There is No Such Thing as the "Hardest Language"

It's a lot more straightforward than you think, which is to say, not straightforward at all.
If anything is off please let me know so I can make corrections.
Timestamps
0:00 - intro
1:12 - why people think languages are complicated
2:38 - english complexities you haven't noticed
4:53 - no, chinese is not the hardest language
6:37 - children & fluency
7:45 - naturally occurring complexities
9:18 - the easiest language?
11:59 - ending thoughts
Featured Tiktoks
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Twitch: / yuvaltheterrible
Twitter: / yuvaldoubtsit

[@jillevi2376]

It's pretty weird that even if you don't "know" almost any grammar rules of your native language, you can still speak it perfectly without thinking about it

[@remy2718]

What's even funnier is the fact that learning the rules doesn't really make it any easier. In my native language, we don't use a lot of tenses, so learning to correctly apply simple past, present perfect, present perfect progressive etc was quite the struggle in school. I've since acquired English through lots of exposure to media/in online spaces, so it doesn't really feel any different from my native language. I don't have to think about the rules anymore - but ask me to fill in the blanks and - expecting some kind of trap - I'll end up overthinking the rules and go for the wrong tense instead of whatever "feels right"

[@Rangsk]

That comes down to the fact that grammar "rules" are simply descriptions of what native speakers do. It's not the other way around and never has been. This is why the "rules" are often broken - we are trying to fit generalizations to reality, and that never works 100% of the time.

[@spicyshizz2850]

I doubt “perfectly” if tested on that front. It’s simply because you probably use the same sort of phrases. Cmon ppl can and sometimes do make grammatical errors

[@MsZsc]

@@Rangskalso the numerous exceptions for english just in general

[@ZilingShen]

agree. i study the grammar of one of my native languages, and started to correct my family members in a group chat when they make a mistake. now i got kicked out.

[@moonlighthalf7378]

As a Chinese person, I totally agree with your opinion. Learning English is one thing so hard for us that we learn from primary school to university. When people complain about how difficult Chinese characters are, they never realize the convenience they bring: 1. No tenses. Ancient Chinese(really, really ancient) did have tenses. However, after Chinese people started recording texts in Chinese characters, the tense system quickly vanished, since the prefixes and suffixes can not be seen in independent characters. 2. Eazy words. A common misunderstanding is to compare 26 letters to thousands of characters. However, Chinese characters are morphemes, and because of the way the Chinese words are constructed, you only need to use these to comprehend words.

[@ANCalias]

I'm not english native speaker but I wonder what % of people in China can have a regular / daily conversation in english In my country we study english for 10 years but only a small part can actually speak english to a B1 level aproximalty 25% (high estimation) / 10 (low estimation) of ours people can speak decent english as an adult If you can, try to guess what is my country☺

[@sparksbet]

I studied Chinese in university and can confirm that it absolutely is harder as an English speaker than something like Spanish or German -- but it's not nearly as hard as many English speakers pretend it is. Nor is it as easy as some others claim! It's just complex in different ways that we're new to.

[@marsimplodation]

currently learning japanese, so lots of kanji and yea they are not as compley as they seem to be. I quite like that some basically tell you a story to get to the meaning. 今 is now 月 is moon so this month is the now phase of the moon 今月 I like that, mnemonics really help to learn the characters

[@artugert]

@@sparksbetHow can you confirm that it’s easier for Spanish and German speakers? Did you survey thousands of speakers of each language who learned Mandarin about how much difficulty they had in doing so?

[@artugert]

I had never heard before that Ancient Chinese had verb tenses. Can you recommend where I can learn more about this?

[@KaKarol]

I fully agree with the last part of the video. Living in the EU, i know so many people, who are fluent in english, just because theyve spent a lot of time on the internet growing up (including myself) It comes naturally

[@taikurinhattu193]

Well, as another EU citizen, i don't think it's "natural" per se. I think it's at most the kind of naturalness as working. Like yeah, we do it, but i'd argue it's because of the lack of options more than anything else, even though some would be doing it even with options. I think this can be verified by looking at the amount of fluent English speakers across countries in Europe. There is quite a correlation with the weakness of one's language and the level of english, as in, - Spanish has a low English level (not a bad thing tho imo), also has the world's second strongest language after Chinese and easily the strongest in the eu - France, a little bit higher level than Spain, also has a stron language when considering the whole world (321 million, and growing rapidly in africa) - Germany, quite a high english level, a strong language in the Eu, but not that strong on the mondial level - little countries (e.g. nordic countries), weak languages, high english This is also why i guess you come from a country with a small language, maybe medium, but probably not something like France or Spain, who have very strong languages.

[@hayabusa1329]

Native English speakers never have to learn another language because everyone else learns English 😂

[@KaKarol]

@@taikurinhattu193 Not what i meant. I live in Germany. The english level here is is quite good, but of course not fluent level. What i meant is that i know many people, that have achieved fluency through stuff like the internet. Theyre above average. I agree with your point though, makes sense.

[@sammakesmusic1]

@@hayabusa1329 Not true. I've lived in several European countries (Netherlands, Germany, France) as a native English speaker and while a lot of people in these countries can speak some English, it's not nearly to a level of fluency that is effective for communication. I also think it's rude to go to another country and expect them to speak your language as if you're not in their country.

