Most difficult to understand spoken language? in terms of listening comprehension.

[drp9341]

Regarding French: one of the features that can make it difficult to understand is the fact that word stress is not distinctive, so one cannot distinguish words in a sentence on the basis of stress patterns alone, which is usually the case in languages like English, German or Spanish. To quote from the website français interactif by the University of Texas:

When words are strung together in French to form sentences, stress is placed on the final syllable of the phrase. In a sense, French speakers treat a phrase like they treat a single word – they place the stress at the end. In English, on the other hand, words retain their individual stress pattern when combined into sentences.

There are of course other factors as well. I've written elsewhere on the forum about how spoken colloquial French tends to shorten words or "swallow" vowel sounds or even whole syllables, like when "ne t'inquiete pas" becomes "t'inquiete" (pronounced "tæŋkɟɐt").

Wow. That actually explains a lot. A few months ago me and 3 friends were coming back to our hostel, making too much noise late at night.. Two of them are native French speakers, and the friend has a C2 diploma in French and lived in Paris for a few years.

This girl bursts out of her room and yells, "Est-ce que vous pouvez pas faire tant de bruit!?"

I didn't understand anything past "Est-ce que vous pouv...." and neither did my friend with the C2 certificate. The native French speakers said "Really? She said it loud and clear."

French phonology seems to be quite unique.

Any language that diverges massively from its written form will be hard to understand if the majority of your L2 aquisition comprises reading and writing.

I'd say Danish is well up there from a theoretical point of view, but then again you could argue that something with a bunch of cases and tenses in the agglutinative form would be hard to follow as you need to get a "feel" for the prefixes and suffixes instantly and on the spot, as opposed to being able to decipher them with plenty of time, which is permitted through reading. Consider how students learn latin at school etc. I certainly remember treating Latin as more of a mathematical problem than as a language. Now I speak Russian the idea of cases makes a lot more sense.

In short, question is hard to answer, but stand by first assessment.

It's funny that you say that declensions make listening comprehension harder. For me, it has made Polish listening comprehension much easier. Often times the cases are redundant, for example: "Nie miała dokumentów". If you don't hear "Nie" you can still understand that she didn't have documents.

In Spanish, "No tenía documentos" if you don't hear "no" that negation isn't embedded anywhere else in the sentence.

I don't know if I'm doing a good job of explaining, but I found that once I had internalized the cases (when I could feel how they are used on an instinctive level,) they actually made listening comprehension easier.

This may not be so with other languages, but at least in the case of Polish, declensions have saved me countless times from having to ask someone to repeat what they just said.

[Arnaud]

This girl bursts out of her room and yells, "Est-ce que vous pouvez pas faire tant de bruit!?"

The girl couldn't yell that
Young vloggers have a tendancy to speak quickly, whatever the language, that's not exclusive to french speakers.

[drp9341]

This girl bursts out of her room and yells, "Est-ce que vous pouvez pas faire tant de bruit!?"

The girl couldn't yell that
Young vloggers have a tendancy to speak quickly, whatever the language, that's not exclusive to french speakers.

Haha when I first read your message, I was confused. I'm pretty sure I misquoted the angry French girl. If I recall correctly she said, "Est-ce que vous pouvez fair un peu moins de bruit" As I said, I didn't understand it. We, (my friend with the C2 and I) both said "huh?" and looked at our buddy from Brussels, who repeated it back to us slowly.

Out of curiosity, how did you know that she couldn't have yelled that? Is what I wrote above incorrect French, or simply awkward?




On a side note, something I noticed a few days ago when a Brazilian friend forwarded me one of those short meme-like videos on Facebook, asking me to tell him what the guy said, (he speaks decent English, but he couldn't parse out the words,) I realized that I couldn't actually "hear" everything the guy said 100% clearly. I simply knew that there was nothing else he could have said that would have made any sense (given the context of that short clip,) other than what I thought he said.

