For people wanting to learn Arabic (I’m Saudi Arabian and it’s my mother tongue) Brian was speaking in a sharp Egyptian accent, which is VERY different from the way it’s spoken in other countries.

Being a native Japanese speaker and knowing English, it made it quite easy to learn Mandarin because I could skip most of memorizing the characters, and the grammatical structure being similar to English. Just had to get over the tones.

Brian, I came across this video accidentally and I absolutely enjoyed watching. I’m Arabic native and couldn’t agree more with what said. You definitely deserve a like and subscribe 👏🏻👍🏻.

يقول الله تعالى في القرآن الكريم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم ( وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ خَلْقُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ وَأَلْوَانِكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّلْعَالِمِينَ )

Knowledgeable and pretty decent pronunciation too 👌

I learn Japanese and Arabic and I find Japanese easier!

أولًا : العربية فيها لكنات مختلفة وأنت تتحدّث باللكنة المصرية تحديدًا، بالإضافة إلى وجود لكنة فصيحة (لغة عربية فصحى). (وأنا أكتب بالفصحى ليتمكن الناس من ترجمة كلامي، اللغة العامية باللكنة المصرية أو السعودية أو غيرها، يصعب ترجمتها في قوقل مثلًا، حرفيًا يبدو الأمر مستحيل، ورغم أختلاف طريقة كلامنا بنسبة لا بأس بها، نحن نفهم بعضنا ولكن قد نجهل معنى كلمات معينة أو حتّى جُمل) فالمصري يقول : عايز أروَّح. والسعودي يقول : أبغى أروْح (بمعنى : أرغب في الرحيل) المصري يقول : عايزين تسيبوني. والسعودي يقول : تبغون تخلوني. (بمعنى : تُريدون تَركِي "لوحدي") وطبعًا العربية باللكنة العامية هي بحر من الكلمات، ناهيك عن كثرة الكلمات الفصيحة بحد ذاتها الأمر الآخر : في العربية توجد كلمات من نفس الحروف تمامًا لكن عند اختلاف نطقها يختلف معناها، مثل الموجودة في اللغات التي ذكرتها أو حتّى اللغة الإنجليزية، ولا سيّما في اللغة العربية باللكنات المختلفة، مع وجود كلمات كهذه في الفصحى أيضًا. مثل : كلمة «وَجَدْت» تأتي بمعنى «لاقيت الشيء أو الشخص» أو بمعنى «علمت به» وكلمة «غُروب» تأتي بمعنى «زوال الشمس» أو بمعنى «جمع غَريب» وهو الشخص المجهول. ولا بد في العربية من التفريق بين «ض» و«ظ» فمثلًا : «الحضيض» هو أسفل سافلين، يعني القاع تمامًا. في حين أنَّ «الحظيظ» هو الشخص «المحظوظ» «سعيد الحظ» وغيرها كثير من الأمثلة .. وهناك بيت شعري يقول : ألم ألم ألم ألم بدائه إن آن آن آن آن أوانه بمعنى : ألم أصاب الجسد ولا أعرف المرض المسبب له، إن حان وقت فهو وقت شفائه. وبالحركات في العربية تكون هكذا : أَلمٌ أَلمَّ أَلمْ أُلِمَّ بِدائهِ إنْ آنَ آنٌ آنَ آنُ أوانهِ وأيضًا للذين لم يعتادوا القراءة بالعربية يكون الأمر صعب بالبداية؛ لأن الكتابة بالغالب تتم دون رسم الحركات فوق الحروف. فمثلًا «أما» قد تكون «أَمَا» وقد تكون «أَمَّا» «أَمَا» كلمة للتنبية أو عرض شيء، ويكثر قولها قبل القسم، مثل : «أَمَا والله» و«أَمَّا» تعتبر مرادفة لكلمة لكن. و«لكن» قد تُقرأ «لكنْ» وقد تُقرأ «لكنَّ» و«تَقرأ» تختلف عن «تُقرأ» في الصوت تختلف بالطبع ويمكن تمييزها، لكنّني أتحدّث عن شكل الكلمة وحروفها، حيث أنّها نفس الحروف تمامًا. لمن سيترجم كلامي قد لا يكون الكلام مفهوم بسبب أن المترجم قد لا يترجم الكلمات المتشابهة بالحروف والمختلفة بالحركات، بشكل جيد، حيث يعتمد على الحروف ولا يراعي الحركات وتأثيرها في المعنى.