[@aceproductions5734]

@@hayabusa1329 Try going to Japan or China. Not everyone speaks English because not everyone has to. In places like Japan and China, their own languages are also extremely prevalent on the internet meaning it is not a necessity to learn English. China has their own google (Baidu), their own youtube (bilibili video), their own shopping sites, their own instagram, and tiktok originates from there. Sure Chinese movies may not be as popular as western, but all their other media is in their native tongue making learning English a non-necessity unless they go abroad. In Japan, it's a little different, but their own media (think Anime, Japanese dramas, Japanese films, Music) are the most popular there, almost all major websites have Japanese translations, and Japanese youtubers and youtube videos are also extremely common. So, while in Europe most Europeans may learn English due to its online and media prevalence, in Asia a lot of countries own languages are also extremely prevalent online and in media as well so English is not that much of a necessity.

[@idraote]

English is so pervasive that I'm actually using it as intermediary to learn other languages (Japanese).

[@clinton4161]

You can then use Japanese to learn Korean. They have a lot in common.

[@dekim_37]

Same, I'm using it to learn both Russian and Hindi!

[@deadbynight4]

I'm also using English to learn Japanese simply because there are more learning material. Plus a lot of native Japanese teacher learn English to teach. Or maybe I just grew accustomed to the convenience of English that it became a habit to look for things in it.

[@carolinanohemi]

I'm using english to learn german 😢

[@EvGamerBETA]

What a coinkidink. I do to

[@gaoda1581]

I had a similar epiphany when I reached basic fluency in Greek and Mandarin. Every perceived “difficulty” was more so a trade off. The words I learned in Mandarin seemed drastically shorter, making the Greek equivalents feel clunky. However, I encountered very few homophones in Greek, while I was almost drowning in them with Mandarin. I realized that precision and convenience would balance out naturally. If a language appears straightforward, with no modifications like articles or verb conjugations, that’s because the speakers are abiding by a firm syntax or inferring/frequently relying on context clues.

[@ok-sj7bx]

I agree with you that languages usually balance out in difficulty, after all they strive for the same result. However since I started coding I believe that there exists objectively better way to tell the same thing. It is hard to see in practise however, since how invidual's brain works and the languages they know affect it more.

[@thisismycoolnickname]

Longer words are easier to learn than shorter words. In Mandarin, since the number of syllables is very limited and nearly all words are one or two syllables long, that makes all words sound virtually the same which makes memorization much harder. I find Greek words extremely easy to remember because every word is not like the other.

[@niwa_s]

@@thisismycoolnickname This is extremely obvious in Japanese with its mix of original Japanese and Chinese-loaned words. 和語/大和言葉 are so much easier to remember.

[@thisismycoolnickname]

@@niwa_s Can't agree more, especially because the tones are gone and many syllables have merged into one. Just imagine how many characters are pronounced こう, for example.

[@Liggliluff]

This is what I've noticed with inflections too. A language with a larger number of infections of words (multiple cases, genders, tenses, mood, ...) seen to have much more straightforward systems. Such as how Hungarian has much more inflections, but all plurals ends with -k without exception, while English has very little inflections but plurals can be very varied (books, men, children, deer). It just seems to balance out.

[@vladimirbmp]

You talked about TikTok becoming unprofitable and that being the reason you're gonna try to focus on KZbin, and really I hope this type of content pays off big time because you're killing it Yuval, and I'm loving this! Such a good video essay. Good luck, keep it up!🥳

[@AirQuotes]

KZbin has it's problems too but I think they're a little better

[@Justinbyleth]

New Yuval dropped everyone tap in

[@flaskofbloodbornetears]

This does not mean you should “Tap out” which is to surrender Or “Tap that” which is to have intercourse Or “Tap quick” which is to tap an object in quick succession

[@GoofyAhhBoxy]

@@flaskofbloodbornetearsEnglish moment

[@gracehughes8776]

You’re the only person i’m willing to not skip ads for

[@rankedaura]

the glazing is crazy

[@Num3whoknocks]

Great job, you made him an extra 1/10th of a cent

[@thelibyanplzcomeback]

Does skipping the ad make the ad not count?

[@lifeboat6284]

​@@thelibyanplzcomeback yes

[@lifeboat6284]

​@@thelibyanplzcomebackyes

[@stummyhort]

I really love the sentiment you ended this video with. I think a lot of Americans feel "doomed" to being monolingual forever because they didn't grow up with a second language. But if you can do it once, you CAN do it again! Being a native English speaker definitely has its own challenges... when you're already fluent in the lingua franca, why bother? Hopefully second language learning will continue to rise in popularity here in the US. Fantastic video, Yuval. I'm very glad you've come over to KZbin :)

[@hayabusa1329]

I wonder how Native English speakers feel about their language being learned by everyone and it being the lingua franca

[@Nyver253]

@@hayabusa1329 I personally don't care about other people learning English as a second or third language and I imagine most feel the same way. However, I have noticed and have talked with others about this toxic mentality from non native English speakers who try to harass native English speakers, usually Americans, when they don't bother to learn another language for whatever reason they may have. I don't mean you or OP, it is just a thing I see from people who say that English is not their native tongue and then try to attack others for not learning a language they have no reason to learn. I don't get why people get like that, my guess is it is a complex around hating that they "have" to learn English to communicate and not just use their own language, but I do know that it that really pisses people off. A lot of people, especially in super small towns, have never interacted with another person who speaks another language for long enough for them to justify learning it, and like you said, it being the lingua franca of the world means we get almost all things in English at release and most people just know English anyways.

[@hayabusa1329]

@@Nyver253 it's not native English speakers fault, it's the lingua franca. People should just learn it as a language for communication with others

[@Thelaretus]

Toki Pona is not simple. It's minimalistic: that is, it comes from an ideology which considers minimising a certain variable to way to complexity. However, the limitations of the language are clear to anyone who actually tries to use it for any real context -- then you come to realise how very complicated it is.

