# Hardest languages to learn



## modgirl

What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?

For reference, I am a native English speaker.  My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).

To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols.  Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters.  However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


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## lauranazario

I suspect any language that does not utilize the same alphabet/characters you are used to must be particularly difficult. Not only do you have to learn a new set of "symbols", but words as well.

Saludos,
LN


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## Artrella

Chinese and Japanese, because apart from the meanings, grammar and so on, you have to learn the letters!! Although next year will try the Classical Chinese....


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## Edwin

modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker.  My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols.  Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters.  However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!



So far as writing, I vote for Japanese--a language I studied years ago.  It not only uses characters (kanji) borrowed from Chinese, but it mixes these with two distinct ''alphabets'' (hiragana and katakana--forty symbols each).  Katakana is used  only for foreign words introduced into Japanese (for example: hai hiru (high heels), infure (inflation), salariman (business man)). It also may be written using the roman alphabet (they call it romaji), but that is not usual.  To make matters worse each kanji can be read in several different ways depending on the context.  For example, the character for mountain may be read as ''yama'' the native Japanese word for mountain, or in a compound such as the name of Mt Fuji, it is written after Fuji and Mt Fuji becomes Fujisan. Here the character for mountain is given a sort of chinese pronunciation ''san''.   The hiragana are mixed in with the kanji to indicate the tenses of verbs, ''post positions'' and such.   It may be the most complicated writing system of any modern foreign language.

On the other hand, it is fairly easy to pronounce Japanese words. The grammar is a little exotic, but lacking in most of those annoying things that make European languages so difficult (such as articles, gender, number, subjunctive, etc...). So if only the Japanese would confine their writing to romaji, I think  it would be still be exotic, but not be considered such a difficult language.


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## kens

To defend Japanese a little... 

I haven't studied it in much depth but it is in many ways a very simple language.  As Edwin says it lacks things that make European languages difficult: articles, gender, etc.; and it also has very simple rules of conjugation -- from what I remember there's only two verb tenses.  It tends to be a very economical language (like Spanish, you don't have to include "I" or "you" or other words that aren't necessary), so sentences can often be expressed in one or two words.  

The written language _is_ very difficult, but I think katakana and hiragana are superior to the Latin alphabet (romaji) because, as soon as you read a word written in either katakana or hiragana, you know exactly how to pronounce it.  There's pretty much only one way to write a word in those two alphabets, since each character represents both a vowel and a consonent sound.  In English you have silly spellings like "knight", etc., and words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently ("polish" and "Polish").  If only Japanese could get rid of kanji, I think it would be a very simple language all-round!

My vote for most difficult language is Mandarin or Cantonese.  Both of those languages are _nothing but_ kanji.  You can never "guess" how to spell a word, you have to learn each word individually.


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## Whodunit

Hi, I'd think most diffcult languages are
1st Chinese --> over 100,000s of symbols, plus some temporal form etc.
2nd German --> the hardest grammar I think of, my native language, and it's even really hard for natives
3rd Arabic --> to defend: it has only 28 characters, but with all variabilities it has over 100 "letters". The grammar is also very hard, but maybe easier than the other two ones. And it's no charcters for vowels (really hard to read)
(4th Hebrew or Japanese) --> Hebrew is very hard to read without vowelization and it's also at least 40 different letters (i.e. there's e.g. a difference between שׁ and שׂ). And the difficulty in Japanese is the line-up of the words. And if there's only one dot incorrect, it can be another word!


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## alc112

Hola a todos!!
Quisiera saber que opinan respecto a esto
Para ustedes cúal es el idioma más dificil de aprender escrito con esta clase de letra, sin ser arabe, japonés, chino etc, etc.

I'd like to know what do you think about this:
for you which is the hardest language to learn with this type of letter. Without being arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, etc.


Para mí el más dificil es español

Regards


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## lsp

Take a look at this post for some more answers to this question.

THANKS, LSP, I'VE NOW MERGED THE TWO THREADS TOGETHER.
ZEBEDEE


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## sibol

Creo que la principal  dificultad en un idioma está en la fonética. Lo otro (gramática, léxico, alfabetos, etc..) se puede aprender, y puedes ir mejorando con el tiempo todo lo que quieras. Pero para un cerebro adulto  hay sonidos que  sino los aprendes de niño después es imposible decodificar (por lo menos en el tiempo real de una conversación). Respondo directamente a tu pregunta.
Creo que –para un adulto-el lenguaje más difícil de aprender es cualquier lenguaje silbado. El más conocido y hablado de todos ellos es *EL SILBO*. Y es español silbado hablado por los pastores de La Gomera. No tienes mejor prueba de lo que te digo que escuchar una conversación en SILBO.
Aunque la gramática y el léxico es 100% español no es que te suene a chino, te sonará a no humano. Colgaría una conversación en MP3 en SILBO aquí pero no se como hacerlo.


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## zebedee

sibol said:
			
		

> Creo que la principal  dificultad en un idioma está en la fonética. Lo otro (gramática, léxico, alfabetos, etc..) se puede aprender, y puedes ir mejorando con el tiempo todo lo que quieras. Pero para un cerebro adulto  hay sonidos que  sino los aprendes de niño después es imposible decodificar (por lo menos en el tiempo real de una conversación). Respondo directamente a tu pregunta.
> Creo que –para un adulto-el lenguaje más difícil de aprender es cualquier lenguaje silbado. El más conocido y hablado de todos ellos es *EL SILBO*. Y es español silbado hablado por los pastores de La Gomera. No tienes mejor prueba de lo que te digo que escuchar una conversación en SILBO.
> Aunque la gramática y el léxico es 100% español no es que te suene a chino, te sonará a no humano. Colgaría una conversación en MP3 en SILBO aquí pero no se como hacerlo.




Goodness! A new language I've never heard of! Sounds fascinating, please tell us more...
Anyone else any idea about SILBO?


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## munchkin5000

I don't now about anyone else, but i find french impossible!

I can speak, write, listen and read, but ask me to do all this with grammatical accuracy and i will laugh!  i can never remember if it's a or de, past anterior tense confuses me, and qui and que will be the death of me!

But i did find spanish straighforward!

Learning chinese at the mo coz im going to move there for a couple of years....think might become a social recluse.  it's impossible! i'm just not picking up the tones!


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## Marc1

The most difficult language to learn, 
is the one of a country you hate.

The easiest language to learn...
The one from a country you love.


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## mjscott

Oh, so well put, Marc1!


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## gaer

mjscott said:
			
		

> Oh, so well put, Marc1!


Well, that would mean I must hate France, because I find French horribly difficult.

And in fact, I don't feel that way at all. 

Gaer


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## Marc1

That may or may not be so, yet I meet a dozen of people every day who lived here for 10, 20, 30 years and ask for an interpreter for their dealings with the government. Why? Because they hate this place, are convinced the "Australians" are out to get them, are racist, hate the joint and want to go "back"... Their chance to learn English? Zero, even if they live to be 150.

