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Where can I find a virtual speaker for different languages?

Which two languages are so fundamentally different that a speaker of one will find most difficult to learn the other one?

  • Answer:

    I remembered seeing a graph that answers just that question.. or well, partly at least. It calculates the lexical distance between languages. Here it is: (search for "lexical distance among the languages") I personally believe the Chinese(mandarin) - Arabic couple would be a good match for completely opposite languages: Writing: 1. from left to right as opposed to right to left; 2. construction of the letters: Chinese: construction blocks add to form words:                 (woman) 女 + (child) 子 =  (good) 好 ..also the final word doesn't sound anything like the parts ( here nÇš + zi = hÇŽo ) Arabic: each of the letters has 4 ways in which it is written, depending on the place in the word -see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Letter_forms 3. Alphabet, - Arabic actually has one, Chinese (mandarin) doesn't Pronunciation: - difficulties in pronunciation are very different:  for Chinese there are the 4 accents that are hard to differentiate, for Arabic there are some sounds that are harder to tell apart (for the average english speaker), like some types of K, H, R, and S. I'm sure there are other things that are different, in grammar probably or like the fact there are no common roots for words (like for instance for romance to sing: [esp] cantar, [fr] chanter, [it] cantare all sound similar, right?).. but you get my point: Basically learning one of those languages doesn't help you, even a tiny little bit in learning the other.

Sanda Golcea at Quora Visit the source

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Depends on which language you use as a means for comparison. In general, a language where almost every possible feature differs from your native language will be most difficult, especially if it's not related to your language. If you speak an isolating language like Chinese, Vietnamese or Thai, then a highly inflectional or fusional (and irregular!) language such as Latin, German, Russian, Abkhaz, Hungarian will be very difficult. If you speak a language with only about 20 or 25 phonemes, then a language with a much higher amount of phoneme distinctions will be hard to learn for you, perhaps. Irregularity plays a role too. So there is no formula or single answer for your question, just this: The more different two languages are, the more difficult it will probably be for the speakers to learn the other language. This will be the language most "alien" to the speaker.

André Müller

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