty polski język, jest trudny nawet dla nas samych ze względu na samą pisownię, która zakłada użycie wielu odmian rzeczowników w prawidłowej ich postaci, masy przecinków, wykrzyczeń itd. odpowiednio w kontekście. Jeśli chodzi o samąwymowę nie jest najgorzej, ale to właśnie pismo i wymowa czyni nasz język trudnym, nawet dla nas samych w niektórych przypadkach. Więc jeżeli ktoś ze studiujących język polski przeczyta ten post ze zrozumieniem to stawiam browara 🙂
a propo, chiński dla Polaków nie jest wyjątkowo trudny, trzeba tylko zacząć od podstaw pisowni, potem idzie gładko, bo wymowa nie jest adekwatna poziomem do pisowni.
Do we really have seven genders in Polish? Guess it’s hard to relise how complex the language is if it’s your mother tongue.
However, the fact is that many Polish people don’t know their own language and they tend to make tones of mistakes. Myself, maybe not tones but definitely some. Nobody is perfect 😉
W żyle żyła sobie żyła, a w tej żyle była żyła.
Who understood it?
I disagree
Slavic languages are hard, but quite similar to each others.
I hae lived in Croatia, my friends could easily understand ppl from former yugoslavia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria.
Croatian is not easy, but in only 4 months with Croatians I could more or less understand and speak basic sentences
I have also lived in Hungary for 11 months and in spite of a language course, no way. IT is simply too hard, too complex, too difficult, too different from anything else. Words change even in their roots.
I am pretty sure polish is not ranked as the hardest by none of the linguistics. As far as I understand Hungarian is the third. But it is your opinion and the article was funny.
Skoro taki trudny, to brać się do nauki! Kto chce się dogadać z Polakiem powinien znać jego ojczysty język.
Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie, w Szczebrzeszynie. Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Chrząszczyżewoszczyce, powiat Łękołody. Gżegżółka grzała grzańca, gdy grzmiący grzmot gromko grzmiał, grożąc grzesznikom. Enjoy, breaking your Maxilla with PL.
It’s strange when any language “study” leaves behind one of the most spoken languages in the world… Portuguese. I’m not saying it’s harder or easier than any other just that it is spoken by 200 million people which is still 140 million more than Italian and 160 million more than Polish and you didn’t find it worth mentioning. Next time you should start by going to wikipedia list of languages and start from the top.
PS: No, it’s not close to Castellano (spoken in Spain) because not even them can speak our language correctly.
Great article. Polish (I am from Poland) is very hard, but only for non-Slavic nations. I have been to Czech once, and you can speak polish there and they’ll response to you in Czech. There’s no problem with speaking this way. It’ll be similiar experience during talk with people from Slovenia. ANd of course you can speak with Russians, it would be problematic, but not so hard – I’ve already tried.
Polish is hard – yes, it is. But children in age 8-9 could speak with no problems even with a high-school proffesor.
Cheers from Poland! 🙂
A word to the author of this article.
Mark, Having read what you have written here and reading most of the comment exchange between you and Frank Wellbinder, I must say you have been wrong so many times I don’t know where to start. Maybe I’ll start from quoting Frank here, as I believe this really hits the nail on the head:
“The final word, to repeat this ad nauseum, is that No (second) language is ‘the hardest’ per se, it all depends on what your first language is. You really need to stop defending your ego turf with Polish.”
Mark, accept the fact that language difficulty is relative and it all depends what your first language is. I am Polish native speaker and I tell you that. To say that Polish kids can’t pronounce until they’re 8 or form sentences before they’re 5 is simply preposterous! And 16 to be fully fluent in grammar and so on? Where have you taught in Poland I ask? Where they normal students or people with some retardation?
I speak Japanese (rather fluently) and Mandarin Chinese (intermediate) and I can tell you that for most of the people I know, these langauges are much more difficult than Polish, which might have more complex grammar (but there are plenty languages where it is more complex) and more difficult phonetics(it has 1 more sound than Mandarin) but come on- what makes Mandarin really difficult are the tones, the fact that it is the context language as well as the writing system (which you cannot exclude from your language difficulty comparison) – by far the most complex in the world (among major languages). Also, to put Japanese and Chinese (BTW without any mention what kind of Chinese you meant – I assume it was Mandarin) as one group is another nonsense. These langauges share only the writing system + around 40% of Japanase vocab is derived from Chinese (but now sounds very different). Everything else is different – from phonetics, through grammar to even the number of readings for one kanji/ hanzi. It is like to put Hungarian and Irish and start comparing just because they use the same wirting system, or better – maybe like Russian and Mongolian.