Another observation is that if the person has never learned formally his own language, he has little chance to learn another.


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## El Hondureño

Here's an Hondureño proverb "the hardest language the learn is the one you don't know" lol. Spanish is impossible for me. There's like American Spanish and Spanish from native countries. Spanish from native countries always phrase things differently lol


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## Edwin

Marc1 said:
			
		

> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.



What of the person who hates the USA and UK but loves Australia?  That's two strikes against English and one in favor of it?


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## Edwin

Marc1 said:
			
		

> Another observation is that if the person has never learned formally his own language, he has little chance to learn another.



Marc, you may want to modify this observation. There are many counter-examples in children that immigrate to a country and learn to speak the new language easily. Or for that matter children who live in an environment where they learn several languages simultaneously.  (Now you are goint to tell me children aren't *persons*?  )

 Another point that has been made in this forum is that most people in the USA really know very little about the grammar of their own language until they start learning a foreign language.


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## sibol

> Originally Posted by Zabedee
> Goodness! A new language I've never heard of! Sounds fascinating, please tell us more...



Silbo is a language that's whistled, not spoken. If you hear a silbo dialogue but you don’t see people  speaking . You would think you are hearing a bird conversation. The best thing is to hear a silbo conversation.
There are many places on the web about silbo.
You have two overview articles in English on the sites of CNN and BBC.

you have an interesting article about how human brain process silbo.
in eurekalert org

Sorry. but these forums don´t permitte  URL's links . I can´t paste them here.

Please. Correct my mistakes.


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## Benjy

actually if you had a few more posts (30) you would be able to post links, the no links before 30 posts is to stop spammers. but you might try asking on of the culture mods if they would post them for you.. or you could just send me a pm and i can do it for you


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## cuchuflete

Benjy said:
			
		

> actually if you had a few more posts (30) you would be able to post links, the no links before 30 posts is to stop spammers. but you might try asking on of the culture mods if they would post them for you.. or you could just send me a pm and i can do it for you



To reinforce what Benjy has said, we do allow links, but we ask you to be careful to limit that to links with valid information to support or enhance what you are discussing.  WR is a 'commerce-free' zone, and we do not permit any form of advertising or posting for commercial purposes.  I've probably put many hundreds of links here, and will be happy to assist you.
For now, you may indicate the link by typing something like www dot silbo/lengua / musical / ejemplo.   Your intrepid readers will understand.

regards,
Cuchuflete


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## el alabamiano

> Originally Posted by *sibol*
> _Creo que la principal dificultad en un idioma está en la fonética. Lo otro (gramática, léxico, alfabetos, etc..) se puede aprender, y puedes ir mejorando con el tiempo todo lo que quieras. Pero para un cerebro adulto hay sonidos que sino los aprendes de niño después es imposible decodificar (por lo menos en el tiempo real de una conversación). Respondo directamente a tu pregunta._
> _Creo que –para un adulto-el lenguaje más difícil de aprender es cualquier lenguaje silbado. El más conocido y hablado de todos ellos es *EL SILBO*. Y es español silbado hablado por los pastores de La Gomera. No tienes mejor prueba de lo que te digo que escuchar una conversación en SILBO._
> _Aunque la gramática y el léxico es 100% español no es que te suene a chino, te sonará a no humano. Colgaría una conversación en MP3 en SILBO aquí pero no se como hacerlo.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Zeb said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Goodness! A new language I've never heard of! Sounds fascinating, please tell us more...
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> _
> 
> 
> 
> Zeb said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _Anyone else any idea about SILBO?_
Click to expand...

_ Hola: échale un vistazo a estos:_

Agulo La Gomera - silbo
Nearly extinct whistling language revived


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## gaer

Marc1 said:
			
		

> That may or may not be so, yet I meet a dozen of people every day who lived here for 10, 20, 30 years and ask for an interpreter for their dealings with the government. Why? Because they hate this place, are convinced the "Australians" are out to get them, are racist, hate the joint and want to go "back"... Their chance to learn English? Zero, even if they live to be 150.


I'm not sure what that has to do with "the hardest language to learn". You seem to be talking about people who move to a new country and who resist learning the native language, and we have that problem in South Florida with Spanish speaking people from Cuba who have formed their own community in Miami, called "Little Havana".


> Another observation is that if the person has never learned formally his own language, he has little chance to learn another.


In general, I agree with you, if you are referring to adults, because if you do not have any formal of the structure (grammar, etc.) of your own language, learning another is at least much harder. Children are another matter.


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## Marc1

Edwin said:
			
		

> Marc, you may want to modify this observation. There are many counter-examples in children that immigrate to a country and learn to speak the new language easily. Or for that matter children who live in an environment where they learn several languages simultaneously.  (Now you are going to tell me children aren't *persons*?  )
> 
> Another point that has been made in this forum is that most people in the USA really know very little about the grammar of their own language until they start learning a foreign language.



Spanish speakers who live in the US hate the US and "love" Australia. Spanish speakers who live in Australia, hate Australia and "love" the US. It is just another excuse for underachieving.

Edwin, there are two type of person in the world, the one that try to learn from others, from experiences and from events, and the one that try to change the others, change the experiences and change the events.

The first types usually do good leaders, are flexible and learn quickly, the second make good pressure salesman but are unteachable and slump into depression regularly....Ah...and they always try to have the last word  

As for Children not being persons, it depends on the context. Clearly in the context of my comment children are not, since they have yet to learn from their parents, bias and misconceptions and racism that will form the baggage of anti-values that will keep them underachieving for another 2 generations. Their "non person" status is probably their only asset that will allow others to have a chance at teaching them new and hopefully better values.


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## zebedee

el alabamiano said:
			
		

> Hola: échale un vistazo a estos:[/i]
> 
> Agulo La Gomera - silbo
> Nearly extinct whistling language revived



Thanks, Neal! Fascinating!


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## Jonathen Christisen

What i think is the hardest language to learn is anchient egyptain.
But most people say english is the hardest lanuage to lean


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## Cath.S.

> Spanish speakers who live in the US hate the US and "love" Australia. Spanish speakers who live in Australia, hate Australia and "love" the US. It is just another excuse for underachieving.


Listen, Marc, I'm not a Spanish speaker but it seems to me that you are pushing the envelope in making such sweeping statements about a whole population.


> if the person has never learned formally his own language, he has little chance to learn another


As a former language teacher I can tell you this just isn't true. There are many ways to teach languages, that do not necessarily involve learning any theory. 

Anybody who is under 60 (they say it gets more difficult after that) and is willing to learn a language will succeed. 

An illiterate person might become able to speak and to understand speech, which is quite an achievement in itself I should think. After all, in every country you'll find a percentage of the population that is unable to read or write, still the local language is as much their own as it is that of highly educated people.

