Comments by "Canice Tang" (@canicetang8837) on "Top 10 Difficult Languages to Learn" video.

  1. Not really, I speak a few languages myself including all of those you have mentioned. German is what you called "old English" where the traditional "King's English" were based on. For example, "have had, had had, and so on" which were taught decades ago but not now. Also English has lots of exceptions in the rules and thousands of dialects all over the world. Chinese is difficult in speaking and properly pronouncing verbal dialogues due to 'tonal' levels. Mandarin has a minimum of 4 levels and Cantonese has 9 (Most in the world). Japanese is more structured grammatically than Chinese because Chinese does not have 'tenses' describing past, present or future. Hence Chinese speakers often have trouble understanding grammatical structures. Japanese have 3 types of characters (Hiragana - native, Katakana - translation verbs from foreign languages (mainly English but not all) with sounds gerund not existed in Hiragana, such as the "f", Kanji (Chinese Characters) - which can be used to condense the Hiragana words and specify the intentions/meanings in the sentences. The difficult part is the "On - Chinese meaning", usually have one or two saying, and the "Kun - Japanese meaning", depends on the variety, you can have up to 20 or more for a common Kanji. Just to learn the typical "Toyo Kanji", which is equivalent to about 2,000 to 3,000 characters for adequate level of comprehension to read Japanese Newspapers. Takes a typical student all to way to graduating from Secondary School. Even then, some University graduates will have problems writing them. While you might be able to get away from simple English in big Japanese cities because of the metropolis crowd and the ex-pats. Once you are away and in the countryside, good luck to you because even I have problems speaking Japanese in Osaka due to different dialects. I learned Japanese in Canada in the typical Tokyo (Kanto) dialect and they speak much differently (Kansai) in Western Japan in Osaka and Kobe. It is same as learning Spanish in Europe where it is more Madrid based. However, in North America, Spanish is based more in the Mexican base from the standard Mexico City dialect.
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