Let me just add one more thing. I come from the city of Lodz, where there is the only one proffesional state Polish language school for foreign students (mostly from Africa + Erasmus exchange) and I’ve some some friends among the poeple who were studying there. There was one German girl, who was able to hold normal conversation in Polish after learning it for about 6 months (any subject you want – from small talk to politics)! True, she was dilligent but it also shows that learning Polish when one is constantly exposed to it, isn’t at all that difficult. And I have seen lots of these African students conducting all their business (I’ve seen them many times in banks, post offices, student offices etc.) always in Polish and hardly ever in English. If that doesn’t convince you about the futility of this whole article then probably nothing will…
Pozdrawiam serdecznie, (kind regards)
Piotr Michalowski
The thought that one could rank difficulty in learning a language in such a linear and simple way seems very fishy to me, since different speakers have different backgrounds. For example, a native Swedish speaker would have no trouble picking up Icelandic, Norwegian or Danish in a couple of months, because the languages are so similar (Swedes and Norwegians can speak to each other in their respective language and understand one another).
Also, there is the problem with grammar. Some people have an easier time learning grammar rules than others, and some people have easier learning correct pronunciation. Which of these do we rank hardest to learn? On what grounds?
Also, when do you consider a person to be fluent in a language? Does that mean knowledge of perfect grammar, usage of perfect grammar, does it involve grammar at all? Very few native speakers have complete knowledge of grammar and even fewer speaks using perfect grammar.
I could continue on and on; but as you can see there are tremendous difficulties in objectively ranking languages. Unless you address them, you ranking does not prove anything except that you find Polish to be difficult and Spanish to be easy.
But what really gets me is this quote:
“There is no way you can objectively measure linguistic ranking or difficulty like the hard sciences like physics or chemistry measure a phenomenon in a vacuum.”
Yet you have done exactly what physicists do; you have proposed a mathematical model for language difficulty. This is what physics all about, proposing a model and then testing whether it holds or not. Only you have done a much poorer job than any physicist or mathematician ever do.
You do not motive why your proposed model is the correct on, you have not taken into account other factors, nor motivated why the factors you have taken into account matter, and you have no good way of testing your model.
As far as I see it, you have done nothing but write a list of languages in the order of which you find them difficult to learn. This is interesting in its own right, but if you wish to make grander conclusions you should to a more scientific presentation of your list.
Polish is complex, but it is not the only one; “hard” is a personal judgment… question about a language is: why is it complex? is it needed? does it bring advantages? is there any reason of being proud of it?
I am a Polish woman, my husband is German and we live in the Netherlands. I speak Polish, German, English, French and Dutch. For English speakers, yes maybe Polish will be difficult. But for speakers of other Slavic languages, it won’t be that bad. Also, if you already speak several langauge, learning a new one is easier. I learned German first and considered English more difficult, while everybody else thought the other way round- I learned German as a child and I couldn’t understand why everybody struggled with it. I also know French, but struggled with it- even more than with English! My children speak Polish, German and Dutch, but not because Polish is difficult, but more because it’s the minority language and hardly anyone speaks it- and the children want to speak the majority language to not be different than their peers, and it also depends on what reputation the language has in a country. For example, while English has a good reputation, Polish does not, which could also explain why the children don’t speak it that well .And finally, there is the question how much Polish do the parents speak with their children. In our case, my eldest prefers German and Dutch, my younger girl speaks all languages fluently, and my son is a baby, so he doesn’t speak much. No, I don’t agree that Polish is the hardest language. My husband is learning it and he understands it quite quickly- I am so impressed! Also, Polish is easier where other languages are hard, because it doesn’t have a complex system of tenses. I don’t think it is easy to decide which language is the hardest- and each nation claims it’s theirs! There are many lists of the hardest langauges, so I don’t think there is a “right” one.
I’m a Polish speaker so I won’t judge how difficult it might be to learn my own language 😉 I can certainly say that for a foreigner to read Polish books – especially the old classics – it could take a massive amount of time to learn. But for general use – not really.
What I have to point out though is that ranking Japanese next to Chinese is simply… weird. I know it’s a subjective list, but Japanese is way easier to learn than Chinese – for a number of reasons.
First of all, you have no tones and all of the sounds in the alphabet are very clearly pronounced – you can actually hear the words. Besides that you have two fairly easy alphabets to learn, with using which you can get away pretty well – hiragana and katakana. You can learn both (around 100 signs for about 50 sounds) in max. a month. It’s really nothing difficult.
Problems come with reading and writing Kanji – but that’s at a much later stage.
