https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/language-families-of-the...
Piracy has its awesome use-cases if not abused.
I grew up in Iran where we have access to very little. Had it not been for piratebay, I could not educate myself on so, so many topics. Even Udacity was blocked there cause their videos are hosted on Youtube!
So if someone reads HN and they need to pirate it, I'm pretty sure McWhorter would be okay, he's a chill dude.
I believe the problem lies with people who can buy it but decide to not; in which case it becomes abusive.
So I wouldn't express dismay just at the suggestion of piracy. It's more nuanced imho.
Also "hard" is difficult to quantify. Humans are odd and quirky, and so are the languages they create (with perhaps the exception of conlangs like Esperanto or computer languages, but even those inherit the idiosyncrasies of their creators - Perl is a good example). Every language has its weird and difficult aspects, some more than others.
Japanese is "hard" because it has a complex writing system, but (for an English speaker) the pronunciation and grammar aren't particularly difficult: in fact I'd argue that Japanese is probably easier to learn to pronounce for an Anglophone than, say, French, and the verbs are considerably easier too. And a Japanese speaker would have an advantage in understanding Chinese characters, even though the languages have no kinship. Having once taught English, I'd say it's no cakewalk either, even for speakers of other Germanic languages: the spelling system barely deserves the name "system" and English verbal phrases are downright weird (put up with == "tolerate"? How?).
For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure.
Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese theres even kind of a leet-like thing in japan to spell japanese sentences with only kanji so they look chinese
and the funniest part? the chinese themselves can actually somewhat understand these sentences
If you are native Finnish speaker left alone in a village where the only practiced language is Arabic, you are going to speak Arabic pretty fast! If you speak 20 different languages and as soon as you try to speak Danish the person in front of you answers in English, you will have hard time learning it.
"Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese"
But this is not a representative example of what Hungarian is like.
Btw there's a saying that Hungarian originated from a Slovakian guy falling down the stairs and cursing.
Czech has different specialties, like vowelless words (vchrstls) and vowelless tongue twisters (strč prst skrz krk).
Also the weird-looking "nenaolejuje-li mě Julie, naolejuji já ji", which is a surprisingly normal sentence (unless Julia lubricates me, I will lubricate her).
https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang...
Category V, requiring 2200 hours of study, has "languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and consists of Arabic, *Japanese, Korean, Cantonese (Chinese) and Mandarin (Chinese), with the asterisk indicating that Japanese is considered the hardest of the lot.
Obvious caveat: the Foreign Service only teaches languages useful for diplomats, meaning that obscure regional languages won't make the cut.
So being "literate" (able to read and write) is different than being "fluent" (able to listen and speak) (not sure that's the definition of fluent, just pointing out there are more issues.)
Which linguists claim this and how do they measure fluency?
Why all well-known Eurasian languages? Lesser-known languages have difficult features galore, especially for European speakers. (The first example which comes to mind is the Papuan language Kalam, which has only ~100 verbs, but uses these to build up precise descriptions of complex actions in a way which is quite difficult for the European speaker to master; but there of course many more examples of difficult-to-learn features like this.)
When it comes to how difficult a language is to learn it depends greatly on what languages you already know and how distantly related (if at all) the new language you want to learn is from a language you already speak, shared language features or phonology or vocabulary also help out as well, etc.
For example while Polish may be difficult for an English speaker it does share some mutual intelligibility with Slovak and Czech, likewise with Finnish and Estonian. Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages but Japanese makes extensive use of Kanji/Hanzi, being fluent in one of these will help you understand the written language of the other faster and knowing either will give you a significant leg up in learning the other over somebody who only speaks English.
There's actually an NLP shared task challenging researchers to automatically detect grammar errors learners make when writing Chinese: http://www.cged.tech/
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...]
(I am not a linguist) (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26868259)
Or so I hear.
f12, ctrl+shift+p, type disable js, reload
After enough time, I don't think picking up Japanese was "hard" per say, just very time-consuming. The thing with languages is that a lot of text written in modern times was not written with the intent of being difficult to understand; there are just a lot of words to choose from to get a specific point across, so you have to learn them all. Even texts that contain a lot of uncommonly used terminology boil down to learning the words you haven't ever encountered in 5 years of practice.
The main roadblock I encountered learning Japanese was not knowing the characters and common grammatical patterns to anchor yourself with that are second nature to people that know the language. With enough practice, there are plenty of times that I'm not even conscious of the effort it took to understand a different language when consuming foreign media. It's a weird feeling when you stop taking it for granted for a moment.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232885372_Is_Danish...
I'm sure it's hard to compare but if one child says "I can has cheeseburger?" and a different child says "May I have a cheeseburger?" we'd generally judge the second child to be more skilled in the language than the first. So, it's arguably not impossible to come up with some measure of when a child is speaking to some level of correctness and compare those across languages.
If you want a blind test you'd just ask lots of kids at different ages to do something "ask for a cheeseburger", transcribe the results, have native speakers, who don't know where the answers came from, judge which answers are not making grammar/conjugation mistakes. Some languages children will stop making mistakes much earlier than other languages which would at least suggest that some languages are harder than others (I'm sure there are confounding factors)
Interestingly, the geographically close but linguistically unrelated Hungarian makes up for all the vowels that Czech eschews. They're almost polar opposites in vowel usage.
However, Phoible is not exactly complete. E.g. Wikipedia has a different list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental,_alveolar_and_po...
I know that Czech also has Ž, but to my ears we pronounce it harder, so words like žrelo, or žrebiček ... it kind of comes close.
What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest).
* the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.
i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand
say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.