There is No Such Thing as the "Hardest Language"

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It's a lot more straightforward than you think, which is to say, not straightforward at all.
If anything is off please let me know so I can make corrections.
Timestamps
0:00 - intro
1:12 - why people think languages are complicated
2:38 - english complexities you haven't noticed
4:53 - no, chinese is not the hardest language
6:37 - children & fluency
7:45 - naturally occurring complexities
9:18 - the easiest language?
11:59 - ending thoughts
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1 май 2024

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Комментарии : 630

@jillevi2376 25 дней назад

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 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

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 21 день назад

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 20 дней назад

@@Rangskalso the numerous exceptions for english just in general

@ZilingShen 20 дней назад

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.

@moonlighthalf7378 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

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 If you can, try to guess what is my country☺

@sparksbet 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

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 23 дня назад

@@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 23 дня назад

I had never heard before that Ancient Chinese had verb tenses. Can you recommend where I can learn more about this?

@KaKarol 25 дней назад

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 10 дней назад

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 9 дней назад

Native English speakers never have to learn another language because everyone else learns English 😂

@KaKarol 7 дней назад

@@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.

@sammakesmusic1 7 дней назад

@@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 4 дня назад

@@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.

@vladimirbmp 25 дней назад

You talked about TikTok becoming unprofitable and that being the reason you're gonna try to focus on RU-vid, 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 24 дня назад

RU-vid has it's problems too but I think they're a little better

@idraote 25 дней назад

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

@clinton4161 21 день назад

You can then use Japanese to learn Korean. They have a lot in common.

@dekim_37 20 дней назад

Same, I'm using it to learn both Russian and Hindi!

@deadbynight4 20 дней назад

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 19 дней назад

I'm using english to learn german 😢

@EvGamerBETA 19 дней назад

What a coinkidink. I do to

@gaoda1581 24 дня назад

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 22 дня назад

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 18 дней назад

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 16 дней назад

@@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 15 дней назад

@@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 13 дней назад

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 25 дней назад

New Yuval dropped everyone tap in

@flaskofbloodbornetears 24 дня назад

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 23 дня назад

@@flaskofbloodbornetearsEnglish moment

@gracehughes8776 25 дней назад

You’re the only person i’m willing to not skip ads for

@ubeydcalis 20 дней назад

the glazing is crazy

@Num3whoknocks 20 дней назад

Great job, you made him an extra 1/10th of a cent

@haydenconstantine310 25 дней назад

Watching the ads in full, not skipping them

@aspoon4801 25 дней назад

Glazing ☝️

@jeromewashere7448 25 дней назад

Same(they are unskippables)

@ivanharo950 24 дня назад

@@aspoon4801how is it glazing he is just helping out yuval cause he’s a good creator💀

@user-jh8dk2ml3y 24 дня назад

@@ivanharo950 What's glazing mean?

@papyrus_12 24 дня назад

@@user-jh8dk2ml3yUnnecessarily praising someone basically

@stummyhort 17 дней назад

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 RU-vid :)

@hayabusa1329 9 дней назад

I wonder how Native English speakers feel about their language being learned by everyone and it being the lingua franca

@Nyver253 3 дня назад

@@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 2 дня назад

@@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

@azarias5666 25 дней назад

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 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

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 24 дня назад

@@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 24 дня назад

@@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

@Thelaretus 19 дней назад

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.

@thequeertelope7941 21 день назад

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

@okthanks 14 дней назад

«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 8 дней назад

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 День назад

@@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 День назад

@@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 День назад

@@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.

@jan_Masewin 24 дня назад

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

@davidsalterego4481 10 дней назад

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 9 дней назад

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 9 дней назад

@@SJrad Great point

@mihan5660 6 дней назад

@@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 5 дней назад

i agree and think this entire video misses the point.

@mihan5660 5 дней назад

@@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

@squammy3536 25 дней назад

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

@ondrejvasak1054 10 дней назад

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.

@Adam-Alkhalil 23 дня назад

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

@nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh777 25 дней назад

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

@Vaporwavee. 25 дней назад

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

@laurenb8001 24 дня назад

Super gr8 vid my dude, loving the long-form content

@shanewhelan1633 23 дня назад

Lets go Yuval 🎉 hope you make more of these❤

@GlitchSquix 25 дней назад

LETS GO YUVAL UPLOAD

@NurtChurt 25 дней назад

lovin the long form stuff, really good video

@famouscurls5323 25 дней назад

great job keeping up the content grind mate we love supporting ur passions

@faith_updated7255 25 дней назад

please post often I will literally watch these types of videos for hours 🙏🙏

@skatehair5876 24 дня назад

Great video love when you upload!!

@JohnnyKarpy 24 дня назад

So amazing! Loved the video it was so interesting great work!

