Also "which written language is most difficult...makes no difference here" and then uses chinese as the main example of a hard language, a language that is specifically called difficult because of its writing system, not its spoken language!

Agreed brother. I'm also a native Chinese speaker and only started learning English around 6-7 years old but my English is much better than my Mandarin

Thats why his declnstruction of mandarin as one of the hardet languages was so flawed: it is considered one of the hardest languages specifically because of its writing system, which he wasnt considering in this video. But tbf, he did say some arguments could be made that some writing systems are harder for others. But yes, before chinese characters were simplified, even most chinese by a large majority were functionally illiterate.

Nobody uses ")))" except Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians Ты спалился)))

@nouneim-iz-interneta в смысле?

@@Dajkon-d3x В прямом. Никто не использует такие скобочки и никто их не понимает тут.

@@nouneim-iz-interneta неее, я просто кринжанул со "спалился"

Yeah, FSI whose difficulty ratings he used, teaches reading and writing along with speaking, and that plays a major part in their difficulty. What you said in the last paragraph was pretty much the theme of the video, but i think it was greatly overstated. While those speakers will learn isolating languages easier, the reverse isn't necessarily true. To use an example similiar to yours, Guy Deutscher points out that pidgins and trade languages between speakers of distant languages, even if they both languages are highly inflected like Russian and Nganasan, are still analytical the vast majority of time, implying it's easier for second language learners to use, regardless of linguistic background.

@@mihan5660 Okay, I get what you're saying in your last paragraph … but aren't pidgins and trade-languages an exception here? Pidgins and trade-languages _are not_ considered full-fledged languages, linguistically. In linguistics, it's said that once a pidgin has become rich enough for everyday use, it's at that point a creole, no longer a pidgin. My statement about analytic-to-analytic vs polysynthetic-to-polysynthetic is based on a sentence I ultimately omitted from my comment: Putting aside the tones and the writing, Chinese will be easier for an English speaker to learn than Japanese because _you put your thoughts together_ in a very similar way in Chinese and English. And that's my point with the difficulty of going polysynthetic-to-analytic: how you arrange your thoughts when speaking a polysynthetic language will, by nature, be _very different_ from how you arrange your thoughts when speaking an analytic language.

@@John_Weiss i think you are right with word order, where primarily similarity to your native language that matters even for otherwise distant languages. However, with other aspects, such as inflection, it seems learning distant inflected languages is more difficult, even for speakers of other highly inflected languages. And what I said holds true even after the languages become a creole and beyond. For example Haitian Creole and Afrikaans are less inflected than French and Dutch, replacing it with stricter word order. And creoles in general are typically ungendered, including those two. Furthermore even speakers.of inflected, they still consider many foreign inflection systems an obstable. In fact, if you look at Russian lists for hardest languages, such as Tomsk Technical Institute's <learn about the world's most difficult languages>, the only analytical language listed is Mandarin because of its "85,568 characters" (which isnt accounted for in the purposes of this video where writing isnt being looked at), *none* of the rest are analytical languages, despite Russian itself being highly inflected. In fact, the only reason it lists for Tabasaran being one of the world's most difficult languages is its 44 cases!