Who are we to despise people's achievements?


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## Marc1

Egueule, you are entitled to your opinion, but mine comes from interviews adding up to ... mm... 50x50=2500x7= 17,500 people. I could double or triple this easily if I consider family members. Certainly a generalisation but with a significant population sample to back up my opinions.

As for "there are many ways to teach a language", you are of course correct. The key is that the person must want to learn. 
My point, (my only point), is that people usualy find difficulties where there is not enough enthusiasm. If you love a culture a country or have some association or motivation for a language you'll learn it at age 30 or 70. My father re-married at age 63 a japanese and was fluent in this his 6th language in a year.

If you hate all of the above you do not learn it. If the person did not go to school as a kid, to learn a different language as an adult is a VERY steep road for many reasons, not the least that the reasons for the persons illiteracy don't go away with age, if anything they are more prominent.

I don't understand your last sentece.


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## basurero

Has anyone here learnt Russian to a high level? How is it once you get past all the basics?


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## Honeyduke

Has anybody tried Russian? I'm reading it at university next year and I'm quite worried! I know there's a different alphabet, however I was wondering what its like in terms of pronunciation and grammar. Any comments would be much appreciated


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## suzzzenn

Hi, 


I think, without question, the hardest languages to learn are the ones that are the most different from your own. 

I have been studying Native American languages and they are VERY VERY difficult. They operate using completely different logic! To me, Chinantec (spoken in South western Mexico) seems virtually unlearnable by outsiders. It has a complex tone system and very intricate syntax and morphology. I studied a language spoken in NW Canada, called Slave. It is related to Navajo and Apache. Verbs can have around 15 prefixes! I am very impressed with people who have mastered these languages as adults. It is very difficult to do. 

Susan


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## gaer

suzzzenn said:
			
		

> Hi,
> 
> 
> I think, without question, the hardest languages to learn are the ones that are the most different from your own.
> 
> I have been studying Native American languages and they are VERY VERY difficult. They operate using completely different logic! To me, Chinantec (spoken in South western Mexico) seems virtually unlearnable by outsiders. It has a complex tone system and very intricate syntax and morphology. I studied a language spoken in NW Canada, called Slave. It is related to Navajo and Apache. Verbs can have around 15 prefixes! I am very impressed with people who have mastered these languages as adults. It is very difficult to do.
> 
> Susan


I agree with the first part. Any language that seem totally different from your own gives you no "common ground".

Gaer


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## JLanguage

whodunit said:
			
		

> Hi, I'd think most diffcult languages are
> 1st Chinese --> over 100,000s of symbols, plus some temporal form etc.
> 2nd German --> the hardest grammar I think of, my native language, and it's even really hard for natives
> 3rd Arabic --> to defend: it has only 28 characters, but with all variabilities it has over 100 "letters". The grammar is also very hard, but maybe easier than the other two ones. And it's no charcters for vowels (really hard to read)
> (4th Hebrew or Japanese) --> Hebrew is very hard to read without vowelization and it's also at least 40 different letters (i.e. there's e.g. a difference between שׁ and שׂ). And the difficulty in Japanese is the line-up of the words. And if there's only one dot incorrect, it can be another word!


 
Actually, Hebrew without vowels is written with just 22 normal letters+2 final letters. Letters that use dagesh aren't separate letters since  the dagesh is usually not used when writing Hebrew without vowels. The vowel system is really simple once you get used to it, much simpler than English.

Arabic on the other hand has 3 different forms of virtually every letter. Not to mention spoken Arabic is very different from written Arabic.

Japanese is definitely harder for native-sepakers of indo-European languages to learn. It uses two syllabaries and anywhere from 5-10,000 adapted Chinese characters.

You only need to know 6,000 characters in Chinese, once you know these, you can figure out virtually every word.


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## sergio11

sibol said:
			
		

> Creo que la principal dificultad en un idioma está en la fonética. Lo otro (gramática, léxico, alfabetos, etc..) se puede aprender, y puedes ir mejorando con el tiempo todo lo que quieras. Pero para un cerebro adulto hay sonidos que sino los aprendes de niño después es imposible decodificar (por lo menos en el tiempo real de una conversación).


 
Hay mucha verdad en lo que has dicho. Lo vemos a diario en Los Angeles, donde hay una gran variedad de inmigrantes.



			
				sibol said:
			
		

> Creo que –para un adulto-el lenguaje más difícil de aprender es cualquier lenguaje silbado. El más conocido y hablado de todos ellos es *EL SILBO*. Y es español silbado hablado por los pastores de La Gomera. No tienes mejor prueba de lo que te digo que escuchar una conversación en SILBO.
> Aunque la gramática y el léxico es 100% español no es que te suene a chino, te sonará a no humano. Colgaría una conversación en MP3 en SILBO aquí pero no se como hacerlo.


 
Acabo de escuchar un ejemplo de *SILBO* en MP3. ¿Lo llamas lenguaje? No parece que lo fuera. No hay palabras, sino solo silbidos. Si lo llamamos lenguaje, cuaquier pieza de música silbada se podría llamar lenguaje. ¿cómo es que lo consideran un lenguaje? Por ejemplo, ¿cómo expresarías el teorema de Pitágoras en SILBO? ¿Cómo dirías que se te descompuso la transmisión automática del camión? ¿Cómo dirías que los precios de los combustibles aumentaron un 24% desde enero? ¿Cómo le dirías al alumno que escriba un ensayo sobre la Revolución Francesa? ¿Y cómo se escribe? ¿En papel pentagramado? Y los que no tienen oído musical, ¿como lo pueden "hablar"?

Perdonen mi ignorancia, pero me va a costar entender esto.


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## paluszak

Honeyduke said:
			
		

> Has anybody tried Russian? I'm reading it at university next year and I'm quite worried! I know there's a different alphabet, however I was wondering what its like in terms of pronunciation and grammar. Any comments would be much appreciated



Well, Russian is quite hard and not because it's written in its own script, but because of the complexity of Russian grammar. Somebody in this forum said that German grammar is difficult and no doubt it is, but comparing to Russian (and other Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian perhaps) German is plain and simple.

For me, Vietnamese is the most difficult language to learn and I have never heard about any foreigner really mastering it. I learned Vietnamese for a few years and I used to live in Vietnam, but it really beats me. Once you tried Vietnamese, Mandarin seems easy. 

Jakub


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## joensuu

For me, the most difficult language is Finnish ... I try to understand the logic with all these suffixes and declinaison. In first, it looks quite simple but not to applicate it ! 

English is also a difficult language. I can speak an reading fluently but i make so lot of mistakes when i write. So it's quite easy to have a basic level in english but to be really fluent look me really impossible.


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## paluszak

joensuu said:
			
		

> For me, the most difficult language is Finnish ... I try to understand the logic with all these suffixes and declinaison. In first, it looks quite simple but not to applicate it !
> 
> English is also a difficult language. I can speak an reading fluently but i make so lot of mistakes when i write. So it's quite easy to have a basic level in english but to be really fluent look me really impossible.



