7. Burmese went from language beautifier to abomination. The very aim of our website and blog is to help people like you learn Burmese. Let’s be honest, learning Burmese is much harder to learn than other languages like e.g. Its letters are simple and in general, pronunciation follows spelling. For English speakers, some languages may appear harder than others to speak and comprehend. The Unkown writer and others Articulation of the human sound has been studied since the days of Yaska who must have lived before Panini. “ဇ” for “j”; “ဈ” for “jh”; I read somewhere a description like “a lot of particles embarrass Burmese sentence, making it somewhat unclear” (sorry for my poor translation). choant = shrink kyoant = shrunken I wouldn’t be surprised if they form the plurality of Burmese immigrants. This gave rise to a literary movement in the 1960s in favour of writing as we actually speak which has gained currency among the public and the media but only to a limited extent. Thank you all for having this opportunity to learn a bit more on people’s thought and interest in Burmese Language. If you want more material and material you can use away from your computer too, download John Okell’s Burmese by Ear book and audio free from http://www.soas.ac.uk/bbe. The simple grammar and syntax of Hindi and Japanese lend itself favourably in learning as a second language whereas the more complicated tones of Chinese, not to mention the multitude of characters one needs to master, pose a not insignificant hurdle for the Burmese never mind the similarities and roots. I hate that i live in the country (the Netherlands) with the hardest spelling which I have to learn ofcourse. The ‘problem’ applies to names too for non-native speakers. instead of bawa and gabba. Many work at meatpacking plants and estimates are as high as 70% being infected, with entire families struggling to cope. Had so much potential. #4: Sa (စ) and hsa (ဆ) letters Actually, my mom taught me to read and write in Burmese when I was younger. hlwè = divert lwè = diverted/miss(ed), Also: I remember saying pyissato for pistol and olanpyit for olympics as a youngster; it made sense! you are wrong.Our consonants are derived from mon consonants. hpyor = dissolve/mix pyor = dissolved ( Log Out /  Please refer to my recent updates on http://www.tuninst.net hosted from Canada. Anyway, I wonder if LA-based Burmese is influenced by the Burmese Chinese immigrants who grew up in old Chinatown?! Learning to write Burmese abroad isn’t for the faint-of-heart. Yes, I and many others can hear and do pronounce differently. He doesn’t actually ‘hate’ the language. Anyway, as I grew up being a Burmese (Myanmar) girl, I have never thought it was such a difficult language. I do notice that even between my dad’s and mom’s families, my dad’s is a lot more informal in speaking Burmese. I look forward to reading and learning more. Reading Pali (although not very well) seems not that difficult after all when you started learning and chanting like the monks do, as you often go to the monastery whilst making good merits. The difficulty unsurprisingly is mutual. No, but quite a few words like aloo for potato in Burmese are of Indian origin. This compares to 600 hours for Spanish. “ဂ​” for “g”; “ဃ” for “gh”; The following sets are also homophones in Burmese but retained for Pali. and the particles are eerily similar, for example, English (As for ___, ___) | Japanese (ha/wa) | Burmese (ga/ga tau) Even for native speakers of Burmese, it’s hard. The below language difficulty chart is based on the FSI language difficulty ranking at US State Department. Burmese is a very very exotic language and there is a lack of good and high quality learning resources. That sounds hard. Burmese people are great! The current system, despite it’s ridiculous ineffective difficulties, was maintained for reading pali buddhist texts, which rarely ocassionally happens. Student Orientation Are you new to SLS or returning and need a refresher? I need some advice and was hoping you could help me out – I just met some Burmese refugees at a church last week. ( Log Out /  I’ve listed my top 10 annoyances below. With the Burmese script, one could say that the alphabet is three-dimensional and this extra dimension gives a unique appearance to those most frequently used words in the Burmese language(as you mentioned, mostly derived from Pali) which use stacked letters. Top 5 Hardest Languages to Learn English (almost like “is”) | Japanese (ga) | Burmese (ha/ti) Wow. Foreign Service Institute language difficulty rankings . But I guess not for Burmese or Tibetan. hmyint = raise/heighten myint = raised/high chè = widen kyè = widened/scatter(ed) Its letters are simple and in general, pronunciation follows spelling. He’s just making