Having a different word order really doesn't make a language much more difficult. I think a language with tones and distinct phonemes would make more of a difference.

@ShiruSama1

8 ай бұрын

I'd argue this too, yes. As a Spaniard who learnt Japanese at a N2 level, learning that word order was SOV was easy, it was just learning one thing. The difficult part is learning new vocabulary, picking up the tones (vowels are easy for Spaniards but we don't have tones so that's pretty counterintuitive) and of course the writing system.

@yaaeerrgghhh

8 ай бұрын

​@@ShiruSama1how long did that take?

@danielenimri9773

8 ай бұрын

​@@ShiruSama1but japanese doesn't have tones

@ShiruSama1

8 ай бұрын

@@danielenimri9773 it does have tonal accents (I don't know if that's the exact term either)

@ShiruSama1

8 ай бұрын

@@yaaeerrgghhh that question is tricky because I had been interested in Japanese for many years and learning random things before actually starting classes. But since I started classes (for a n5 level) I think it was less than 2 years.

I think something to consider as well is how pronunciations and sounds change across languages. For example, while trying to learn Korean I ran into a couple sounds that don't appear in English and were very difficult for me to replicate. This is really important especially in languages which use the nuance of pronunciation to change the meaning of a word or phrase and can make your language skills seem sloppy

@rajeshe5279

9 ай бұрын

Yes and these sounds are called phenomes.Each language has a specific set of phenomes. Non native speakers just straight up cannot hear or distinguish these. So yeah you are right.

@marteenee88

9 ай бұрын

Which is ironic because being a Spanish speaker I just pronounce every Korean word as if it were a Spanish word. I'll occasionally get complimented on my pronunciation.

@undefinedusername

8 ай бұрын

Indeed, if we don't take pronunciation into account, Mandarin actually wouldn't be that hard for English speakers.

@AtarahDerek

8 ай бұрын

There is a whole language family in Africa that uses sounds completely foreign to Indo-European speakers to convey not just intention and inflection, but sometimes entire words.

@ShiruSama1

8 ай бұрын

Great point. For instance, Spanish is closer to French than Norwegian, so Spaniards should have it easier to learn it. However, while Norwegian has 8+ vowels, Spanish has only 5. Both Norwegians and Spaniards can have an accent when speaking French, but Norwegians have it "easier" to pronounce vowels (their "u" is closer to French's for example).

Me a Slav: wtf is a fixed word order... 😅

@sendansen7416

7 ай бұрын

So relatable 🇧🇾

@dmytrorekechynsky2083

7 ай бұрын

On other hand, we pay for it with lots of different word forms, just to know which role every word plays in the sentence

@nickmaul4069

5 ай бұрын

@@dmytrorekechynsky2083 totally worth it

@jopeteus

2 ай бұрын

Same in Uralic languages. Although, in Finnish, we use different word orders to put emphasis on words.

I'm from Maracaibo, a city in Venezuela that has a very large wayuu (or guajiros as they're called in Spanish) population. I grew up in a part of the city where a lot of them live, but as far as I remember not a lot of them actually spoke Wayuu. I never knew a lot about the language because of that, only knowing some words (most of them being insults lol). Despite that, a lot of wayuu people from the more rural areas in the north do speak it, but they also speak Spanish as a second language, and to be honest that surprises me a lot, considering how incredibly different both languages are from each other. I never learned wayuu, I don't actually remember hearing anyone speaking wayuu fluently, but I still think it's important to keep alive such an important part of our regional identity. Also now that I moved to the US I guess I will never have the chance to learn it lol

@josef3588

9 ай бұрын

Guajiros aren’t wayuus. Wayuu is an indigenous tribe located in La Guajira department.

@diegoalejandroherranaragon8121

9 ай бұрын

@@josef3588 Guajiros is just another name to refer to them, But Wayuu is the autonomous name and guajiros is a more generic one.

@ap0llo.

9 ай бұрын

@@diegoalejandroherranaragon8121guajiro is an iffy denonym, wayuu is preffered. also, guajiro is only supposed to be used for people who happen to be from la guajira, not to refer to wayuu ppl

@gunslinger8781

8 ай бұрын

In Venezuela, we call them guajiros. That is a fact.

@ap0llo.

8 ай бұрын

@@gunslinger8781 and i'm also venezuelan and wayuu and im telling you that's incorrect lmao? guajiro refers to people who just inhabit la guajira, doesn't mean wayuu... you guys need to stop referring to us incorrectly

Hi from Riohacha, capital of Colombian department of La Guajira. One of the territories where Wayuunaiki (which is the correct term to call the language in order to differentiate the language from the name of the indigenous tribe that is also present in Venezuela's Zulia State) official. There's another linguistic feature about Wayuunaiki and it is that is a agglutinative language, specially with nouns, where the suffixes must be gendered and those suffixes (being gendered as I said) may also work as particles that describe size, intensity... That's curious considering that they're some subtle differences among the Wayuunaiki variants in the 3 Guajiran regions (North, Middle and South: here in Colombia) vs Venezuelan Wayuunaiki. Otherwise that is mostly a spoken language, despite the fact that there're studies that propose proposals on how to standardize written Wayuunaiki.

@axelfalcon7189

7 ай бұрын

Ta potente el idioma

@AvyBuecel

7 ай бұрын

@@axelfalcon7189 sí, aglutina mucho

@nicks0alive

7 ай бұрын

@@AvyBuecelHi, can you speak Guajiro? If you can, would you say that Garifuna and Arawak (Lokono) are mutually intelligible with Guajiro?

@robnierse2378

7 ай бұрын

​@@nicks0aliveI know some Lokono, it doesn't look like Wayuu

as a colombian i felt the peninsula in the thumbnail was very familiar, but i wasn't able to figure out it was la guajira until you mentioned the wayuu language lol, the wayuus are a very prominent indigenous group around these parts and its pretty cool to see them mentioned

@barranquillaaviation

6 ай бұрын

como no vas a reconocer a la guajira 😤😤

@cadiazm

6 ай бұрын

Maestra, póngale cero en geografía. I agree with the other comment, how as a Colombian you are not able to easily recognise the Guajira peninsula...