[@haydenconstantine310]

Watching the ads in full, not skipping them

[@aspoon4801]

Glazing ☝️

[@YT.jer0me]

Same(they are unskippables)

[@ivanharo950]

@@aspoon4801how is it glazing he is just helping out yuval cause he’s a good creator💀

[@user-jh8dk2ml3y]

@@ivanharo950 What's glazing mean?

[@papyrus_12]

@@user-jh8dk2ml3yUnnecessarily praising someone basically

[@azarias5666]

I've just had this morning a discussion with my English teacher (who lives, like me, in Switzerland, so speak French) and she said to me that "Spanish is so logical compared to German" but that's just because she mastered gender and conjugation thanks to French and many sentence structures are similar but she has no knowledge on how a case work so she finds it illogical, I told her that for me, that spent years learning German, this case system became logical by exposure to it and other case language (Latin) and thinking about it !!

[@ipiutiminelle739]

Yes ! That's why I had less of a hard time learning Russian because I had started to learn German and Latin few years before, it really becomes easier when you're immerged for a long time

[@matt92hun]

I think it's the "genders" that make German cases seem difficult, because some of the words look the same in different cases and not remembering the right "gender" makes you not remember the right case. For example Finnish have way more cases than German, but you only need the rules for those cases and you can apply them to any word intuitively without having to know more about the word than the word itself. Like, knowing the word "Haus" in itself is not enough, but knowing the word "talo" is enough to apply any case to it.

[@Fytrzaczek21]

Personally, idk. I'm native Polish, learned English and a bit German in childhood. I like German, but for me Spanish also makes much more sense and is easier. No declination (that is imo inconsistent in Ge), noun gender can be often guessed, there are less irregularities in conjugation and even for them there are sensible rules.

[@matt92hun]

@@Fytrzaczek21 I agree. In Spanish you don’t even have to learn the genders for all words, you just have to learn the exceptions that break the patterns. In German there’s no rhyme or reason why you use one gender over another, the pattern has been lost millennia ago and it’s a silly idea to study Proto-Germanic just to learn modern German.

[@azarias5666]

@@matt92hun there's some pattern and for example I can now easily guess the gender (and plural) of most nouns just by knowing a large vocabulary (which might not be ideal for casual learners but it works. Pattern be like : -ung, -tion, -schaft, -heit, -keit, -in, -e are feminine and take (e)n as a plural -er, -el (usually), short words with one vowel are masculine (or neuter rarely) and the first two case add nothing to plural and the short word take an e (and umlaut sometimes -en is often neuter

[@okthanks]

«Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides).»

[@mihan5660]

Yeah, this video's viewpoint is more a useful fiction for linguists: that languages magically compensate to equalize out difficuties. Which demonstratedly doesn't happen: when swedish and dutch lost most of their cases and became much less complicated in that regard than old norse and old (and current) german, nothing then spontaneusly appeared in another aspect of the languages to balance that out.

[@bofbob1]

@@mihan5660 You picked an area where there happens to be a very clear trade-off. Languages that lost their case markers made up for it by developing more rigid word order patterns. The complexity just shifted from morphology to syntax. Even hardcore proponents of differential complexity don't deny that one...

[@mihan5660]

@@bofbob1 yes, like afrikaans has stompi, which takes far less time to learn than cases. This is why trade languages and pidgens, including russian pidgens, will typically not have cases (and will be analytical), even if the speakers' native languages all have a case system. Cases as present in world languages take more time to learn as they involve multiple individual changes instead of a broad rule that can be applied. The book Through the Language Glass goes into how these utilitarian, non-native languages tend to many similiar gramatical features, no matter what the speakers' native languages are

[@bofbob1]

​@@mihan5660 That's a good book. FWIW, Guy Deutscher thinks that trying to measure overall linguistic complexity is a "wild goose chase" (his words). I'm inclined to agree. Which means that to me all discourse on overall complexity, whether equal complexity or differential, is misguided. The work that sociolinguists do on esoteric vs exoteric communication and whatnot can be done just as well without having to assume differential global complexity. Measuring overall difficulty might be a little bit easier, but even there it might end up being impossible even just on theoretical grounds alone. Besides, there isn't a 1-to-1 relationship between difficulty and complexity. E.g. you can have complex gender systems that are acquired very quickly and simple ones that aren't. Things like frequency, saliency and monofunctionality tend to be better predictors of speed of acquisition than complexity is. Which is how you end up with Bantu kids mastering 8 "genders" (in Bantuist research they usually refer to noun classes, but I guess it's pretty much the same thing) years before English children stop making mistakes when trying to get a pronoun to agree with words like "daughter". Like, in English you have just 3 genders and they only apply in the very narrow setting of pronouns. That makes it a lot less complex than in Bantu languages, but it also makes it a lot less frequent and salient, hence it takes longer to acquire. Or at least that's the usual interpretation of that kind of data. So yeah, it's complicated. Re: the OP's post, I'd just mention that Bleses's paper on this also found that British children are as slow as Danish children on vocab growth. AFAIK they haven't done the necessary follow-up research to explain why British children would be slower than American children. I don't think there's any strong argument there to say that the sound profile of British English is more opaque than American English in the same way that Danish is more opaque than Swedish (she attempts to make that argument in her paper, unconvincingly IMHO). It's not that her hypothesis is bad or anything, but it's one hell of a clusterfuck to control for all the other variables that might come into play.