@bo-williamgilligan1456 24 дня назад

Great to have you back on youtube Yuval!

@OperatorNoah 20 дней назад

Very well done video! Would love to see more long form content.

@YeeeeGreg 17 дней назад

Very cool video and very well made. I really like the way you articulated all of this

@anomalo. 24 дня назад

yuval upload my day is better now

@reachplayer5201 25 дней назад

Love the long form content man!

@wintrywind 24 дня назад

YUVAL! oh my god I've stopped watching tiktok and you're one of the content creator that i miss, though thank god RU-vid recommendations gave me your content again it's a blessing.

@azoo6269 15 дней назад

nice to not see your thoughts limited by the short-form format. keep it up!

@Ayla_Furtado 19 дней назад

thanks for this video, it´s really motivating for language learners, even if it was not meant to be

@takuroczykotek 20 дней назад

Wow this is really informative thanks

@geffbob8960 24 дня назад

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!

@northstarradio 22 дня назад

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

@zhet 3 дня назад

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

@DeggaTheDev 18 дней назад

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

@injeraenjoyer4570 24 дня назад

YUVAL!!! love you on tiktok man!! Can't wait to see more

@learneratheart2564 12 дней назад

OMGosh! I've been saying this for years! Great video 😃

@PulseFIare 25 дней назад

yippeeeeee Yuval upload

@GrungerTheBunger 24 дня назад

We love you, Yuval!

@krakencore6491 10 дней назад

Great video Yuval. You should make more longform content

@HERUSUKAeigo-lt3fc 11 дней назад

This video was honestly perfect at explaining the, in my opinion, only correct answer to the conversation of "Hardest language". You explained all the relevant points perfectly and followed them with concrete examples. Good job👍

@uamsnof 24 дня назад

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 10 дней назад

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 10 дней назад

@@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 9 дней назад

@@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 2 дня назад

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 День назад

@@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 7 дней назад

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!

@Abhi-wl5yt 25 дней назад

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.

@godominus9222 24 дня назад

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.

@user-bp3lp6nv4u 21 день назад

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

@godominus9222 21 день назад

@@user-bp3lp6nv4u 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 10 дней назад

@@user-bp3lp6nv4uA language of 5k words is inherently easier to master than a language of 200k words. Just physically in terms of brain capacity.

@ira1420 8 дней назад

@@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

@amratoski2780 5 дней назад

Thats not true@@ira1420. A spanish speaker here. Never got confused because there are no genders or something similar, nothing even close to that. There a 2 big things that made me lose hair in the process of learning english: 1. Pronunciation: bro yall just wrong. You cannot say the exact same letter in 25 different ways, like what? 2. Irregular verbs: basically nothing follow any patter. Grammar rules shouldnt exist in english because theres exception of the exception of the exception of the exception... But in general, i would that english is among the most spoken languages, the easiest one.

@mrleaf6055 14 дней назад

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

@corbinblack6341 25 дней назад

Yuval you are amazing great video such a big fan

@hermonymusofsparta 3 дня назад

Great video!

@andrwzal 21 день назад

alright, u motivated me to keepin my journey w korean

@josh9159 21 день назад

Yuval you are really going up in the world 😢😊

@ellepalmer4590 22 дня назад

great video! also a jan pi toki pona (edit): I've spoken t.p. fluently for almost a year now, and learned it along side a friend. since we speak it every day together, it to has developed a: english pidgin, slang, new words, idioms, new/and more complex grammar, and the use of tones unlike englisj (posing a question with a falling tone) (we are both native to english and only speak english (im learning other languages too)

@Ghosty45 25 дней назад

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

@xetsuma 21 день назад

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 19 дней назад

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 16 дней назад

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 15 дней назад

"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.

@oriyadid 25 дней назад

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!

@zara5096 23 дня назад

will watch all the ads on this one get your bag bestie

@KipperDipperr 24 дня назад

so real yuval, yet another W

@mattcustance5806 9 дней назад

“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.