@fabiancarrascalsalazar5793

6 ай бұрын

confirmo, pongale cero, literal la razon por la que este video resalto en mi feed de youtube fue por que literalmente vi la cabecita de la guajira :V

A big part of language-learning difficulty in practical, logistical terms is just finding the resources to do it. Japanese or Turkish or Finnish are all pretty distant from English too, but you can find educational materials, entertainment media, and real people to communicate with fairly easily. Wayuu qualifies for being very difficult to learn in this way, too.

@MyFiddlePlayer

7 ай бұрын

Similarly, Frisian is really similar to English and theoretically should be easy to learn, but instructional materials are sparse and you pretty much have to travel there and find a native speaker to converse with if you want to learn it.

@SC-tl3px

7 ай бұрын

That's such an excellent point. I've tried to learn Kannada and the resources are scant and often outdated, error ridden and irrelevant. Sorry, Kannadigas. Your language is utterly beautiful but very badly taught. Obviously, this opinion is just based on my personal experience.

@emanuelfigueroa5657

5 ай бұрын

I found the same problem when I had the interest to learn Fulani or Kanuri, quite common African languages with 38 and 9 million speakers, yet very few content in English and Spanish (NL), so in order to find material knowing French is the best option.

Hard to think that the Colombian government usually neglects these people to the north of our territory. TIL they also live in Venezuela outside of La Guajira (the department/region's name in Colombia). I consider myself highly proficient in English, so it's baffling that a language so close to my native Spanish (geographically, that is) could be overkill for me due to the way my brain is wired at this point.

@Normal_user_coniven

8 ай бұрын

Fun fact: This Wayuu land at the Northern most part of Venezuela and Colombia border is what gave Venezuela its name. Because, Venuzuela made of Venice (Italian city) and Uela (means small), since this part looks like the Adriatic sea, espically most Northern part of the Adriatic sea, where Vinece located and used to control the whole Adriatic Sea from it. But, in Venezuela (Wayuu), it is the opposite, where the boats enters from the North to South, instead of from South to North as in the Adriatic sea.

I'd like to add another variable: amount of resources. While languages like Japanese or Finnishare fairly different and foreign to English speakers, and have very different grammar, they also have a lot of media and courses to take to learn them, at least compared to more obscure languages with few speakers like say, Ket or Ainu.

@XSR_RUGGER

6 ай бұрын

This is very true. I remember starting to learn Scots Gaelic many years ago and the amount of material I could find was very scarce. Then after Outlander came out, I believe, there was a resurgence of interest. Even then it was more abundant than many languages I've tried to look into around the world.

As a Venezuelan I consider this quite funny and curious, since the most different / difficult language in your opinion is one located in the Country I live. (The Wayuu people, also called as Guajiros are well kwown, specially in the state of Zulia)

@mpforeverunlimited

9 ай бұрын

English isn't your first language though, so it doesn't quite apply to you

@philswiftreligioussect9619

8 ай бұрын

@@mpforeverunlimited Did he ever mention the difficulty of Wayuu at all? No. He's a Venezuelan who lives near the Wayuu people. Your answer makes no semantic sense because the FACT that he lives somewhere does not hinder the argument that Wayuu is hard for English speakers.

@philswiftreligioussect9619

8 ай бұрын

En Colombia también hay tribus indígenas wayúu en la Guajira, una vez me llevaron a una especie de retiro escolar o jornada pedagógica en quinto de primaria. El colegio nos dejó con un Man que hablaba español y wayúu, era el líder o el "organizador" del retiro, y de lo que me acuerdo se veía jóven pero me sonaba como un sabio. Tristemente nunca lo oí hablar el idioma, y ni le pregunté si me podía decir algo en wayuunaki.

@ap0llo.

8 ай бұрын

@@mpforeverunlimited that doesn't change anything though? 😭

@PePeninja494

8 ай бұрын

@@philswiftreligioussect9619obvio que si bro son de nuestro territorio…. Sino estoy mal diomedes Díaz es de ese origen…

I think there are a lot of factors that are being ignored here when considering what makes a language hard to learn from a native English speaking perspective. The number of cases involved, the writing system, and sounds that just don't exist in English are just a few examples of many. This video was more about finding which language would be the least initially intuitive when first learning to speak it. Which doesn't translate to overall difficulty.

@cufflink44

8 ай бұрын

Excellent points.

@hanesco219

7 ай бұрын

Correct. For Wayuunaiki (the correct name of the language, as Wayuu is the name of the tribe), while agglutinations and OVS word order makes it difficult to learn, the use of the latin alphabet and the fact that they only have 5 vowels with both short and long versions, doesn't make it as difficult to learn as other languages like Thai.

@cadiazm

6 ай бұрын

Agree, writing system and sounds are key. Chinese is one example of having a pretty simple grammar, mainly SVO, and according to the uploader's graph close to English in the isolating end of the spectrum. However, the different tones, and sounds that don't exist in English plus the writing system, makes it one of the hardest language to learn for an English speaker.

@Blokfluitgroep

5 ай бұрын

Also, regularity plays a great role. Some languages have a lot of cases, but if every in/from/to has a seperate case which is regular, I think it's easier to learn than if there are all sorts of exceptions.

I would actually like to see a fully- or, or at least moderately- (by the major languages we know) populated chart of the isolating polysynthetic / word order spectrum to get that full visual/conceptual picture of the stratum of human language.