[@mihan5660]

@@bofbob1 good points. And I take this video as focusing on difficulty; complexity I think is beyond us unless ai figures it out, and that's definately something that it seems most academic linguists have no interest in. Similarly, comparing language difficulty has little research, instead they give a just so story of how they magically even each other out like in this video. In fact, n the real world, apprently obvious trade-offs oftrn dont work that way. For example Russian is very inflected and you can make grammatically correct sentences with many word orders. But in practice, Russians have a understood neutral word orders and if they want to emphasize something, they put that at the front or the sentence. If you listen to michel thomas russian, a lot the teachers corrections is to fix the students' word order as they emphasize the wrong part of the sentence in the contexts of their prompt. Or she makes up possible contexts where their word order might make sense. In fact, way more than Michel Thomas dutch, despite dutch's less free word order and faster pace of the lessons

[@thequeertelope7941]

i have one nitpick. you count english aspectual differences as their own tenses. but then you say russian has only one of each tense, despite the fact that it also has aspectual differences, just like english. these are just encoded on the verb rather than through auxiliaries. so make up your mind whether or not you want to equate aspect to tense

[@jan_Masewin]

From another angle, all languages communicate complex things, so all languages must be complex in some way, even if it might not be immediately obvious to you. As for toki pona, if any conlang was used as frequently and diversely as natural language it will increase in complexity until it hits the same equilibrium. We see this play out in the real world when pidgin languages develop into creole ones. On top of that, people also like to cite English as 'having the most words.' What this leaves out is that not all languages are used all of in the home, at work, in education and for formal occasions. Many, many, many people live in a multilingual environment where different languages are used for different roles, and so they don't all have the same vocabulary

[@DanTheCaptain]

Every language is hard. Learning a language is not an easy feat. You’re retraining your brain to learn a whole new set of rules and sounds and a whole new way of thinking. You’re literally reprogramming your brain. There ain’t no 5 minute videos that’ll teach you that. You gotta put in the hours. It’ll make you mad, it’ll make you cry, your head will probably hurt from thinking, but it’s on of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.

[@mapl3mage]

not to mention the many hundreds of vocabulary you just have to memorize and know how and when to use.

[@mrleaf6055]

According to this video's transcript, these are the top 10 most-used words in this video: 1. "to": 102 times 2. "the": 89 times 3. "that": 77 times 4. "you": 67 times 5. "is": 61 times 6. "of": 56 times 7. "a": 55 times 8. "language": 50 times 9. "it": 47 times 10. "English": 47 times

[@squammy3536]

LETS GOOO YUVAL PLEASE I NEED TO KEEP WATCHING YOU AFTER THE TIKTOK BAN TAKES EFFECT, KZbin IS PERFECT

[@brendanmurray1213]

What do you mean Spanish has 6,000 tenses?!

[@Adam-Alkhalil]

Love this! Good luck Yuval! Can’t wait to see more 😊

[@Vaporwavee.]

Yuval is the only person who can get me interested in this type of stuff

[@nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh777]

Amazing, simply amazing Yuval, you've done a terrific job explaining everything that I have ever wanted to express to people why all languages are equal difficulty but english being much easier for people just for the fact it's everywhere

[@GlitchSquix]

LETS GO YUVAL UPLOAD

[@geffbob8960]

Hello Yuval! "Tonal language" is correct, alternatively you could have said tone language, pitch language, pitch-accent language or even marked language (seldom used). Great video!

[@laurenb8001]

Super gr8 vid my dude, loving the long-form content

[@famouscurls5323]

great job keeping up the content grind mate we love supporting ur passions

[@ondrejvasak1054]

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.

[@shanewhelan1633]

Lets go Yuval 🎉 hope you make more of these❤

[@MTRG15]

Might I ask where do claim Spanish having 6000 tenses from? The list you show during 1:34 is a list of conjugations with different verbs, it's like saying that "is walking" is an individual tense separated from the present progressive. Spanish has 17 tenses, from which regional spakers usually use 14 or 15

[@NurtChurt]

lovin the long form stuff, really good video

[@faith_updated7255]

please post often I will literally watch these types of videos for hours 🙏🙏

[@Bayyyro]

2:06 Monolingual beta*

[@wintrywind]

Hi fellow hyperpolyglot gigachad alpha male who's very attractive to every woman and man on the planet watcher

[@anomalo.]

yuval upload my day is better now

[@JohnnyKarpy]

So amazing! Loved the video it was so interesting great work!

[@skatehair5876]

Great video love when you upload!!

[@reachplayer5201]

Love the long form content man!

[@YeeeeGreg]

Very cool video and very well made. I really like the way you articulated all of this

[@davidsalterego4481]

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’.

[@SJrad]

And they are including the written form of the language. It is primarily why Japanese is considered so hard. It’s not just that it’s very different than English, but that theres 3 alphabets, with kanji containing thousands of different logographs.

[@davidsalterego4481]

@@SJrad Great point

[@mihan5660]

@@SJrad same with mandarin, its easy if you just want to be illiterate. You just have to deal with tones, a new vocab and what would otherwise be homophones without tones. It's analytic like english, the basic word order is the same, no cases, gender, etc. But the writing is complicated enough the vast majority of the chinese population itself was illiterate prior to its simplification!

[@Archchill]

i agree and think this entire video misses the point.