Yeah, but you can say that about every language on Earth - it's pretty easy to grasp the basics, but the further you go the more difficult it gets.

Let's take English for instance, for me, as a native speaker of Polish, English seemed fabulously easy when I started to learn it - almost no declensions, very simple conjugations, not so many irregularities. However, it got more difficult when I had to struggle with regional varieties and more sophisticated vocabulary. When I heard New Zealanders speaking English for the first time I didn't know it was English at all. 

Jakub


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## anangelaway

I've never heard of El Silbo before, but seems very interesting!

Some infos: http://www.vaucanson.org/espagnol/linguistique/lenguas_silbogomero_esp.htm


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## jess oh seven

i suppose a language which doesn't use our alphabet would be very hard, but i've never tried so i don't know.

maybe some form of Chinese would be very difficult as it's apparently a "tonal" language where the same thing said in two different tones could mean something completely different.


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## JLanguage

Hardest languages? Really it depends what your native language is, but here's my list for English speakers.

Not in Difficulty Order:
1. Basque
2. Arabic
3. Any of the Chinese dialects
4. Japanese
5. Korean
6. Finnish
7. Estonian
8. Latvian
9. Czech, Polish, or any of the slavic languages.
10. Vietnamese

Those are my top 10, although there are probably a lot of hard ones missing from my list.


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## laoghaire

Acabo de escuchar un ejemplo de *SILBO* en MP3. ¿Lo llamas lenguaje? No parece que lo fuera. No hay palabras, sino solo silbidos. Si lo llamamos lenguaje, cuaquier pieza de música silbada se podría llamar lenguaje. ¿cómo es que lo consideran un lenguaje? Por ejemplo, ¿cómo expresarías el teorema de Pitágoras en SILBO? ¿Cómo dirías que se te descompuso la transmisión automática del camión? ¿Cómo dirías que los precios de los combustibles aumentaron un 24% desde enero? ¿Cómo le dirías al alumno que escriba un ensayo sobre la Revolución Francesa? ¿Y cómo se escribe? ¿En papel pentagramado? Y los que no tienen oído musical, ¿como lo pueden "hablar"?

Perdonen mi ignorancia, pero me va a costar entender esto.[/QUOTE]

Pues es como todo lenguage primitivo util para expresarse en conversaciones de la vida diaria.Los esquimales por ejemplo,-entre tantos otros dialectos indigenas-tienen un vocabulario bastante reducido pero lograr comunicar.


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## Whodunit

paluszak said:
			
		

> Yeah, but you can say that about every language on Earth - it's pretty easy to grasp the basics, but the further you go the more difficult it gets.



Well, there're so many German learners in our German forum who speak German almost perfectly. Jana, Elroy, and Jorge, for instance, started to learn German and they found it very hard, but the further you go in studying it, the more logical it seems. All the cases and the difficult grammar deters learners from going deeper in that language, but that's what you shouldn't do! If you keep learning a language, you'll find solutions and simplicities you haven't even discovered before.



> Let's take English for instance, for me, as a native speaker of Polish, English seemed fabulously easy when I started to learn it - almost no declensions, very simple conjugations, not so many irregularities. However, it got more difficult when I had to struggle with regional varieties and more sophisticated vocabulary.



That's a very good point, because I've been studying English for more than 4 years now, and I still make lots of mistakes. I hate that, but I know I can't speak perfectly that language, unless I go to America or another English speaking country. I have to be corrected here over and over again, just to improve my written English, not to speak of my spoken English, which is very poor.


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## elroy

I don't think anyone can make any sort of educated or informed claim about what the hardest language to learn is unless he's studied every single language in the world.

That said, I would just like to point out that I have yet to meet one person who has studied Arabic as a foreign language and knows it (I use the word "knows" to include both "speaks" and "writes/reads," which are vastly different) with even a relative degree of fluency.  Maybe I just haven't met enough people yet.     If you're out there, I want to meet you!


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## JLanguage

elroy said:
			
		

> I don't think anyone can make any sort of educated or informed claim about what the hardest language to learn is unless he's studied every single language in the world.
> 
> That said, I would just like to point out that I have yet to meet one person who has studied Arabic as a foreign language and knows it (I use the word "knows" to include both "speaks" and "writes/reads," which are vastly different) with even a relative degree of fluency. Maybe I just haven't met enough people yet.  If you're out there, I want to meet you!


 
Elias, does that include people who have lived in an Arabic-speaking area for at least 1-2 years?


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## sergio11

JLanguage said:
			
		

> Elias, does that include people who have lived in an Arabic-speaking area for at least 1-2 years?


While Elroy reads your question and prepares an answer, let me say that I have many friends from Arabic speaking countries. I know people who were *born and raised* in Lebanon, who admit they don't know enough Arabic because their parents were not natives. They went to school and got university degrees in Beirut, but all their study was done in English and they only learned Arabic as a mandatory high school class, but they did very poorly in it. They themselves say they are not fluent in Arabic and that it is a very difficult language. _(Of course, this applies only to people from *Lebanon*. All those I know who came from Syria, Iraq or Egypt are fluent in Arabic and proud of it)._


----------



## JLanguage

sergio11 said:
			
		

> While Elroy reads your question and prepares an answer, let me say that I have many friends from Arabic speaking countries. I know people who were *born and raised* in Lebanon, who admit they don't know enough Arabic because their parents were not natives. They went to school and got university degrees in Beirut, but all their study was done in English and they only learned Arabic as a mandatory high school class, but they did very poorly in it. They themselves say they are not fluent in Arabic and that it is a very difficult language. _(Of course, this applies only to people from *Lebanon*. All those I know who came from Syria, Iraq or Egypt are fluent in Arabic and proud of it)._


 
I have a friend whose father is from Lebanon, I'm pretty sure he's fluent in Arabic but I'll certainly ask about it. I understand Arabic is a very difficult language, but would it not be possible to acquire a certain degree of fluency after a few years of immersion?


----------



## sergio11

JLanguage said:
			
		

> I have a friend whose father is from Lebanon, I'm pretty sure he's fluent in Arabic but I'll certainly ask about it. I understand Arabic is a very difficult language, but would it not be possible to acquire a certain degree of fluency after a few years of immersion?


Of course, I am sure you can acquire "a certain degree of fluency" within a reasonable time, but I think we are talking about more than just that.  I am talking about being able to speak, read and write without gross errors of vocabulary, grammar and spelling; for example, being able to write business correspondence, letters of recommendation, an essay and a short story or report, and give a brief speech with short notice.


----------



## xxatti

gaer said:
			
		

> I'm not sure what that has to do with "the hardest language to learn". You seem to be talking about people who move to a new country and who resist learning the native language, and we have that problem in South Florida with Spanish speaking people from Cuba who have formed their own community in Miami, called "Little Havana".
> 
> In general, I agree with you, if you are referring to adults, because if you do not have any formal of the structure (grammar, etc.) of your own language, learning another is at least much harder. Children are another matter.