With Chinese you’re up against a very steep hill from the very beginning. The sounds are nothing like you know from the Western languages, the writing is very complex, since there’s no real alphabet in the first place.
You can learn to communicate in Japanese fairly quickly, but to do that in Chinese will take you a lot more time.
Bursztynowy swierzop -deal with it
Dear mr frank wellbinder. Please to read it loud. Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, powiat Łękowice Szczebrzeszyn..
Sincerly simple Polish man,
It’s funny, if you flip the pyramid, u get the languages ordered by their levels of importance to the world.
I read your article with lot of interest. I’m from Poland and i can say that its very easy for polish people to find out who is not from here. Even if your from Russia you can’t speak polish without mistakes. We heard that pronounciation is diffrent more soft. We say that is east pronounciation. And even if you speak polish for twenty years and your not from here you will make a mistakes. I have an english native speaker in my village and she lives here since i remember she’s pellucid to us but she makes a mistakes and her pronunciation sometimes bring about strange situations when she want to say something but we heard something tottaly diferent.
I speak eanglish and germany, i’ve learn it in school and now i study ukrainian. 80% of words in ukrainian have an orgin in polish. Thats why we understend each over without translation. But its hard for ukrainian to speak like us because pronunciation is completly different.
I agree with the comment: “So we should put this to rest, the most difficult language is likely simply the one whose pronunciation/cultural norms is/are the most alien to what you already speak.” and I am Polish (also speak German and English fluently) and basic Russian (could get more fluent if using it more)
I must say I liked the article, and I will send it on to a couple of Facebook friends.
Your “hyperbole” about the Polish language is a nice provocation to people like Frank Wellbinder who has quite obviously shown you to be off the mark, and quite subjective in your view.
It’s a lot more complicated than that.
Intelligent people from all the Slavonic cultures should have no real problems with Polish as they will see a lot of patterns familiar from their own language.
To say that English is far easier, with its horrendous spelling (no rules, no consistency, just masses of exceptions) is just not correct. And to say that 12 year olds are really great at English is just not correct either. Just look at the number of mistakes you see on an average surfing day on the internet.
I learned French, German and Latin at school went on to study Dutch and to live in that country for several years. For the past few years I have been exposed to Polish, then Russian, then Czech and now Ukrainian. Of those, I found Czech the most inaccessible, even after several years of Russian.
But, please, Mark, you might do well to go back through your original post and clean it up a bit. It has grammatical mistakes, a lack of punctuation and some sentences that are so sloppy I cannot understand them.
A fun idea, and it has drawn a good response. But I reckon Czech is more difficult than Polish.
Cheers
i like the mathematical approach towards figuring out what language is easier to master (i mean, executive business level .. no family, friends, newspaper, street talk) but i think, as it has been said here, the equation must include background and exposure rather just the linguistic characteristics.
btw. this post also reminds me why some americans are … well, lets say i feel more comfortable between europeans.
To Frank Wellbinder: I’m not going to argue here whether Polish is hardest language on the Earth or not – I’m definitely not an expert in a subject – just as a native speaker of Polish want to point out you are wrong stating: “24 x 7 immersion in a language from birth clears up any ‘complex’ grammar issues immediately through constant exposure”- no it doesn’t in case of Polish, many people in Poland, not only children but adults as well, have problems with grammar (e.g. many people uses wrong cases, even though they here right pronunciation all their lives)
I speak Russian and Chinese, and as far as everyday language is concerned, we can discuss, being Chinese grammar very essential, it is easy to order at a restaurant, to go shopping etc, but if you compare the two languages from a general point of view (that is what I personally consider to be the meaning of the phrase “to learn a language”), including writing, and written Chinese (as opposed to spoken), Mandarin is far more difficult for any western to master.
You seem to be pretty confident about the fact that Chinese people understand you. That is either a misunderstanding of their way of pretending to have understood, or you have a really good ear: Mandarin tones take months to be mastered in a sentence, even a simple one.
Last, the notion of Japanese having no verbal flexion is false: it has some changes according to the mode of the verb, and the degree of respect you have to pay to the person you are talking to or of.
In general, I totally agree with those stating that there is no language that is more difficult than others “per se”, the degree of difficulty depending totally on your talent in learning languages, your feeling towards a particular language and above all your mother tongue.
Znowu kolejny bloger o polskich korzeniach brandzluje się jaki to polski nie jest trudny – czy to jakiś międzynarodowy konkurs na najtrudniejszy język? Wszystko jest względne, Słowianin nauczy się polskiego w mgnieniu oka, najtrudniejszym językiem jest ten który jest dla uczącego się najbardziej odległy kulturowo i należący do zupełnie innej rodziny.
