What's the most difficult aspect in your target language?

As language learners, what’s the most difficult aspect in your target language?

Speaking, Listening, Reading or Writing?

As a Chinese learner, I would say speaking! The tones…:roll_eyes::exploding_head:

1 Like

As a Chinese learner I would say speaking as well as it is the aspect of the language I use most!

But then we have writing…well…

I used to have to write a lot by hand at university and was quite good at it, hours of practice made the process easier, however I haven’t written anything in a while, I just don’t have to. Even though I can recognise and pronounce all characters learned through writing when I read them in a text, I find myself struggling to remember the stroke order or even the whole character itself if I want to write it down

2 Likes

For me, the most challenging aspect is writing in Chinese characters. Remembering the correct strokes can be difficult. However, speaking is not as challenging, as Vietnamese and Chinese tones have some similarities. There are certain Mandarin words whose meanings I can guess, even if I haven’t learned them before, because their sounds are similar to Vietnamese.

2 Likes

As a Japanese learner, I was struggling with reading comprehension because of the language structure. In Japanese, the whole sentence is in the exact opposite to English. When I first started, I was shock because the verb would be at the end of the sentence, and there is rarely any subject included. My brain has to finish reading the whole sentence, rearrange each component and translate it to English. Not to mention, there are kanji that I don’t know how to pronounce or read. But it’s just something you can only overcome by being more exposed to the language. It gets easier.

But the learning curve was curving fr in the beginning.

1 Like

How many Kanji can you read roughly Holly? It’s tough with all the different pronunciations isn’t it :upside_down_face:

For me In Chinese, when speaking, getting out long sentences with the right grammar patterns, and without having to hesitate to think about which word to use amongst related words i.e. 关注 , 关心,专注, etc / or trying tp “translate” some English word.

Also, characters.

2 Likes

For Korean, it’s remembering all the vocab and learning how to speak naturally. As a native English speaker, I have no foundation I can draw on to remember words the same way for Spanish or French, so it’s pure memorization. And since Korean grammar is much more forgiving, I can construct sentences in a way that is understandable but knowing how to do it a Korean native speaker would is a big challenge.

For Vietnamese, the vocab is the most difficult for the same reason as above. Though I am a heritage speaker, so I have a better chance at making immediate connections than with Korean.

For French, using the correct prepositions and conjunctions are hard because there are so many and not completely the same as in English.

Spanish has been the “easiest” language for me so far, perhaps because I speak English and I started learning Spanish as a child. Nothing in particular seems very hard, just trying to get exposure to natural Spanish and speaking with natives!

5 Likes

For Chinese, it’s pronunciation… I seem to have no issue with being understood when speaking freely, but when reading dialogues out loud I often kinda stutter inbetween words because I try to pronounce stuff correctly and my brain doesn’t keep up.

For Japanese, it’s grammar. Complete opposite of Chinese - the pronunciation is very easy lol

3 Likes

As an English speaker learning Vietnamese, I think listening is the most difficult. I seldom understand anything spoken at normal conversational speed. Some phrases have opposite meaning but sound almost the same to me.

3 Likes

Vietnamese strikes me as one of the hardest to learn.

Having been to Saigon, and heard the language multiple times, I have huge respect for anyone who can speak/understand it even to base level! Not easy :woozy_face:

3 Likes

I’m studying Korean and speaking is the hardest. I have no interest in writing so that’s not even on the list. Reading is ok although my vocabulary is small and I need to look up a lot of words obviously. When it comes to speaking remembering the grammar is a pain because if it’s not perfect the person you’re speaking to likely won’t understand you. Unless they can literally predict what you’re about to say anyway. I studied Japanese so the word order is not a problem but I mix up Japanese with Korean and contrary to what Japanese people say, Koreans do not understand you if you mix Japanese in with your Korean. People who speak only Korean or only Japanese don’t realize that Korean grammar is more difficult. It just has a lot more conjugations. You have to conjugate differently for past/future depending on the grammar structure and it’s also different for verbs and adjectives. Japanese seems so simple in comparison.