 
You cant really compare a childs capacity to learn a language with an adults because often times they are in completely different learning situations. The children attend school and have to read, write, and speak in the language, not to mention interact with all of their classmates/friends in the language. 

Adults often are not so immersed in the language. They will be working in their career feild using their native language, talking with other co-workers (like themselves), etc.... All the while using everything but the language they are trying to learn. Plus they are going to speak their language at home. So the only time they get exposure to the foreign language is during their 1hr tutor sessions or while they are at the local market where they are forced to interact with the natives. On the other hand, the only time the children will be using their mother tongue is at home with their parents that havent yet mastered the foreign language. 

To put these two cases on equal comparison for learning ability is just not fair.


----------



## gaer

xxatti said:
			
		

> You cant really compare a childs capacity to learn a language with an adults because often times they are in completely different learning situations.


Did you check the date of the post you are replying to? I wrote it four months ago, and I believe at the time I was trying to disgree, politely, with someone.

You don't know me. I don't know you. Let's get off on the right foot, okay?

First of all, I agree with what you just said. Second, I would add that children have a huge advantage over adults in learning new languages. Few here would disagree with that.


> The children attend school and have to read, write, and speak in the language, not to mention interact with all of their classmates/friends in the language.


I agree.


> Adults often are not so immersed in the language. They will be working in their career feild using their native language, talking with other co-workers (like themselves), etc.... All the while using everything but the language they are trying to learn.


No disagreement.


> Plus they are going to speak their language at home. So the only time they get exposure to the foreign language is during their 1hr tutor sessions or while they are at the local market where they are forced to interact with the natives.


Okay.


> On the other hand, the only time the children will be using their mother tongue is at home with their parents that havent yet mastered the foreign language.


That's true too. In fact, I teach many kids in this area, for instance, who are incredibly weak in Spanish in spite of the fact that they speak it at home. They are completely fluent in English.

Many of their parents struggle to communicate with me in English. I speak slowly to them.


> To put these two cases on equal comparison for learning ability is just not fair.


Where did I do that? Why did you pick me to get irritated at? I think you are making a lot of assumptions about what I think and what kind of person I am. 

G


----------



## Honeylhanz

modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker. My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols. Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters. However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


FOR ME ARABIC, JAPANESE AND CHINESE IS THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN. THOUGH I KNOW HOW TO SPEAK A LITTLE MACAO BUT I STILL NEED TO LEARN THE LETTERS.


----------



## gaer

Honeylhanz said:
			
		

> FOR ME ARABIC, JAPANESE AND CHINESE IS THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN. THOUGH I KNOW HOW TO SPEAK A LITTLE MACAO BUT I STILL NEED TO LEARN THE LETTERS.


I know from personal experience how hard it is to read and write Chinese and Japanese.

I think you had your caps lock on! 

Gaer


----------



## Chiborashka

i speak arabic i learned english and it was easy for me and i speak very good

i would like to learn french and chinese
i think the hardest language to learn would be german and arabic


----------



## elroy

JLanguage said:
			
		

> Elias, does that include people who have lived in an Arabic-speaking area for at least 1-2 years?


 
I'm so sorry I never got back to you - I totally missed your quesiton?

Yes, that includes those people.  I went to an American school in which my teachers were almost all American.  Many of them tried to learn Arabic - with little or no success.


----------



## elroy

sergio11 said:
			
		

> While Elroy reads your question and prepares an answer, let me say that I have many friends from Arabic speaking countries. I know people who were *born and raised* in Lebanon, who admit they don't know enough Arabic because their parents were not natives. They went to school and got university degrees in Beirut, but all their study was done in English and they only learned Arabic as a mandatory high school class, but they did very poorly in it. They themselves say they are not fluent in Arabic and that it is a very difficult language. _(Of course, this applies only to people from *Lebanon*. All those I know who came from Syria, Iraq or Egypt are fluent in Arabic and proud of it)._


 
Wow - reading your post it sounded like you could have been talking about me!  The only difference is that my parents are native speakers and Arabic was mandatory until eighth grade.

Basically, I speak it with no problems but my grammar is not as advanced as it should be and my vocabulary is relatively limited.

Goes to show just how difficult the language is.


----------



## elroy

JLanguage said:
			
		

> I have a friend whose father is from Lebanon, I'm pretty sure he's fluent in Arabic but I'll certainly ask about it. I understand Arabic is a very difficult language, but would it not be possible to acquire a certain degree of fluency after a few years of immersion?


 
Of course, but what is a "certain degree of fluency"? Furthermore, I daresay most people would acquire most other languages quicker than they would Arabic in the same amount of time. It's just a very difficult language, really. And I've been exposed to over 10 languages, and by exposed I mean learned enough to at least knowledgeably assess the degree of difficulty.


----------



## mari.kit

i think..its japanese and chinese because of its alphabet and characters..


----------



## Merlin

mari.kit said:
			
		

> i think..its japanese and chinese because of its alphabet and characters..


I'm with you. And also Arabic! It's hard to read and write. But I guess with constant practice will help a lot.


----------



## annettehola

I sincerely think one of the hardest languages to learn (both as concerns grammar and pronunciation) is Czech. This language has 7 cases (whereas Latin, f.x. "only" has 6), and everything, absolutely everything is declinated in Czech (Numbers, names, what not). Let me give you an example: KRK is neck. "I have something around the neck" is in Czech: "Mám neco kolem krku." Krk changes to krku because of the preposition kolem, that belongs to a particular case. What's more, Czech has extremely many accents and bing-bang-bong-I-don't-know-what-they're-called and also special characters. I'm Danish. Danish is also rather complicated to learn, but mostly along the lines of pronunciation. Danish grammar is almost non-existent but there is one funny thing about this language: There are two groups of words: n-words and t-words. Danes say: eT bord (bord=table) but eN pige (pige= girl). (ET and EN mean the same: A in Eng., they are articles). I, a native of Denmark, cannot explain why. It comes intuitively to me, and I only feel the difference. We never learned any rules in school either. I cannot explain it.
Annette  PS: Actually I heard, that Austrian is also extremely difficult.


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## paluszak

annettehola said:
			
		

> I sincerely think one of the hardest languages to learn (both as concerns grammar and pronunciation) is Czech. This language has 7 cases (whereas Latin, f.x. "only" has 6), and everything, absolutely everything is declinated in Czech (Numbers, names, what not). Let me give you an example: KRK is neck. "I have something around the neck" is in Czech: "Mám neco kolem krku." Krk changes to krku because of the preposition kolem, that belongs to a particular case. What's more, Czech has extremely many accents and bing-bang-bong-I-don't-know-what-they're-called and also special characters.(...)



