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This article was nominated for deletion on 16 December 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was merge to Second-language acquisition. |
The contents of the Difficulty of learning languages page were merged into Second-language acquisition on 01:21, January 6, 2013 and it now redirects there. For the contribution history and old versions of the merged article please see its history. |
This article was nominated for deletion on 10 March 2011. The result of the discussion was to keep. |
Above I noted several problems with this article. Now I'm going to try to start thinking about some solutions. I don't think there's any point in doing any rewriting yet until we have agreed on what the article should actually be about. I propose that "Hardest language" is not really the best title or topic; the very concept of a single "hardest language" is not taken seriously or investigated anymore in second language acquisition, it's only discussed on random people's blogs; it's not an academically valid topic, as any linguist can tell you there are many ways to measure a language's difficulty. Searching Google for "hardest language", the first two pages come up with numerous blogs, which claim Icelandic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Sanskrit, Russian, and a variety of other languages as the "hardest". This illustrates two things: 1) there are many more languages that claim the title of "hardest" than the nationalist editors here want you to think; and 2) the people discussing this problem are, for the most part, not linguists and have no idea what they're talking about (see some of the laughable claims here and here). If you search Google Scholar for the same term, it becomes clear that "hardest language" is a concept in computational linguistics and is wholly unrelated to the topic being discussed in this article; and it's not a concept in SLA at all.
So the article, most likely, should be about language learning difficulty in general, not about some hopeless quest to find the single 'hardest' language. Unfortunately, a good title for this is hard to find. Google Scholar reveals that "language difficulty" (which is currently a redirect to this page), is actually used synonymously with language impairment in most of the literature (and a secondary use, but still with more hits than our topic, is for measuring the difficulty level of a passage, for example in a standardized test). "Language learning difficulty", likewise, is mostly about language impairment. Any other ideas? rʨanaɢ talk/ contribs 16:10, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
I started this article with the full awareness that it is going to report opnions on which languages are considered "hard" (or "hardest"), for whom.
The article has seen an extraordinary amount of trolling and confusion introduced by the well-meaning and clueless. If you do not know what the article is supposed to discuss, and if you do not have any references on the topic, how about just leaving it alone? This article will be based to 100% on quotable references. Our task is just to gather these referenes. If it is "anglocentric", too bad, that's because you didn't provide sufficient references from the Russian or German viewpoint.
Historically, what happened was that I happened to find a couple of references suggesting that Korean is the hardest-to-learn language. These references were suppressed by Kjoonlee ( talk · contribs), apparently a Korean expat, for no reason other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT. After some time I became fed up and walked away. Since then, the confusion here on this talkpage has just become worse, with insightful comments such as Utopial's "Including some of these studies is also OR" (wtf?) who took it upon himself to call the artice "uneducated" and "a disgrace to the linguistics field" again for no coherent reason, although he did ramble about "a yahoo top contributor". What is going on here? Why does this topic attract comments of such abysmal qualtity? -- dab (𒁳) 20:04, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
I feel this article treats an artificially constricted topic. Replacing it with a new article on a slightly more general topic e.g. Comparative difficulty of acquisition of various languages (human) (I'm not really suggesting that as a title) would allow a more relaxed discussion of the features of various languages that tend to make them more or less easy to learn, without the narrow focus on "more difficult." EEng ( talk) 00:02, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Oops, I confess my eyes glazed over when scanning the Talk page here. Keep up the good work. EEng ( talk) 03:13, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
"Wikipedia has lots of similar articles" is not an argument for notability (see wp:OTHERSTUFF). For the topic to be restricted to the popular perception of the relative difficulty of various languages, there would need to be reliable sources discussing such popular perceptions. Are there? (And here, BTW, we run into a really, really serious parochialism issue: such perceptions without doubt vary widely depending on the mother tongue of the perceiver. How could an intelligible article comprehend all that -- or would it just be "...perceptions among speakers of English"?) EEng ( talk) 15:01, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
