There is No Such Thing as the "Hardest Language"

[@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.

[@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.

[@damienwit]

@@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.

[@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

[@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?

[@idraote]

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

[@Ziggy9000]

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

[@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

[@brendanhunter389]

Bro how do you find this

[@connivingkhajiit]

@@brendanhunter389ctrl+f with the transcript open on desktop

[@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

[@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.

[@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

[@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

[@Darius2010-r1g]

Language 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.

[@divkachan]

Super! Jsem rád, že vidím lidi, jak se také učí česky!

[@stareatershouldeatmystarsxoxo]

Me with Russian LOL. I'm purely learning Russian for the summer break (and beyond) because I am NOT having a summer where I am rotting in bed, again.

[@Darius2010-r1g]

@@stareatershouldeatmystarsxoxo Lol здравствуй I'm learning Russian too, I already speak Czech

[@Darius2010-r1g]

@@stareatershouldeatmystarsxoxo I'm like A2 in Russian and B1 in Czech

[@stareatershouldeatmystarsxoxo]

@@Darius2010-r1g niceee

[@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

[@TomatosRaafatos]

I've also always wondered how it would feel like if everywhere I went in the world I found most people speaking my native language. Sure, it would make my life much easier, but would it feel funny that everyone spoke my language with an accent that I would have to get used to? Also, how would it be if I can never have a private conversation in public when literally everyone on the bus can understand what I'm saying to my girlfriend? It's one life-hack of having an obscure native language that nobody speaks that English-speakers really miss out on when you think about it.

[@stummyhort]

​@@TomatosRaafatos I am from the US and have traveled quite a bit in Europe, and have been lucky to meet many travelers from all over the world. In my own opinion, it is quite a luxury to be a native English speaker as a traveler. Even though some people may be unfriendly towards Americans in a way they aren't to other foreigners (my friends who live in France complain about this often, lol)... I still think the benefits of English native fluency outweigh that. I don't think this is a common opinion among Americans though, as most Americans have not traveled significantly outside of the country. People born and raised in the US just generally aren't familiar with the linguistic diversity present in the rest of the world (they have no reason to be), so language isn't something they consciously think about. When people speak English with an accent, it does not bother me at all. Many times I do not even really notice. The people I meet are almost always better in English than I am in their native language, so I cannot complain at all! The challenge comes when you hope to practice the language you are learning, and you have to convince everyone to stop speaking to you in English lol

[@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.

[@tuluppampam]

It's also funny that it developed certain set phrases in the community, so you don't have to learn only 120 words, you need also those set phrases (which could almost be considered a form of compounding).

[@lred1383]

Yeah, the fact that it's working with so little means you have to jump over some serious hurdles if you're trying to talk about more complex subjects. I don't know if that's the "correct" way of doing this, but from what i've seen Toki Pona constructs more words for more complex notions through large chains of simple words. Inefficient, often difficult to guess the translation, and arguably more complex than just having words for those things

[@ExzaktVid]

I eat big yellow stick fruit and round red triangle fruit. it tastes good.

[@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

[@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.

[@slayla2926]

its so hard even though we were born being able to do it

[@ExzaktVid]

how to speak english in 5 minutes: step 1. wait 5 minutes step 2. start talking!

[@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

[@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

[@haydenconstantine310]

Watching the ads in full, not skipping them

[@Fripplingakarhano]

Glazing ☝️

[@YT.jer0me]

Same(they are unskippables)

[@ivanharo950]

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

[@Julian-n4v6j]

@@ivanharo950 What's glazing mean?

[@papyrus_12]

@@Julian-n4v6jUnnecessarily praising someone basically

[@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

[@tuluppampam]

Russian speakers wouldn't normally consider them aspectual differences, but completely different verbs that are translated into a single one. Lexical aspect exists limitedly in many languages, so it is understandable to not analyse it correctly.

[@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

[@The_Licker]

I think it was just him exaggerating for comedy

[@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

[@tuluppampam]

Fun fact about toki pona: the community has developed set phrases that people kinda have to learn to communicate properly. That could be called an increase in complexity.

[@jan_Masewin]

@@tuluppampam sure, though I can only think of 5-6 of them, so it's veeery minimal still atm

[@tuluppampam]

@@jan_Masewin the community is small and there isn't much done in the language, so there isn't any necessity of new set phrases.