Thank you very much for the explanation

As a Japanese, I think the most difficult thing to learn Japanese is “Onomatope”, which is often used like the adverb. If you are interested in it, please search and know how difficult it is.

ابداع كالعادة يا براين وشكرا ليك جدا 🤩🤩🤩🤩

この人の英語すごく聞きやすいから字幕なしで理解出来る！ He speaks English very clearly so I can understand the content without subtitles

Very fun video !

as a native arabic speaker, i must say your pronunciation is incredible for real. also i never noticed "صباح الخير" would be so hard to pronounce lol. it's like a piece of cake for us :)

Good video, by the way I am also learning French as a second language not counting my mother language Arabic, and I know English. and you may find the counting system hard which it is hard ngl, but when you learn it and reach the numbers from 100-1000 you will find it very logical and actually Arabic grammar is like a connecting system you find each rule has a connection and supports the other one

The fact that you forgot the ض🙂

Your English pronunciation is absolutely beautiful.

I can't believe you didn't touch on onyomi and kunyomi regarding reading japanese.

Dear Mr Wiles! Thanks for your wonderful video comparing 3 really heavy languages each challenging its learner with lots of difficulties and, besides, confronting him or her with a long history and a huge literature. What makes this triple challenge even more formidable is that the learner has also to master 3 different writing systems, just the most difficult on planet Earth. Your are not only a great language learner, but also a skilful, tricky teacher, who is entertaining and enjoyable to listen to as well. I consider your almost perfect pronunciation of these 3 languages, which are so different in this respect, a big achievement proving you a real talent for languages, that is a pretty gifted linguist.#

Technically language learning is easy especially if you have the right tools. Immersive translate has been working out for me and i have never had an issue with foreign language difficulty at any point since i tried it out. I love it.

5:53‬‏ I loved how he say it 😂😂😂 Thx for this beautiful video, and I long for the day when you will become our brother

I agree with you about Arabic, even for native speakers is hard to learn, I'm a native speaker of Arabic and I can make sure that I don't have enough knowledge about Arabic grammar. btw: I'm a postgraduate student Thank you Brian and keep going 🎉

Thank you, Mr. Brian. I follow your lessons constantly, and I hope that you will provide us with many English language lessons and will not be absent from us.🎉

👋🏼 Small struggling Travel Channel here. I love your content, thanks for this great video! You inspire me to keep grinding my channel, maby one day I’ll grow as big as you 🥲

You should do another video comparing these 3 languages with Hungarian, Basque, and Navajo

I absoulotly love this video! Thanks for your effort.❤ From an Arabic native speaker.

Excellent video. Would love to know your opinion on which languages would constitute the next tier of difficulty below these three. Korean, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Navajo?

Over all, very nice and I just have subscribed.

Amazing video brain keep going ❤❤❤❤

Amazing prononciation in arabic amd chinese !!and amazing video!! Good luck

I thought this was going to be very uniformed and surface level like many videos on this topic. Glad I clicked it because i was wrong! Solid video all around! Thanks😊

こんなにカタカナ英語が上手な海外の人初めて見た

I can speak Mandarin, Japanese, and English at a business level. I can say it is quite difficult to achieve that, and I am proud of myself.

Impressive explanation. Gut gemacht 👌👍

難しい部類の言語を３つ比較できるまでに習得してるって。。。シンプルに凄っ！！ 10:07の表は難しさがわかりやすく表現されていて感動すら覚える。

I still remember that one sentence you said when you were selling the (fresh) tomatoes in Egypt 😂 it's always fun and entertaining to watch you much love from Egypt

The real curve ball of mandarin grammar is just how versatile 了 is. And also the classifiers/counters, and also the special grammar used in the ubiquitous idiomatic expressions.