OK now, um, what question is "one of the most popular questions"? Is it, Which language is hardest? (whatever that means)? Or is it, What are the popular perceptions regarding which languageis hardest? ? Anyway, Wikipedia can't have an article simply because it deals with an oft-posed question. If there are no reliable sources which can act as a basis for a presentation of actual answers to such a question (or, at least, of a framework by which the question might be usefully attacked), then it can't be the subject of a Wikipedia article. As it stands the article has few or no such sources. EEng ( talk) 17:34, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I didn't say an article should be based only on a single source. I also didn't say an article shouldn't try to answer questions people might have; I said that along with good intentions there must exist one or more reliable sources on which the article can be based. In particular, if such answers must be arrived at by synthesizing bits of 20 other articles, and there is no source (or to be clear, are no sources) which have done that work already, then Wikipedia can't present such answers. See wp:No_original_research#Synthesis_of_published_material_that_advances_a_position. Good luck to you all in refining the scope and building the article; I was just making a passing observation. EEng ( talk) 19:45, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I keep reading about a study by the British Foreign Office that found the most difficult language to learn for British diplomats. (For example, on this article at usingenglish.com.) However, I haven't been able to locate the original source, and I can find no mention of it on the Foreign Office website. Is anyone aware of where it might be found? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 01:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I found a document on the Foreign Office Personnel Rules, which states that, among other things, the overseas allowance for diplomats is "also paid for language skills, varying according to the difficulty of the language". There may be more on this on their website - I shall have a look. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 13:23, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
I got a nice reply from the man at the National Archives. From the search he did for me, it looks like this might be the document we are looking for: 'Hard' languages and their relative degree of difficulty. It looks like I will have to shell out some cash to get this document into digital form, so I'd like to make sure it's the one we're after before I get an estimate. It is quite old (1950), and it seems reasonable to assume that the Foreign Office may have changed the way they measure language difficulty since then. Does anyone have advice? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 15:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
Requested move/dated|Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers}}
Most difficult language to learn → Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers — The difficulty of a language depends highly on what languages you already speak. The present title, however, implies that there is a "most difficult language" in absolute terms, which is not the general view in linguistics as far as I can see. Restricting the article to the difficulty of languages for native English speakers would allow for a much clearer direction in writing the article, and would avoid much of the arguments about scope, adding new languages, etc. that can be seen on the talk page archives. I am also concerned that the concept of a "most difficult language" in absolute terms does not have any reliable sources that can prove its notability, whereas the concept of the most difficult language for native English speakers can be easily sourced. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page ( here and here) and in the recent deletion discussion. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 03:54, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
A good seminal paper to cite there would be the following:
rʨanaɢ ( talk) 14:52, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
It is important to remember that this article must be written accurately. My edits to the phonology section were to remove the absolutes that implied "all speakers have trouble (or ease) doing X". Japanese speakers can HEAR the difference between [r] and [l], the problem they have is in producing the difference when they speech center is conditioned to vary them by environment. English speakers have the same problem with initial [ts] and [ŋ]--they can hear the sounds there, but they just have a very difficult time producing them there. -- Taivo ( talk) 17:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
"Allophone" is really not all that technically esoteric or abstruse of a term -- it's among the first things students learn in an introductory beginning Linguistics 101 class, and a number of people outside formal academic linguistics are familiar with it (including many foreign language teachers). If removing the term "allophone" would create difficulties for the article, I support keeping it... AnonMoos ( talk) 15:39, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
This sentence is a bit of a mouthful: "These sounds do not always appear to pose significant problems for second language learners, unless they are radically different than sounds in the native language, such as pharyngeals or clicks to a speaker whose native language does not contain them." Is there a way of making this more readable? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 03:01, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: page moved. This move does not mean that the suggestions for merging or considering a better name are invalid. Those efforts should continue. Vegaswikian ( talk) 21:31, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Most difficult language to learn → Difficulty of learning languages — Relisted. -- rgpk ( comment) 20:46, 4 April 2011 (UTC) I think difficulty is more appropriate than most difficult because there doesn't seem to be agreement in the literature about which the best way to measure difficulty is, let alone which language is the most difficult. If we imply that there is a "most difficult" language in the title, we also invite the argument of who the language is most difficult for; difficulty of learning a second language depends heavily on what languages a person speaks, and we do not have space to follow this through for every language combination. Most difficult could also imply that there is a "most difficult" language in absolute terms, but as far as I can see the literature does not back this idea up. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page ( here and here), in the recent deletion discussion, and in the recent requested move discussion that was delisted halfway through. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 02:44, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
seealso}}
linked from that subsection of the SLA article, and then a more academic-y title would be ok I think.
