I learnt english by watching The Good Place without subtitles lol

Wouldnt it be intersting, if every language had sort of a FSI? Maybe there is really a language, that is relatively hard for foreigner to learn. I do not disagree with the point of the video, i think so too, that there is no hardest language. But it would be intriguing ...

It’s a desire, not a need.

yea i agree i have family members or friends that gas me up sayin how cool it is that i can speak mandarin (not fluently yet lol) and then say they could never do it bc its so hard. i respond with no you cant learn it bc u keep telling urself u cant. too many times people look at the grammar of another language as a whole and dont get that no speaker of a language thinks bout the grammar of the language they speak like that.

in French, " une chaise " is less confortable/soft than " un fauteuil " ( chair vs armchair ) ... so Boroditsky will conclude that all French men are girly ? I like her scientific approach ....

so, Boroditsky demonstrates that the " teachers " of University of California are incompetent-unusefull-woke ... jusqu'à la moelle 😂😂😂

But to be honest here, english is not the easiest language to learn, not with all the new slang arriving pretty much every month

2:22 Personally I'd write it like this if Mariah Carey were my mom: "We invited my mom Mariah Carey, and a Stripper." 6:58 I guess yeah... Writing "My mom, Mariah Carey and a Stripper" feels weird because the vibe I'm getting is: - My mom - Mariah Carey and a Stripper With the comma, the vibe is: - My mom - Mariah Carey - A Stripper So, while I guess yeah, it's mostly for vibes, but it's a pretty important vibe to me personally... Because the first one feels like 2 items, and the 2nd one feels like 3 items... Btw here in Indonesia we do use this kind of comma, Idk if it's a standard, but I remember learning this in school...

3:26 And it's even more difficult for native Indonesian which has no tenses...

hi :D UwU

On the one hand, you are entirely right. All languages have their own complexities and learning from the ground up, they aren’t any more or less difficult. But when English speakers say “the most difficult language” the context almost exclusively means “most difficult language to learn starting from English.” Because that’s what the person speaks. Not “Universally the most difficult language to learn.” And I know you addressed right at the start that you’re not talking about those instances, you’re instead talking about learning from childhood. That’s fine, it just doesn’t disprove the claim that there is a “most difficult language” since most of those claims are made with that context of being difficult to learn as an English speaker. (Or, for a person talking about whatever language is most difficult to learn for their own, making that claim in the context of whichever language they know.)

I clearly don't agree with this video since there are languages that are really harder to learn. It depends on when it is standardized and which processes the language have gone under. For example, If native speakers came across with the native speakers of another language by, let's say, invasion or colonization, they tend to simplify as irregularities of one language do not comply with other languages. We see this process in loss of grammatical gender in english. After they are invaded by nordic people which also had grammatical genders, they didn't comply and English had to drop grammatical genders. Also as language have more speakers that are around the world, they tend to get simpler because people from various accent need to understand each other and irregularities or rules that don't follow a strict pattern make communication harder. Thus people tend to drop or use simpler alternatives instead of hard grammatical concepts. for example, the word "spell", at first it was irregular and pronounced as "spelt", however, people from various accents and countries just simple forget the rule and say "spelled" which makes sense at some points. Thus the word got regularized. or when a language again is used across a bigger population, even some sounds get lost due to difficulty of pronounciation or slight differences. British Empire had encountered with many languages and English got influenced a lot during the processes. To ease communication, it got simpler by time and later on it is standardized. If it wasn't, we would drop even more irregularities such as "waiter-waitress". the word "waitress" would be lost totally due to unnecessary gender reference. actually it did at some point, we can simple say "waiter" for both now.

3:09 😂😂🤣

We, as English speakers, need to stop downplaying how ridiculously hard English is

The amount of videos being like 🤓uh actually those languages are only complex from the perspective of an English speaker. Such a cliche that I’ve heard a thousand times

Now that is true. In my humble opinion the almost mathematical maximalism you have about the idea that landuages' complexity in comparison is absolutely equal if we find a way to compare them objectively might be slightly farfetched, but the fact that the difference in their complexity is surely miniscule is absolutely grounded. If we go with peer to peer comparison as you did with English - Mandarin, I am more than sure, that there are languages' pairs that are unequaly hard for native speakers of A to learn B compared to leanring A to B speakers. But what you are 100% correct with is that there is this general drive for languages to be just-about-enough-complicated, they just took different "shapes" in doing so. I tend to believe that English for me was not especially hard to learn as a Russian native speaker, however indeed the tenses took me years to master to some decent level, and what was probably just as hard to wrap my head around - oh, it's those goddamn articles!!! I still make mistakes sometimes...

The last part is so true, a lot of memes from the hispanic community are brought directly from the english community, yet it is extremely rare to see a meme originated from either brazil or Portugal despite both being big countries with a very similar language to Spanish

English pronunciation is very truly odd. We only thin it's simple and makes sense because we hear it all the time.

Another piece of evidence is that languages tend to have the same bitrate, i.e. the same speed of information being conveyed. Chinese is one of the most information-dense languages, and Japanese is one of the least information-dense languages, but Chinese is also spoken slower on average and Japanese is spoken faster on average so that it normalizes in the end.

georgian:

Great video!

