By continuing you agree to eChinacities's Privacy Policy .
Sign up with Google
Sign up with Facebook
Q: Is mandarin the most dificult language for western people?
I have been in China for many years and it sames for me really difficult to learn mandarin. Do you think mandarin is the most difficult language in the world?
I wouldn't say so. The characters you could probably pick some of those up. I've seen more difficult languages than mandarin. The words in mandarin are not that hard to pronounce either.
Personally I would put Cantonese down as more difficult than Mandarin, that is, if you start from scratch on either one. The difficult thing about the Chinese languages however, is mainly the written language due to the massive amount of characters.
I think that the written aspect of Chinese is probably the most difficult, but as for spoken Mandarin, there are more difficult languages.
It's hard to start with but gets easier. It's certainly not the hardest language. I've heard people say Polish is much harder in terms of grammar, and it's certainly hard to pronounce. I've heard a few people say various languages are more difficult than Chinese.
Nessquick:
I go - Ja jdu
You go - Ty jdes
He go - On jde
We go - My jdeme
They go - Oni jdou
I'm sleeping - Ja spim
I slept - Ja jsem spal
I'll sleep - Ja budu spat
burn - palit, pripalit, zapalit, odpalit, spalit - ja palim, ty palis, on pali, my palime, ....
ja zapaluju, on zapaluje, my zapalujeme ...
do you need any more lessons ?
xunliang:
erm....don't remember asking for any lessons in the first place but I hope your random comment helped with your ego
Chinese is tough but pronunciation-wise, Vietnamese is much harder. I damn near dislocated my jaw each lesson. Their writing is much easier, though.
I think the Scandinavian languages have the hardest grammar, but I've never tried to learn any.
My eastern European students sometimes try to teach my a few words of their languages but it just sounds like a random mash of consonants to me.
Scandinavian:
I've heard the same about the Scandinavian languages, but as a person growing up with them I would call it childsplay to learn.
MissA:
If you grow up with one, the others are easier to learn, right?
Scandinavian:
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish is really just one language, there are differences in grammar, pronunciation and spelling, but if a person from each country sits and talk, they can just talk in their native tongue and the others responds in their native tongues. This would stump anyone not native, despite being fluent in one of the languages
DrMonkey:
Lol, for me Mandarin is harder to pronounce than Vietnamese ^^ Go figure...
I understand Arabic is rather hard, both to speak and to write....
The most difficult? For sure not. Cantonese is for sure harder due to even more fuc*ed up pronunciation and use of traditional chinese signs. apart from that, vietnamese, thai, arabic, japanese, etc... all very hard. and if u want to learn a messed up european language, try german haha^^
No, Chinese is actually a very simple language. Conjugations are fairly easy as is the grammar. Look at French, for instance... the grammar structures are far more difficult to learn. And I know cause I've learned both and my Mandarin is already better than my French and I grew up in Canada with French all over the place.
I don't know German, but I've had to write some words like pension which was like 46 letters, they seem to have long words.
t91camp:
For proper nouns and such, German combines all the words into one. So, for example, "Department of Penile Examination" would look more like "Penileexaminationdepartment". The language itself isn't especially challenging, by European standards.
Scandinavian:
German is excellent of you need to yell commands at people
Chinese is pretty easy, except when it comes to writing.
I found Japanese to be a lot tougher, but maybe it's just because I wasn't so much into it.
My American mate Clark, a real big-noter who'd been studying Chinese for years in both the US and China, took me to some restaurant, a huo guo joint, and couldn't even get the waitress to understand anything he was trying to order. Gees I laughed. After that I realised learning Chinese would be a waste of my valuable time. And since then I go into a restaurant all by myself and have no trouble ordering at all. It's not hard....all the tucker's the same, so a nod's as good as a wink to a blind man.
Chinese for me has been super easy, I love learning it, Korean was sooooooo hard.
I believe Polish is the hardest language to learn, whether writing or speaking it. Why? because we have so many diacritical marks over the letters and endings change depending on how its used in a sentence. We have six endings for a persons name for example. Say you want to phone a girl named Iwona. Calling over the phone you would ask. Czy mogę rozmować z Inowo? Can I speak to Iwona? and many more.
So I think Polish would be the hardest language for foreigners. Sentence structure changes often as well. We often have two or three ways to say a sentence, but the endings of verbs and adjectives will change and can be confusing for people.
It is phonetic when spoken, but is does not follow the same sentence structure of most Romance languages. Then of course in my region, Silesia, we have our own dialect which changes the rules a bit more and uses words you won't find anywhere else.
Many of my friends from around the world find it hard to speak Polish. Even Polish people have a problem speaking Polish. This is why there is a yearly contest to see from across the country to see who can write Polish properly.