[@mihan5660]

@@Archchill yeah, kids grow up trilingual if their situation demands it where they grow up; they are very overqualified for learning any one particular language on its own, as Guy Deutscher points out

[@jenarabastos4249]

As a brazilian portuguese speaker, i'm learning english because i want to learn better other languages and started with english(USA). A point/tip i want to share... what I have understood so far is that one word is equivalent to another in another language. and I'm not saying it's "the same" because if it were the same it would be the same language, each language has a history of development so keeping that in mind helped me a lot. 😂😂😂OMG! when the " have, had, has appeared" it was really difficult to me learn it(and i still make mistakes sometimes).

[@PulseFIare]

yippeeeeee Yuval upload

[@northstarradio]

Glad to see your move to KZbin. Big fan of your tiktoks, but something about video essays really works for your commentary.

[@bo-williamgilligan1456]

Great to have you back on youtube Yuval!

[@OperatorNoah]

Very well done video! Would love to see more long form content.

[@wintrywind]

YUVAL! oh my god I've stopped watching tiktok and you're one of the content creator that i miss, though thank god KZbin recommendations gave me your content again it's a blessing.

[@godominus9222]

I mean, some languages CAN be inherently more difficult to learn. Some languages have less things to learn, regardless of the "grammar" which is not actually the most difficult part of mastering any language.

[@user-bp3lp6nv4u]

Tell me your first language and an example of these 'more difficult' languages

[@godominus9222]

@@user-bp3lp6nv4u That is not relevant. The point is, having to learn a unique grammar exception to every other word, or an immense vocabulary, many grammar rules, regardless of whether your language has SIMILAR grammar rules, means MORE time to learn. That is the inherent measure of difficulty.

[@acksawblack]

@@user-bp3lp6nv4uA language of 5k words is inherently easier to master than a language of 200k words. Just physically in terms of brain capacity.

[@ira1420]

​@@godominus9222 I could argue that a language with less rules also will feel more ambiguous to a learner, compensating the lack of difficulty from a lack of a great amount of rules

[@amratoski2780]

Thats not true​@@ira1420. A spanish speaker here. Never got confused because there are no genders or something similar, nothing even close to that. There a 2 big things that made me lose hair in the process of learning english: 1. Pronunciation: bro yall just wrong. You cannot say the exact same letter in 25 different ways, like what? 2. Irregular verbs: basically nothing follow any patter. Grammar rules shouldnt exist in english because theres exception of the exception of the exception of the exception... But in general, i would that english is among the most spoken languages, the easiest one.

[@azoo6269]

nice to not see your thoughts limited by the short-form format. keep it up!

[@uamsnof]

Great video! There are many people out there who need to see this. This is the kind of thing people don’t know unless they’ve sat down to do a little more in-depth research. Before that, it’s all gut feeling and (false) intuition

[@acksawblack]

This video is gut feeling and intuition, provides zero evidence or an actual logical for why this would be true. A language of infinite size would of course be more difficult. He makes so many reductions on his dentition it becomes meaningless.

[@uamsnof]

@@acksawblack not sure what your sources are but any statement based on things like number of dictionary entries or number of grammatical tables will also be false. Just because a language has many words doesn’t mean people use more words. There is complexity in things, that cannot be accurately quantified, like the use of idioms, social registers, nuanced differences in usages of the same Lexeme…

[@GopherpilledTunneler]

@@acksawblack Zipf's Law proves every language is roughly equal in terms of the vocabulary you need to learn to become fluent. Even if a language with an infinite dictionary existed, the native speakers of that language would use the same level of vocabulary as any other speaker of any other language.

[@mihan5660]

The little research that has been done has found major differences in learning speeds of the average native speaker of their native languages, even in closely related languages like norwegian and danish. E.g., Bleses found it takes danish speakers 2 years longer to learn the past tense than norwegian speakers. But it is pc in the linguistic sphere to say all languages are equally difficult for native speakers, and generally they don't like to encourage research that potentially challenges this.

[@bofbob1]

​@@acksawblack What he says around 8:00 is the underlying argument. Usually that dual constraint is expressed in terms of social vs cognitive. Social forces push linguistic complexity upwards. Cognitive constraints set a limit to how high it can go (hence a "language of infinite size" is impossible, at least for us humans). Those constraints of course aren't about how much language you can "store" in your brain. Otherwise there would be no bilinguals... It's about the perceptual bottleneck and how much information the auditory tract can process at any given moment. The upper limit is relatively easy to support because of that perceptual bottleneck. The lower limit is harder to support. There are some well-attested trade-offs that provide some support for the idea. E.g. case marking vs rigid word order (languages that lose their case markers make up for it by developing complex word order rules), syllabic structure complexity vs tonal complexity (if you have complex consonant structures, you probably don't have tones, and vice-versa), and syllabic rate vs information density (if the language is spoken faster, each individual syllable will contain less information than individual syllables in a language that is spoken more slowly), etc. But ultimately proponents of both equal and differential complexity run into a wall because none of them are capable of saying how we could possibly measure global linguistic complexity. Neither side has a full-proof evidentiary argument to knock out the other. Ultimately they just fall back on arguing that their position should be the null hypothesis, and they do that by invoking theoretical priors that the other side doesn't agree with... It's basically sociolinguists (in favor of differential complexity) vs functionalists and generativists (in favor of equal complexity). So yeah, it's not going to be settled any time soon! ^^

[@Ayla_Furtado]

thanks for this video, it´s really motivating for language learners, even if it was not meant to be

[@Fan_of_Ado]

I am bilingual in both English and Chinese and understand a few dialects (hokkien, cantonese). While spoken Chinese is certainly around the same difficulty as English, the writing system is certainly more difficult. The reason is that there is no connection between the characters and sound they make. This means that given a completely new character, you can only guess how it is said and might be completely off. This is quite different where in English, what you see is what you say. That said, given sufficient knowledge in Chinese, you can get pretty accurate with your guesses but that takes longer than learning something like an alphabet.

