The Top Five Hardest Languages to Learn

I was surfing the Web the other day when I stumbled upon this article on ThirdAge.com, which (naturally) got my linguistic antennae quivering: The Top 5 Hardest Languages to Learn (you may have to load it a few times to get past all the annoying, difficult to shut down pop-up ads and videos).

According to the article, the most difficult languages to learn - particularly for an English speaker - are:

1. Arabic;
2. Chinese;
3. Japanese;
4. Korean; and,
5. Hungarian

The presence of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean on the list don't surprise me, as they all use ideographic alphabets built on thousands of characters which convey meaning, rather than traditional alphabetic letters, which represent sounds. They are also tonal languages, in which changes in the vocal delivery (tonal quality) of individual words can give several different meanings to words with identical spellings. In addition, Korean features a different system of sentence structure than most of us are used to, odd syntax, and difficult verb conjugations.

Arabic is at the top of the list because of its radically different writing system which uses fewer vowels than European languages, making it difficult to read. It also has very few words which resemble those of European languages, and a difficult system of pronunciation. The difficulty of the language is an advantage to those who rely on the inability of most people to translate and interpret the classical Arabic of the Koran to advance their own interpretations.

Hungarian is in a world by itself, unrelated to just about anything except ... ready? ... Finnish. It's a so-called "finno-ugric" language, with a bizarrely twisted grammar and a difficult system of pronunciation.

There are a few languages I'm surprised didn't make the list:

The Language of Economics - if you ever tried to figure out what Alan Greenspan was talking about in any speech he ever delivered while he was the Fed Chairman, you'll know what I mean. Economists have their own system of communication which is utterly incomprehensible to Real People, and thus allows them to pontificate at great length without being understood, thus enabling them to be able to say "I told you so!" no matter what happens in the economy.

The Language of Politics - this one is especially difficult because it relies so much on the deliberate distortion of fact and reality, and because it is often spoken not in complete sentences but in short, staccato slogans designed to fit on bumper stickers and be remembered by individuals with limited education and short attention spans. In addition, the language of politics is complicated by the proliferation of completely unrelated and mutually unintelligible dialects, such as:

Libertarian (recognizes no grammatical rules);

Tea Party Republican (a slogan-based dialect generally shouted at high volume);

Reagan Republican (the word taxonomy or any variation thereof cannot be used in analyzing its grammar);

Conservative Republican (widely spoken, if not completely understood, in Middle America);

Moderate Republican (virtually extinct);

NRA-ish (used by those who are fond of shooting off their mouths);

Far-Left Democratic (similar in structure and volume to Tea Party Republican);

Moderate Democratic (also virtually extinct);

Ivory-Tower Academic Democratic (based on willful ignorance of grammatical and other reality); and,

Liberal Democratic (widely spoken in California and the Northeast, but unintelligible in most other locations, particularly Texas, Idaho, Montana, and the Deep South).

And don't get me started on The Language of Advertising ...

I hope this helps. You'll get lots of lessons in the political dialects between now and November. I recommend investing in a good set of noise-reducing headphones.

Have a good day. Be here tomorrow for Cartoon Saturday.

More thoughts then.

Bilbo