I think hardest language to learn in the world is the one you don’t want to learn. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school and can barely remember anything. I’ve developed a passion for finnish and after a year and a half I can have a conversation and tackle day to day functions in the language. Passion and motivation are huge.

@pyrochroma

7 ай бұрын

this is sooo true i am forced to learn spanish in school and cant say shit but i am passionate about learning japanese and i actually keep being motivated and actually learn stuff

Mandarin is definitely not the hardest because Cantonese is objectively harder...

@user-hp5bc5cy2l

7 ай бұрын

广东话呢含义更美丽，所以更有意思，结果并不更能。

@user-lh2hx5xf4e

7 ай бұрын

@@user-hp5bc5cy2l 更能？你難道想說更難嗎？ 廣東話肯定比普通話更難。他們有很多的表達方式在standard Chinese 不出現。

@owgirl

6 ай бұрын

I like Hong Kong more than other Chinese cities, and I want to show off to my ex (a native Cantonese speaker) but I’ll learn both because why not!

@rpg9392

Ай бұрын

What makes it objectively harder? more tones = less ambiguity. I'd say the only thing objectively harder about it is the lack of resources to learn it

No, as a Chinese, I had to learn Classical Chinese, which is way harder. Here's how school system for Classical Chinese goes: in grade school you learn about Poems (there are different type of poems), you're required to recite the popular ones. From 7-12 grade, you learn to read classical text ranging from 700 BCE to 19th Century CE. Most words remain the same, some words are pronounced differently, and meaning of words some times change from era to era. Bonus point: classical chinese have complete different grammar from mandarin.

I love these videos! I feel very talked to on a level that doesn’t make me feel dumb, and it gives me hope and confidence to keep learning! Thanks!

I suddenly realize that when I was a kid, I had a real hard time learning how to write Chinese characters too!

I'm a native speaker of Portuguese from Brazil. I speak Mandarin Chinese and I know a lot of Japanese. I find Japanese harder to learn for a lot of reasons, but one of them is related to the Chinese characters, "kanji": in Chinese, most of the characters have only one reading and it consists of only one syllable, it is extremely concise and elegant. Also: most characters have a phonetic component that gives you a hint of its reading and it helps A LOT. In Japanese, there are at least two readings: one that emulates the Chinese reading, and at least one Japanese reading that can be one or more syllables and completely ignores the phonetic component, making it much hard to remember. To make things worse, Chinese characters are inserted into Japanese words in a very bizarre manner. It is as if we decided to include Chinese characters into English, and it would go as follows: take the word "drink"; take the Chinese character for drink: "喝". Substitute the first letters of the original word for it, and you get: "喝nk", or "喝rink". But don't forget: you have to remember that, in this case, the sound of 喝 is "dri" or "dr", as the word was originally. Japanese is a Frankenstein of a language, and that is one of the reasons it is so hard. Also: I really doubt Chinese people in general know 8000 characters. With 2000 you will have a very high reading proficiency, which is about the number of kanji officially accepted in the Japanese language apart from names. If I remember correctly, according to some estimates, Chinese books use between 4000 - 5000 characters. To get to know more than that, even Chinese people would have to grind a lot of rarely used characters.

@panorama7654

7 ай бұрын

As a chinese speaker from China, i will say it's kinda tricky to tell whether you "recognize" a character. For example there's a simple, daily-used word "深圳” , every literate person(96.4% according to UNESCO) can easily pronouce it as a whole word yet almost no one can recognize the "圳” independently 😂

@mandarimtupiniquim8947

7 ай бұрын

@@panorama7654 That is true! If we use 深 as context for recognizing 圳, are we really "recognizing" 圳? Probably not. Sometimes I like to show some random character alone for my chinese wife and her brain freezes!

@Hay8137g

6 ай бұрын

So why does anyone want to learn Japanese? Perhaps for fun? Japan created their own language based on Chinese characters and thought they were being superior.

@rpg9392

Ай бұрын

I highly doubt your mandarin is very good if you're making this argument. Why would "喝nk" be any harder to learn than any multisyllabic string of characters if the Japanese equivalent is partially phonetic and the Chinese is not? I don't understand that as a reason for it being harder. If anything that makes it easier. Additionally, the structure of Japanese sentences make the verbs and noun easy to distinguish. Chinese is an ambiguous mess that only begins to develop clarity when a learner has already reached an advanced conversational level.

@mandarimtupiniquim8947

Ай бұрын

@@rpg9392 1. Yes, the japanese writing is partially phonetic, but so what if you still have to read the kanji? And what is worse, you have to remember at least two readings for every kanji: 食 in chinese is always "shí". In japanese you have the chinese reading しょく and the japanese reading た in 食べる。Do some characters in chinese have more than one reading? Yes, but they're in the minority. 2. Yes, in japanese you have clear indicators for nouns and verbs. But, in chinese, the word order is basically SVO and is very inflexible, which makes it very easy to know if the word is a noun or a verb, especially until intermediate level. Contrary to what you're saying, it is in more advanced sentences that it can ocasionally be a problem. I've been teaching chinese for almost 20 years and I have never had a single student complaining about not knowing if a word is a noun or a verb.

Could you do a video on Dutch? It would be interesting. I’m learning it and it’s pretty simple but the pronunciation is super hard.