[@jan_Masewin]

@@tuluppampam Imma disagree, if they're stable and actively being used, clearly there is a need. I'm also of the niche opinion that a moderately more complicated toki pona would be more useful

[@tuluppampam]

@@jan_Masewin I meant to say that due to the limited use of the language, the community doesn't find situations that would lead to new set phrases. That is because they need continuous use throughout time in that context, which just won't be the case when the language is used almost exclusively for fun.

[@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.

[@yan_dj]

​@@niwa_s It's completely accurate lmao, just say you don't like Japanese media, it's still massive worldwide

[@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.

[@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!

[@themindset3329]

I was born and raised in Spain, learned English naturally by watching content on KZbin, moved to Germany and learned German, now I have a Polish girlfriend and I'm learning Polish. For both German and Polish I'm using the same method: first intensively repeat basic vocabulary videos until I'm familiar with a bunch of words and how they sound. Then purposely binge watch content in said language (I use Netflix rather than KZbin for this) and use every chance I get to speak in that language with natives, no matter how basic and awkward my level is, I know it's only gonna get better and at a dramatic speed. Incredibly fast compared to the average person who just waits for their language course to start and only practice while in class, or doing a bunch of theoretical work on paper, with some listening exercises here and there. The difference may be as dramatic as being fluent within 2 years as opposed to literally never reach a B1

[@themindset3329]

And yes, every language helps you learn the next. I saw Spanish similarities in English. I saw Spanish and English similarities in German, and now I see Spanish, English and German similarities in Polish. The faster that word recognition starts, the faster you'll start understanding and speaking fluently. I can see how it becomes so easy for polyglots after they master 4 or 5 languages to learn every other

[@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!

[@Vaporwavee.]

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

[@saucysos]

No - hardest language is whatever there are the least resources, speakers and documentation as you cannot seek help and can’t be corrected if you make mistakes. Russian and Chinese may be “hard,” but there’s five billion different places to learn them. African Romance is grammatically and linguistically far closer to English but ridiculously hard to learn because we don’t have access to a lot of written records and the language is extinct, so you cannot practice it with anyone.

[@Yusuketh443]

​@vpansf9:36

[@hayabusa1329]

Russian is only spoken in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and sometimes Mongolia. Chinese is only spoken in China, Taiwan and some parts of southeast asia.

[@saucysos]

@@hayabusa1329 First of all, 1/8 of all people speak Chinese and there is a giant diaspora. Secondly, by sources I mean stuff like Duolingo, Babbel, etc. which ALL have Russian and Chinese as an option.

[@hayabusa1329]

@@saucysos but Chinese and Russian are not useful at all. Chinese is only spoken only by Chinese people who are learning English

[@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

[@hellowehavecookies]

I believe his arguments apply to learning a foreign language as well, maybe not at the a1 level but to speak fluently. I'm not going to be as confident as to say all languages have exactly the same amount of complications but still, I'd argue that any 'inherent' complication is a vanishingly small factor in how difficult it is to acquire a language. That's because all languages are exactly as complex as the ideas they want to express. The best example I can think of is clefts in English. You may think that languages with an extensive case marking system are more difficult to learn but those case marks give us the freedom to switch the word order for purposes of emphasis. In English, for the same degree of emphasis, you have to build a separate sentence structure with sub-clauses ("I wanted to see you" vs. "It was you who I wanted to see"). English wanted to express a nuance that synthetic languages were able to do with ease so it just delegated a structure, a structure that wasn't being used for anything else, for that purpose. Another example can be given with articles. Germanic and Romance articles make it ridiculously easy to differentiate indefinite and definite nouns. When languages like Russian or Turkish that don't have articles need to differentiate between the two, we come up with some disheveled methods. For example, in Turkish, only the definite nouns are marked in the accusative or genitive. We have no way to distinguish the two in dative or instrumental cases, if we really need to we'll just add an extra word or an entire sentence to clarify. In Russian, some negations can alternate between the direct object in the accusative for definite and in the genitive for indefinite. Sure, some languages can have lower or higher barriers to entry. Since case marks are ubiquitous, you'd need to memorize them pretty early on so passing an A1 test could be more difficult for Russian than for English. However, to achieve fluency, at a level where you can express your own nuanced opinions independently, you need a lot of exposure to the language and this takes care of the memorization required for grammar. You start figuring out nuances on your own without being taught them and they stick to your memory. Through the natural evolution of the language, unneeded details that no one uses die and new nuances appear. Also, natives remember to uphold seemingly illogical grammar rules or word forms because they've heard it as such in context for an enormous number of times (common verbs are more likely to have an irregular conjugation), this is doable for second language learners as well. It happens alongside obtaining vocabulary. Another way to think is in terms of brevity vs discrimination. To use a language, you have to be able to discriminate between the things you wanted to say vs the things you did not. Simpler structures are, well, simpler for the natives as well but they make discrimination more difficult. So however much a language evolves towards simplicity, it evolves back towards complications once again.