If acquiring near-native level listening comprehension abilities in a language like French or English (as a non-native, obviously) requires such a deep knowledge of the language that you can confidently say, "there's no alternative that would make sense," then I seriously commend those learners who have reached such a level. Being able to recognize subtle mistakes or "abnormalities" in a foreign language requires some serious skills.

[Dragon27]

I'm going to start learning French somewhere around next year probably, so that I can see what all the fuss is about. As it stands, I don't believe that French is somehow uniquely difficult in its phonology for foreign speakers to learn to comprehend it. From what I've learned about the French phonology, it certainly has its own interesting peculiarities (the notorious liaison, for instance), but nothing that is principally different from any other language. All languages are difficult to understand, all have a tendency to mash the words together, reduce and swallow syllables, etc., in real-life colloquial speech. English certainly has given me many a headache (and still does sometimes, but I've learned to bear it with fortitude and equanimity), and, as has been mentioned earlier in this thread, Spanish, despite its deceptively simple phonology, proved to be no less merciless when it comes to comprehending the language of regular people from the street.

[Arnaud]

Out of curiosity, how did you know that she couldn't have yelled that? Is what I wrote above incorrect French, or simply awkward.

For me, it's incorrect French. She probably asked to make less noise: "moins de bruit".

I'm going to start learning French somewhere around next year probably, so that I can see what all the fuss is about.

Usually Russians don't have the problems English speakers have concerning the accent and the listening comprehension, you'll be disappointed to see that there is no fuss, in fact.

[Thala]

Languages whose words flow together more are probably more difficult to understand, and those furthest to your own.

For example, I can't make sense of French or Turkish (Turkish sounds so melodic, everything flows together). But Greek is super easy to me! Spanish too. Each word has a clear beginning and end. Italian and German too, even though I don't speak them I can tell words apart.

Russian is also incredibly easy for me, but that's because I'm Bulgarian and am used to Slavic language patterns and speech.

[Christopher]

Another thing that makes spoken French difficult to understand (in addition to its stress pattern and use of liaison) iis the sheer number of homophones that exist in the language. My electronic version version of the Petit Robert even lists them at the bottom of each entry and I have never seen a dictionary do that for any other language. For instance, here are a few groups, all pronounced identically, out of almost countless possibilities.

un saut - jump, leap
un sceau - seal, stamp, mark
un seau - bucket, pail
sot - silly, foolish, stupid

vain - empty, superficial
le vin - wine
vingt - twenty
vins - first and second person passé simple of venir
vint - third person singular passé simple of venir

pair - even
le pair - peer
la paire - pair
le père - father

[Aloyse]

This girl bursts out of her room and yells, "Est-ce que vous pouvez pas faire tant de bruit!?"

It looks odd when written, but as spoken French it's perfectly ok in my opinion.
Just add "ne" before "pas" and it becomes unambiguous as well as correct written French.

[Lisa]

I can weigh in only as applies at the A1 level, not a deep level of understanding. E.g. someone is talking, and you try to pick out the words you recognize.

For me, at least, I think it's the variability and length of vowels that's an important factor... as well as speed, German has always been so much easier than spanish, partly since the constant combinations in German take more mouth effort and make it slower to speak. In Spanish, I found the longer, more unusual words easier to recognize than small everyday words and spoken Spanish had all these short simple words that require contexts, lo, la, se, etc. In German there are all the auf and zu etc. but these are a big more distinctive sounds.
I throw up my hands at French - while it's easy-ish to read and the things I say have been understood, I can never understand any of it.
Tones don't help but at the simple level it's not as bad as the vowel problem... I could pick out words in chinese, but I found vietnamese much harder. While it's no kind of test, Thai is my only complete failure, not a single word understood in either direction.

[Speakeasy]

Another thing that makes spoken French difficult to understand ... iis the sheer number of homophones that exist in the language...

Sorry, but I find your point rather over-stated. Homophones exist in all languages. Native speakers and advanced second language students are sufficiently familiar with the language so as to distinguish the meaning of any particular homophone from its context, more-or-less instantaneously, and they would never make the types of errors that your list of French homophones would otherwise imply.