استمعت بالفيديو ! شكرا ❤ سوي المرة الجاية فيديو مقارنة بين اسهل لغات بالعالم (مستخدمة)

I'm Japanese. He showed 10:07 how opposite are the sentence constructions between Japanese and English. That's also why we Japanese are quite bad at mastering English. Japanese grammar is actually similar to Turkey's (a.k.a agglutinative languages). These sentence constructions are not so strict but very flexible because of the marker-particles that define the word's function in the sentence, so we can shuffle the order or drop the subject/object/verb. However, this grammar concept is quite alien to the English. The only strict thing in English is sentence construction, the function of the word is defined by its positions, not by conjugations or particles. So, sometimes we can't understand an English sentence even though we know every single word in it.

日本語は日本人に伝わる程度の発音を身に付けるのは比較的容易ですが日本人と同じように発音できる外国人はほとんど見た事がありません

You impressed me with the fluency of your tongue. You speak the Arabic language very well. God willing, I am an Arab young man

The way you compare the difficulty of languages is very logical, well done

Thanks Brian for the huge effort and yeah the standard Arabic is even hard for the native speakers

Alhamdulillah that my first language is arabic for me it's so amazing to learn it if you are not from arabic country

you did not get it wrong, the video is very nice and easy to swallow information about amazing languages, I am already Arabic speaker, and I really want to learn mandarin and Japanese.

Such a great video!

I'd say pronunciations aren't part of how hard a language is. It can be hard at the start, but after a few months, pronunciation isn't a blocker for learning. Instead, I'd replace it with "available language content". Native indigenous languages are some of the hardest because there's no available learning content. Similar to chinese. Compared to Japanese, it has a huge amount of content. They make so many interesting shows that it makes it easy. Also, why so many people can learn English. There's so much English content out there it makes it easy.

if you want to live without inconvenience in Japan and read Japanese book. you should know 3000 words about Japanese. but some Japanese can be read several ways. ex)生・・・140ways 日・・・205ways It is just two words.but as far as i know,you should know 500words like this. so I feel Japanese is the hardest language except for pronounce.

So i'm lucky to know Arabic, English, some Spanish as well 😂 Nice video keep it up ❤😊

Makes me realize just how far I had to go in becoming fluent in spoken and standard Arabic, as well as dialect (Syrian dialect btw). And now I'm learning Japanese. Sentence structure is easy once you catch on to it, and context and dropped words or particles likewise. It just takes a lot of listening, and it's not quite as hard once you get used to it. At this point the only thing that still remains challenging is kanji. I learn using the acquisition learning method, so naturally that would mean I only learn the kanji that I need, when I need them, hence I only know about 15-20 kanji so far.

والله بتوحشني يا صديقي وبتوحشني فديوهاتك. ماشاء الله عليك، انت ظاهرة تستحق الدراسة، عندك قدرة ملفتة للنظر ومبهرة على تعلّم اللغات، ورحابة صدر واتساع أفُق. ربنا يحفظك من كل سوء ❤😊🙏🌷

I'm a native egyptian and I know english and I was contemplating whether i should complete learning Japanese or should I switch to mandarin and this video and watching you speak japanese made me wanna learn both

I speak arabic, studied it for years, so it's funny to see your conclusion here bc Chinese and Japanese seem so much more difficult to me. Of course I've never studied them so what do I know.

Although alluded to, one of the biggest difficulties with Arabic is that most people don’t actually speak MSA in conversation so when you really want to learn, you have to study both MSA and the regional dialect (eg Egyptian), so you’re basically learning two languages in one. This probably should’ve weighed it higher in difficulty