rʨanaɢ (
talk)
15:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)I think Grammar is what could determine the difficulty of a language alot more, followed by the phonetics (such as pronunciation). Like an isolating language is easy, and an agglutinative language is intermediate but an inflecting language is hardcore. I can very much call Basque the hardest language ever, it takes like books and books to explain it's grammar. Those scientific racists are ignorant, they say Europeans have a sophisticated language. Just look at English, it's not that hard, I'm not even sure where English falls into.
Here's a following example of a made up extremely difficult language.
"I love rainbows
I/Me = Fulazmingaru love = Pustaskishamaruna Rainbows = Baluumoucharamu
" Balum Fulaz Garu muuchmaramiyat Taskishapustaruna minsijirats " — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.159.9.234 ( talk • contribs) 06:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Well, at last, we have reached a point of closure with Vegaswikian moving the article to Difficulty of learning languages. But just as he said, we shouldn't let this stop the discussion about the possibility of merging this article with second language acquisition. Myself, I have begun to feel that the real issue in whether we should merge or not is that of space. It feels better to me to have this topic as a section inside another article, because it is not usually considered a valid topic in SLA, and giving it its own article seems to be giving the subject a credence that it doesn't deserve. But, as Taivo says, it is useful for readers, and while being useful is not a good reason to have an article on something, it is something that can be taken into consideration.
To balance these two viewpoints, I propose a practical solution: we should merge if we can condense the article down enough, but if we can't, we should leave it as a standalone page. As the present main contributor to second language acquisition, I am perhaps in a special position to comment on this. I can confirm that the article is pressed for space - I have already split long sections out into sub-articles, and even so, it is still missing some essential sections such as sociolinguistic views on SLA. I am also concerned about undue weight - a large section on difficulty might erroneously cause readers to think it is as important a topic in SLA as say, interlanguage or sequences of acquisition. Is it possible to work difficulty into the article without causing an undue weight problem? I would like to hear your views. — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 13:53, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
About Rosenberg, A. (1979). Lingvisticæ Investigationes:III 3(2). 323-339 - this study was really not intended to be taken seriously. I've read it, and the author basically goes through all the major languages looking for the equivalent of English's "It's all Greek to me". For example, although English picks out Greek, the Greeks have a phrase that says "that sounds Chinese to me" (actually, I can't remember the actual phrase or language - this is just an example off the top of my head to demonstrate the method). He then goes through all similar phrases in all the languages, and works out who is at the top of the tree. It just happens to be Chinese. I notice the sentence in the article contains caveats about his claims, but I don't it belongs anywhere near a section that is trying to represent scientific consensus on the matter. We could maybe include it at the bottom of the article in a "myth of the hardest language" section or similar if we find enough pop science examples... — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 09:54, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
Has a decent discussion of some of the issues mentioned at this article, as well as links to some other sources that might be more WP:RS (although less accurate--this source has some valuable caveats about those other sources and the woman who wrote it is more of an expert than the writers of the more "official" sources probably are, but unfortunately it's still just a blog post). rʨanaɢ ( talk) 21:07, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
This article states a list of 5 most difficult languages in the world with details. This might be very useful for those who seeks to learn a new language.