[@MichHa-g2r]

​@@hellowehavecookies but this wouldnt apply to language where a significant bulk of users within the homeland of the language are second language speakers like indonesian or afrikaans in the past, and they cant hold on to many of these extra complications like inflections. Afrikaans, for example, even lost the conjugations for 1st person, 2nd person, etc, unlike dutch which retained them over the centuries with their native population being dominated by native dutch speakers. Afrikaans managed to quickly lose these complications with the large non-dutch population using the language. Instead of years worth of inflections to learn, they just use a strict word order, "stompi", which can be learned and understood within a few hours of practice

[@GlitchSquix]

LETS GO YUVAL UPLOAD

[@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

[@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

[@SentientRaven]

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

[@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

[@gergo7507]

Interesting. I, someone whose native language is Hungarian, have experienced the complete opposite! I could never fully learn German, even after living in Austria for 10 years, but I could learn English at a C1 advanced level in less time (for reference I am at around B1 in German, which is much worse). I especially had problems with the gendered nouns and articles (Der, die, das, des, den, dem) in German.

[@xkancho]

yeah he's lying some languages are harder than others how can German not be harder than English? it's basically English with more complexity

[@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.

[@_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.

[@ianstarkm]

I agree that we often conflate ‘hard for english speakers’ and ‘hard’ language, or the same with what is an easy language is, generally I see your point and agree for the most part that most hardest languages lists are western language speaker focused and will tend to list chinese/arabic/japanese, etc when obviously chinese is as easy for a japanese speaker as spanish is for an english speaker. BUT, I have to disagree. I think a language like for example Bahasa Indonesian, which has a phonetic spelling, fewer words than many languages, no past, present or future tense, no grammatical gender, no plural conjugations, no cases, etc. HAS to be objectively easier than a language like Russian which has 6 different cases with chnging noun and adjectives endings, tenses, plural conjugations, three genders with different endings, verb conjugations, changing word order, etc. I mean, the grammar of Russian HAS to be objectively more complicated AKA harder than that of Indonesian. Moreover, the latin alphabet has to be simpler than Chinese or Arabic scripts which even native speakers struggle with. So if an alien where to come to earth, they would have to think that a language like indonesian in a simpler script and with very simple grammar is easier than a language like russian or chinese or arabic (which is spoken and written sooo differently you basically learn two distinct languages, a written and a spoken one). And yes, babies in China will learn Chinese at the same rate that babies in Indonesia will learn Indonesian, but that is because it is also connected to brain development for language speaking ability, because despite the different complexities of any language all children will spend more than enough time 100% immersed every single second of their day in that language that by the time their brain develops enough to speak they have already had enough exposure to learn any of the languages.

[@kekulta]

I'm a Russian native speaker and I absolutely agree. As a native I have Russian grammar hardwired into my brain. That is grammar that is really closely related to Polish grammar, for example. Does this mean that learning Polish would be easier for me than learning English? Absolutely fucking not. While it is naturally easier for me to understand the inner logic of Polish than for English speakers I'm absolutely terrified of this language and how complex its grammar is. While your mother tongue makes learning some languages easier than others there are languages that are objectively harder.

[@sem5263]

fewer words than many languages?

[@ianstarkm]

@@sem5263 yes, Bahasa Indonesian has approx. 127k total words. For context, English has approximately 1 million words (depending on what you count) but the oxford dictionary alone has around 470k entries. French has around 408k words, and so on.

[@sem5263]

​​@@ianstarkm That's a puzzling (and problematic) point to make. You can't reasonably measure how many words a language has. We don't even have a clear definition of what a word is to begin with. Also, dictionaries don't fully capture how languages are spoken. Just think about all the specialized words they may include or leave out, or how their sizes vary just due to the inherent limits of compiling them. You also seem to overlook other factors that make Malay/Indonesian covertly complex (note how context-dependent it is), not to mention the challenges of diglossia that learners have to deal with.