The same goes for most of Slavic languages, excluding Bulgarian and Macedonian, which have simplified declensions, but added post-positional (put behind a noun, not in front) articles instead. In some modern Slavic languages, like Russian, only six cases are used, but some nouns still retain a special seventh case (vocative) used in more solemn speech, like in prayers or such.

Cheers,
Jakub


----------



## Mitcheck

I think there are no hardest languages to learn as long as we put our full interest. Practice makes perfect as what the clichè goes. 
Just like us, our main language in the Philippines is Tagalog(Filipino) and our second language is English. And as for me, as of the moment my third language is Spanish aside from those dialects we have in our region. And if given the chance I want to learn Chinese. It won't be harder if we will only be fascinated with the new language that we are about to explore and as much as possible learn it by heart .


----------



## jj8723

I'm surprised no one mentioned Hungarian, with its 35 cases.


----------



## paluszak

jj8723 said:
			
		

> I'm surprised no one mentioned Hungarian, with its 35 cases.



Hungarian is a piece of cake, it sounds difficult, but the case endings are mostly regular, with a few exceptions of course.


----------



## Kräuter_Fee

Whodunit said:
			
		

> Hi, I'd think most diffcult languages are
> 1st Chinese --> over 100,000s of symbols, plus some temporal form etc.
> 2nd German --> the hardest grammar I think of, my native language, and it's even really hard for natives
> 3rd Arabic --> to defend: it has only 28 characters, but with all variabilities it has over 100 "letters". The grammar is also very hard, but maybe easier than the other two ones. And it's no charcters for vowels (really hard to read)
> (4th Hebrew or Japanese) --> Hebrew is very hard to read without vowelization and it's also at least 40 different letters (i.e. there's e.g. a difference between שׁ and שׂ). And the difficulty in Japanese is the line-up of the words. And if there's only one dot incorrect, it can be another word!


 
Do you really think that Arabic is easier than German? Wow, then I have some hope... Arabic is my favorite language and if I learned German then that means I could learn Arabic. 

I don't know what the hardest language is because I haven't studied them all. Of the languages I speak or I have learned (Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Romanian and Turkish)... German is definitely the hardest.

Of those I don't know, I think (or used to think since I read Whodunit's post ) Arabic is the hardest... Japanese and Chinese must be really hard too, just like Russian...


----------



## jj8723

I've only approached German on very simple terms, but am seriously considering a more in depth study.  What exactly is unique to it that makes it so difficult?


----------



## Eugens

I have read that all languages, except for pidgins and languages in their death processes, are equally complex (I don't know if also artificial languages like Esperanto are considered less complex than natural languages. I haven't read anything about that). Some languages are more difficult in one aspect, others in another; but in the end, these difficulties balance out.

The same language can be regarded as very difficult or very easy by different people. However, a given language by itself is not more complicated than any other given language. What makes a language difficult or easy for someone is that person's own first language. For example, a Spanish speaker may consider Italian as a language easy to learn and Korean as difficult. But, by the same token, a Japanese speaker may consider Italian difficult to learn and Korean as easy. (Just to give an example, I really don't know if Japanese and Korean are similar)

So, the question of which language is the hardest to learn is really "which language is the hardest to learn to *you*" and the answer may be very subjective (whether you like the language you are learning) and depend on your native language.


----------



## Kräuter_Fee

jj8723 said:
			
		

> I've only approached German on very simple terms, but am seriously considering a more in depth study. What exactly is unique to it that makes it so difficult?


 
What scared me at first were the cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive). 
The structure of the sentences is very strict, the verb goes in second place in main sentences and in subordinate clauses it goes at the end, just imagine in English: I know that your brother everyday at 9am up wakes , it's weird at first and looks so fake...
Then, the vocabulary, it's completely different from any other language I know. English does not come from Latin, but it has a lot of latin words (and I just realized it when I started with German).
Then, there are lots of compounds, they make words new words out of any word.
... And the separable verbs (prefixes that are separated from the verb and go at the end of the sentence), the prepositions, etc.

Anyway, I have to say... German becomes easy once you're used to it, because the structures are so strict that once you learn them it's not so easy to make mistakes. The phonetics is extremely easy as opposed to English, so it's not that terrible, I love German and I don't regret it at all.


----------



## TheMissouriDandy

The strangest language must be Irish: the convoluted systems for aspiration and eclipsis; no one words for "yes" or "no"; a completely different set of prounouns for every preposition; inflections for the inflections of the inflections; perhaps the worst appropriation of the roman alphabet for maybe any language that uses it; general grammatic weirdness. There are times when it almost seems to make a bizarre kind of sense, but I think at least moderate eccentricness of the mind, if not outright loopyness, must be a requirement for anyone ever hoping to achieve fluency in the language.

Contra, I think the easiest language for a native English speaker is Norwegian. I studied it for 6 months several years ago, and I can still pick my way through a Norwegian newspaper. The singing sound it makes when you speak it is a lot of fun, also.
Someone mentioned that they didn't understand why some words used en as the indefinite article, while others used et. I'm not 100% sure, but I think et is used for neuter nouns, and en is used for masculine/feminine?

Eugens:

Sorry, I don't buy that "all languages are equal" stuff. For instance, the Caucasian languages have 48 different cases and more than 80 unique sounds, as compared to the 2 noun cases and 41 sounds in English (most languages average a little less than that). 

People might say that it's only more difficult for people who don't already speak a related language, but so what? Calculus is a lot more difficult for people who don't already know triggonometry and algebra. By any standard you can judge a language by, I really think that is an example of a language that is, objectively speaking, a lot more complicated than almost any other language.


----------



## Outsider

TheMissouriDandy said:
			
		

> Eugens:
> 
> Sorry, I don't buy that "all languages are equal" stuff. For instance, the Caucasian languages have 48 different cases and more than 80 unique sounds, as compared to the 2 noun cases and 41 sounds in English (most languages average a little less than that).


But is inflection the only measure of complexity for a language?


----------



## elroy

Kräuter_Fee said:
			
		

> Do you really think that Arabic is easier than German? Wow, then I have some hope... Arabic is my favorite language and if I learned German then that means I could learn Arabic.
> 
> I don't know what the hardest language is because I haven't studied them all. Of the languages I speak or I have learned (Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Romanian and Turkish)... German is definitely the hardest.
> 
> Of those I don't know, I think (or used to think since I read Whodunit's post ) Arabic is the hardest... Japanese and Chinese must be really hard too, just like Russian...


 
I don't know about all languages, but I can assure you Arabic is *not* easier than German. 

Even Whodunit has retracted his previous statement.


----------



## Silva

modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker. My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols. Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters. However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


 
It is quite hard to say. For example I can speak English and French and I have been studying German too. German is an indoeuropean language as Italian is, but I can assure it is so difficult for me to speak. On the contrary I can read it and write it quite well. In my opinion it should be made a distinction between oral/written and anyway it is a matter of "feeling" - for instance I adore Arabic and sooner or later I will work at it!!!!

