Відео

0:46 As a french, do not apologize to them, they don't deserve it😂

Good to know that arabic is not the same since you didn’t include it in the title thumbnail. So arabic is the hardest

I felt on my skin this last part you said, i didn't really actively go after learning english, i had an interest but not to the point of pursuing it, i just had so much influence thrown at me that i ended up picking it up after some time with the help of google translator. Media really is a big factor, so much that i'm planning to learn another language just 'cause of it, lol!

very interesting video

I just feel like there has to be some usefulness in these categories. Otherwise they would drop off because it makes teaching the language more difficult and it would die out. I don’t think the language classification of “gender” means the same thing as man/woman gender. I don’t see how that could benefit the language in anyway.

English is pervasive because of the US, not the British.

It’s true that every language is complex, but the paradigm of “all languages are equally complex” has fallen out of favor in linguistic communities because every language being exactly the same in terms of objective difficulty is simply infeasible unless constructed. That being said, the most important aspect of language learning is its distance from one’s native or already learned languages, so “objective language complexity” really only matters so much. Great video!

This reminds me of how a Russian student once made the argument that "it's much easier to learn Russian from Ukrainian than it is to learn Ukrainian from Russian because Ukrainian is much harder", which is partially true, but only because Ukrainians are generally extremely exposed to Russian content and media rather than the other way around...

took me untill 8:00 to realize that this is a vid from yuval💀

This is exactly what I'm saying! Honestly, if children can learn any of these languages with no difference in how much time it takes them, there really can't be any such thing as an objectively "difficult" language. And while some languages have certain unique grammar contraptions that a lot of other languages DON'T have (eg: English's progressive verb form), there isn't really a such thing as a language that can express a significantly wider range of subjects or concepts...

The easiest language is Indonesian. Love from Slovenia 🇸🇮❤🇮🇩

Excellent. I like to tell my students in German class, "There are around 130 million native German speakers in the world. They're not ALL smarter than you." A language has to be simple enough to learn communication as a child and complex enough to accommodate the adult need to speak of abstract ideas. Briefly put: 1) Languages are created by humans, 2) humans are crazy, and therefore 3) any language reflects human insanity. QED

10:31 I'd say for a Muslim arabic may take a similar place here. As a Muslim I'm always surrounded by Arabic the whole day. From praying, to studying the religion, to speaking with friends. As a revert I've learnt Arabic without even trying Wallahi.

This video is completely packed full of misinformation 😂

you are wrong. most latin languages if not all, are at least readable, writeable, and in some context, understandable. Arabic, Asian (including Hindu and such) and some European like Greek languages are not only visually look intimidating, but are difficult grammatically too. Arabic for example, change a letter here and there, entire sentence will have a whole new meaning. Russian is difficult in terms of grammar, and the easiest language is American English only because British English wants to look unnecessarily fancy. *drops mic*