[@ramuk1933]

In Japan, companies will sometimes put English on their products as decoration, but often, it just makes no sense. The first time I visited Japan, I stayed in a hotel with a note in the room about eco-friendly laundered slippers, whatever that means...

[@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).

[@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.

[@ofir231]

behatzlaha!!(good luck in hebrew)

[@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)

[@hayabusa1329]

I'm a Chinese who learned Mandarin from birth and English at 6 yet I am still better at English.

[@user-cmcumm]

​@@ItsAllEnzynesI'm native in Russian, proficient in at least vernacular English and a Chinese HSK2 level learner. In the very beginning I thought my greatest concern would be tones as I've never studied music (tones are othen compared to it), but now after about 40 short lessons I've had so far I can say it's not that hard to remember and sound them out. I might occasionally forget some, but the same is true for pronunciation and strokes as well so it's not something specific Chinese sounds aren't the most natural thing either, but transcribing pinyin futher if it's needed to understand it works just fine

[@katelyn1782]

Where do you learn Mamdarin though? In the US? Well, then no shit. Also, OP, You mean you are a biligual speaker of English and MANDARIN, not Chinese then.

[@antogs3203]

6:45 Danish babies take CONSIDERABLY LONGER to learn the language than Norwegian babies (2 YEARS LONGER to learn past tense). Not saying there is a direct connection to difficulity, but this contradicts your assumption here.

[@mattcustance5806]

“I’m not talking about learning it as an adult. I mean inherently more difficult to learn as a native.” Ah. So this video helpfully answers a question nobody is asking… Excellent. Strap in.

[@SupremeDP]

I disagree :)

[@Wandsworth1]

Unless a relaible points system can be used to rate every aspect of grammar, vocabulary, writing etc of each language, no one can really be sure that all languages are inherently of the same level of difficulty. Thats just a belief, or wishful thinking. They might all be the same - but they might not.

[@laithtwair]

You're correct but your point is so abstract and specific that it kinda falls apart when you try to generalise it to acrually learning a language. Sure, writing systems and "academic" grammar aren't part of the language by some definition, but you still need to bother with them if youre learning a language. Like Japanese and Chinese kids learn new characters throughout their whole time at school and arab kids have to learn the very complex grammar of msa/classical arabic which nobody has natively known for hundreds of years. There are many parts of how we communicate that we don't necessarily acquire as kids.

[@DanielKolbin]

fr

[@acksawblack]

Yes this video is wild 😂, who on earth views language difficulty based solely on spoken words only used by children

[@Samadiarie]

Not having to learn your OWN language throughout all of your years in school is an English speaker privilege :3

[@Meandbroafter2]

4:35 This part of language you are supposed to learn by imitating like goo goo gah gah speaking baby.... There is no other way

[@brendanmurray1213]

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

[@GopherpilledTunneler]

1:30 This isn't true unless you're counting in some extreme way. There are 8 simple tenses and 8 compound tenses, plus the imperative. Out of curiosity, how did you get this number?

[@lizzie6028]

finally, someone that has the brain to understand this and the courage to tell the truth! it's time to stop the language war, it's stupid and senseless.

[@Samir96a]

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

[@sad1kitten]

i have learned English from school and extra classes (unfortunetualy i forgot the very strange latin word for naming last one) and... 8:23 holy shit WHY

[@squammy3536]

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

[@yunrumector]

.-.) Ngl we have *some* advantage from Thai language to learn other languages such as: 1.) Tones (We have 5 Tones in Total, It used to be 4) 2.) Roll and Unroll "R" Sound (Literally separate by "ร" and "ล") 3.) Consonant for Tones (With 44 Consonant And 21 Sounds Each repeating consonant represent it Higher sound or Lower it needs to be, Sometimes There aren't tone mark but you still has to read it as some tone because of this rule) 4.) 32 Vowels (21 Sounds) (Some of the Consonant sounds that are repeated just because of Short or Long vowel sound) 5.) No space or fullstop needed (Literally you can write it a Hundred character long without spacing between words) 6.) Grammar (It uses SVO but not actually strict using it this way) 7.) Most words are borrowed [so There's only a little true Thai word (Not near 500 Words) and mostly are borrowed] 8.) Flexibility (It is very flexible since even you create a new word from an existing words People still understand it) and yeah that's all i can see and i think most language have more advantage than this since even native can't even finished the True thai lesson

[@mihan5660]

I disagree with this video. Research such as by Trecca shows that even in closely related languages there are major differences in how quickly toddlers learn their native language depending on which language it is. For example Danish infants learn danish vocabularly much more slowly than norweigian infants learn norwegian words. And Bleses found they picked up past tense on average two years later! Also, FSI makes mardarin students learn lots of characters and thats why its one of the "hardest languages". Chinese grammar is certainly not the time suck for the average native english speaker.