I learned Japanese to fluency and Mandarin to broken-degree. First I was pleased as the grammar was easier than anything I've ever seen. But the tones got to me and I find the language extremely "brittle". Meaning if you mess up a few things, they quickly don't understand what you try to say. In now hundreds of hours of speaking Japanese with natives, I really can't remember a single instance where they asked me what I meant or clearly didn't understand what I said. Somehow Japanese seems more "robust" with respect to mistakes and on top of that, due to the culture of dropping subjects, objects and even verbs all the time, as you said, they have developed extremely good skills at guessing what you want to say. I found speaking with Japanese natives a really joyful and effortless experience from the start, even when I was still very bad at it. While with Chinese I often felt like we were truly sitting in different worlds. I have this hypothesis of "Inverse Relationship between linguistic robustness and grammatical complexity". It could be total BS and I am an engineer and know nothing about linguistics, but it seems to me that the harder the grammar, the more you can make mistakes without too many consequences. My native tongue is German, which is fairly difficult grammatically, for example it has these dreaded 4 "cases" that learners always fear. But in practical terms, I often speak with foreigners that make like 8 mistakes per sentence, wrong conjugations, and mess up like 85% of these cases etc, and still, communication is totally no issue, at times even totally fluent. Sure you don't sound native but we understand 99% of what you say perfectly. Chinese has easy grammar and I realized often if you mess up one little thing, the meaning is lost. I once forgot a "个" (which is pronounced "ge" more or less for those who don't know mandarin, so very very short) and the person didn't understand what I wanted to say. I quit Chinese, for a few reasons. I was frustrated with the tones, and also the horrible slurring and bumbling when they speak fast. Japanese often speak faster but apart from the odd 100 year old grand pa, you always hear everything they say clearly. Also I have no connection to China, I never go there, while I visit Japan often...

wow your arabic is really great you bodied the egyptian dialect !

I speak English, Spanish, and Japanese. Being half Mexican and growing up around it in my 95% hispanic town certainly helped lay a foundation for me though. But I didn't always speak it, I learned it after high school. I could understand it (contextual speaker) but I wasn't good at speaking it or expressing myself. But after a few months of serious studying I could safely say I speak Spanish finally. It was actually stupid easy to be honest. Japanese took 2 years. I started the first 2 months by learning to read and write Hiragana and Katakana by heart (forget about Kanji for a second) and then I memorized hundreds of the most common vocab words, and hundreds of the most common phrases. Upon memorizing so much stuff, I quickly learned I was easily able to understand how the grammar works even without watching 1 hour videos explaining how the grammar works. lol But I also had a lot of help from random youtube shorts and fun videos explaining the grammar every now and then, or sometimes they would tell me new formal and informal ways of saying things and I'd memorize that too. I started shadowing subbed anime more as well, really trying to repeat what the character said and almost role play it, it made it easier for my brain to remember. A few other things, but yeah, I had a very make shift wacky approach to Japanese. Then I kind of learned Kanji here and there eventually, still learning. Basically I brute forced my way to becoming conversational in Japanese by memorizing 2K+ words and phrases and learning slang, ect.

You are speaking egyptian

الله اللغة العربية حقته فنانه ماشاء الله ‏‪0:28‬‏

I have studied Japanese and I'm currently learning Mandarin. I personally love learning new writing systems. I also studied Hebrew. I think, while Japanese does use a lot of particles, there's only a handful you need to start engaging in the language. I also wonder how you'd rate these languages if the student is a native Spanish speaker. I've always thought Japanese would be easier to learn if you know Spanish, because the vowels are similar and Spanish also implies the subject sometimes. For what it's worth, I can't seem to speak any foreign languages, but I can pick up grammar and reading pretty easily. I don't think those should have been doubled in your score.

very inspiring brain, and it shows actual dedication, very impressive just wanted to mention one thing, the Arabic we speak today is formal, not academic, where the academic is much more difficult. and as we know the finest Arabic literalist + books we have these days only grasp about 15% of Arabic, for example, if a native regular Arabic speaker reads the Quran "Islam's holy book" we will need an explanation of what it means. Of course not all of it we understand some of it. hope you find this helpful

I think Cantonese in terms of pronunciation is more challenging than Mandarin as there are 6 tones in Cantonese.