I’m a native speaker of Chinese and I’ve learned English as well as Hebrew. I think, for a native Chinese speaker to learn English, it is as hard as, if not harder than it is for a native English speaker to learn Chinese. It’s difficult for a new learner to understand that there are grammatical phenomena that exist in one language but don’t exist in another. A lot of very smart people in China have totally fail to learn English. In fact, many Chinese people couldn’t advance in their careers, precisely as a result of their failure to master English. Before I went to the US to attend university, I spent years and years learning English. But for the first 3 years in college, I completely had no sense of humor and couldn’t get most jokes. And I used to be able to make up dirty jokes spontaneously and create new metaphors in almost every sentence effortlessly when I spoke my native language. In contrast, my European friends whose native language wasn’t English, learnt English pretty easily. It really depends on what languages one has already known. When I was learning Hebrew near the end of my college in a class full of Jewish classmates, I was even doing better than most of them. They only knew English and maybe a little bit of Spanish. They were not ready for a language that was so different, at least in the writing system. But to me, Hebrew was easier to learn than English, because it was my 3rd language and I already had the experience of learning my 2nd language that was so drastically different from my 1st.

Ancient Egyptian is harder. Also Sumerian is a difficult one.

@worldwatcher1236

7 ай бұрын

Lmao

@goodusername7037

7 ай бұрын

True, writing the languages are about the same difficulty, but pronunciation, experts don’t even know!!!

@user-ol2fb9fo7r

7 ай бұрын

@@goodusername7037 we actually do know how the words are pronounced, just we just don't have native speakers of the language though.

as an english, cantonese, mandarin chinese and japanese speaker, who have learned some Vietnamese and also capable to write both trad & simpl characters, and typing pinyin & cangjie, i will say that if u only consider the difficulty of speaking the language, then J>M. However if u add writing in, mandarin is not even closed to cantonese but still enough to knock down Japanese. Mandarin: Writing(Simp)-3.5 Speaking-3.5 Listening-4 Reading-4 Japanese: Writing-3 Speaking-4 Listening-4 Reading-2.5 Cantonese: Writing(Trad)-4.5 Speaking-4.5 Listening-4.5 Reading-4.25 btw i want to add sth, I speak Portuguese and French as well, for those who speaks either Spanish/Portuguese and saying that they speak other Latin langueses(French doesn't fully counted but still helps), and call themselves a POLYGLOT is a joke, just stop pulling legs guys. Knowing Cantonese and Mandarin only gives you 40% of advantages to learn Japanese and probably 30% to learn Korean, 20% to learn Vietnamese, but on the other hand it's like 80% of pronuncation, words and grammars are either similuar or the same in those Latin languages.

@Ray-zj4wf

7 ай бұрын

Mandarin has 4+1 tones, Japanese just have a system of how the accents are put in different location(mostly systematic), even the speaking part, they are already closed(just consider u care tones and accents since most of the natives cant be both taking care of the cracking, probably-wrong pronuncations and words collocations) and tones in the same time. When it comes to vocabs, Japanese has its special katagana system, which basically keep absorbing mostly eng words. However the ratio in Chinese is really low and ignorable. Also reading part, the only comparable is the kanji part, since the 50 basics are too easy, the commonly used kanji is less than or roughly equal to the Chinese simp characters, but got outnumbered by the trad characters.

@sergbastian5

7 ай бұрын

I worked in a chocolate store that had many foreign tourists. I speak 3 languages (Portuguese, Spanish, and English) but a customer asked me one time, "Is that all you can speak?" The Latin languages are so similar and this experience helped me to want to learn other languages‐- I just want to say there are many differences if you want to be FLUENT or even conversational in Latin languages. There are small, but significant, differences in any language. I wouldn't call myself a polyglot but understanding the small differences between languages (even Latin ones) is a huge barrier between being "conversational" vs "fluent."

Love it.

Interesting!

Captain America: Language!!! Iron: Eeehhhh...English, German, Mandarin? Jarvous: Please select one, sir.

A few problems with Chinese not mentioned: -Plenty of homophones. (Read the famous lion eating poet story) -Chaotic system to render foreign names. -Chinese culture is almost completly different to Western. Westerners have zero knowledge of Chinese history. Not only the words are different, but also the culture is different. -Hard to dinstinguish consonants. -Pinyin is very tricky and has some irregularities.

Mandarin IS super easy to speak and fake to be fluid for Westerners.. but to be genuinely fluid & be able to use it like a native, another thing ;)

Knee how ma

What other languages have a ton of characters?

You have completely left out that there are two writing systems for Chinese Mandarin. 1) traditional characters and 2) simplified characters. Chinese Cantonese is much harder than Mandarin. It makes Mandarin look like a "walk in the park", whereas Cantonese is a "walk in the dark". Cantonese has 8 tones vs. 4 tones. Also, their spoken language is different than the written language. There are also spoken vocabularies that have no written translation.

@rpg9392

Ай бұрын

Cantonese has 6 tones + 3 "tones" that are not really tones and there are not spoken words with no transliteration. There are many cantonese specific characters. Cantonese speakers text in cantonese.

The toughest part of mando is the fact it uses sounds which do not exist in eurolangs pintin X/SH R/ZH Q and has N/L shift. Chars are easy grammar is too. Damn few cognates. I love it.

as a chinese people i should tell you there's no vaule to learn chinese at all in nowdays world, because japan is the future in east asia , we all learn japanese and english as harder as possible, china has no future because of ccp

Mandarin is "difficult "...yes! Let's add Arabic in there as well. 😮 nice video.

对于英国人汉语比较难。 其实并不难而且是最有趣的外语。

Lol