Friday curious. Hardest languages to learn

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I don't know where they've taken these figures from, but the Afrikaans speakers are 7 million native speakers and 10 million have it as a second language.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Some have argued (http://www.mezzoguild.com/korean-language-is-not-difficult/) that Korean actually isn't that difficult.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

German seems an odd language to omit.

[leo-sosnine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, also noticed that. Something is off with this infographic

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Yep. It doesn't have enough space to mention all the languages that exist in the world.

[leo-sosnine.livejournal.com]

Nope, it talks even Afrikaans which is a sort of a dialect of Dutch and not mentions German at all. It would be a stretch to think that the authors missed German because "there are so many languages in the world".

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Bengali is spoken by 200 million people, and yet it wasn't mentioned, either. Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Malay, Telugu, Vietnamese, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu also have a number of native speakers that is comparable to German, and they weren't mentioned, either.

I can't read the author's mind, but I'm guessing they wanted to include a language from Africa for the sake of diversity. Or something.

Is this the one thing you guys could nitpick from this whole graph?

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

> I'm guessing they wanted to include a language from Africa for the sake of diversity

By this logic, Swahili would've been a far more appropriate pick. Just sayin'.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Not giving enough fuck. Just sayin.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Shrug.

[leo-sosnine.livejournal.com]

Don't want to proceed to other things that I could nitpick on without first resolving this one.

All the languages you mentioned are from either 2nd or 3rd category, while German you'd expect to be in the first one. And yet it's not there.

Also, I think we can assume that this infographic was created for a western audience, therefore, it would make sense to mention primarily those languages that westerners interact with more often, that's probably why we don't see Telugu or other weird languages here. Apparently, German isn't such a language as its speakers contributed a lot to a western civilization and majority of Americans are of German origin. Still, it's not there.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I think we can assume that this infographic was created for a western audience

That's written on the infographic itself. Did you not notice?

Okay, German is not there. How do you plan to "resolve" this one?

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

You've found a problem to resolve, eh?

Gimme a break, LOL.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

I get that, but it just seems to me that if you asked a random person, "name four European-based languages," they would almost always include German in the list.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

OK.

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

Heh. I can see how Slavic languages would appear difficult for people speaking Germanic or Romance languages. We've got some pretty weird archaic things still remaining in our grammar.

[garote]

English should be on that list.

... For the sake of some people I met in the midwest ;)