Greetings and salutations, all! I would like to thank this opportunity to inform you all that I have taken the liberty of merging all of the content of this article into the article w:Second-language acquisition per TEMPLATE:afd-mergeto (Date: January 2013). Thank you and happy wikiying! Illegitimate Barrister ( talk) 06:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
This redirect does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article was nominated for deletion on 16 December 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was merge to Second-language acquisition. |
The contents of the Difficulty of learning languages page were merged into Second-language acquisition on 01:21, January 6, 2013 and it now redirects there. For the contribution history and old versions of the merged article please see its history. |
This article was nominated for deletion on 10 March 2011. The result of the discussion was to keep. |
Above I noted several problems with this article. Now I'm going to try to start thinking about some solutions. I don't think there's any point in doing any rewriting yet until we have agreed on what the article should actually be about. I propose that "Hardest language" is not really the best title or topic; the very concept of a single "hardest language" is not taken seriously or investigated anymore in second language acquisition, it's only discussed on random people's blogs; it's not an academically valid topic, as any linguist can tell you there are many ways to measure a language's difficulty. Searching Google for "hardest language", the first two pages come up with numerous blogs, which claim Icelandic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Sanskrit, Russian, and a variety of other languages as the "hardest". This illustrates two things: 1) there are many more languages that claim the title of "hardest" than the nationalist editors here want you to think; and 2) the people discussing this problem are, for the most part, not linguists and have no idea what they're talking about (see some of the laughable claims here and here). If you search Google Scholar for the same term, it becomes clear that "hardest language" is a concept in computational linguistics and is wholly unrelated to the topic being discussed in this article; and it's not a concept in SLA at all.
So the article, most likely, should be about language learning difficulty in general, not about some hopeless quest to find the single 'hardest' language. Unfortunately, a good title for this is hard to find. Google Scholar reveals that "language difficulty" (which is currently a redirect to this page), is actually used synonymously with language impairment in most of the literature (and a secondary use, but still with more hits than our topic, is for measuring the difficulty level of a passage, for example in a standardized test). "Language learning difficulty", likewise, is mostly about language impairment. Any other ideas? rʨanaɢ talk/ contribs 16:10, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
I started this article with the full awareness that it is going to report opnions on which languages are considered "hard" (or "hardest"), for whom.
The article has seen an extraordinary amount of trolling and confusion introduced by the well-meaning and clueless. If you do not know what the article is supposed to discuss, and if you do not have any references on the topic, how about just leaving it alone? This article will be based to 100% on quotable references. Our task is just to gather these referenes. If it is "anglocentric", too bad, that's because you didn't provide sufficient references from the Russian or German viewpoint.
Historically, what happened was that I happened to find a couple of references suggesting that Korean is the hardest-to-learn language. These references were suppressed by Kjoonlee ( talk · contribs), apparently a Korean expat, for no reason other than WP:IDONTLIKEIT. After some time I became fed up and walked away. Since then, the confusion here on this talkpage has just become worse, with insightful comments such as Utopial's "Including some of these studies is also OR" (wtf?) who took it upon himself to call the artice "uneducated" and "a disgrace to the linguistics field" again for no coherent reason, although he did ramble about "a yahoo top contributor". What is going on here? Why does this topic attract comments of such abysmal qualtity? -- dab (𒁳) 20:04, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
I feel this article treats an artificially constricted topic. Replacing it with a new article on a slightly more general topic e.g. Comparative difficulty of acquisition of various languages (human) (I'm not really suggesting that as a title) would allow a more relaxed discussion of the features of various languages that tend to make them more or less easy to learn, without the narrow focus on "more difficult." EEng ( talk) 00:02, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
Oops, I confess my eyes glazed over when scanning the Talk page here. Keep up the good work. EEng ( talk) 03:13, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
"Wikipedia has lots of similar articles" is not an argument for notability (see wp:OTHERSTUFF). For the topic to be restricted to the popular perception of the relative difficulty of various languages, there would need to be reliable sources discussing such popular perceptions. Are there? (And here, BTW, we run into a really, really serious parochialism issue: such perceptions without doubt vary widely depending on the mother tongue of the perceiver. How could an intelligible article comprehend all that -- or would it just be "...perceptions among speakers of English"?) EEng ( talk) 15:01, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
