I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.
It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages.
Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality.
By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.
Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.
If answering that question was necessary to speaking and understanding the language fluently, it wouldn't be so hard to answer the question. Mapping concepts between two languages is much, much harder than simply speaking and understanding both languages.
Right, and that's part of the problem. The whole culture and language are so alien to most people that it is incredibly hard to map concepts.
As far as I can tell the only non-native speaker who is actually fluent is Daniel Everett. Given that the language is the subject of a fair amount of linguistic interest because of its uniqueness, it's pretty amazing that he is the only one.
Not only that, but even with a natural aptitude for languages and desire to learn, it took him 7 years of living with them to get to that point.