It is ridiculous that this “study” does not account for Portuguese which would be along with Italian and Spanish an easy language as it is Latin descendent…
In the world map, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola appear painted with some colours when there is no reference to Portuguese, not even to mention Brazil which appears “white”
Please correct the above and bring some more accuracy to your claim.
Opowiadacie sobie głupoty,a i tak nic nie zmieni tego, że jak nie spróbujesz,to się nie dowiesz.. Dla mnie język polski jest najłatwiejszy na świecie,bo jest to mój język ojczysty, więc każdy inny będzie trudniejszy. Każdy ma też inne zdolności jeśli chodzi o języki, tak więc nie ma co się kłócić, bo takich “rankingów” jest cała masa w sieci, a każdy z nich ma inne wyniki. Pozdrawiam ćwiczeniem z wymowy :
STÓŁ Z POWYŁAMYWANYMI NOGAMI
Hey guys,
I’m Polish, I’m 25… and i would say that my language is really tricky – orthography and grammar can still be an issue for me. I learned French – quite difficult due to spelling and Italian – simple and pleasant i would say.
To everyone who is trying to meet Polish – good luck, powodzenia!
What in my opinion is the most difficult in Polish is synthax. You may have two sentences with simmilar words and meaning and sythax of each one will be different becouse of just one word added or changed.
And what do you know about some languages from Africa? Or from other continents? There are about 1000 different languages, and much more dialects, did you compare them all? The different African languages don’t appear on the world map, where only the colonisator’s languages appear… I’m trying to learn Fulani right now, it has nothing to do with french or german, my mother tonges, and its grammar and prononciation is really difficult. You should precise in your text that you only speak about the most current languages in the Western part of the World.
What is tough for foreigners in Polish pronunciation is the fact of accumulation of postalveolar consonants (sz, cz, ś, ć, dź, dż, ż). But after that pronunciation is REALLY EASY to learn due to fact almost every letter has its unique sound which doesn’t ever change, phones have standard sounds (similar to Latin, with the exception of c pronounced as ‘ts’) with no twists. Sound of each is very clear (opposite to cockney English, Dutch or Scandinavian languages), plus Polish is a slow language — you don’t need to ask native speaker for repeating if you ‘decoded’ each phone before.
Chciałem tylko zaznaczyć, że wszyscy tutaj dyskutujecie o trudności języka polskiego z punktu widzenia osób które uczą się go jako “drugiego” języka. I wielu z Was dodaje że to nie jest taki trudny język. Myślę, że po prostu nie zdajecie sobie sprawy jak to jest słuchać jak masakrujecie wszystkie odmiany, gramatykę i słownictwo kiedy wydaje się Wam, że znacie ten język już co najmniej poprawnie… Na szczęście jest to na tyle logiczny język, że jesteśmy (my Polacy), często w stanie zorientować się, co też Wy, “świetnie” mówiący po polsku przybysze, macie nam ważnego do przekazania. Ale to nie znaczy, że jest to proste.
Ot prosty przykład, by zrozumieć to co teraz napisałem większość z Was, sięgnie zapewne po tłumacza… I wyjdzie Wam kompletny chaos… Bo ten język nie rządzi się tak prostymi prawami jak np. angielski, czy w ogóle języki romańskie – u nas gramatyka nie jest tak oczywista, a każda odmiana rządzi się swoimi związkami między wyrazami. Ja za to zrozumiem łatwo co napiszecie po angielsku. Tak jak rozumiem to teraz. A wcale nie jest mój angielski jakiś perfekcyjny.
Prawdą jest też że dopiero w wieku ok. 15-16 lat mówi się poprawnie po polsku. Często (CZĘSTO!) zresztą ludzie popełniają błędy będąc już dorosłymi. To jest wręcz oczywiste. Myślę, że polska fascynacja np. Grupą Monty Python wynika z tego, że nasz język przygotowuje nas właśnie na absurdalne sytuacje – bardzo popularne jest np. w Polsce, absurdalne słowotwórstwo. Inna sprawa, że słowacki i czeski, jak i w ogóle języki słowiańskie są trudne, ale prawda, że Polski (taką mieliśmy historię) nie inną jest troszkę reliktem i był w swym rozwoju bardzo odosobniony… Znam ukraiński i rosyjski są ciut prostsze, za to akcenty obce są łatwo rozpoznawalne – w polskim nie są, my mamy łatwiej… Znam chiński i japoński też trochę – uważam że są trudne, ale tylko poprzez wymowę i myślę, że Chińczycy są równie cierpliwi jak Polacy i bardzo się starają zrozumieć innych.
