viewtopic.php?f=11&t=36133Yohan wrote: ↑March 18th, 2019, 6:40 amIt depends - Japanese is hard to learn compared to which language?
Many Asian languages are rather complicated and often have a different writing system too.
I don't know what is more difficut compared to Japanese, but Burmese spoken in Myanmar is difficult too, and Khmer in Cambodia is known as complicated and it is not even a tonal language. Vietnamese is not easy to study, despite its writing is in Roman letters, Korean is at least equal time consuming to learn as Japanese...Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil are known a headache for any newcomer who never had anything to do with such languages....
The only not really so difficult Asian languages which come to my mind are Indonesian/Malay and also Tagalog...but otherwise?
Chinese is not easy, and to study languages of Asian countries like Pakistan - Urdu/Punjabi etc. - and Iran - Farsi - might also not a simple task.
@chanta76 - I was thinking you can speak/read Chinese and/or Korean and you are Asian-American - or not? I am not sure, maybe I am wrong.
What is your native language?
I thought that it would be better to incorporate this quoted text into a new topic rather than creating a tangent in the original thread.
As for the difficulty of the various Asian languages, it's true that virtually all East Asian and Southeast Asian languages present a significant challenge for the Western learner with the notable exception of the Austronesian languages (Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Cebuano, etc.). That's because all of them are genetically unrelated to European languages and often include their own unique hurdles.
Japanese has a simple phonology with most of its sounds being easy to pronounce (getting the correct pitch accent down is another story, however) but at the same time the language uses three completely foreign scripts including about 2000 kanji/Chinese characters for decent literacy, features an agglutinative grammar with a considerable number of suffixes which work differently to anything Indo-European, incorporates various levels of honorifics, and wields a very exhaustive alien (non-IE) vocabulary often with multiple synonyms to express a single concept. Formal Japanese can be difficult to understand due to the many instances of homophones which are composed of kango (i.e., Sino-Japanese roots).
Chinese has simple grammar with largely the same word order as English but at the same time the language is tonal (four tones for Mandarin) and requires knowledge of an even greater number of hanzi/Chinese characters for decent literacy. Again, like with Japanese, the vast majority of the vocabulary is completely alien to an Indo-European speaker.
Korean has a somewhat more complex phonology than Japanese with the aspirated and tense consonants and has an even more complex agglutinative grammar and more levels of honorifics. Nowadays Korean doesn't use many hanja/Chinese characters and instead gives priority to its own native hangul script. However, the lack of hanja makes it more difficult to distinguish between homophones in writing, a substantial drawback. Korean also lacks long vowels and is spoken at a fast pace. This makes it even tougher to understand homophones in the formal language.
The above are the "big three" of the Asian languages. It's simply a case of "pick your poison".
Many of the less popular Asian languages are considerably difficult too. Thai and Vietnamese are both tonal and have their own unique vocabulary. Khmer, while not tonal, is still very different from any Indo-European language. Moreover, most SEA languages use their own script.
Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, etc.) and Farsi aren't as difficult as any of the East Asian or SEA languages mentioned above. To begin with, they're all Indo-European and therefore share common grammatical structures and cognates with many European languages. Usually the most difficult part is the script whether it be Arabic (in the case of Urdu and Farsi) or Devanagari or some other variation of the Brahmi script used by the Indic languages. After learning the script everything else becomes easier.
Hindi/Urdu isn't particularly complex in terms of its grammar. It has two genders, an extremely simplified case system and moderately complex verbs.
Bengali grammar is actually quite simple. No gender, simple case system which works more like a set of agglutinative particles (-ke for definite accusative, -r/-er for possessive and -i/-e for locative), slightly different declension paradigms for animate vs. inanimate nouns, and verbs significantly less inflected than, say, Spanish or French.
Punjabi has a more complex grammar conserving more of the genders and cases of Sanskrit. Same with Marathi which retains three genders and more conservative noun morphology.
Farsi, a Persian language, is also grammatically simple. It has a simple phonology, no gender, simple prepositions and an objective case suffix (-ro) to indicate relationships between words, and simple verb morphology. The main obstacle when learning Farsi is the Arabic script, a non-native writing system which doesn't even suit the phonetics of the language.
Non-Indo-European Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are quite difficult though. Of these Dravidian languages, I'm under the impression that Tamil is the most complex while Malayalam is the most simple.
Which Asian languages do you guys think are the easiest and most difficult?