[@ItsAllEnzynes]

Not my words, words of natively bilingual friends: - mandarin is way harder than English because of tonality - written Chinese is way harder than written English because written Chinese isn’t phonetic - Chinese grammar and vocabulary are way easier than English

[@Fan_of_Ado]

@@ItsAllEnzynes Disagree with the first point. For a English speaker, tonality might be hard, but as a Chinese speaker, tonality actually makes life much easier since it's all very explicit. Learning the tonality means you know exactly how to say the word compared to say English where different people might pronounce words differently. That said, tonality goes out the window in Malaysia/Singapore and we have our own way of speaking that differs between families (which is often considered wrong)

[@takuroczykotek]

Wow this is really informative thanks

[@Abhi-wl5yt]

I also feel like age, and how assimilated you are into the culture/language makes a lot of difference on how fast you can learn, or how easy it will be to learn. I learned English as a third language, but from a very young age. So, although it is completely different from the first two languages I learnt, it was easier to pick up as I not only learnt the language at school, but I could immerse myself into the language with media when I got home. Now, I am trying to learn German as an adult, and it is proving to be quite a struggle (even living in Germany), and that is because my approach to the language is inherently different now, compared to how I learnt any other language as a kid.

[@injeraenjoyer4570]

YUVAL!!! love you on tiktok man!! Can't wait to see more

[@krakencore6491]

Great video Yuval. You should make more longform content

[@victoriawhite9421]

Here from TikTok for long-form Yuval thoughts. Subscribed. Wishing you the best!

[@DeggaTheDev]

So happy to see you over here. *Turns add block off*

[@MD-bs5oc]

I agree that the difficulty of a language mostly depends on whether you know related languages or languages with similar concepts. However, I'd say that things like noun genders, cases, verb conjugations/tenses, tones etc. do make a language more difficult compared to others that do not have these features. German and Dutch for example are very similar languages, yet Dutch has simplified a lot in modern times. --German has three genders, Dutch has only two. --German has four cases, while Dutch has only one (nominative, like English). --German has more tenses, as well as more variance in conjugations per tense. --Dutch spelling is more phonetic/consistent than German spelling, it also has fewer symbols In my opinion these aspects make Dutch fundamentally easier than German, no matter what your background is. While both German and Dutch people can pick up the other language relatively quickly, I've noticed German people have an easier time learning Dutch than the other way around. I've spoken with people who have learned both (or have tried to), and all of them told me they found Dutch much easier (mostly because of the above points). If there are two languages that are exactly same, except language A has an irregular verb while language B has not, doesn't that automatically make language A slightly more difficult? Learning Russian cases is easier if you already speak another Slavic language with cases. But would any Slavic person find a language like English more difficult because of its lack of cases? No, they'll find it difficult because of all the other aspects like articles, spelling and phrasal verbs, but not because it doesn't have the case system that they're familiar with! Would a Spanish person find Chinese difficult because it doesn't have verb conjugations? Nope, they'll find the writing system and tones very difficult, but the fact that verb conjugations are nonexistant poses no obstacle for them in the slightest. Finally, I'm not sure why you dismiss artificial languages so easily. They function like any other language as a tool for communication. Esperanto was specifically made to be easy to learn for a large amount of people. It has few tenses, no conjugations, 100% consistent spelling and phonetics etc. As a result, it is quite easy to learn for people of any background. If some languages are universally easier than others, then surely there must be universally more difficult ones as well?

[@niwa_s]

In what sense is German spelling less phonetic or consistent?

[@loremarker6255]

He made a weird, but somewhat true argument in that all languages are learned in around the same time by infants as they develop their mother tongue. This argument does not apply to adults.

[@oriyadid]

Fascinating video! Great as always. I subscribed to you after watching the grammatical gender video when it came out, and then forgot about your channel. I recently followed you on Instagram for your linguistics content there and only when I got this notification I realied I had already heard of you!

[@n9it]

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!

[@learneratheart2564]

OMGosh! I've been saying this for years! Great video 😃

[@tarantuIas]

Great video!

[@corbinblack6341]

Yuval you are amazing great video such a big fan

[@andrwzal]

alright, u motivated me to keepin my journey w korean

[@ItsAllEnzynes]

I think you’ve done a great job arguing that no language is harder to pick up for a native speaker, but I don’t at all agree with your conclusion that the difficulty of learning a second language is based on how similar your native language is to it. I would argue that languages absolutely have some inherent level of complexity to learn them regardless of what your native language is. The obvious evidence, which you completely brushed over, is constructed languages. If a language can be designed to be easily learned internationally, then surely it is inherently less complex as a second language, right? That’s the discussion I think people were interested in. Some actual foundational language properties than make them easier for a non-native speaker to learn regardless of native language.

[@rainer_1137]

7:49

[@HERUSUKAeigo-lt3fc]

This video was honestly perfect at explaining the, in my opinion, only correct answer to the conversation of "Hardest language". You explained all the relevant points perfectly and followed them with concrete examples. Good job👍

[@Ghosty45]

yoo ur biggest fan here yuval 😊 Greetings from Poland🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱

[@GrungerTheBunger]

We love you, Yuval!