11:04 We are still waiting for the Winds of Winter 🗿

Aside from grammar and vocabulary, languages can be called difficult to learn primarly because of the complex writing systems and orthography. If we would say that every language is the same for all native speakers, we must exclude these two things from language for the argument to be consistent. As the writing systems and orthography can, in fact, be very difficult for native speakers. Aside from obvious examples like Japanese, there's also an obvious example of English, as well as French and Mandarin, and my native, Russian. Also, claiming that English is the easiest language to learn, contradicts itself based on this issue, because exposure to English is went primarily through writing system. And frankly, reading and listening are not the only things you need to practice for you to become an English speaker. Not to mention that because there's so much content and information in English doesn't inherently mean that there's "so little" for others, and if you desire so, you can as easily immerse yourself in other major languages as in English. Continuing the rant about how languages differ in their difficulty because of writing systems, what about their phonetics? Saying that "all children acquire the language by the same age" is not saying anything concrete, also the claim is lacking evidence. I believe some languages are inherently less difficult based on how less effort the child must put in his pronunciation. When a 5 year old child speaks a language, they don't have adult level of articulation. At this age children will often make mistakes with their pronounciation, as they have much harder time pronouncing things than an adult. Some sounds are specifically harder to make, like rolling R, and some of them people can't even learn until adulthood! If not handled at the right age, the problems with pronounciation can be persistent during a lifetime. And we can also touch the issue of how different languages can be much harsher towards people with disabilities of speech. Although there's not really much research that was put into this issue. As a final thought I want to be heard by a public, people in general (it's mostly applied to youtube linguists, who just like to compare languages with disregard to this exact phenomenon) tend to think that there's just ONE language level for a native speaker. I believe it's mostly based on the popularity of CERF, but whatever. Native speakers can very much differ in how well they operate with their language. Some people can read a lot and speak very little, and that affects their ability to express their thoughts in life. Some children can be very educated for their age because of how much they read, and some adults can have very short vocabularies. Not every person can speak, or even simply understand Shakespearian poetry, but it is still English, and some people are not even literate to begin with. Language is an instrument that can take very different forms, and you can get better at them, you can forget them, and you as well can never master them fully.

yeah but whay about kay(f)bop(t) and ithkuil

6:43 _as a a child_ - is double article a mistake or special language construction?

by the logic in the video, Japanese should be considered among the 'easiest' language because there are a ton of resources both free and paid, and Japanese pop culture, anime etc are prevalent all over the world.

For a similar reason to the one you explained for English being the easiest language to learn, I'm actually finding myself making progress a lot more easily in learning Japanese than German.

Everyone on earth should learn English so there will be no more communication barriers

I am absolutely and utterly convinced that french is objectively and unequivocally superior to any other languages 😎

This is a great video! I am glad someone is talking about this, however I would like to point out that the examples you used as "english slang" are linked closely with Ebonics/AAVE which is a dialect of English and has different grammatical rules than SAE.

Nah sorry. Korean is way harder then indonesian and french. Ive learned them both. Same with spanish.

How do you explain native Japanese speakers not understanding some of the written words (but they actually do know them, they just can't read them or forgot). Or how do you explain that some people native speakers make more mistakes in some harder languages like Russian? A wrong spelling is almost non existent in English, while in Russian it's actually difficult for a native speaker to write words correctly?

3:00 when he started saying that - i understand what suppost to happen. 3:05 on that moment my 9 years of learning English in school - disappeared UPD: Im native russian language speaker

“I’m not talking about learning it as an adult. I mean inherently more difficult to learn as a native.” Ah. So this video helpfully answers a question nobody is asking… Excellent. Strap in.

There is a study that has found that danish children learn the language much slower than other countries

1:30 This isn't true unless you're counting in some extreme way. There are 8 simple tenses and 8 compound tenses, plus the imperative. Out of curiosity, how did you get this number?

0:30 If you ignore learning languages as an adult of course there’s no hardest language, but most people ARE referring to this when they say ‘hardest language’.

That's so cap, if you have learnt both Italian and Spanish, you would know that Spanish is definitely easier bc it has less interlocking contractions and vocab overall. And this goes for any language, some languages have more required topics to learn before you can speak.

as a native english speaker i never realized english was so complicated.

When do people say something like mandarin is harder than english? Usually when a native english speaker is asked what the hardest language is, they say english, from my experience

Good Lord, I've thought this for years! It's complete commonsense. The "closer" a spoken language is to your native tongue, the easier it is to learn. So, the Germanic languages are easier for an English speaker to learn than non-Germanic ones. Somewhat paradoxically, the Romance Languages are also relatively easy because the English vocabulary has so many loanwords from Latin and French. Although English has no problem with making new words by compounding like, say, German, it generally doesn't like words to get too long unless, for some reason, they're medico-technical words. So, it'd rather borrow a shorter word that has the desired meaning from another "friendly" language if available. English also tends to hide many of its compounds by not linking them. Conversely, a language is more difficult the less similar than your native tongue. So, non-Indo-European languages are much more difficult for English speakers. The US State Department estimates that Sino-Tibetan language family is the most difficult for English speakers to learn, presumably because it is the most removed language family from English. But this is a continuum that works both ways. So, for Sino-Tibetan speakers a language like English is the most difficult to learn. Therefore, language difficulty is a relative concept, not an absolute one. How a language is written is a more or less artificial complication.

