1.2 billion chinese speakers?? jaja, the correct number is 1.200 million (1.200.000). We are about 6.000 million people in the world. A billion is 1.000.000.000, a million of thousants of millions. And i think spanish should be in medium category, cos it contains a lot of verbal times, very difficult for english speakers!
Well, you should try to speak portuguese, with all the verbal times, actualy more than the spanish language. Though i heard the most difficult language to learn is icelandic... that's not even in the list!
German should definitely be in the "easy" category. Dutch, on the other hand - while probably the closest to English in terms of vocabulary and grammar - is extremely difficult to pronounce.
Just so everyone knows, what is considered 1 trillion in the US is considered 1 billion in the UK. I'm not sure of the reason why, but that might be why some of you say one million and some say one billion.
"[...]written Korean also relies on many Chinese characters."
False. Korean has it's own ALPHABET meaning they have actual *letters* that have NOTHING to do with Chinese characters. Their alphabet was invented by their King and is unique to the language/country. Also, it is not based on syllabic pronunciation as Japanese is (katakana & hiragana) and does not use characters/pictures (kanji) like Japanese and Chinese.
Yes, there are some words that use Chinese characters, however,they are usually old words, for stylistic purposes, or names. One can very well learn to speak fluent Korean everyday without ever learning to read or write Kanji.
And the other anon is right, that Japanese in the picture is wrong.
(also, it's not *that* difficult to learn Japanese/Korean for English speakers, or any language for that matter. You just have to apply yourself. I taught myself Korean...so..uh yeah.)
This chart was clearly made by someone who knows little of actual language and linguistics. The languages listed as "closest to English" are in fact not. The languages closest to English would be Dutch, Afrikaans(which is evolved from Dutch), German(which in a sense English came from) and the rest of the germanic language family. Things like French, Spanish and Italian are romance languages and not closely related to English. If you don't know what that is, start by googling "language families" and go from there.
I disagree with this. The hard seems to be just based off of writing scripts. I know people who have done high school, full-immersion exchanges in Japan and Finland and more people come out of Japan fluent in Japanese than Finland in Finnish. Japanese structure is very different, but it becomes second nature pretty fast if you really start speaking the language (I was a high school exchange student in Japan). I am now studying Turkish and with it's vowel harmony and conjugations, it is proving harder to speak than Japanese, but Japanese will be much harder to become literate in. Literacy =/= fluency. If you want to know a language, becoming literate and fluent is necessary, though. But, writing systems aside, this isn't really accurate.
Jacopo is right. I suppose he's Italian, so am I - and I see English-speaking people struggle to understand the structures of our languages, even to form a simple sentence.* Same with English for Italian speakers: most struggle to put together a correct sentence. Marta
*And there are also those who think we speak Spanish... :-)
25 comments:
So, how about German ? Deutsch we call it. Its supposed be in Easy !
I love German
1.2 billion chinese speakers?? jaja, the correct number is 1.200 million (1.200.000). We are about 6.000 million people in the world. A billion is 1.000.000.000, a million of thousants of millions.
And i think spanish should be in medium category, cos it contains a lot of verbal times, very difficult for english speakers!
^ummmmmmmmmm
Uh, not to be pedantic, but the Japanese in the uppermost graphic is wrong.
You haven't included "Javanese," a language from Java Island, Indonesia. It's like...hectic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_language)
hey anonymous, shut your retarded mouth.
you make no sense ^
Why he's trying to say is, yes, Chinese does indeed have 1.2 billion speakers. China is just that big.
Well, you should try to speak portuguese, with all the verbal times, actualy more than the spanish language. Though i heard the most difficult language to learn is icelandic... that's not even in the list!
total fools
Try to learn Serbian,it has cases,u have to change every single word through them.
I object to Finnish being a medium language. Incredibly hard to learn, and only Finnish babies or Mormon missionaries really learn it!
German should definitely be in the "easy" category. Dutch, on the other hand - while probably the closest to English in terms of vocabulary and grammar - is extremely difficult to pronounce.
How about Malayalam, a South Indian language? Check out the Alphabets.
how come Hebrew's not with Arabic? They're very similar, and even borrow slang from each other.
That anon needs to shut the hell up...the world population is well over 6 billion
Just so everyone knows, what is considered 1 trillion in the US is considered 1 billion in the UK. I'm not sure of the reason why, but that might be why some of you say one million and some say one billion.
Hindi should be ranked in the easy column. Danish can be very difficult to pronounce for English speakers.
"[...]written Korean also relies on many Chinese characters."
False. Korean has it's own ALPHABET meaning they have actual *letters* that have NOTHING to do with Chinese characters. Their alphabet was invented by their King and is unique to the language/country. Also, it is not based on syllabic pronunciation as Japanese is (katakana & hiragana) and does not use characters/pictures (kanji) like Japanese and Chinese.
Yes, there are some words that use Chinese characters, however,they are usually old words, for stylistic purposes, or names. One can very well learn to speak fluent Korean everyday without ever learning to read or write Kanji.
And the other anon is right, that Japanese in the picture is wrong.
(also, it's not *that* difficult to learn Japanese/Korean for English speakers, or any language for that matter. You just have to apply yourself. I taught myself Korean...so..uh yeah.)
What about Hungarian?
written korean does not rely on chinese characters. you will almost never see chinese characters anywhere.
Wo ist Deutsch?
This chart was clearly made by someone who knows little of actual language and linguistics. The languages listed as "closest to English" are in fact not. The languages closest to English would be Dutch, Afrikaans(which is evolved from Dutch), German(which in a sense English came from) and the rest of the germanic language family. Things like French, Spanish and Italian are romance languages and not closely related to English. If you don't know what that is, start by googling "language families" and go from there.
I disagree with this. The hard seems to be just based off of writing scripts. I know people who have done high school, full-immersion exchanges in Japan and Finland and more people come out of Japan fluent in Japanese than Finland in Finnish. Japanese structure is very different, but it becomes second nature pretty fast if you really start speaking the language (I was a high school exchange student in Japan). I am now studying Turkish and with it's vowel harmony and conjugations, it is proving harder to speak than Japanese, but Japanese will be much harder to become literate in. Literacy =/= fluency. If you want to know a language, becoming literate and fluent is necessary, though. But, writing systems aside, this isn't really accurate.
Jacopo is right. I suppose he's Italian, so am I - and I see English-speaking people struggle to understand the structures of our languages, even to form a simple sentence.* Same with English for Italian speakers: most struggle to put together a correct sentence.
Marta
*And there are also those who think we speak Spanish... :-)
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