@reetamb5835

9 ай бұрын

it can only really get to overview level since the definition of the spectrum breaks down once you get more specific there's a distinction made between fusional and agglutinative languages, for example, where fusional languages have fewer affixes that convey more meaning each (i.e. French mang- (stem for 'eat') → mangeaient (they were eating: the 'they', past tense, and imperfect aspects are all conveyed in -aient, rather than separate affixes) agglutinative languages, on the other hand, use more suffixes but each one means closer to a single thing. turkish is a good example, but since I know some bengali I'll use that instead: dekh- (stem for 'see'), → dekh-ecchi-l-am (see-had-past tense-1st person → i had seen) the issue here is that: 1) are agglutinative or fusional languages going to be considered "more polysynthetic"? (we can pretty easily settle this by just saying agglutinative, I guess) and then 2) most languages mix them together! Bengali is mostly agglutinative in its verb, and kinda in the pronouns, but not in say, the definite marker (-gulo means "the" and plural and inanimate in one suffix), so in that way it's more fusional i have to admit though it would be really cool to see an overview kind of version of it i just wanted to explain why that doesnt really super exist

Any language you don't understand is hard

the part about language learning difficulty being dependent on languages you already know is only partially true. for me, as a polish native speaker, it was much easier to learn english than when i was trying to learn russian. vocabulary is only a one thing when trying to learn a language, and i think, languages can be objectively hard, when they have a lot of cases and inconsistent grammar rules. russian is similar enough to polish, to have a shit tone of cases for every word, but different enough, that those cases don't make intuitive sense for a polish speaker. so you basically have to learn all of them, no matter, which languages you already know.

@carkawalakhatulistiwa

9 ай бұрын

Saya suka Polandia. 🇮🇩😂 from Indonesian

@SpartanChief2277

8 ай бұрын

Yeah, i speak english and Spanish, so the romance languages are easier to learn. For example Portuguese is the most similar to spanish.

@alexzhukovsky8361

8 ай бұрын

@@SpartanChief2277 it's easy to learn, because they are simple languages

@suomeaboo

8 ай бұрын

​@@carkawalakhatulistiwaYou can flip the flag of one country to get the other.

@luckneh5330

8 ай бұрын

@@alexzhukovsky8361 all languages are equally hard. there is no "simple" language

Greetings from Colombia, these are really good facts to know!

Firstly, English is an Indo-European language - not "PROTO-Indo-European". "Proto-Indo-European" is the forefather of all European languages. Secondly, word order is hardly the most important factor when determining language differences. Even for a language with very standardized word order like English, it is not difficult to get used to a different word order. Is understanding Yoda difficult? Is it hard speaking like Yoda? "English Yoda speaks" in OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language.

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thank you for your feedback. However, I disagree with some of your points. First off, you are right about English being an Indo-European language not a Proto-Indo European language. I will add a correction into the description. Thank you. Second, in English significant is word order. Difficult it to comprehend becomes sentences complex when become. In OSV speak Yoda does never in but chunks large. Speakers as English, brains our are sentence structure wired to connect meaning such as specific when as question a asking. You Wayuu to learn completely rewire your brain not connect to but regular sentences to specific meaning. Over and again over. Additionally, you yourself say that "OSV word order, which is the most unnatural word order for almost ANY language." You say it is unnatural while saying that it is not difficult? I'm sorry but Yoda's short simple sentences in OSV do not make this word order any easier. I think the real problem here is that we fundamentally disagree in how we think word order influences a languages difficultly. Also, OSV is arguably easier to learn as an English speaker due to it sharing the SV order as we have in English (SVO) whereas OVS does not share that similarity (which is Wayuu's base word order). Wayuu also sometimes uses VSO which, again, does not share this similarity.

@iamcleaver6854

9 ай бұрын

@@LeafNyeThank you for replying. English uses word order to determine relationships between words. It doesn't mark subject, direct and indirect object. So I would argue that using complex English sentences with mixed up word order as a way of demonstrating the unnaturalness of an alternative word order is cheating. Indeed, if you change everything about the word order like start using prepositions as postpositions it would make it very difficult to understand without first figuring out the new word order. I would argue it would take very little practice to get reaccustomed to a different word order. At least much less so that it would take to get used to grammatical tones or tenseless verbs. Indeed, something as mundane as a radically different verb system with a bunch of irregularities would make a language much more difficult to learn than a different word order. Just to clarify, I indeed said that OSV is unnatural (hardly any language uses it for unmarked sentences), and despite being so unnatural it is still easy enough to get used to. My point is that even with the most unnatural (rare) word oder, getting used to it is not much of a problem.

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

This comes down to opinion unfortunately. In this video, I have taken an extremely subjective topic and have attempted to make it objective by adding criteria to how the most different language will be narrowed down and selected. I recognize that there are countless ways to rank language difficulty but taking all of them into account would be impossible unless I could somehow make a graph larger than three dimensions. Word order is, from my experience, one of the most significant things in making a language difficult. If you disagree you are entitled to that opinion.

@natekite7532

9 ай бұрын

​​​@@LeafNyeIt definitely is subjective, but calling word order the most challenging part of learning a language comes off as a very limited perspective. Languages like Navajo, Georgian, Nuxalk, Piraha, !Xóõ, Tsez, and more push the boundaries of human language in ways that most English speakers would find unfathomable. Any lay person can understand the idea of "apple eat I", but good luck explaining to them Navajo verbs, !Xóõ phonology, Piraha culture, Georgian clusters/ergativity, Nuxalk phonotactics, or Tsez cases. Saying that Wayuu is harder than all of these just because of OSV word order is pretty questionable. Honestly, I bet the word order isn't even the hardest part of learning Wayuu. EDIT: Also, I skimmed that paper... isn't that talking about translation algorithms, not human understanding? The two really aren't similar. Humans are way better at finding patterns, figuring out stuff context, etc.. But even so, all they do is say that translation models perform better on foreign languages when they focus on stuff other than word order. Which like, yeah, makes sense, because use of word order varies dramatically crosslinguistically and even within a single language. It doesn't mean that word order is the most difficult part of learning a language, either for humans or even computers.