Thanks Brian for your time and effort. We really appreciate it

I've been trying to learn all of them, my Japanese is pretty good, still improving my arabic, and my Chinese is so-so... so which one do I think is the hardest? polish, idk I'm really struggling with Polish, maybe bc I'm asian

حمدا لله علي السلامة يا براين، هتيجي مصر تاني وتنورنا امتي😊😊

That was a fun video! I am starting to learn Egyptian Arabic and came across your videos recently. Very helpful. You helped me memorize the alphabet with mnemonics that I was initially having trouble with!

Japanese is easy to start but way more changeling when you go deep into it, while Chinese is difficult to start but getting easier and easier as you study longer and longer.

How did you go from speaking mandarin with a strong accent in the first few examples to speaking mandarin with a good accent in that pimsleur example?

1:40 Note that the pronunciation of "hashi" is reversed in Kanto (roughly Tokyo area) and Kansai (roughly Osaka area). The video shows the Kanto pronunciation. To reach the level of a native Japanese speaker, it is also necessary to understand this difference.

您好老师As a student of mandarin with a Chinese wife from Hubei Province， I endorse every point made about mandarin. 太好了！

Great video! Fun fact: Amharic and Japanese have the same syntax. My definition of syntax: "How we put words together in a sentence to make sense."

Japanese is very hard for not noly foreigner but also 100％ of Japanese.

One of the best videos I ever seen thank you now I can know the difference between these languages ,Note that I speak Arabic

Awesome explanation, as an English/French/Arabic speaker trying to learn Mandarin this definitely gives context and insight! I also tried Pimsleur in the past to try out Turkish and the fact that it's conversational focus I did notice significant leap in short amount of time. I might look into it again. I did notice how much easier it is to memorize Chinese characters once you break down the characters a little. For example the word Good has 2 characters (mother and child) in it. Which kind of suggests a mother with her children is a good thing. I also really appreciate that there is no headache whatsoever when it comes to grammar. Your Arabic pronunciation is pretty spot on considering you're able to speak other very different languages. Quiet the tongue twisting adventure!

What a beautiful comparison among these languages, as Arabic is my mother tongue, I can say your Arabic pronunciation is really Excellent. I always think of the difficulty of learning the Asian languages as they seem to me, are very complicated languages, especially in writing! Thanks from my ❤️ for this amazing video!

You start smiling and it feels like it's bringing out a different Brian the moment Arabic comes out haha!

Interesting video, as an English speaker that has learned Japanese to an upper intermediate level pushing advanced. I would put writing/reading as a solid 10, maybe even a 10+ and bring chinese down a point or 2. I don't speak Chinese but I have a basic level knowlege of the language and while the tone has the potential to change depending on the word, It's of my understanding that each character has one reading assigned to it. Japanese kanji has a minimun of 2 different readings. some of which have up to 13, which are also subject to slightly change from soft to hard consonents for ease of pronunciation. For example in the phrase, 女子部屋 (womens room), the first character, 女 by itself is read as "on'na", and the second character 子 is read as "ko". But when put together they are read as joshi, not on'na ko. furthermore the word 部屋 (room) is read as heya, but not so fast, becuse it is preceded by 女子 (joushi) it changes from heya to beya, making the phrase read as "joshi beya", and this is not a rare thing, it happens quite a lot. However to even the scales a little, I do belive pronouncing Chinese to be much harder, especially when you are starting to learn it. And while Japanese does have pitch accent, it's not neccasary to know to be understood in the language, it's more of just sounding more natural and being slighly easier to be understood. If I was telling my JPN friend that the event was closed becuase it started raining, but I said the wrong pitch accent and instead of rain, said candy, it would only take him 0.3 seconds to realize I meant it was raining, and not that candy was literally falling from the sky. Or if I went to a resaurant and asked for a bridge It wouldn't take them long to realize I meant chopsticks. Wile pitch accent exists in Japanese it's not nearly as crucial in terms of understanding as it is in chinese. For that reason I would bring chinese pronunciation up a point or two.

Im struggeling more with japanese reading than chinese reading. Because japanese kanji can be pronounced in MANY different ways.