Dwie jeszcze uwagi.
1. Dla Polaków najtrudniejszym (w szerokiej opinii) jest węgierski. Osobiście myślę, że rzeczywiście trudne są armeński, wietnamski (więcej tonów niż w chińskim) i np. języki ludów syberyjskich – mają mało odniesień do innych języków na świecie…
2, Pan z Tunezji napisał że arabski ma litery nieznane w innych alfabetach… No cóż Polacy posiadający alfabet najbardziej zbliżony do proto-słowianskiego języka mają dużą liczbę głosek kompletnie niepodobnych do większości innych alfabetów: ą, ę, ć, ź, ń, dź, dż, sz, ż=rz, cz i są one w częstym użyciu…
My się naprawdę staramy, a Wy nie przestawajcie się uczyć, to jest fajny język, choć moim zdaniem Szekspira u nas nigdy nie będzie, bo za dużo jest różnych praw nim rządzących by go tak ładnie formować jak np. język angielski… Dlatego angielski jest przyszłością…
Pozdrawiam serdecznie
Adam Gąsiewicz
ps. jestem z wykształcenia historykiem, ale hobbistycznie interesuję się językami i różnicami między nimi… 😉
Beeing french, I do not totally agree with your ranking. As I would believe french is fairly hard to master. Probably more than german. Indeed there are many tenses, 17 I believe, among which more than 12 are commonly used… if you do not use them you would speak or write “baby” french then. It is the same with all the grammare rules and exception, most of them are not mastered by french adultes, although we learn french at school from 6 to 18 years old. I do more spelling mistake and grammar mistake in French ( my mother tongue ) than in english (and maybe spanish). Even french teacher make mistakes, and we even have a special state body ( academie francaise) that determines what is french ( rules, words ) and what is not.
Basically I would not like to learn French…
Hi, I’m Polish, English is my 2nd language and I also communicate a bit in Japanese. I’m truly convinced that I am fluent in Polish and it’s hard for me to agree that I’ve mastered it at age of 16 as I’ve speaking perfectly for much longer than that. I think I know where are you going with this in your article – some Poles do not speak so called “proper Polish”. But come on, it happens in every country, some don’t read much even in their first language or even have problems understanding TV news. And basically it’s their lack of education, it does not mean all of the native speakers of given language find it so difficult. So don’t agree that we cannot speak Polish properly under age of 16.
I also believe it is kind o hard to say what language is the hardest, since is relies on what’s your first language. Most of the European languages seems easier to me that Asian ones as I’m not from Asia, as I get surprised by some of their ideas 😉 I think some Asians feel the same way –I’ve personally never meet one that was really comfortable speaking English, but they spoke other Asian languages. And also learning a language depends on personal abilities and most importantly – on how much you need it in your daily life 😉
Interesting article anyway, it was fun to read 😉 You really had a hard task as it is always hard to generalize anything 😉
“Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese – No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. ”
Whilst I am not a linguist and have little knowledge of languages besides English/Chinese/Japanese, this statement seems very inaccurate to me. It seems like you know a lot more about Chinese than Japanese and for some reason you have grouped them together…
Japanese has no cases no genders yes. But it certainly have tenses and verb changes, not to mention keigo (polite form and humble form) pretty much changes every noun and verb you’d use to a pretty much completely different word. Grammar is not easy as correct grammar requires correct usage of verb transformation, using the correct particles (which most 2nd language learners find extremely difficult to grasp)
However, Japanese writing is a lot closer to latin base writing than Chinese. Yes, it borrows words from Chinese (kanji) but you can write the same thing purely with Hiragana/katakana(their alphabet) and still be understood. Chinese however, you don’t know the word then you’re stuck. It is also a lot easier to pronounce japanese words than chinese (Japanese has no dipthongs and its intonation matters a lot less – wrong intonation in japanese doesn’t really turns a word into a different word, but it almost certainly does in chinese)
At this point it may sound like Chinese is easier than Japanese – but I don’t think so. Chinese is a very vague language (hence the seemingly easy grammar, however because it’s vague it’s hard for 2nd language learner to judge whether they’re saying it correctly), there are also a lot of proverbs and they are still commonly used in daily life. What you write is also very different to what you speak (especially true if you are learning a dialect, such as Cantonese).
Overall I think your evaluation is based too much on latin based language frameworks and perhaps the difficulty of asian languages are not exposed fairly this way. Regardless, the article is an interesting read. 🙂