There is No Such Thing as the 'Hardest Language'

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

*Featured Tiktoks*
you good? from thehalamander
ze lo big deal, from me

[jillevi]

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

[moonlighthalf]

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.

[idraote]

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

[KaKarol]

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

[mrleaf]

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

[gaoda]

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.

[vladimirbmp]

You talked about TikTok becoming unprofitable and that being the reason you're gonna try to focus on YouTube, 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!🥳

[gracehughes]

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

[stummyhort]

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 Youtube :)

[haydenconstantine]

Watching the ads in full, not skipping them

[azarias]

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 !!

[Thelaretus]

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.

[okthanks]

«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).»

[DanTheCaptain]

Every language is hard. Learning a language is not an easy feat. You’re retraining your brain to learn a whole new set of rules and sounds and a whole new way of thinking. You’re literally reprogramming your brain. There ain’t no 5 minute videos that’ll teach you that. You gotta put in the hours. It’ll make you mad, it’ll make you cry, your head will probably hurt from thinking, but it’s on of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.

[ShortRacoon]

Language 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.

[Fan_of_Ado]

I am bilingual in both English and Chinese and understand a few dialects (hokkien, cantonese). While spoken Chinese is certainly around the same difficulty as English, the writing system is certainly more difficult. The reason is that there is no connection between the characters and sound they make. This means that given a completely new character, you can only guess how it is said and might be completely off. This is quite different where in English, what you see is what you say. That said, given sufficient knowledge in Chinese, you can get pretty accurate with your guesses but that takes longer than learning something like an alphabet.

[thequeertelope]

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

[ondrejvasak]

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.

[Vaporwavee.]

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

[jan_Masewin]

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