@MD-bs5oc 24 дня назад

I agree that the difficulty of a language mostly depends on whether you know related languages or languages with similar concepts. However, I'd say that things like noun genders, cases, verb conjugations/tenses, tones etc. do make a language more difficult compared to others that do not have these features. German and Dutch for example are very similar languages, yet Dutch has simplified a lot in modern times. --German has three genders, Dutch has only two. --German has four cases, while Dutch has only one (nominative, like English). --German has more tenses, as well as more variance in conjugations per tense. --Dutch spelling is more phonetic/consistent than German spelling, it also has fewer symbols In my opinion these aspects make Dutch fundamentally easier than German, no matter what your background is. While both German and Dutch people can pick up the other language relatively quickly, I've noticed German people have an easier time learning Dutch than the other way around. I've spoken with people who have learned both (or have tried to), and all of them told me they found Dutch much easier (mostly because of the above points). If there are two languages that are exactly same, except language A has an irregular verb while language B has not, doesn't that automatically make language A slightly more difficult? Learning Russian cases is easier if you already speak another Slavic language with cases. But would any Slavic person find a language like English more difficult because of its lack of cases? No, they'll find it difficult because of all the other aspects like articles, spelling and phrasal verbs, but not because it doesn't have the case system that they're familiar with! Would a Spanish person find Chinese difficult because it doesn't have verb conjugations? Nope, they'll find the writing system and tones very difficult, but the fact that verb conjugations are nonexistant poses no obstacle for them in the slightest. Finally, I'm not sure why you dismiss artificial languages so easily. They function like any other language as a tool for communication. Esperanto was specifically made to be easy to learn for a large amount of people. It has few tenses, no conjugations, 100% consistent spelling and phonetics etc. As a result, it is quite easy to learn for people of any background. If some languages are universally easier than others, then surely there must be universally more difficult ones as well?

@niwa_s 16 дней назад

In what sense is German spelling less phonetic or consistent?

@davidd.9951 21 день назад

cool video, yuval! i suggesting finding a better way to record your audio however when you are walking outdoors. i think it will help maintain the quality of the videos as the drop in audio quality at the end was noticeable.

@sebwk01 24 дня назад

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 7 дней назад

Stå på, sebwk01! Det blir gradvis lettere etter hvert, så lenge man ikke legger seg og bare gir opp. :-)

@gabrieladimitrova341 11 дней назад

Great video.❤

@anotherone204 24 дня назад

Don't worry, brother Yuval. We've got you convered. Inshallah, it'll be worth it.

@4miopo 13 дней назад

Thank you! Language difficulty is relative to what you speak already!

@beastdynasty6221 23 дня назад

My glorious smart man yuval posted we NEED to lock in😭

@Bayyyro 24 дня назад

2:06 Monolingual beta*

@wintrywind 24 дня назад

Hi fellow hyperpolyglot gigachad alpha male who's very attractive to every woman and man on the planet watcher

@fionaross9664 21 день назад

Keep on Keeping on!

@ShortRacoon 10 дней назад

Languages 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.

@TheLordofconfusion 19 дней назад

great commentary, I´ve had the same opinion for years

@Timnormas 25 дней назад

Awesome video please make more

@jamespond3668 20 дней назад

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.

@lizzie6028 15 дней назад

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.

@spongehub8246 25 дней назад

Yuval on youtube already feels natural

@yakinseahorse7642 18 дней назад

I know you from TikTok, very cool to see you making longer-form content :) Great video.

@sappyginger 20 дней назад

I agree! 🎉 Was thinking about making a similar video actually 😅

@zachroot5228 24 дня назад

I LOVE YUVAL !!!!!!

@ianstarkm 24 дня назад

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 10 дней назад

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.

@MSK.L 2 дня назад

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...

@AlmondShinKat 23 дня назад

I watched a 2 minute ad for you Yuval

@rollizle 16 дней назад

תודה בשביל הסרטון יובל! 😅

@whatplan4335 24 дня назад

great video more please !

@juanandresrueda4957 2 дня назад

The last part is so true, a lot of memes from the hispanic community are brought directly from the english community, yet it is extremely rare to see a meme originated from either brazil or Portugal despite both being big countries with a very similar language to Spanish

@bbroderickmar 11 дней назад

omd why did i not know he uploaded another vid two weeks ago

@magic_milkman3434 23 дня назад

commenting for better engagement stats to help yuval

@willianalee6336 9 дней назад

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.

@theo7049 16 дней назад

I really liked this video.

@brendanmcdowell1395 24 дня назад

Wake up babe long Yuval content dropped

@MichiaLatia 24 дня назад

Thanks for the great video this should be spread like wildfire 🎉

@aspoon4801 25 дней назад

Great video

@maxf9291 20 дней назад

Just came across your channel, but you get another subscriber because this video echoes the thoughts I’ve had for a l long time but can’t articulate this well! It’s frustrating to see people make a hierarchy of languages by how “complicated” they are because that’s a pretty meaningless metric. It only has negative effects on people learning languages too.

@GeneralXD1 20 дней назад

I 100% agree with everything in this video. Bravo

@Saamu1612 22 дня назад

great video great content

@DragonsAreAwesome45 25 дней назад

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 17 дней назад

John McWhorter(linguist) suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language for the world.

@philipdavis7521 13 дней назад

This overlooks one aspect that can complicate language learning - the 'forgiveness' of the language to mistakes. Some languages (e.g. German or Vietnamese) require a lot of precision - a fairly minor error can completely change the meaning of a sentence. English is a particularly forgiving language (possibly because of its hybrid origins?), which is one reason its so popular for learners.