OK now, um, what question is "one of the most popular questions"? Is it, Which language is hardest? (whatever that means)? Or is it, What are the popular perceptions regarding which languageis hardest? ? Anyway, Wikipedia can't have an article simply because it deals with an oft-posed question. If there are no reliable sources which can act as a basis for a presentation of actual answers to such a question (or, at least, of a framework by which the question might be usefully attacked), then it can't be the subject of a Wikipedia article. As it stands the article has few or no such sources. EEng ( talk) 17:34, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I didn't say an article should be based only on a single source. I also didn't say an article shouldn't try to answer questions people might have; I said that along with good intentions there must exist one or more reliable sources on which the article can be based. In particular, if such answers must be arrived at by synthesizing bits of 20 other articles, and there is no source (or to be clear, are no sources) which have done that work already, then Wikipedia can't present such answers. See wp:No_original_research#Synthesis_of_published_material_that_advances_a_position. Good luck to you all in refining the scope and building the article; I was just making a passing observation. EEng ( talk) 19:45, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
I keep reading about a study by the British Foreign Office that found the most difficult language to learn for British diplomats. (For example, on this article at usingenglish.com.) However, I haven't been able to locate the original source, and I can find no mention of it on the Foreign Office website. Is anyone aware of where it might be found? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 01:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I found a document on the Foreign Office Personnel Rules, which states that, among other things, the overseas allowance for diplomats is "also paid for language skills, varying according to the difficulty of the language". There may be more on this on their website - I shall have a look. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 13:23, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
I got a nice reply from the man at the National Archives. From the search he did for me, it looks like this might be the document we are looking for: 'Hard' languages and their relative degree of difficulty. It looks like I will have to shell out some cash to get this document into digital form, so I'd like to make sure it's the one we're after before I get an estimate. It is quite old (1950), and it seems reasonable to assume that the Foreign Office may have changed the way they measure language difficulty since then. Does anyone have advice? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 15:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
Requested move/dated|Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers}}
Most difficult language to learn → Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers — The difficulty of a language depends highly on what languages you already speak. The present title, however, implies that there is a "most difficult language" in absolute terms, which is not the general view in linguistics as far as I can see. Restricting the article to the difficulty of languages for native English speakers would allow for a much clearer direction in writing the article, and would avoid much of the arguments about scope, adding new languages, etc. that can be seen on the talk page archives. I am also concerned that the concept of a "most difficult language" in absolute terms does not have any reliable sources that can prove its notability, whereas the concept of the most difficult language for native English speakers can be easily sourced. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page ( here and here) and in the recent deletion discussion. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 03:54, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
A good seminal paper to cite there would be the following:
rʨanaɢ ( talk) 14:52, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
It is important to remember that this article must be written accurately. My edits to the phonology section were to remove the absolutes that implied "all speakers have trouble (or ease) doing X". Japanese speakers can HEAR the difference between [r] and [l], the problem they have is in producing the difference when they speech center is conditioned to vary them by environment. English speakers have the same problem with initial [ts] and [ŋ]--they can hear the sounds there, but they just have a very difficult time producing them there. -- Taivo ( talk) 17:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
"Allophone" is really not all that technically esoteric or abstruse of a term -- it's among the first things students learn in an introductory beginning Linguistics 101 class, and a number of people outside formal academic linguistics are familiar with it (including many foreign language teachers). If removing the term "allophone" would create difficulties for the article, I support keeping it... AnonMoos ( talk) 15:39, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
This sentence is a bit of a mouthful: "These sounds do not always appear to pose significant problems for second language learners, unless they are radically different than sounds in the native language, such as pharyngeals or clicks to a speaker whose native language does not contain them." Is there a way of making this more readable? — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 03:01, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: page moved. This move does not mean that the suggestions for merging or considering a better name are invalid. Those efforts should continue. Vegaswikian ( talk) 21:31, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Most difficult language to learn → Difficulty of learning languages — Relisted. -- rgpk ( comment) 20:46, 4 April 2011 (UTC) I think difficulty is more appropriate than most difficult because there doesn't seem to be agreement in the literature about which the best way to measure difficulty is, let alone which language is the most difficult. If we imply that there is a "most difficult" language in the title, we also invite the argument of who the language is most difficult for; difficulty of learning a second language depends heavily on what languages a person speaks, and we do not have space to follow this through for every language combination. Most difficult could also imply that there is a "most difficult" language in absolute terms, but as far as I can see the literature does not back this idea up. These issues have already been discussed at length on the talk page ( here and here), in the recent deletion discussion, and in the recent requested move discussion that was delisted halfway through. — Mr. Stradivarius ( drop me a line) 02:44, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
{{
seealso}}
linked from that subsection of the SLA article, and then a more academic-y title would be ok I think.