Have a nice day


----------



## Eugens

Hi!
I don't remember which was the website where I originally read about the complexity of different languages, but I found this one that says something similar. Here they only talk about the grammar of languages. I will share with you some of what I have read. ¡Saludos! 
http://www.zompist.com/lang9.html#13


----------



## Silva

Hallo! I just had a look at the website You indicated, it offers really interesting hints at the matter of language. In particular I liked the fact that there was mentioned Noam Choamsky and the universal character of language, which can be widely shared. 
I do not agree so much with the distiction between language and dialects: on the conception of language, if You want, I suggest to read something by Ferdinand De Saussure. the differences between dialects and languages is of sociological nature, don 't You agree?


----------



## annettehola

I think a dialect is a national language made personal. "Sociological"? I suppose so, if I understand the term correctly. But I think it's wrong to make a clear distinction between "language" and "dialect." They are both part of the same: language as spoken in a particular country. In Denmark, where I'm from, there are many dialects. The reason for them? I believe they are various. Fx: You can engage in speaking a dialect because of tradition. Or because you want to distinguish yourself from those, that speak the national tongue "properly." PROPERLY? It's a terrible term. No such thing exists. It's "THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH"-thing, and it's intolerable. But it's used in "the media." In Denmark this kind of purified Danish is called "Rigsdansk," and no one, no one speaks it apart from those employed in the media. This, to me, implies, that when we speak about dialects, we speak about VALUES. 
The queen, poor girl, only says what her words say. Speakers of dialects say what they feel and use their words in a manner that express both their linguistic message AND their person. This is my opinion.
Annette


----------



## Welshdarkness

I wanna learn all these languages. but they'r soo hard 
Italian
Welsh
Chinese
Japenese


----------



## zebedee

Silva and Annettehola, you're going off-topic here, guys. 

If you want to discuss the differences between dialect and language or move the discussion away to explore new topics, please search the forums and contribute to existing threads on the subject or open a new thread on the topic you'd like. 

I'm going to delete your subsequent posts between Silva and Annettehola because they have nothing to do with the topic in hand and I encourage you to communicate by PM if you'd like a one-to-one conversation.

Please re-read the Forum Guidelines. Thank you.

Cheers,
Zebedee
Culture Moderator


----------



## Claytor

The answer to the question is that it depends on you. Your mother tongue, other languages you have learned, and your interest level in the language you are going to learn are all part of what determines the level of difficulty of a new language. Many linguists will point to Hungarian or a Caucasian language due to the complexity of grammar and morphology. Others point to Chinese because of the tonal nature of the spoken language and the large amount of memorization needed to learn the writing system. Many of you mention that a language being related makes it easier as well. 

I am a native speaker of English. I learned Mandarin, and a sub dialect of Wu as an adult. I can tell you that there is another factor in how hard a language is to learn. How different a culture is from your own is possibly the most important factor. For example, Vietnamese is a island language(linguistically speaking). It is not part of any language family. However, the reason that Vietnamese people learn to speak Chinese more quickly than Westerners is because culturally speaking the two countries are very similar. Therefore, the way Vietnamese and Chinese people think and express themselves is very similar. This is not true of Westerners and Chinese. The cultures are very different. That is what makes Chinese so difficult for westerners to learn well. Yes learning Chinese Characters is time consuming, but it is simple. The tones are difficult at first, but become fairly easy after a little time, and the grammar and morphology are otherwise simple. The true difficulty expressing oneself beyond a middle level fluency in Chinese (from a Westerners point of view) is that we think very differently. As a result, we express ourselves very differently. 

I’ve studied some other western languages and Vietnamese. I can tell you that even though English and Russian are not closely related our cultures and the way we think are very similar (relatively speaking). After one gets past the differences in Grammar and Vocabulary we otherwise express ourselves in much the same way. Getting use to Chinese grammar and pronunciation is just the beginning. Learning to think like a Chinese person is the only way to achieve any high level of fluency, and that is a tall order for a non-Asian. In short I would say that the language with the most closely related culture is going to be the easiest and the one with the most foreign culture will be the most difficult. If you speak English, German or Spanish will probably be the easiest, while Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Arabic (formal) will be among the most difficult. 

That said if you have a good reason to learn, average aptitude and a chance to immerse yourself you can learn any language well given some time.


----------



## suzzzenn

> The true difficulty expressing oneself beyond a middle level fluency in Chinese (from a Westerners point of view) is that we think very differently. As a result, we express ourselves very differently.


 

Can you give some specific examples of this? A professor of mine recently asked this question in class...Do you think it would be easier to learn a langauge that is structurally similar to your own, but the culture is very different, or would it be easier to learn a language that is culturally similar but structurally different.  In other words what is more important, typology or shared cultural references. At the time, I argued that typology was more important. Lately I have been questioning that opinion. I would really love any specific example of differences in thinking or conceptual structure. 

Susan


----------



## Claytor

First let me say that I am not a formally trained linguist.  What observations I can offer are largely anecdotal.  The only languages that I can think of that may offer some insight into your question are the Ural-Altaic group of languages.  This language family has been spread out over a large enough area for a long enough time to have vastly different cultural identities.   Unfortunately, I don’t speak any of these languages.  However, I would bet that a Japanese person would learn Vietnamese, an unrelated language, much faster than Hungarian, a language of the same family.  
 
I do think that the argument is largely moot.  Most related languages also share a somewhat common cultural identity.  I’ve heard some people argue the opposite using Native American languages as proof.  They argue that Native American Languages share American cultural history with American English and American Spanish yet for Native English speakers Native American languages can be quite difficult.  The argument is flawed.  Two hundred years is a very short time in linguistic terms.  Just look at how little American English has diverged from the Queen’s English during that time.  Also, most Native American languages are and have been dieing since Europeans came to the Americas.  Dieing languages have little ability to form new structures or even new vocabulary.  I would go even further to say that because of the segregation and extermination of most Native Americans we don’t really even have much of a shared cultural identity.  
 
I digress.  You wanted specific examples from Mandarin or Wu.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but unless you speak Chinese I don’t think any example will be very helpful.  Any example I give would have to be translated and thus loose the element of which I am speaking. All that would be observable in a translated example would be Grammar disparities.  However, below I’ll give a simple example.  In the Nanjing form of Wu one would say: “Li dao la bian ki?”  translated: “Where are you going?” (it has a connotation of being within a metro area).   Literally translated it means Li=you, dao=arrive, leave for, or go to,  la=which, bian=side or section, ki=go, or “You leave for which section go?” For any of you that speak Mandarin this sentence is “Ni dao na bian qu?”  I know this is not how one would ask this question in Mandarin but it is the literal translation.  A more accurate non-literal translation would be “Ni dao nar qu?”  However, if you get on any zhong ba che or taxi just out side of Nanjing the above sentence is what you’ll hear.   I could talk all day about the differences between Chinese and English.  What it really comes down to is that we think very differently.  Is that because of language or culture?  I don’t know.  Which came first the chicken or the egg?  I go back to my original point. How could a language such as Vietnamese with no linguistic relatives be so much like Chinese in the way that it is expressed if they didn’t have such similar cultural identities and thus such similar ways of thinking?