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thanks for the comment! I’ll quote a reply I gave to someone “There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary. I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.” Also, I think that resource was scuffed for this topic and I took it down. Again, this topic requires going all the way back to the drawing board and trying to patch holes will not work.

0:07 Cantonese and Mandarin are not "pretty similar". They grouped to different families of Chinese spoken languages and they are non-mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Toisanese, on the other hand, are grouped in the Yuet family of spoken languages and they are mutually intelligible to an extent.

This is the most spoken pre-Columbian language in Colombia, however its native speakers are invisible, there are some references to this people in the movie Encanto

You forgot about cases. If a language has a case system, then the words in a sentence may stand in any possible order: SVO, OVS, etc., because the endings show you the role of each word. So try to find a language with the biggest number of cases.

An interesting iteration on these criteria is to factor in learning resources. The methods by which you're taught a language are an important factor in how well you can learn it. But it would probably still be Wayuu because I doubt it ever will be put on Duolingo or something.

@ap0llo.

9 ай бұрын

it won’t but enough knowledge, you can translate a lot of duolingo’s sentences and words into wayuunaiki (i have translated the whole of unit 1 from chapter 1, so it is possoble)

Try Rossel (or Yella) Island language. Only in the last 10 years have they worked out how to write it. Rossel Islanders use to learn Missima language to write. Rossel is a Island the last in the chain of islands (on the way to the Solomon Islands) of the Papuan coast.

YOOOOOOO LETS GOOOO dude its so cool to hear people talk about wayuunaiki, like, ever. its soo underrated. by far my favorite indigenous south american language

@ap0llo.

9 ай бұрын

its my tribe’s language and im learning it, and yeah its really hard 😭

Funny to think that an ARAWAKAN language is so opposite to English.

@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543

7 ай бұрын

how is it funny? I’ve never heard anything about arawak languages being englishy

@joselugo4536

7 ай бұрын

@@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543 Perhaps that's the reason in the Bahamas and Jamaica the Arawak's legacy was so throughly erased.

@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543

7 ай бұрын

@@joselugo4536 it was because disease wiped out most taino and the descendants of the ruling and slave population displaced the ones who remained idk about the bahamas tho

@joselugo4536

7 ай бұрын

@@hlaweardlaighonaghidau6543 Well now, there's more Arawakan DNA in the Spanish Speaking Caribbean than in 1491!

@stevenweint7893

7 ай бұрын

How so? Explain!

As a Cantonese speaker, I think there are 3 main factors that were not mentioned in this video that I think will heavily impact how many issues one faces in learning a language. Firstly, learning the writing system could be challenging - this could be anything from non-phonemic spelling to logograms like in Chinese languages(which I think many non-Chinese/Japanese learners struggle with). Secondly, the availability of resources to learn the language is important. This could be how many speakers one encounter, how many language courses or books there are, how much media in the language etc (this is also true for mostly spoken languages like Chinese languages). Lastly, as others have mentioned having a very different set of phonemic inventory, for example many different consonants, tones, articulations etc. could be challenging to a learner.

@J.o.s.h.u.a.

7 ай бұрын

I would add a 4th criteria which is whether the language has been standardised or not. It's way easier to learn the national language of a country, because there are for certains many grammar books for it. Learning a language that has no written tradition, but it's primarily spoken would be a nightmare to learn.

@splooey2151

7 ай бұрын

@@J.o.s.h.u.a. For me that'd fall under writing system or resource availability; unstandardised languages could be hard to learn because the resources all point to something different, so the resource for what one wants would be a lot more limited.

@sushibunnyplayz1507

6 ай бұрын

Also as a Cantonese speaker, I would add a 5th criteria. Cantonese has a lot of unfamiliar and different sounds that make up the language compared to english

@omp199

2 ай бұрын

"Criteria" is the plural of "criterion". If you have five criteria, then they would be the first criterion, the second criterion, the third criterion, the fourth criterion, and the fifth criterion.

This is not actually for sure. With only these dimensions represented, Hungarian can also fall in this category. there are way more dimensions. also the lack of resources is a very hard thing too

So interesting! (And nice visuals to help us understand!). Thank you!

I love how KZread subtitles wrote "Wayuu" as "Why you"

Correction: at 1:52, you put 中国人 which literally means ‘Chinese person’ instead of 中文 or 汉语 which means Chinese language.

@user-py1gk5wt1i

7 ай бұрын

汉语 too

@edwinhuang9244

6 ай бұрын

It's Google Translate jank. When you put "Chinese" into Google Translate, the 1st thing you see is "中国人". Technially not wrong, but not what we're searching for. Why is it the 1st thing that pops up?

I hate to disagree. I’ve heard it explained this way before. Synthetic languages, like Finnish, are structured more like pyramids. Difficult at first, but they build so that the climb gets easier as you progress. English is like an upside down pyramid. So, you pick it up quick, but as you progress in learning it, the climb becomes almost impossible. While English sticks to SVO order firm enough, everything else about it is ridiculously flexible, and don’t get me started on the loan-words from Norman, German, Latin, old Norse but that doesn’t even include the modern ones that enter our vernacular on a daily basis! To this day I haven’t seen any language evolve as quickly as the radioactive-mutant that is English! I’d add more but this is already too long to read. Just some food for thought.

@frostflower5555

7 ай бұрын

English is changing and some rules are being ignored. I guess it also has to do with all the various English speaking countries.

I watched this entire video and only after that saw how little views it had and honestly if I had to guess I'd say it had at least a few hundred thousand, keep up the good work, amazing!

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thanks for the comment! I do plan on keeping up the work!