لم أكن أتوقع أن العربية ستكون الأصعب. نعم أعلم انها صعبة في القواعد ولكن القراءة سهلة جدا اذا أضفنا التشكيل للحروف.

Many people don't know the difference between Standard Arabic and Dialectical Arabic. Brian was speaking Egyptian Arabic, a dialectical variation of Arabic. It's fairer and better when making comparisons and/or reviews to use Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.

What a vídeo!!! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻...by the way...what about korean?

شكرا على القيديو براين❤ تحية لك من المغرب

As an English speaker Arabic is the hardest for me out of the 3. The language itself is very different and they have about a million dialects that change in every other city. At least with Mandarin and Japanese, the dialects are usually not quite as extremely different. Plus I've actually studied Japanese for a while so I know it's not too bad.

It is in fact fairly easy for mandarin and English speakers to learn Japanese cause we know first of all, some of the kanjis and second, some commonly used English words, which got transferred in katakana. However, Japanese grammar is a real headache and it takes a long time to memorize things and it's even more complicated when it comes to daily practice.

إيه الجمدان دا كله يا براين ما شاء الله

What an amazing video, Thank you bro!

As an Arabic guy i learnt Chinese and i think Arabic is the hardest language ever! Many dialects and fusha To be professional you have to study all of them not only fusha or one dialect. It's really a big challenge to be like a native man !

I am german and I currently study japanese. I don’t know what it feels like to study those other 2 languages but japanese is pretty simple to learn IF you have the motivation for it. I think every language is simple to learn if you have the necessary passion and motivation for it. If you like and learn something about the culture and country (through videos, books or you travel to that country), you automatically learn the language and understand how the language works. So at the end, the difficulty of the language is based on the person learning it.

استمتعت بكل ثانية والله من الفيديو ❤

日本語が母国語だと英語が難しく感じる😢

Very intersting video, but the different readings of kanji are a core part of learning to read and a major contributor to the language's difficulty. Kinda surprised you left that out given how good your Japanese sounded!

Hi. Thanks for this video and I want to mention that there are 400 names for the lion, 300 for the sword, 255 for the camel, 170 for water, 70 for rain, and each of these words have a particular usage. and I want to mention that there are five different types for calligraphy in Arabic, just the professional skilled people can write them.

Your arabic pronunciation is very good 👍🏼

ただ意味が伝わればそれでいいというのであれば、日本語はこの中で簡単な言語だと思いますが、文法的に正しく話すことや、動画内にもある敬語は日本人の大人ですら上手く使えない人がいるほど難しいです。

As a korean, japanese and chinese are easier than english to understand. I can understand some words without knowing how to pronounce. But arabic is very hard to me. I can't find learning source for beginners and I can't find how to start to learn. And japanese and chinese are more demanded than arabic. Maybe they are spoken neighbor country. Your video is impressive - 最高!

When i learned Japanese many many years ago as a kid. My teacher jokingly said jpn is a very sneaky language since so many details are dropped and omitted and depends on one to infer (you blink or you'd miss), whereas Chinese is more similar to English, SVO structurally, plus more clear and straightforward with less guess work lol

I liked for the perfect pace of your speech

片言の外国人が「日本語は簡単」と言い、ほぼネイティブの外国人が「日本語は難しい」と言う不思議😐

(Im not English native speaker) I do study only Japanese out of the languages you mentioned, but i think Japanese has a huge gap between beeing understandable and sounding like native. The pronaunciation is really hard to get natural, and the honorific system is pure horror. Although, being Japanese begginer is quite easy

The hardest language on earth is the traditional Bantu languages like Kenyang but the hardest language I learned is pure lingala written in mandombe script. It has 4 tones and the mandombe script operates different. Each spelling changes according to the tone. Like it or not Mandombe script is used by some millions of Africans and it is the core script in writing lingala , mandombe script is easy to learn but the hardest script to read on earth, I used it for 2 years but I am struggling to read it like I read romance script

If you have learnt simplified Chinese characters well, you can also easily read the traditional Chinese. And I suggest you to learn about ancient writing Chinese because it is quite fun.