an analysis of the Burmese language in a light-hearted, fun and entertaining way. Discarding its Buddhist Canon influence would be worse than ridding English of its Latin derivatives. The Burmese alphabet retains certain letters for spelling Pali loan words although many of which are homophones in spoken Burmese. There was a drive to “write as it’s spoken” in the sixties which made some headway though failing to supersede the old form completely. A Mandarin speaker would find learning Hokkien/Cantonese easier. Likewise, “ဒ” for d and “ဓ” for “dh”; There is nothing wrong with that. There was a story about the hunt for Stalin in colonial times before WWII when the authorities received a report about someone called Stirling in the Shan hills! Burma has many languages, but only one culture, she said. In Japan, for example, children study for 12 years. And for Spotify users, it’s easier than you think to start your lessons. Despite being cited by many language-learning websites, the ranking is based solely on the FSI’s view, and there are many experts who would rank certain languages differently. It has do-it-yourself exercises and even recordings. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. I would like to develop a friendship with many of the people that I met last week and I want to learn to speak their language. 3. “လ​” and “ဠ​” — “l” sound, Someone who’s learned (and can read) the Burmese Buddhist prayers would definitely know the differences. Zawgyi and other pseudo-Unicode fonts will not properly display the following Burmese text. If you are not the native speaker and have learn the language since you are young it’s hard to get the right accent in speaking. As native speakers we don’t stop and think about it, do we? အသံလႊင့္တဲ့ေနရာေတြကေတာင္ ျဖစ္သလိုေျပာေနၾကေသးတာ ဆိုေတာ့လည္း… 2. Pudina, instead of Pusinan, as a different version for mint is not uncommon. The Three Most Difficult Languages for English Speakers to Learn Learning a language isn't easy, and some languages are naturally more difficult than others, especially for us native English speakers. Can anyone point me to some free Burmese script practice sheets or websites online? It’s the same with the voicing rule. Mainly due to the lack of high-quality resources and teachers outside of Myanmar, even with the internet at one’s disposal! One peculiar and distinctive grammatical phenomenon (not a rule) is the aspirated simply turning into the unaspirated in certain transitive verbs: hmyouk = lift myouk = lifted “ဍ​” and “ဎ​” — also “d”! chwin = put aside/exempt kywin = left over/remain, And: Assoc. Aung Zeya – Thanks for the comment I think part of my difficulty in distinguishing different Burmese sounds is that many Burmese speakers, especially my age are less concerned with their pronunciation and mutter a lot (or as some would say, get lazy with their pronunciation. (I know that Mandarin and Cantonese don’t. Measure words are a minefield for those who speak Burmese as a second language including the ethnic minorities in Burma. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are Category V languages (the hardest category there is), which require around 2,200 hours of study to achieve the same level of proficiency. Most Burmese I’ve met in my country picked up chinese quickly and japanese even faster. The program has French, Spanish, Chinese, German, and more available for free. ဒီထက္ပိုျပီး သိေစလိုတာကေတာ့ And let me conclude this post with the most important reason why you should learn Burmese. hmyaw = float myaw = float, LOL (sorry for my very informal way of talk in this blog >..>) e.g – a girl named “Thiri”, we dont say thiyi but thiri with r sound, But feel free to correct me as i only have a very limited knowledge of burmese history, and if you correct me I learn more dont I? I will help you as much as I can. Consonant endings are similar to the above but card is even spelt with a d ending today to conform to the sound of this borrowed word. Hnyat = crush/trap nyat = crushed/trapped. So not just any old influence it seems- when you hear an Indian language do you understand some words? Learn Burmese, the official language of Myanmar — The Land of the Fast and the Strong — with script, over 6,000 MP3 audio, PDF, dictionary and unique grammar color-coding. ဘာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ျမန္မာစာကို စိတ္၀င္စားလို႔ , ေနာက္ သရုပ္ခြဲဖို႔ၾကိဳးစားလို႔ ( မွန္တာမွားတာထက္ အားထုတ္မွဳကို ခ်ီးက်ဴးရမွာေပါ့ ) This means that you cannot just read the language after you learn the alphabet. It is quite subjective to say which is the most difficult language(s) to learn in the world. We have both the theta sound and th as in then. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. hpone = cover pone = hide, Likewise: (…But I did once listen to a sermon by a Burman monk from central Burma, who had the same problem. Lu ta yauk a man must never be confused with hkway da gaung a dog or yahan da bah a monk for that matter. The voicing rule (should be #11) dictates which one as with other consonants. Note: This post requires a Unicode 5.1 Burmese font (I highly recommend Padauk.) The fact that so many Burmese live in Thailand, should make it really easy to find native speakers to practice with too. It’s more like he just finds some aspects of the Burmese language somewhat odd and peculiar. 2200 hours! Hello friend, I would like to help you. retd. It can sound very rude when used incorrectly. Chinese language learning for kids. This blog clearly reflects the love for Burma and the Burmese language by someone born and brought up in the West by Burmese born parents. Myanmar! In that list Burmese is in the Group of Category 4 languages and it is estimated it takes at least 1100 hours to reach general proficiency in speaking and reading. Old Burmese phonetics sounds alot like Tangut phonetics. German, Hatian Creole and Swahili (36 weeks) are a little more difficult. Required fields are marked *. Based on my highly unscientific observations, the inability to distinguish “th” and “t” sounds is usually associated with Chinatown speech (at least in Yangon). Fun piece…..look up the parallel piece “Why is Chinese so damn hard?” ………..On a serious note – I am looking for the best Burmese language tools for computer analysis use…… Dictionary, thesuarus and most important is a grammar structure to deconstruct open text into grammatical parts……..my Tibetan is a bit rusty; but Burmese seems closely related……thanks for the help….. What I hate most is many browsers do not support the signs! I want it with the word and between. And those words look and sound beautiful. English (Eye) | Burmese (mye) | Chinese {cantonese dialect} (muk) Words with same pronunciation and different meaning are common in sino tibetan language and others have no problem what so ever. How do you pronounce Thair Aye and Zeya in English? http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/Default.htm (link to fonts) He at least kept me awake since I was trying to figure out where he was from). Spanish! English (Life/Breath/Kill) | Old Burmese (sat) | Modern Burmese (tat) | Chinese {cantonese dialect} (sat) Thus it is not widely known outside the country. They are very friendly, genuine and open and if you visit Myanmar you will make some great friends -especially if you can speak a bit of the Burmese! Having said that we do find Japanese and Hindi easier to learn than Chinese, or English for that matter. Happy learning. We are still relatively new but we have already put online some great resources like e.g. (short creaky vowel) The Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages are considered the world's most difficult languages from the point of view of written language. The r and y in the sun thuriya or teacher arsariya however will be pronounced properly as the two occur together. People may make spelling mistakes but that is only to be expected. According to this wiki page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_alphabet, they pronounce differently and are denoted as /k/, /ɡ/, and /ɡˀ/. word lists and some language specific tutorials and we are planning to offer much more like language quizzes, grammar notes etc. Now, let’s remind ourselves that speech and script are quite different. Thanks for all that you do and all the best in the New Year. (Don’t know exactly how their Pali transliteration works. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone (save very old people) speaking “lu” and “wa” today in Yangon, even in Chinatown. “တ” and “ဋ​” — unaspirated “t” sound as the t in “stock” Please go to my website: Tun Institute of Learning, http://www.tuninst.net. I can’t tell the difference between က and ဃ. Mandarin Chinese. The bulk of languages ranked fall into the “hard languages” category, and … Pu Si Nan is even called Nan Nan Bin widely. Beautiful. Iowa's tight-knit Burmese community is inundated by the coronavirus. Oddballs: The dictum “yay daw a hman, hpat taw a than” tells us to write the correct form but read the speech form. Simple charts are kind of hard to learn off of. The Burmese language will always be my white whale and my albatross. there are so many different ways of addressing others based on their age, gender, social status etc. English (Chicken) | Burmese (je/kye) | Chinese (ji) Interesting post … I’ve been thinking about trying to learn Burmese next and found what you had to say interesting. Reason #2: Chinese is not a phonetic language. But I don’t notice any other pronounced differences. (They are usually seen stacked under some other letters; your pet peeve #3.) I am doing what I could to study the languages now current and past. Not only do they indicate their Pali origin, in later periods it is suggestive of a word’s foreign origin which I believe is very useful as in the terms India, English, even engineer. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), 10 things I hate about the Burmese language, http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/Default.htm, http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/language.htm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_alphabet, March 30, 2016 as told by Burmese newspapers, 10 things I hate about the Burmese language, Part 1: Burmese personal names - Introduction. . A typical stanza goes something like: I would really appreciate your help! hlant = frighten lant = frightened More examples of transitive verbs changing from aspirated to unaspirated; hpyè = tear/rip pyè = torn/ripped Just one thing to add to your list is the lack of standards for learning Burmese. 6. It is spoken by about 180,600 people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, particularly in Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachari districts. My wife and I are determined to teach at least spoken Burmese to our children (when we have children) but I must admit we haven’t been that ambitious about teaching them writing. ခ်စ္စရာေကာင္းတဲ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ရယ္ ၊ ပ်က္စီးလာေနတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့လူ႔အဖြဲ႔အစည္းရယ္ ၊ ခ်စ္ဖို႔ေကာင္းတဲ့ ျမန္မာကေလးငယ္ေတြရဲ႕အနာဂတ္ရယ္ ၊ အဲဒါေတြကို ျပီး တဲ့ေနာက္မွာ ေခတ္မွီေအာင္မြမ္းမံသင့္တဲ့ ျမန္မာ့ဓေလ့ထုံးတမ္းေတြေပါ့ေလ…ဘာသာေဗဒ က စလို႔ေပါ့. Wish we were able to understand Chinese and Japanese but no, we don’t. I enjoyed your perspective. Now theres a world of difference between the Abugida system and Alphabetic system. And how in the world is that against religion, and how is that relevant to the ‘meaning of life’? I work in an American University Program in Myanmar as a full time executive manager, and as a creative director in my small company. And not just pyin-nya for pa-nya, also pyissi for pissi. Conducting a controlled study of relative language difficulty is very difficult considering the large number of variables that affect language acquisition. chan = put aside/save kyan = left over/remain Return to the main article here: What are the hardest languages to learn? Yes, Pali in Burmese is probably far more important than French words in English. Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English. If you are interested in the Burmese Culture, learning Burmese is a great way to understand it. Panini, who has been called the Sanskrit grammarian was a contemporary of the Gautama Buddha. Burmese, instead, has the honor and distinction of being the most difficult language in the world. It is so sad that the SPDC doesn’t see the value of such standards for propagating the Burmese language abroad. His mom did a better job than I did for my British born youngest who can read Burmese very slowly but finds official Burmese very difficult. Not sure about Hokkien.) Your having been raised in the LA Burmese community could be a reason. (Most likely due to burmese being old chinese and japanese loan words were actually old chinese and not modern chinese). I’m just barely, and I stress barely learning how to read and write Burmese. Burmese has indian loanwords such as, gabba (world), widiya (no accurate english translation but it’s close to peserverence), thadda (grammar), etc etc. hlè = fell lè = fall Both languages are SOV grammar. #9: Ta (တ) and tha (သ) letters Where one symbol presents (1vowel) or (1consonant+1vowel). hlaint = roll laint = roll(ed) I am sure you will find lots of answers to the questions posted. See the rankings below. I have a passion for languages, especially in the part of relating languages with senses and emotions, culture and expressions. ( Log Out /  However, it has its fair share of oddities, mostly found in spelling. Marma (မရမာ) Marma is a member of the Lolo-Burmese branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Myanmar and Devanagari (the script used for wrting Hindi and Sanskrit) are Abugidas, whereas Latin is the Alphabetic script used to write the English speech, French speech, Spannish speech, etc. But don’t get the wrong idea. Again aside from buddhism, there is no other reason to kill your language like that with that ineffective writing system. I have added Mon to my study since January and I am finding that my invention – Romabama, the intermediary language – is under a very severe stress. I’ve wanted to for some time and did learn alittle when I was much younger. But it seems the LA speech is kind of frozen in time.