[@northstarradio]

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

[@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

[@TSZKwanDuan]

German: oh we have :1 Nouns, pronouns and articles Nouns Pronouns Articles Adjectives Comparative adjectives Superlative adjectives Possessive adjectives Verbs and adverbs to verbs in German 11 Verb tenses 13 > Present tense 14 > Past tense 19 > Future tense Verb cases 25 > Nominative 26 > Accusative 26 > Dative 28 > Genitive Modal verbs 33 Verbs in questions 37 Commands using verbs 37 Reflexive verbs 38 Adverbs Prepositions 41 Introduction 41 Some different uses of prepositions 43 With the accusative OR the dative Numbers, time and date 45 Numbers 45 Time 47 The date 49 Days and weeks 49 Months, years and seasons as always Weather and greetings 52 Weather 52 Greetings 53 Word order 53

[@parvjain2435]

I don't know if it's entirely correct to say but I think the only way to make a language seem easier is to hide the hard parts. I mean almost all languages have tones which change the meaning of the thing you are actually saying but we think it to be simple but when Mandarin language mentions it as a part of language, it suddenly becomes hard.

[@ЮраН-ь2к]

2:27 Articles in English are not very difficult thing. However, sometimes they are difficult. I put some photos to Panoramio, and had to title them. But I do not know, do I see *a* river or *the* river. I could remove the article, but if there is the preposition "to " before the noun, it turns into a verb, and the title becomes ambigious. Once my classmate, who learnt German, saw the word "the" in the English textbook, and asked me what is this. I answered: "Definite article". Then he asked me: "of what gender?". He thought that articles are used to indicate gender of noun.

[@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.

[@ComputingTheSoul]

If you think that copy and pasting is our job then you're a horrific programmer who doesn't care about coherent internal architecture or best practices

[@yandodov]

@@ComputingTheSoul I said it's *most* of our job, not all. Understanding *what* you've copy-pasted is the tricky part, then connecting it adequately to everything else. Programming is about solving problems, not necessarily writing. You're not a poet. Writing everything by hand and not using external resources like Google, Stack Overflow and ChatGPT doesn't make you a better programmer. It makes you a less efficient one. It doesn't matter where the code came from, as long as you understand what it does and it's exactly what you need. For this reason you have to edit it most of the time, of course.

[@davidsenra2495]

Don't be so literal. It's a fact, English helps a lot. Also, most of literature about architecture, patterns and best practices are written in English anyway. He's right. If you're from a foreign country and can't read English, your level of difficulty acquiring programming skills is tenfold.

[@spicyshizz2850]

12:12. But the difficulty in the language’s grammar should contribute to the language’s difficulty as well. There are multiple factors

[@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! ^^

[@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!

[@Ghosty45]

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

[@edwardwu1038]

I suppose what you are claiming is not wrong when it comes to simply the spoken aspect of languages, but as a native Mandarin speaker person, I cannot be convinced that Chinese characters are simpler or require less time to learn than something like an alphabet. We had to memorize them as kids just as painfully as all foreign Chinese-learners. I find it significantly easier to learn European languages as they all simply use variations of the Latin alphabet, whereas I struggle with Japanese, despite it using the same characters we do in Chinese, simply because these writing systems are objectively more complicated and thus harder.

[@hayabusa1329]

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

[@MichHa-g2r]

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.

[@PulseFIare]

yippeeeeee Yuval upload

[@joshcortezmusic8697]

10:14 [fissure writhing wetly] That’s the first time I’ve ever come across such series of words.

[@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

[@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!

[@plzno7714]

7:27 world history AP flashbacks 😭

[@Sirithang]

I'm a French person who have been living in the UK for 11 year now, and I still chuckle every time I met a British person here who tell me dead serious "Props to you for having learn english, it's one of the most difficult language to learn". It seems to be a weird common sentiment over here. This is based on absolutely no data other than a personal feeling from the moving here, but I feel a thing that make English "easy to learn" is also that is is quite resistant to "mistake". Sentences stay surprisingly understandable even if you mess a lot of it like time, article, pronouns etc... I always felt that you will exchange with English native speakers a lot earlier in your learning journey than with French native speaker, because even beginner broken sentences won't require as much effort for native speaker to understand in English than in French.