@dr.armstrong

8 ай бұрын

@@LeafNye In the Russian language you can use any method: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV etc. корова ест траву траву ест корова ест траву корова ест корова траву корова траву ест траву корова ест

What about *Hungarian* ? - Not Indo-European. (Our language is Uralic.) - It's polysynthetic. We can express so much with our prefixes and suffixes. (Some examples: [csinálni = to do], but [megcsinálni = to do something and finish it], [asztal = table], [asztalon = on the table], [asztalról = from the top of the table / about the table] .) - We have a strange word order. Our word order doesn't tell anything about the words' role in the sentences, so we can't speak about SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. We can know the words' role if we know, which suffix means what. For example, the object of a sentence alwas gets a "-t" ending, so if you see a noun ending with "-t", it's maybe the object. Our word order is... Topic-Focus-Verb-Rest? I think... I don't really know what does it mean. 😅 Thanks God, I'm a native speaker, so I don't have to learn this. I can use my language without knowing the grammar rules. So our word order is very different from other languages' word order. It's a different type. +3 factors that you haven't mentioned: - Tones. Some languages are tonal languages, as Mandarin for example. Learning the tones can make a language more difficult, I think. - Alphabet. Many languages have different alphabets. The characters can stand for sounds/letters, only for consonants, for syllables or for words. So what counts: how different the symbols are from latin alphabet, and what they mean. - The direction of writing. OK, it's not too hard to learn that some languages are written from right to left, but it can be a bit confusing. (At least, Hungarian is not a tonal language and it uses the latin alphabet. As I know, Hungarian is the _nightmare of language learners_ . If we used the old Hungarian runes and our language was tonal, Hungarian would be _The Nightmare of Nightmares_ . 😄 *Fun fact:* Old Hungarian runes are written from right to left, so it's 2 in 1.)

I think that word order shouldn't be much of a factor when considering about how hard that other languages are to learn, 'cause word order's very easy to get used to, as long as that's consistent within those languages. Some languages have word orders that're different in some circumstances(many Germanic languages, for example).

@sykomp1760

9 ай бұрын

And in some languages the word order doesn't even matter in the same way, anyway. Like in Finnish, word order is (mostly) free because all the information is loaded on the endings. The order can be used to imply what is important in the sentence instead. This is makes fundamendal difference in understanding as demonstrated by this video, since the creator is focusing on the word order as an important thing in the first place

As a native Cantonese speaker, I think the hardest part for English speakers to learn Cantonese or any related Asian languages is the fact that in these Asian languages, you'd get very different words by raising and lowering the pitch and tone. Even shutting the sound vs. letting the sound last for longer time would result in very different words. On the other side, I think the hardest part for Cantonese speakers to learn English is the tenses. Chinese languages do not have the concept of tenses.

I think the Hungarian language is the most difficult, because it can be SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV, VOS, and VSO. But it also has 44 letters like ö, ű, á, é, dzs, etc... And this language is very polysynthetic, and because of this, each verb has at least 16 different forms. But it get's better because also it has 150 thousand plain words without any modifications. And I didn't even talk about the grammar... Also as a native speaker, I can confirm that this language is brain killer to natives as foreigners well. And there is no other language like ours. Everyone says it's similar to Finnish, but it's very different. So Hungarian is the most difficult.

@ywgmb35

7 ай бұрын

No, Inuktitut and Greenlandic are MUCH harder than Hungarian!

@ywgmb35

7 ай бұрын

@@Noradory Hungarian is much easier to read and write, though. That also makes a huge difference.

@Ron55O

7 ай бұрын

@@ywgmb35 Reading Hungarian is very easy, but writing it is more difficult. (There are situations when it has to be written differently, or when there are exceptions that have no logic.) So, reading Hungarian is the only thing that is an advantage compared to other languages. Maybe the 3 verb tense is better and easier, but nothing else (maybe) ;)

@d.b.2215

3 ай бұрын

Hahaha, no, you guys still don't have tones. Your language also doesn't require learning 3000+ ideograms to understand written documents like Chinese does.

Sehr gut, looking foward for more videos for yours.

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

More to come! Thank you!

I speak Chuukese. We use SVO like English and a few loanwords come from English after WWII. (Most of our loanwords are Japanese.) I've watched a few language videos, but the languages that are just too difficult for me to get the grasp of is the languages with clicks in it (example: the Khoisan languages).

technically the hardest language to learn is the language spoken on north sentinel island, since you have to be the first one to fully translate it and not die.

@eduardsusai559

3 ай бұрын

Lol

Wow! You really understand languages. This is so interesting to me. I moved to Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines and cannot grasp their language Waray Waray. It is similar to Tagalog which I know a little bit about. Have you ever examined or evaluated Waray Waray? It is the 5th most spoken language in the Philippines.

I recently got to watch your videos and they are amazing! Keep up the good work!

@LeafNye

7 ай бұрын

Thank you! Will do!

interesting video although I gotta disagree with your critera. Word order can be a little weird but is so minor compared to other stuff. Plus, you left off a lot of wild stuff that makes languages tough. I would point to: a) not being indo-european or heavily influenced by indo-european. b) phonology & phonotactics (unlikely to be _too_ important but is a real problem if you're learning a caucasian or salishan lang) c) ergativity, because morphosyntactic alignment breaks people d) polypersonal agreement & double marking, because more morphology = more mental overhead. e) irregularities in grammar and writing. f) grammatical gender and systems like it g) cultural differences enshrined in the language (see Korean) h) language-specific nonsense Looking at this, my vote is Navajo. Highly irregular, animacy hierarchy which fucks with word order, polysynthesis, polypersonal agreement, five modes, seven aspects, every word is irregular, evidentiality, categorizational affixes, little IE influence, plus tones, ejectives, and three lateral affricates. Georgian (and other caucasian langs) is another strong contender but the IE influence in the caucuses is too strong. There's probably some salishan lang that's harder tho bc salishan langs are messed up

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thank you for your comment! There are quite a few people saying pretty similar things to this. I probably should have emphasized the nuance of this topic better. It is an incredibly subjective topic that I have tried to make objective. After all, there are ~7,000 different languages and it would take a lifetime to study even a fraction of that number. Using criteria to eliminate languages down to a manageable pool is necessary. I do think that yours and others critiques of my criteria is fair and I plan on going back and re-analyzing this topic.

