[1960s movie music]
What is the hardest language to learn?
There's no real answer to this question
but some people say that -- at least for English speakers --
Chinese is the hardest.
For one thing, it has tones
so that ma1, ma2, ma3, and ma4 are all different words...
and go3-shur2 means "dog food," but go3-shur3 means "dog excrement"
Also, learning to write Chinese involves memorizing thousands of characters,
many of which looks similar.
But if you ask Chinese people what they think the hardest language to learn is
they will almost all say Russian
This is partly because Chinese has a very simple grammar,
while Russian's is very complicated
In fact, it's so complicated that for almost every verb in English
there are two in Russian...
one for a completed action...
and another for the action in general.
For example, the sentence "I didn't call Olga"
has two versions in Russian
The first means you didn't even try to call
and the second means you tried but didn't get through.
Also, Chinese people find Russian's long slurs of consonants
very difficult to pronounce,
such as "zdrastvooytye" and "vodokhranilishche"
But other languages could be just as hard
Consider Hindi...
like most South Asian languages, Hindi has groups of consonants
that would sound the same to most English speakers
for instance "d", "dh", "d" (retroflex) and "dh" (retroflex)
are all totally different sounds.
even though they'd all be considered the same sound in English.
If you say "dal" you mean "lentils"
but if you say "dal" (retroflex D), you mean "shield",
and if you say "dhal" (retroflex D), you mean "a tree branch"
And then you have some of the languages of Southern Africa,
where they use click stops
For instance the name of this language
-- the native tongue of Nelson Mandela -- is pronounced [click]-hosa
Xhosa has three main types of clicks...
the X for the click made at the side of the mouth,
the Q for the click made on the roof of the mouth,
and the C for the click made on the front teeth.
And like Chinese, Xhosa has tones,
as do many of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa.
So between languages with tough pronunciations ...
tough grammars...
and tough writing systems...
there's a lot to wrap your mind around.
On the other hand it's a fact that
anyone can learn any of these languages.
It doesn't take any special ability,
just a lot of practice.