中文是最难学的语言？

看了篇文章说据UNESCO(联合国教科文组织)统计，汉语是世界上最难的学的语言 －我们可以学会世界上最难的语言，还怕别的吗?

我觉得, 这样的话随口说说还行, 别真的当作“证据”。仿佛是无论在什么地方我们都要争个排名一样。首先, 语言学上说“Languages are equally complex and valid.” 我也没有找到可信的资料证明UNESCO有过这样的统计(如果你找到了欢迎分享给我)。 其次，这个命题也不够清楚，“汉语是世界上最难学的语言”是对谁来说的？是对英语母语的人还是日语韩语为母语的人? “最难学”的界定是在什么基础之上？最后, 第一语言的习得和第二语言的习得毕竟是不同的。

不过对英语为母语的人来说，中文确实让人头疼。BBC上说:

Dutch is said to be the easiest language for native English speakers to pick up, while research shows that for those native English speakers who already know another language, the five most difficult languages to get your head around are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

对他们来说中文的writing system和tone是最头疼的。有位叫David Moser的人在1991年写了篇正儿八经的吐槽学习中文的文章，叫做 "为什么中文这么TM的难?"「Why Chinese is So Damn Hard?」

David Moser（莫大伟）是我们很熟悉一个面孔了

在第一段他写道:

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

What makes a language difficult?

《经济学人》的这篇文章或许会给我们一些启示。

注意Each leaner is differernt下面小字部分

EVERYONE has the intuition that some languages are more difficult than others. For the native English-speaker, professional agencies that teach foreign languages have made it quite clear. America’s state department reckons that Spanish, Swedish or French can be learned in 575-600 class hours (“Category 1”).

Russian, Hebrew and Icelandic are more difficult (1100 class hours, “Category 2”).

And Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin and a few others are in the hardest group, Category 3, requiring 2200 class hours.

But what makes a language difficult?

How long it takes to learn a language does not answer which ones are hard independent of the learner’s first language (nor the related question “How hard is English?”) Ranking languages on a universal scale of difficulty is itself difficult and controversial. Some languages proliferate endings on verbs and nouns, like Latin and Russian. Such inflection can be hard for learners who are not used to it.Several years ago, two scholars found that smaller languages (those with less contact with other languages) tended to have more inflection than big ones. By contrast, creole languages—which arise between groups that do not share a common language—are thought by scholars to be systematically simpler than other languages, even after they become “normal” languages with native speakers. They typically lack heavy inflection.

Inflection -- 例如英文中的动词时态变化，名次单复数的变化都叫conjugation. 而我们中文就没有这种形式, 所以学起来会很不习惯。

But inflection is only one element of “hardness”. Some languages have simple sound systems(such as the Polynesian languages). Others have a wide variety of sounds, including rare ones that outsiders find hard to learn (like the languages of the Caucasus).

Sound system. 例如对英语为母语的人来说，中文的q就很难发。例如在葡萄牙语中没有p这个音.

Some languages (like English) lack or mostly lack grammatical gender. Some have dozens of genders (also known as “noun classes”) that must be learned for each noun.

Grammatical gender. She和He是永远的痛姑且不说。例如法语中的形容词和名次还分阴阳性，要特意去记。

Languages can have rigidly fixed or flexible word order. They can put verbs before objects or even objects before subjects. Yet it is not clear how to rank the relative difficulty of exotic consonants, dozens of genders or heavy inflection.

例如法语中“我爱你”的顺序是“我你爱”

Another recnet approcah sought to go around the problem by finding languages that had the most unusual features, skirting the question of whether those features were “hard”. Comparing 21 feature parameters across hundreds of languages, they ranked 239 languages. Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Mexico, was the weirdest. English came in place number 33. Basque, Hungarian, Hindi and Cantonese ranked as among the most “normal”. The researchers did not find any larger similarities between “weird” and “normal” languages. (For example, they do not claim that smaller or bigger languages tend to be “weirder”.) But again, the caveat is that this only compares which languages are unusual in a global context, not which are hard.

So the two most robust findings seem to be that smaller languages are more heavily inflected, and that languages farther from your own in the linguistic family tree will be harder for you to learn. If you want a challenge, a good bet is to pick a tiny language from halfway around the world.

阅读原文: Why Chinese is so damn hard?