[@meganfelder4597]

Actually blushed and kicked my feet up 😂 Yuval and LL content ?? I'm here 😂💕

[@gabrieladimitrova341]

Great video.❤

[@OMGitshimitis]

Thank you for this video- it gave me the push to start learning Hebrew to speak with my friend. I have always viewed it as an insurmountable goal but not longer.

[@davidd.9951]

cool video, yuval! i suggesting finding a better way to record your audio however when you are walking outdoors. i think it will help maintain the quality of the videos as the drop in audio quality at the end was noticeable.

[@ellepalmer4590]

great video! also a jan pi toki pona (edit): I've spoken t.p. fluently for almost a year now, and learned it along side a friend. since we speak it every day together, it to has developed a: english pidgin, slang, new words, idioms, new/and more complex grammar, and the use of tones unlike englisj (posing a question with a falling tone) (we are both native to english and only speak english (im learning other languages too)

[@fionaross9664]

Keep on Keeping on!

[@sebwk01]

I must say, in the beginning of the video I was tempted to comment something along the lines of "that's bullshit, learning to read kanji makes Japanese so much harder, etc.", but as the video progressed and you made your point clear, I realized I actually agreed with your stance. It was especially satisfying to reach the same conclusion on how complexity is limited in language due to populations being required to learn it, and you really blew my mind with the "you good" part. In the end you even managed to motivate me to keep learning Japanese, which has felt like a fruitless endevour as of late. So in my native tounge, 🇧🇻: Tusen takk skal du ha, og lykke til videre med kanalen din 🙌🏻

[@sloppytightbottom]

Stå på, sebwk01! Det blir gradvis lettere etter hvert, så lenge man ikke legger seg og bare gir opp. :-)

[@donkbonktj5773]

Ey en nordmann her jo

[@ShortRacoon]

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.

[@nHans]

I'm afraid I disagree. While it may not be possible to identify a single "hardest" language, I believe that one can objectively compare and rank the "hardness" of different languages. Unfortunately, I don't know of any academic studies that I can reference. So, like all KZbin commenters, I'll use my own life experience plus anecdotal evidence. I worked in old-school Computational Linguistics (aka Natural Language Processing) for a few years, with the specific aim of machine translation. Unfortunately, the recent arrival of AI, CNNs, and LLMs made my job all but obsolete. However, each language clearly presented a different level of difficulty for computer processing. Of course, you can argue that the human brain works differently from a computer, so what's difficult for the computer is not necessarily difficult for humans and _vice-versa._ I agree. Besides, the project never got completed. Still, it offered lots of insights. Specifically, the more linguistic "features" a language has-like gendered nouns and verbs; irregular verb conjugation; declension for case, number, person etc.-the more difficult it becomes for programmers to write algorithms to process it. I am good at learning languages. I grew up in a particularly language-rich part of India. I could speak 5 languages-including English-fluently by the time I was 10. As a child, I learnt languages much faster than my peers. I was able to notice when they (or their younger siblings) made mistakes, and also when their parents corrected them. And now, as an adult, I'm observing my nieces, nephews, and children of friends and colleagues-who speak different native languages-going through a similar language learning process. It reinforces my observation that children make mistakes that are very characteristic for the particular language they're learning. For example, consider Hindi. You've mentioned Hindi in your earlier video on Grammatical Gender. It's gendered, with 2 genders-masculine and feminine-which are arbitrarily assigned. Young children learning Hindi often use the wrong gender, and their parents keep correcting them until they master it. Another feature of Hindi-which also you mentioned in that video-is that Hindi verbs-like in Hebrew-are conjugated for gender. So recently, my friend asked her children _"Who will eat some mangoes?"_ Her little boy said _"I will eat (masc.)."_ His little sister, imitating him, said _"I will eat (masc.)."_ My friend gently corrected her: _"I will eat (fem.)."_ The girl repeated the correct sentence. But then, the boy thought the correction applied to him as well, so he too said _"I will eat (fem.)."_ Children learning Kannada don't make such mistakes, even though Kannada has *3* genders-masculine, feminine, and neuter/inanimate. But only humans and deities are assigned masculine and feminine genders-which conform to their sex-while everything else is neuter/inanimate. Children pick this up very easily, and parents rarely have to correct them afterwards. Contrast it with Marathi, which also has 3 genders-masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, the genders are arbitrarily assigned. (The vowel ending of the noun often determines the gender, but not always.) So it takes children even longer to master this. Incidentally, there are dialects of Hindi that eschew inflecting the verb for gender. While proponents of standard Hindi decry it as a provincial sacrilege, IMO, it's a valuable simplification. These dialects also always use the "Royal We" instead of the singular "I"-another useful simplification. I have a feeling their children learn their Hindi much faster. With English, while there's far less scope for gender-related mistakes, I've noticed that children struggle with irregular verbs: _"Did you eat your veggies?" "Yes, mommy, I eated my veggies."_ My point is that quirks like these-arbitrary genders, irregular verbs etc.-do indeed make languages harder to learn, even to a child, even in a fully-immersive native language environment. However, children master these quirks at a very young age. So after they grow up, they don't remember the struggle they went through. They end up believing that they acquired the language naturally and smoothly. Only their parents know that it wasn't all that easy. Every parent has worried at one time or another whether their child is slow compared to its peers. As to your point that children generally master their native languages at roughly the same rate, regardless of the language-I suppose it's because different languages have different quirks, and these average out more-or-less. Even then, I can't help thinking that if we constructed a simplified language by eliminating unnecessary hurdles, perhaps children would spend more time communicating-talking, getting creative, telling stories-rather than getting their grammar corrected at every step.