[@pxolqopt3597]

There was an old lady talking to some guy who moved here from another country and she said the exact same thing you said about English being super hard.

[@SmallvilleSP]

Such a great video! You perfectly summarized what makes a language hard when compared individually in a vacuum, but easy in practice when they're learned with the help of another language. Just pointing something out about your argument regarding English tenses compared to Russian tenses: while Russian doesn't have compound tenses or progressive verb forms (like I have had and I will be having), it does have more tenses than you showed: every Russian verb is essentially "paired up" with another verb, which is the "complete" version of that verb. I.e, a verb like "to do" in English would give you делать and сделать in Russian. And when conjugated, they essentially convey the same meaning as other verb forms in English, and other verb conjugations in other languages (делал/I was doing or I did, сделал/I just did, буду делать/I will be doing and сделаю/I'll do shortly). Another thing is stress. While English is harder than most other Indo-European languages when it comes to stress, Russian is even harder and messier ;( I know this falls a little bit outside of the scope intended for your video, but I just wanted to contribute these!

[@BB_6w6]

YUVAL KZbin UPLOAD

[@kyleh4354]

Yes, Russian has 6 *singular* noun declensions, but it also has 6 *plural* declensions for the same word, so 12 different forms for each noun. Add in the fact that it has 3 genders, and each gender has 4 standard patterns of noun stems (and there are hundreds of non-standard stems), and you literally have to memorize hundreds if not thousands of different forms. It's a PITA for non-native speakers :-)

[@pxolqopt3597]

If you just blindly do the calculations.. six cases times 4 noun stems times 2 numbers, etc, it seem that way, but in reality there are A LOT of patterns between each noun stem and gender which makes the total number of declensions you actually have to uniquely remember instead of just recognizing a pattern less than like 20 plus or minus maybe 5. And adjectives are also the same, like theoretically there's 24 different forms until you realize masculine and neutar declensions are the exact same, there's only 2 different endings for feminine declension (3 if you include nominative), and the plural has 3 different forms (4 including nominative).

[@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.

[@ПудинговыйСуп]

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

[@godominus9222]

@@ПудинговыйСуп 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]

@@ПудинговыйСупA 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

[@bombasticnoa]

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.

[@plush1312]

Scary that I got you recommended without following you on here Yuval but for once I am thankful to our algorithm overlords

[@AirQuotes]

Scary that you don't understand how data brokers work.

[@carlosdumbratzen6332]

I tell this to people when they say it must be hsrd to learn japanese. Nah, if you understand that the kanji are just words it becomes easy. When I learnd engish I had to memorize vocab and how to write it and because this language is so fucked up, you cannot see a new word and now how to say it

[@zoharlevy278]

Yuval you know im your cousin

[@YuvalTheTerrible]

כן זוהר אני זוכר שקנית לי גרביים בפעם האחרונה שהייתה פה. אני חושב שהיית בן חמש.

[@zoharlevy278]

@@YuvalTheTerrible זוכר גם כן🤣

[@Phymacss]

@@zoharlevy278what language Is this?

[@artandstuff9026]

Hebrew

[@zombipro739]

3:00 when he started saying that - i understand what suppost to happen. 3:05 on that moment my 9 years of learning English in school - disappeared UPD: Im native russian language speaker

[@StewGuy]

Wrong, hardest language to learn is North Sentinelese 😂

[@amandado6519]

I doubt Sentinelese children take longer pick up their language than other children do.

[@StewGuy]

@@amandado6519 The joke is that it’s the hardest language to learn because no one other than the north sentinelese speak it.

[@amandado6519]

Haha, yeah, in the same way that English is the easiest language to learn like Yuval said in the video.

[@chrisbooker3349]

Thank you for making this video. I found it informative and relaxing, despite going into some pretty complex stuff it was easy to follow along. I wish you all the best and I hope you have a good evening, or a good whatever time it is there. Cheers, Chris

[@-ism8153]

This guy opens with “No language is any more complex than another” and then lists off a bunch of circumstantial mistakes people make when thinking about the complexity of a language instead of addressing the core claim. This is ridiculous- figure out what you actually want to make a video on and focus on that instead of reaching for clickbait.