rʨanaɢ (
talk)
15:18, 9 April 2011 (UTC)I think Grammar is what could determine the difficulty of a language alot more, followed by the phonetics (such as pronunciation). Like an isolating language is easy, and an agglutinative language is intermediate but an inflecting language is hardcore. I can very much call Basque the hardest language ever, it takes like books and books to explain it's grammar. Those scientific racists are ignorant, they say Europeans have a sophisticated language. Just look at English, it's not that hard, I'm not even sure where English falls into.
Here's a following example of a made up extremely difficult language.
"I love rainbows
I/Me = Fulazmingaru love = Pustaskishamaruna Rainbows = Baluumoucharamu
" Balum Fulaz Garu muuchmaramiyat Taskishapustaruna minsijirats " — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.159.9.234 ( talk • contribs) 06:36, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Well, at last, we have reached a point of closure with Vegaswikian moving the article to Difficulty of learning languages. But just as he said, we shouldn't let this stop the discussion about the possibility of merging this article with second language acquisition. Myself, I have begun to feel that the real issue in whether we should merge or not is that of space. It feels better to me to have this topic as a section inside another article, because it is not usually considered a valid topic in SLA, and giving it its own article seems to be giving the subject a credence that it doesn't deserve. But, as Taivo says, it is useful for readers, and while being useful is not a good reason to have an article on something, it is something that can be taken into consideration.
To balance these two viewpoints, I propose a practical solution: we should merge if we can condense the article down enough, but if we can't, we should leave it as a standalone page. As the present main contributor to second language acquisition, I am perhaps in a special position to comment on this. I can confirm that the article is pressed for space - I have already split long sections out into sub-articles, and even so, it is still missing some essential sections such as sociolinguistic views on SLA. I am also concerned about undue weight - a large section on difficulty might erroneously cause readers to think it is as important a topic in SLA as say, interlanguage or sequences of acquisition. Is it possible to work difficulty into the article without causing an undue weight problem? I would like to hear your views. — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 13:53, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
About Rosenberg, A. (1979). Lingvisticæ Investigationes:III 3(2). 323-339 - this study was really not intended to be taken seriously. I've read it, and the author basically goes through all the major languages looking for the equivalent of English's "It's all Greek to me". For example, although English picks out Greek, the Greeks have a phrase that says "that sounds Chinese to me" (actually, I can't remember the actual phrase or language - this is just an example off the top of my head to demonstrate the method). He then goes through all similar phrases in all the languages, and works out who is at the top of the tree. It just happens to be Chinese. I notice the sentence in the article contains caveats about his claims, but I don't it belongs anywhere near a section that is trying to represent scientific consensus on the matter. We could maybe include it at the bottom of the article in a "myth of the hardest language" section or similar if we find enough pop science examples... — Mr. Stradivarius ♫ 09:54, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
Has a decent discussion of some of the issues mentioned at this article, as well as links to some other sources that might be more WP:RS (although less accurate--this source has some valuable caveats about those other sources and the woman who wrote it is more of an expert than the writers of the more "official" sources probably are, but unfortunately it's still just a blog post). rʨanaɢ ( talk) 21:07, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
This article states a list of 5 most difficult languages in the world with details. This might be very useful for those who seeks to learn a new language.
Greetings and salutations, all! I would like to thank this opportunity to inform you all that I have taken the liberty of merging all of the content of this article into the article w:Second-language acquisition per TEMPLATE:afd-mergeto (Date: January 2013). Thank you and happy wikiying! Illegitimate Barrister ( talk) 06:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)