@zzzyyyxxx

9 ай бұрын

​@@LeafNyetelugu is similar in this regard. Could you cover it?

@bagelman2634

9 ай бұрын

I’m pretty sure Navajo is hard for almost everyone. There’s a reason Japan couldn’t crack US communications during WWII.

I was trying to learn different languages, and one I found difficult wasn't because of the order, it was because I had no idea how to reproduce the sounds. I was trying Icelandic, and it has sounds that are so different to me, I can't even begin to pronounce them. It's the closest language to ancient Nordic (Viking), but there were sounds I had no idea how to copy.

honestly, what about the piraha language, part of the mura language family 1. women and men pronounce words differently at times 2. no recusive sentences 3. no abstract color words other then for light and dark 4. no numbers, only words for small and large amount 5. very agglutinative 6. no distinction between singular and plural, not even in pronouns all extremely different then english

@Woistwahrheit

9 ай бұрын

Transgenders just be incorrect Ig

@ComradeGiru

9 ай бұрын

That first point is not entirely true. Firstly, they don't write. Traditionally, pirahã don't have writing. Secondly, it isn't a rule that men and women must talk differently, there just simply is a different in speech affectation between men and women. Which is true in all languages that I've learned anyway. It's just that in the case of pirahã, that results in the 's' sound tending to be pronounced in such a way that it's very weak is basically H. Occasionally you can hear women pronounce the s sound, and sometimes hear men pronounce S like an H. Also, children pronounce S like H because of being around their mother all the time. And if they're boys, they eventually learn to speak like the men through exposure. But it's not a rule as far as I'm aware.

@TheUniversialTurtle

9 ай бұрын

@@ComradeGiru oh, thanks. i was just going off memory when i made the post. ill edit it later to fix.

@evermay1582

9 ай бұрын

isn't it a language isolate tho?

@vierrente

9 ай бұрын

@@Woistwahrheit What do trans people have to do with anything

Theres a language in southern india called Telugu where you can flip the SOV order into any form just by adding and subtracting required prepositions, and they all make sense most of the times. There is no legal order but people mostly dont mind it. I guess its a convenient thing to have in a a language haha

Wonder where Xhosa falls on your chart? One thing for sure, it may be one of the hardest to speak!

It's not the most different language possible, just the most different language which we have documentation of. Thracian could've been more different. I think that Wayuu could be made more different by including a complex tonal system and click consonants. Sign languages also count as languages too

Also depends on what one focuses on. In Swedish for example, newcomers just can't learn pitch accent well. It's a dead giveaway that someone is not native. You need to learn Swedish from before 12 years old to have no noticeable pitch accidents (!), or be one of the very rare geniuses who can break through that.

that’s kinda useless to determine which language is the hardest by it’s sentence structure, because in slavic languages there are absolutely no structure and you can say it in any way you want

woah the editing on this vid is so clean

Try learning Navajo. It will blow your mind on the difficulty scale. You also have to keep your lips from moving, as much as possible, as well as grunt a specific way, with each sentence, at the same time.

that was great. thank you.

That explains why one of my college friends had such a hard time in English class(in Venezuela). His first language was Wayuunaiki and his second language was Spanish.

This Channel deserves more viewers ❤ Thank you for that valuable information 🙏 New Subscriber here 🖐️🙂

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thanks and welcome!

I'm from Maracaibo and lived with a Wayuu person for most of my childhood so I knew *instantly* what this video was about lol, it's pretty good !!

What about languages that have topic prominent word order? wouldnt that be even harder, as it is on a completely different scale to english?

This is an amazing amazing video!!! Currently learning Hawaiian so I had a frame for reference. I watch a lot of your KZread inspos as well, and I appreciate already your uniquer presentation style. I'm excited to watch the channel grow, it's inevitable!!! Keep it up!

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thanks for the support! I really appreciate it!

@stephenlitten1789

9 ай бұрын

Currently the proud owner of a cluster of phrases of NZ Maori, which is a near relative of Hawai'ian. Good luck with it

What about the spirit? Languages also have a spirit, which affects how speakers think and see the world around them. English is very analytic---indeed, it assumes that a word is only a word when you can look it up in a dictionary . Whereas Russian is more expressive, and a Russian speaker can invent a word when he cannot think of the right one.

aside from these three a fourth would be tonal languages. yes i suppose mandarin is isolating (although im not sure where the way modifiers are used in chinese would fall into this), but tonal languages are difficult to learn for native nontonal language speakers and vice versa. additionally tonal languages tend to be quite homophonic, which is where the stereotypical "chingchong bingbong" typecast comes from. without learning it all sounds like repeated gibberish.

Very true explanation.

oh hey, Wayuunaiki is spoken in my hometown! I'm not a speaker myself, but i was offered free lessons and ive met a lot of people who spoke it. Never thought id see anyone even acknowledge it outside my home

4:18 I think it's kind of strange to use a sentence in passive voice (which reverses subject and object) to show a difference in word order between the 2 languages.

I think for SVO languages, the most difficult would be one where the object comes first and where the verb isn't in between so either OSV or VSO

I think head-initial vs hear-final would be a lot more indicative of difficulty than word order.

Word order is such a strange metric for difficulty, especially since you already used another grammar concept, degree of synthesis. New, diffucult sounds or complicated phonotactics have got to be one of the biggest barriers to language learning yet you didn't mention it.

For me the OVS is insanely cool, and not hard at all, but now you made me wanna learn Wayuu

I think my vote would go to Lardil. Tense markings on *nouns* ?