Languages learning is so much fun. "Why do you learn Czech? Where do you want to use it?" I learn languages for fun not for use.

When i was in the 6th grade i was terrible at english. Then i started watching english language youtube and netflix and now my english is probably better than my native language. Almost any piece of information or media is easier to find in english, so its more conveniet for almost any non-conversational use

As a native Russian speaker I cry every time I really think about all these poor souls that have to learn the endless conjugations of my language. Do not get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE my mother tongue and think it is beautiful but I have absolutely no idea how you can actually learn it if you're not native, that should be really really difficult. And I do not think that learning Polish would be easier for me than learning English even if it is much closer to Russian. UPD: I feel like mandarin being rated as a hardest language is just a big misunderstanding. Mandarin really is an easy language with a few hard traits for English and basically non-asian language speaker. The list everybody mentions based on time to learn language. And it do take some time to learn characters and get used to tones. But ones you're there the grammar is fairly easy. The better example would be arabic or russian. Is it easier for english speaker to learn arabic/russian or vice versa?

Like with your sign language example, there are languages that are naturally easier for children to learn and, so, speak at an earlier age. But what I find significant is some linguistic studies indicate that it is easier for a baby to learn a complex, even polysynthetic, language, while it is easier for those past the initial acquisition stages to learn languages with simpler grammar. Persian and Mandarin are prime examples of this. While the surrounding dialects and sister languages speak a more complex language, those languages that were lingua franca, responsible for helping to integrate diverse people into their realms, shed much of the grammatical complexity. Like English. Danelaw helped to make Anglo-Saxon almost a creole. Too bad the Norman-French conquest brought in Romance complexity that was not really needed

Great video Yuval. You should make more longform content

5:30 now explain EL AGUA

You provide no actual evidence, human brain is not infinite in capacity. If you use a logical extrapolation, a language of infinite terms is of course harder to learn as the human brain physically could not learn it.

Its about your base language I think

I personally still use "hard" and "easy" with people and mention that i mean "more similar to our language" usually not only is it easier to communicate with that, but i feel like that's usually what difficulty boils down to: unfamiliarness the more unfamialiar you are with a language's concept, the harder it will feel to learn

Its really not gender. I mean you could call it "direction" and east vs west or elemental earth vs fire and it wouldnt make any difference. It would just coincidentally match up with actual gendered words like boy or mother.

1:46 Heya! Thanks.

as someone who speaks polish, polish is the most complicated language

This video pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly. People are always cought up in comparing which Language is more difficult. But most languages are very close to each other in complexity, because they serve the same purpose. It's just that they accomplish the same outcomes in different ways. Having one part of a language simple means some nuance is lost, which you must compensate in different ways if you hope to express complex ideas in the language. In the end, it comes down to the individual. Primarily what your native language is, but also your own strenghts and weaknesses can make a particual language more or less difficult for you to learn.

There are objective reasons why chineese (and moreover japaneese) are way harder than any other modern language if we discuss writing and reading

as someone who learned every word in toki pona, i think it is not necessarily a simple language, depending on what you want to say. those few words can quickly end up being used as, essentially, morphemes for very long compound words. and i think it can sometimes be very difficult to come up with a succinct translation when most of your vocabulary is taken away when you're used to having tens of thousands of words at your disposal. and because of the incredibly broad meaning of any given word, it can be just as difficult to understand someone due to the wide range of english words and phrases that correspond woth one toki pona phrase. even the name of the language could mean many completely different things