[@siteamedits8300]

Extremely based and strictly rad as raddish, kudos af

[@siteamedits8300]

tho its worth mentioning that a lotta people in western english countries struggle with speaking their native language fluently ( saw quite few videos about collage graduates not just misspelling single words but also making mistakes in common sense while constructing the sentenses, and i wanna say that partially its because american good life quality and the absence of need for being "just like the others" as America is free etc. In my motherland for instance (russia) you get bullied for the slightest misspelling or even wrong use of stressing the vowels which forces even the most top notch moronic mofos to actually think before saying. In english you get corrected you just throw out a "duuuh" and folks kinda gtf off u

[@burrdurger3825]

Best comment I’ve read in a very long while, kudos. I couldn’t help but to compare this video and its points to my own language, which is Finnish. Finnish is a very compex language and nothing compared to the likes of English, Swedish and French that I have mastered. What I mean by this is that you can’t get any help from these languages if you want a deeper understanding of Finnish and its quirks. Moreover, written Finnish and spoken Finnish are two different things. Spoken Finnish has very many grammatical errors but we make them because it can save alot of time when you just blurt out an incomplete sentence. New learners wouldn’t understand at all if I was to speak the way I speak to my friends. Also when I’m writing Finnish I still make errors even though I’m a 17 year old. Those errors still happen in day to day speech and like you said, parents try to correct them. I really liked your comment as it was filled with wisdom that can’t be gotten by any other means than living here for a long time. Best regards to you!

[@judtt]

This is a compelling argument!

[@OmnivorousPancake]

You said it yourself, different quirks average out more or less. And if you construct a language without "quirks" (let's say you can and want to), it will naturally acquire them as the time goes by

[@SentientRaven]

At 8:24, thank you for just going there and without reservation. You, sir, have earned yourself a subscriber.

[@KipperDipperr]

so real yuval, yet another W

[@Timnormas]

Awesome video please make more

[@rollizle]

תודה בשביל הסרטון יובל! 😅

[@spongehub8246]

Yuval on youtube already feels natural

[@yakinseahorse7642]

I know you from TikTok, very cool to see you making longer-form content :) Great video.

[@josh9159]

Yuval you are really going up in the world 😢😊

[@zara5096]

will watch all the ads on this one get your bag bestie

[@zachroot5228]

I LOVE YUVAL !!!!!!

[@philipdavis7521]

This overlooks one aspect that can complicate language learning - the 'forgiveness' of the language to mistakes. Some languages (e.g. German or Vietnamese) require a lot of precision - a fairly minor error can completely change the meaning of a sentence. English is a particularly forgiving language (possibly because of its hybrid origins?), which is one reason its so popular for learners.

[@whatplan4335]

great video more please !

[@AlmondShinKat]

I watched a 2 minute ad for you Yuval

[@yandodov]

English is also the most important thing for programming, while maths is useless for the most part. That's right, if you know basic algebra, you're good to go. But if you don't know the language in which 99.99% of all technical documentation and resources about programming is written, you're pretty much fucked. As a programmer, searching in Google and copy-pasting other people's code encompasses most of your job anyways, so knowing English is generally the only thing you could ever need. Everything else is a few clicks away.

[@tessemo]

you’re the perfect man Yuval :( I need you in my life

[@beastdynasty6221]

My glorious smart man yuval posted we NEED to lock in😭

[@aspoon4801]

Great video

[@xetsuma]

The last bit about English being easiest to immerse yourself in is so true (I mean even this video itself and all the comments are in English). That's also why I've been saying for a while that Japanese is actually the easiest language to learn (assuming you are a native English speaker and therefore can't learn that). There is an immense amount of extremely high-quality content to immerse yourself in with Japanese, more than basically any other language, and a lot of it is already popular with English speakers anyways, so you get to experience your favorite things a second time and see it in the original language, which is always cool.

[@Mathias-bz2kr]

Japanese is really easy to learn if you know english, as subtitles, dictionaries, classes are in english, same is true for university level material. Therefore have to learn with english as proxy, my native tongue is Danish, there are no support or utilities in danish anywhere, it's kind of intriguing observation, that the bigger the languages the more languages you can learn with it.

[@anna8282]

Lol, my problem with Japanese is that I can't find anything I like for immersion, whereas Korean is suuuper easy to immerse in since I love every kind of Korean entertainment.

[@niwa_s]

"There is an immense amount of extremely high-quality content to immerse yourself in with Japanese, more than basically any other language" This is an insane and completely out of touch thing to say. So exactly befitting of Japanese language learners online, I guess.

[@MSK.L]

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...

[@sem5263]

Very well said!

[@_dr_9869]

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.

[@rahimaakhtar9174]

HE POSTED ON KZbin YAAAAYYY. Please upload more 🤍🤍🤍

[@zhet]

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

[@mariolotov4892]

Good video Yuval ! But the audio mix is off at the end during the video taken on phone, it only comes through the left ear canal !

[@YuvalTheTerrible]

Noooooo dammit. Thanks for letting me know--will try to keep this in mind next time! Still relatively green here.

[@DragonsAreAwesome45]

Every grammatical feature and word distinction take time to learn, while not having them requires you to come up with your own ways to communicate certain ideas and make yourself understood. Which option you find easier depends greatly on what you're trying to say and how you're used to saying it, and it does apply to conlangs like Toki Pona as well.

[@ladycempluk2481]

John McWhorter(linguist) suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language for the world.

[@willianalee6336]

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.

[@JulyIzHere]

Thank you for saying that. He just completely ignored that

[@wisam6498]

Good shit!