[@axoluna]

Did you like… watch the video? I feel like he definitely did address that main claim, specifically by referring to how long it takes young children to acquire languagr

[@-ism8153]

@@axoluna That was around where I gave up. It's some fine evidence, but "takes longer for a baby" is different from "hardest for an adult" and very different from "most complex". At that point, I had been evaluating all these previous, tangential arguments as explanations of the initial claim, so I decided the video wasn't focused. I might have been a bit harsh, but I'd say it's at least badly organized, especially considering its contentious thesis.

[@axoluna]

@@-ism8153so you made sweeping claims about content a video didn’t have without watching the video (which did address your concerns)

[@-ism8153]

@@axoluna I said it lists off a bunch of circumstantial mistakes instead of addressing the core claim because it does, even if it might do something else later. I felt it was wasting my time by giving me (at the very least in large part) what was not advertised, and I feel I shouldn't put up with unhelpful arguments for half the video just because it might get better later.

[@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.

[@maddies4852]

This video is completely packed full of misinformation 😂

[@mapl3mage]

to be fair, the video is about how difficult it is to learn the spoken language as a baby born in said country. not as an adult, and it also throws all the written language out the window.

[@jboss1073]

3:52 - quise = wanted, quería = was wanting. It does exist in English.

[@liambyrne591]

Absolute no proof just his own opinion

[@FebruaryHas30Days]

The hardest language is !Xoo (a Khoisan language), spoken in the southern parts of Africa. It is not a major language, that's why it is not mentioned.

[@ethanhastings7816]

Free Palestine

[@ummtulip]

until it’s backwards

[@noobian458]

Why did you post that here

[@Feefa99]

​@@noobian458Necessity

[@noobian458]

@@Feefa99 nobody has ever commented it under my videos

[@Feefa99]

@@noobian458 Make one, I'll surely do it

[@excitingfruit]

I don't agree. You listed a large number of ways that languages differ from each other, and then somehow reached the conclusion that despite that, all languages are exactly equally complex, which I find impossible to believe. Babies reaching the same size vocabulary in the same amount of time regardless of native language doesn't imply that all languages are equally complex - if I eat a banana in the same amount of time it takes someone else to eat a pizza, it doesn't imply that bananas and pizzas have some intrinsic common quality or complexity that makes them take the same amount of time to eat. We are not necessarily eating at the same speed. I agree that languages share the same constraints of needing to be sufficiently complex to communicate meaning while being simple enough to efficiently acquire and that this would average out to about the same across all cultures. But it doesn't follow that there is no language that is more complex than any other one; just that it's unlikely that there are large and significant differences in complexity between them. I also don't agree that no language is richer than any other. The English language is certainly more expressive and richer in vocabulary than a language spoken by an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rainforest.

[@jboss1073]

2:39 - 3:18 - this "have" example by definition cannot be said to be "complex" nor "particular to English" since it is part of Standard Average European.

[@leehaiko3999]

If languages are easier to learn based on its approximation to your native language, then what language is the one that will make learning any language equally easy/difficult?

[@albandary6935]

I am a native Arabic speaker and I totally agree with you I found language that have grammatical genders are easier and that’s why German was easier for me than English Also I think anyone can learn arabic it’s a very flexible and simple language and you really don’t need to learn the grammar I myself in Arabic classes in school always wonder if it is the same language I use they are making it so complicated and even most of students get low marks 😂

[@rawcopper604]

9:10 no it's not. Messing up tones in mandarin would be the equivalent of saying "gu tood"?

[@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

[@DeggaTheDev]

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

[@TranslucentGanon]

2:05 as a Russian learner who natively speaks English cases are relatively easy to me. I make some mistakes but a lot of the time it’s intuitive or I get it after some thought. I’m also 12 so that probably has something to do with it but I still don’t get why every native English speaker ever complains about Russian cases when it’s not that bad

[@airacristina2693]

As a brazilian the " up, down" and the "on, off" phrases are very wierd to me. With time you learn to use whithout thinking.😊

[@hozier_hoser_hoe]

I needed this for real. Ive been struggling to learn another language all my life and its been extremely isolating as the only monolingual person living amongst bilingual and sometimes trilingual people (including my family😭)

[@Theroha]

It's fascinating to think that language learning as a hobby is probably reaching the point where it is almost exclusive to the anglophone world. For every other language world, learning another language (English) is a necessity.