9:37 There is also the thing about English that also helps you to come over through first steps of learning. I live in Russia and i honestly can't even remember when I just knew the basic English grammar rules (is, do, are, am verbs, -ing and such). It's one of those knowledges that you feel that is known by you from the very birth (which is obviously not true), and i love modern internet culture for that

yuval forever

Puente de Portugalete, tu eres el más elegante.

Language does change the way we think tho

As a native hungarian speaker, gramatical gender is so difficult for me when it comes to learning languages. I managed to learn english pretty easily, but i have been struggling with german for 8+ years since in primary school the teachers couldn't teach it to us properly...

this video misses the point. when people say “hardest/most difficult language to learn” they mean as adults learning a second, third, or fourth language.

Actually, You talk about is the Morden Life Vulgar Language. What about the "Ancient Chinese" or Latin.

Blud litterally forgot danish

I never care about 'difficulty'. I just learn because I want to know more about a culture. All is possible.

i learn jp in uni in my country (vietnam). and guess what? only the beginner textbooks has vietnamese translation. as i go higher and higher into jp, the textbook no longer has vietnamese trnalsation. only english translation. i have spent a significant amount of time on the internet since 6th grade. also studied in private school. private schools in vietnam often place very very very heavy emphasis on teaching english. so i got used to english eventually and english become my second mother tongue. i major in cs so english is so important. yeah, my life got a lot easier compared to my peer on that part, but i still struggle cuz i was not trained to be a study machine like them back in k-12 days.

tell me why this is the same yuval guy from tiktok

I also observed something regarding the easiest language. It is harder for Americans to learn another language than for other people. Why? Because if every world is in English, why should I bother try learning another language? So when they take it seriously, other people already have that skill at some level. However, when you start learning the second or third foreign language, its much easier than the first language.

This is a very politically correct assertion, which should immediately make us suspicious. Also, the best way to know that it's true is after you have learned all of earth's languages -- at that point, you can say that they are equally hard. Otherwise, it's a guess. They are all exactly as hard as each other? None is more difficult than any other? Mostly you discuss English, Chinese, and Spanish. Compare those to languages like Tsez, !Xoo, Navajo, or Ket. Linguist John C McWhorter will tell you (does tell us) that Chinese and English are significantly easier than those latter languages. Massively easier. The man has spent a lifetime studying the topic. Children who learn Ojibwe as a mother tongue need until age 12 to become fluent. English speaking kids need about half of that. These things are not all equal. Take a look at Indonesian, while you are at it, it's much easier to learn than most other languages (factoring out languages like your mother tongue).

People get difference confused with difficulty. Just because a language is vastly different to yours doesn't mean it is inherently any more difficult. It will be harder for you to learn personally, yes, but that does not mean the language as a whole is more difficult.

I'm so glad you hit on the English speakers assuming "grammatical gender? automatically harder" because in their worldview, it does not contain useful information. In reality, babies who learn Czech or Spanish or German don't take a longer time to acquire those languages on account of that grammatical gender. English speakers especially think you can objectively list out the features of a language and rank them based on difficulty for those features. "Grammatical gender, noun declensions, AND 6 points of view per verb conjugation? Wow this is objectively harder than English." Is ambiguity not also a feature that makes communication harder?

English and Japanese are media wise the most pervasive. That is why alot of people find it easier to learn.

In Russian you're actually need to use a comma before "и" ("and"), but only if "and" is used repeatedly (*yes, this is used frequently) (In English it would look something like "If and a, and b, and c, then..." or "Containing and a, and b, and c." (I know these aren't valid in English, but such constructions are valid for Russian; also first "and" might not always be necessary which would make it look more like an Oxford comma, but I'm not sure about the rules (it's definitely used in speech, but I couldn't promptly find a rule about it))). Technically not an Oxford comma (and it's not optional when it seems like one), but figured I'd point that out. Can't say for certain about other languages.

As a person who learned English and Russian in my childhood (though I don't necessarily remember much of it and even as an adult I'm pretty bad at both lol) I would probably agree. As a child you don't have any foundation to go off and so no matter the language it should be equally simple to learn it. Though I wouldn't say that only natural languages can classify as a mother tongue. You can just as well teach your child Toki Pona (or Esperanto, or any other conlang (just don't pick Ithkuil)) before or at the same time as natural language(s) (by the way, it's an interesting topic in and of itself - do bi-, tri-, polylingual babies learn languages faster, slower or at the same pace? does the number of languages you're exposed to as a child affect your proficiency in them?). And I believe that conlangs can be (and some objectively are) easier or harder to master than natural languages. After all they are constructed to be (in)effective. I personally haven't heard of such precedents, but given how big our world is, it probably already happened and there are definitely some Esperanto and Toki Pona native speakers. But as far as the points in the video go I completely agree. For a child learning a natural language it shouldn't matter which language to learn, all the perceived difficulty by adults comes from their familiarity with other languages and similarities (or lack thereof) between the language a person aspires to learn and the languages they already know.

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 🇸🇮❤🇮🇩