@StuffandThings_

8 ай бұрын

And I raise you Damin... the prerequisites are probably enough to turn almost everyone away

Ah this reminds me of that index of the world's language features yielding the top 10 most unique/weird languages and the top 10 languages with the most common language features. Cantonese, for example, is in the latter camp, while English is in the former (among languages like Kutenai, Zoue, Mixtec, Nenets, Mandarin etc.).

I am a graduate of Japanese (Univ. of Shizuoka). Although I am partly Italian as a native speaker, my mother is German and in fact, I consider myself bilingual. My English is purely the result of my studies. However, I studied and graduated for the second time in Japan. Compared to European languages, Japanese is characterized by great vagueness. To give an example, in Japanese there are neither genders nor numbers regarding words. Accordingly, "友達" which generically means "friend", can mean "male friend, female friend, male friends, female friends". The verbs are almost all regular although I had some difficulty with the "pitch" which is not a tonic accent but rather a raising or lowering of the voice (and it changes from region to region). from a morphological point of view, it appears to be an easy language; from the syntactic point, the structure follows the subject, various complements (movement, possession etc), object complement and finally verb. An SCV structure. I'll give a simple example: 松の木は丘の上にあります Matsunoki wa oka no ue ni arimasu. Matsunoki = the pine tree oka = hill/hill no = of ue = top/upper part ni (place complement) on arimasu = is located/is If translated literally it becomes: pine tree top hill on stand. That is, the pine tree is on top of the hill. I found it very difficult at the beginning. Once one has achieved a certain familiarity with the grammar, the problem of the 3 writing systems remains. Of these 3 systems, only one represents a real challenge: the Kanji

Good analysis. But limited, there are all sorts of other criteria. Like writing (ideograms, Braille, knots) or things so alien that English wouldn't even dream of, pronunciation (tone, clicks), register or medium (like sign languages) etc.

I think there can be other criteria on what determines the hardest language to learn. One example could be how many characters you need to know how to read and write. For something like that, Mandarin would be extremely difficult to learn. Not to mention words that have the same spelling would be completely different by how you pronounce each syllable.

That Wayuu sounds like a fantasy language in the Avatar movie but it is not weird at all it's beautiful. I would like to learn more about it.

Oml finally a channel who remembers my language It’s Cantonese :) But Cantonese to mandarin for me is hard

I live just in the venezuelan state where this language is talked, and there are people in my family that speak it.

@Gazofrenico615

7 ай бұрын

Sabes algunas palabras en wayuunaki?

At 2:07 you write 中国人 which means Chinese person, not the Chinese language which would be 中文

@LeafNye

9 ай бұрын

Thank you for telling me, I realized this too but unfortunately the video was already published so I couldn't change it :/

El orden va a ser dificil dependiendo el Idioma, no es lo mismo el Japones, Hindustani y Vietnamita, estos 3 tienen un orden diferente al Ingles y a las lenguas romances, pero hay que sumarle que el Hindustani y Vietnamita carecen de reglas gramaticales como el Ingles por ejemplo, por lo que pueden ser relativamente sencillos incluso por el orden, en cambio el Japones al tener una gramatica mas compleja y diferente resulta mas complicado Siempre eh pensado que los idiomas mas complicados son algunos del Caucaso, como el Abjasio, Abaza, Circasiano, Balkaro, Avar, Checheno, Darguin, Megreliano, Lak, Lezguiano, Tabasaro, etc ya que estos o tienen un orden diferente o un orden igual pero al tener una gramatica supercompleja pues da lo mismo el orden ademas estos son de los idiomas con mas sonidos, por lo que pronunciarlos va a resultar un reto para casi cualquier persona del resto del mundo Y eso estoy contando los que aun tienen miles de hablantes para poder practicarlos "sin tantos problemas"

Reversed word order or absence of subject such as in Japanese doesn't make a language difficult as it just a few days to accomodate. Tones are frequently used and need precise pronunciation

I’m Venezuelan and I live in Maracaibo there’s a lot of speakers here and it’s really interesting to see how the sentences in wayuu are formed

@Zapatero078

5 ай бұрын

ya empezaste a aprende wayú?

@daikonyum3688

5 ай бұрын

@@Zapatero078 no😭😭 es demasiado difícil 😔 no tengo el tiempo

Interesting because my wife is Colombian. So I know a fair bit about the Wayuu already

im trying to learn my mom's mixteco, but havent been successful as there are many types of mixteco variants in mexico. And she also learned the language verbally because at the time they didn't have a writing system and now they do so we are trying to get a book from her village. I would say mixteco is pretty hard because its kind of like chinese. It uses lots of tones and pauses, and if you pronounce something slightly wrong it means something else. My mom has had people berate or question her why she is mimicking chinese or another asian language and she has to keep explaining that its not an asian language and that it is a rare mexican dialect. Only thing i know how to say is "What's up?" - "Na'sa'anu?", "Girl" - "Ñaluli", "Stupid or Ugly (one of these two)" - "Yocabi/llocabi". I've heard my mom say "Chidu" a lot but i dont know what it means (Also, these spellings are probably wrong as i dont know how to write in mixteco at all. Just how i think they would be written by a spanish speaker. the ' are pauses.)

What about making more videos like this but with other languages instead of English? It would get a lot of views for sure

@stevenweint7893

7 ай бұрын

English is the official language of science and technology, diplomacy, air-speak, etc. There is no need to hate and disparage English.

