Some language learners believe that some languages are too hard to learn due to their sound system (phonetics and phonology). Which language, do you think, is the most difficult one for learners, and why?
Xhosa is hard due to its clicks. Some forms of Cantonese are difficult due to large number of tone contours. But Taa has both clicks and tones, and over 100 different phonemes (the western dialect having 164 consonants including 111 clicks).
Y(J)S
Of course, it depends on your native language... and on how early you learn a foreign language. This said, infants and young children seem to learn their own native language with equal ease, and when they learn a second language at the same time or soon after, they don't seem to care which it is. But when you learn a second language as an adult, your auditory and mental language processing patterns are already set for native language, and it is then much more difficult to build another (parallel) pattern system, particularly if the new phonological and prosodic patterns are far removed from your native ones.
One should differentiate between relative difficulty in learning a language at a more advanced age and the question asked here about sound systems.
It has been shown in many studies that the basic phoneme perception mechanisms are determined very early in life (which is one of the reasons that it is so hard to acquire an accent that could fool a native speaker).
On the other hand, fluency in the syntax and grammar of a new language can be acquired at a much later age - theoretically not limited although more difficult with age.
Y(J)S
danish language because they have some sounds that people from other language cannot express it easily.
Danish is indeed harder than the other Germanic languages since it has over 25 vowel sounds and unusual prosody especially when spoken quickly. However, it is still orders of magnitude simpler to non-native speakers than languages with clicks or multiple tonal structures.
Referring to Ladefoged and Maddieson’s book “The sounds of the world's languages”.
As my individual opinion in India the most difficult languages to learn are unclassified languages. Unclassified languages are those which cannot be included in any language families. In India mainly four languages families are there: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-asiatic and Tibeto Burman. Unclassified languages are those which don't come to any four language families. So, phonology, Morphology etc are difficult to learn. In India unclassified langues are Burushaki, Nahali, Andamanese etc.
@sibasis mukherjee. Unclassified languages are not phonologically or morphologically alien to humans. Unclassified languages are those languages which fully don't share any of the features with its counterpart languages( based on the theories of language families). How can we say that the individual whose language falls under the family group of Indo-Aryan can easily learn Dravidian language rather than unclassified language?
I think it's the native language that determines the difficulty of any language to learn.
I wish people would stop saying that it depends on what language(s) the person already speaks. That is almost, but not quite, entirely incorrect. The question was about the sound system, not the vocabulary or grammar!
Remember "My Fair Lady"? Eliza was a native English speaker and it was tremendously difficult for her to learn the upper class King's English ("received") pronunciation.
Similarly, Spanish and French are extremely close and to an extant mutually understandable, but a Spanish speaker will be hard pressed to get the French nasalized vowels correct and a French speaker will find it difficult to reliably distinguish the Spanish flap vs. trill rhotic (single "r" vs. double "r"). And neither speaker could convincing produce the Brazilian Portuguese voiced alveolar fricative (although a Czech speaker could).
So, it is true that someone who speaks a dialect which happens to have a similar phoneme will find it easy to handle THAT phoneme, but it would be difficult to find two dialects that have precisely the same phoneme set.
Y(J)S
Very interesting question. In general, languages with tonal nuances in their vowels that affect the meaning are complex, at least for new speakers.
I like this question. Thanks. I would like to nominate Ubykh, an extinct language of the Caucasus with 84 phonemic consonants and only 2 phonemic vowels.
Good example, but mainly because Ubykh had 20 different uvular phonemes. 84 is a lot of consonants, but only for languages without clicks.
I still think clicks are harder for non-native speakers than uvulars.
SURE! Also in several languages with different meanings just with little tonal diversity. Languages are a neverending universe!
In my opinion, for a certain sound system to be considered more difficult than others we need to look at various factors. One of them, despite what Y.J. Stein has pointed out, is the phonic proximity between the learner's mother tongue and the language he or she wishes to study. In this sense, Basque, a non-Indo-European language, is, in some ways, closer to Spanish than French or English, to give an example. For a Spaniard, Basque is an incomprehensible language from a lexical point of view, but not from the point of view of its phonetics, as both share a system of five vowels and many consonants. As pronunciation is really a problem of perception, we must take into account whether the language has a syllabic or an accent rhythm. The moment it is learned is also important. If a six-year-old Catalan-speaking girl has enough time and input, she could learn the click sounds of the Khoisan languages without any problems, despite their apparent difficulty. However, it will be very difficult for her if her age is 20. To sum up, in order to give an accurate answer –if there is one– it would be necessary to make a possible list of influencing factors, weigh up their importance, and analyse data with statistical tools.
Completely agree with Xose (despite his prefacing my previous answer with "despite"). I had tried to convey that the overlap of phoneme sets between the dialects already spoken and the new one is important.
Age is of course a factor, since in most cases the phoneme detectors are set by some young age. I remember reading a paper many years ago in which a set of fluent French and English speakers, half of whom had learned English before age ? and half the other way around, were asked to report on nonsense sounds. The results were strikingly different. If anyone remembers the reference I would appreciate seeing it.
Y(J)S
II believe that, The lanuage which has a spcial rules for male and female is more difficult, Especially which has irregular and unclear rules to differentiate between both of them like arabic, urdu, germany and the russian languages, because it's looks to this difference from their own point of view.
I think also, the more different language (at rules, sounds etc ..) from the person's native and previously known language, will become harder to learn.