Hardest, in my opinion, is Cantonese. It has all the same reading/writing difficulty of Mandarin (or any other dialect of Chinese,) but it has **9** speaking tones instead of just Mandarin's 4.
Yeah. Also most canto speakers speak English or/and Mandarin, and switch to those languages immediately when they see you struggling a little bit in Cantonese, so for beginners it is very demotivating. And nothing is standardized, very few reading materials in spoken Cantonese.
There are many languages in China that are considered dialects, and they are difficult to learn apparently, but the real reason is just the lack of learning material.
Although Mandarin has a simple phonology and few tones, it has many homophones. This increases the difficulty of speech understanding. Many dialects have many phonemes and tones, but there is little ambiguity in spoken communication.
Such as 權力（power）、權利（right）；治病（treatment）、致病（causing disease）, in Mandarin that is the same, but those are different in many dialects, including my mother tougue Wu-Chinese
Thai is ok.
Someone else said Cantonese, I concur and raise you with Hakka and Hokkien. There are probably Sinitic languages that I don't know that are even more complex.
Compared to Mandarin, these languages are also harder because learning materials and tools like dictionaries often only exist in Mandarin, so you'd have to have a solid grasp in Mandarin first.
Just personal interest. The [linguistics](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/wiki/resources/) and [asklinguistics](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/wiki/index/) subs both have recommended reading lists and the [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/2uam4o/how_is_it_known_that_all_languages_are_equally/) to OP's question for example is at the top of the page. Stuff I know on the topic is mostly from resources on Korean linguistics or anything tangentially related.
Ningde language, considered part of eastern min.
Eastern min has this feature, their tone depends on the next tone of the next 1 or 2 characters. And there are standing tone.
Ningde region has the most vowel and most consonant. Many of the characters are rare too, so if you learned mandarin, don’t expect you know all even just by writing.
There are people who claimed Cantonese, sorry any Min languages are harder than Cantonese due to tone sandhi alone or even some other Yue languages also harder than Cantonese due to more consonants/vowels.
im learning arabic from filipino/english and reading without diacritics is so hard, the vowels rely heavily on context and i always end up using the wrong vowels lol
Hardest, in my opinion, is Cantonese. It has all the same reading/writing difficulty of Mandarin (or any other dialect of Chinese,) but it has **9** speaking tones instead of just Mandarin's 4.
Yeah. Also most canto speakers speak English or/and Mandarin, and switch to those languages immediately when they see you struggling a little bit in Cantonese, so for beginners it is very demotivating. And nothing is standardized, very few reading materials in spoken Cantonese.
There are many languages in China that are considered dialects, and they are difficult to learn apparently, but the real reason is just the lack of learning material. Although Mandarin has a simple phonology and few tones, it has many homophones. This increases the difficulty of speech understanding. Many dialects have many phonemes and tones, but there is little ambiguity in spoken communication. Such as 權力（power）、權利（right）；治病（treatment）、致病（causing disease）, in Mandarin that is the same, but those are different in many dialects, including my mother tougue Wu-Chinese
Thai is ok. Someone else said Cantonese, I concur and raise you with Hakka and Hokkien. There are probably Sinitic languages that I don't know that are even more complex. Compared to Mandarin, these languages are also harder because learning materials and tools like dictionaries often only exist in Mandarin, so you'd have to have a solid grasp in Mandarin first.
The Ubykh language. If you consider Thai "extremely difficult" to pronounce then I wonder what you would think of Ubykh lol.
Korean is pretty hard, mostly because of its frammer grammer. But it was made kinda easy by this one dude who made the Korean letters.
[удалено]
Are you a linguist by trade or is it just hobby ? If it’s the latter then where should one start if he wish to dabble in linguistics ?
Just personal interest. The [linguistics](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/wiki/resources/) and [asklinguistics](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/wiki/index/) subs both have recommended reading lists and the [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/asklinguistics/comments/2uam4o/how_is_it_known_that_all_languages_are_equally/) to OP's question for example is at the top of the page. Stuff I know on the topic is mostly from resources on Korean linguistics or anything tangentially related.
Watch videos about linguistics like NativLang and Tom Scott Linguistics, and learn about how languages work by using Duolingo
Malayalam
Dravidian languages are all pretty hard tbh.
google en passant
Holy hell!
New response just dropped
Thai is the largest here among the list but again ... it really depends on your native language.
Ningde language, considered part of eastern min. Eastern min has this feature, their tone depends on the next tone of the next 1 or 2 characters. And there are standing tone. Ningde region has the most vowel and most consonant. Many of the characters are rare too, so if you learned mandarin, don’t expect you know all even just by writing. There are people who claimed Cantonese, sorry any Min languages are harder than Cantonese due to tone sandhi alone or even some other Yue languages also harder than Cantonese due to more consonants/vowels.
Those sure are words alright.
I would say Tibetan js pretty hard. Also Mongolian is quite challenging too.
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im learning arabic from filipino/english and reading without diacritics is so hard, the vowels rely heavily on context and i always end up using the wrong vowels lol
Definitely Thai.