I worked as a medicine doctor in la guajira, I had a chart of useful words that let me had a somewhat decent conversation with the locals, they would giggle when I mixed up the words or mispronounced them, I have a very thick accent in english, I have no doubt is even thicker in wayunaiki. I could not, for the best of my efforts ever pronounce the sound ü… or tell the difference between the long and short vowels. For example ja’rai jarai… is easy to differentiate in text, but try that in a normal speed conversation with a bunch of other words. But with my conversation skills and the charity of the locals I got to be able to treat basic stuffs. Like itching, flu, pain, eye problems, gastric issues, and detect pregnant women. Which was my most common mispronounced misussed word “Pregnant?” Apparently I always asked if I was pregnant. The same way we have verb conjugation in spanish, wayuunaiki has conjugation for words, teki, is head… but is my head, your head is piki, and that other person head.. is… i dont remember that word. So, i would ask AISH TEKI? And they would look at me, like… how would I know? I should ask AISH PIKI? Then they would reply to me AISH TEKI. Obviously I never learned written wayunaiki, so whatever I am writing, is me writing in spanish whatever I heard. (Just in case) One of my most memorable patients was this grandma who refused to aid my basic wayuunaiki, and would blast me full constructed sentences. For her, I was wayuu, and therefor I should speak the language, didn’t help my last name is a very common last name in la guajira. Im not from la guajira, neither I am wayuu, but my looks and my last name convinced her that I was supposed to speak the language. I would tell her, I am not wayuu, I am “mocaná”…. Mocaná… who are those? She would ask me, and I would explain to her my ancestry, im mixed, but in her head she would only type me as the side of my native american ancestry. It didn’t matter to her my white, arabic or black ancestry, only the native american, and she would scoff when I tell her that the mocaná language is a dead language now… it dissapeared. The cycle would repeat in the next appointment, or she wouldnt take no for an answer, I was wayuu. She didn’t do that to the other doctors tho, only to me. I do look native american, at the time the other doctors working with me, altought also mestizos like me and most colombians, one was more black, the other two were very white. So she would pick me as her doctor and scold me for not speaking wayunaiki properly, good thing her grand daughter always came with her, and translated me whatever she said includding the nagging. 😂

Even closely related lanaguages can have different word order, e.g. in German subordinate clauses the verb(s) are at the end of the clause (and if an auxiliary verb is involved it is the last one). 'The man who there been had.' as opposed to the English 'The man who had been there.' Fluent/native German-speakers feel free to correct this if it is wrong - it's rather a long time since I did German.

I've heard Tibetan is one of the hardest, because it has the most extra rules to know of any other language making it sort of the universal hardest language to learn. However that might just be the reading and writing, not necessarily the speaking. Dine (Navajo) is also really hard as well.

As an English speaker who knew a good amount of Spanish, I found German slightly challenging but kind of similar to English. Norwegian is like a bridge between English and German

@ChefGoreb

8 ай бұрын

Absolutely agree. Although a (especially dutch/flemish/friesisch/swiss german, not so much high german) would definitively understand more than a native english speaker, not everything, but as a swiss I can usually follow, not word for word, but the topic of a conversation when spoken slowly in Norsk. Dansh would be just as understandable, they just shifted their pronounciation so far back their throats, it became ununderstandable... reading bokmal and danish is equally difficult for me (cant say anything about Nynorsk, never seen/heard that varietie)

@roberttbrockway

7 ай бұрын

There's a new hypothesis that English is more closely related to Norwegian than German.

as a Japanese, most difficult part of learning english is articles(a,the) and prural form like car, a car, the car, cars, the cars because that sort of function is nothing in japanese grammar

Nice and fun video. However, a learner of foreign languages, I find a few common difficulty ‘axes’ missing. For example, pronunciation is something that makes Danish harder than Swedish, tonal harder than non tonal languages, and languages with more tones (Cantonese) harder that languages with fewer tones (Mandarin). All from a perspective of an English speaker. Script is another area that is missing for the video. Learning ideograms alone can take a foreign learner years. Learning letters, even in more complicated scripts like Arabic, takes just a few days at most. Something that is not related to the language itself, but to the wider context, is the size of the population speaking it. If you are studying a language with less than 1m speakers, it is going to be a lot harder to find good learning materials, good teachers and a variety of films, books and songs to give you exposure to the language without moving to the area where it’s spoken.

w video, im from colombia and ive heard wayuu

On the subject of learning, it can be separated into speaking & listening/understanding and reading & writing.

Agma Schwa's cursed conlang circus contains some good ones lol Also as a N E D E R L A N D E R I recognised the hij is naar de winkel gegaan N E D E R L A N D S

What is with the Klick-Language of the "Khoisan"?

Speaking of SVO, in Russian language a sentence "I brought a plate", for instance, can be said in any order whatsoever (SVO, OSV, SOV, etc.) without much change to the meaning, although most commonly it'd be said as SVO. Just made me wonder if there are many other languages that can do the same thing.

Hahaha! Wayuu sounds like waiyu (外语） in mandarin, which can literally mean “foreign language” 😂

You should try Guarani, second official language from Paraguay. Very hard

@stevenweint7893

7 ай бұрын

It is challenging, but not too arduous.

What about Guarani language?

pretty interesting!

oh yes, La Guajira mentioned. Btw i just had a class of WayuuNaiki last week, what would be the odds

Great vidz, really enjoyed it but yiu just say "indo european", without the proto, proto means before. In linguistic world that just means the origin-language

The basic vocabulary would be small and at least the writing system is just the Latin alphabet. The simplicity of their culture removes difficulties as well. I'm probably not going to be chatting about Bernoulli's differential equations for heat exchange or the Western/Eastern schism of the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed.

Bruh never expected this me being someone where wayúu it's spoken quite often and even taught in some schools (if you ask) and being able to understand both really it's funny to me bc when I joke with Americans while changing structures and words they freak out!!

a language that emphasizes the other/ the object over self is very interesting. Also I come from a Finnish speaking family and speak some Finnish .too. It is very different from germanic and romantic languages. Although it is considered svo there are constant variations from that order to impart meaning. since thee is no 'a' or 'the' or 'there is'. If you change the word order it accentuates importance. Grammar is way more important in Finnish than english

mandarin and cantonese actually are both from middle chinese, as are all the rest of the chinese dialects/languages, except for min, which diverged much earlier