----------



## boelo

I think my own language (DUTCH) is probably one of the most difficult ones. Don´t know any non natige speaker that speaks it correctly


----------



## annettehola

I am of the opinion that it would be easier to learn a language that is closer to your own as far as culture is concerned. That is to say, if you are on board a ship and you want to learn how to navigate that particular ship it would be easier for you if you came from another ship than if you, fx. arrived on a bike and you had never seen a ship before in your life.
 Cultural framwork (if you like that expression, I don't) is far more important for the learning process than any set of (socalled) structural rules a given language is said to be made up of. Why is that? Because the structures we have in our language, - this cannot be stressed enough - come from the structures that make up our culture. It is not the other way round.
Annette's opinion.


----------



## annettehola

And now that I am made to think of this subject again, I have a very interesting, intelligent and above all NECESSARY question: What, people, does it mean to LEARN A LANGUAGE? WHEN have you learned a language? WHAT criteria are you putting down for this? Is it, f.x., when you know all the grammatical structures? Is it when you know a given quantity of the words it is said that a socalled native speaker uses on a daily basis? Is it when you can write it? Is it when you can read it? Is it when you can speak it? (but not necessarily nor write nor read it, like fx. all of us when we were children and before they sent us to that sick institution called "school")? You get me? I personally think the term "learning a language" is something that starts with my last suggestion: to speak it. And NOW it really becomes interesting: For I believe in an element in language learning that no one here has taken into consideration: This is the element of MUSIC. Not just "an element," no, but actually a constituting element. How? Well, you know, I believe you can speak a language when you can PRONOUNCE it. Knowledge of the words and what they stand for and all that, is something that comes later. Or at the same time approximately, but if you cannot pronounce the word "jablko" in Czech, they will never give you what you want: An apple.
Language learning is to be open to the melody that each language rests on, flow with it and make it yours. Then start learning the words, then speak. Then read, then write. And sure, you can learn any language in the world. 
Annette


----------



## Claytor

boelo said:
			
		

> I think my own language (DUTCH) is probably one of the most difficult ones. Don´t know any non natige speaker that speaks it correctly


 
I’m sure the same could be said of Basque, Inuktitut, or Zhuang.  While Dutch is more popular and more important than those Languages, it is relatively unimportant as a second language.  It is not important in business, science, or politics.  Therefore, only those who choose to live in your great and beautiful country have much of a motivation to learn your language.    It is (in theory) the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn.  Why do you think the Dutch speak English so well?  By the way it should be fairly easy for a German to learn too.  With Dutch it isn’t a question of difficulty so much as opportunity and need.


----------



## boelo

Claytor said:
			
		

> I’m sure the same could be said of Basque, Inuktitut, or Zhuang. While Dutch is more popular and more important than those Languages, it is relatively unimportant as a second language. It is not important in business, science, or politics. Therefore, only those who choose to live in your great and beautiful country have much of a motivation to learn your language. It is (in theory) the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn. Why do you think the Dutch speak English so well? By the way it should be fairly easy for a German to learn too. With Dutch it isn’t a question of difficulty so much as opportunity and need.


 
It true that the English can understand us, and that they get by if they speak, as well as the Germans. But when you show them some writing they completely fall over. And as well, one thing is speaking and understanding and the other thing is speaking and writing without errors. And you're right, Dutch is not the most important language. I prefer Spanish.....


----------



## thecelt

I think Gaelic is being missed out here. Thats got to be in the top 10 hardest languages surely!


----------



## badgrammar

All of what I'm about to say I remember from a study I read on the web about a year ago and now I cannot find it.  It is about what languages are the hardest to learn, and how that can be quantified (measured).  Unfortunately, my numbers are probably off, please forgive me.

To measure language proficiency, they looked at how many hours of study were required to reach a certain level of proficiency in the target language.  The more hours of study recquired gain x level of proficiency, the harder that language was considered to be.

They looked at language learners from about a dozen different maternal languages, English, German, Chinese, etc., and measured their progress in other languages in terms of the number of hours they studied to reach X level.

Native English speakers required about 750 and 800 hours of study to reach that level of proficiency in Turkish and in Japanese, respectively, putting these two languages among the hardest for Enlish speakers to learn.  Again, my numbers are off, but by comparison, an English speaker needed about 450hours to learn Germa, and Spanish somewhat less.

Now what stuck out in my mind is that for a Native speaker of Turkish, it is far easier to learn Japanese than it is to learn English, probably because of the agglutination-based structure (or syntax or grammar...) in Turkish and Japanese are similar, whereas they are radically different from English.  

Anyway, that's just another tidbit of information, I wish I could find that report again and post the link, it was very interesting and answers a lot of questions...  I only remember a tiny part of it...


----------



## jorge_val_ribera

annettehola said:
			
		

> And now that I am made to think of this subject again, I have a very interesting, intelligent and above all NECESSARY question: What, people, does it mean to LEARN A LANGUAGE? WHEN have you learned a language? WHAT criteria are you putting down for this? (...) I personally think the term "learning a language" is something that starts with my last suggestion: to speak it.


 
A very good question, indeed. 

I think it depends a lot on the language and the person. 

For example, why should you learn to speak Ancient Greek if no one speaks it anymore? The same is true for most dead languages. I think you can say that you've learned a dead language if you can fully understand what you read and you can write it. And, according to what you said, a mute person could _never_ learn a language properly! That's of course not fair and not true.

And would you say that someone masters Japanese if he can speak it but can't understand one single character? I surely wouldn't! It is even true for people who are illiterate in their native languages...they of course master the spoken part, but they're lacking an important part: the written language.



> Language learning is to be open to the melody that each language rests on, flow with it and make it yours. Then start learning the words, then speak. Then read, then write.


 
I disagree. It depends on the person. Why should be there a specific order?


----------



## La Bionda

Marc1 said:
			
		

> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.


 
Nicely put and all so true! I love Italy and therefore I love learning the Italian language. And when you have a passion for a language, culture and country then you do not perceive the learning of the language as difficult but as a challenge.

But I also agree that you only have a chance of learning another language when you have a good understanding of your mother tongue. I am German and at school I learned German grammar from primary school age. Then came English, Latin (brilliant foundation!) Spanish and now Italian. I did not get on with Spanish - personally I think it was the teacher!  

I met a girl in Italy who was there for nine months on secondment by her employer. The second time round. And she hated it. She did not like Italy, therefore she found the language and socialising with residents very difficult. If my employer would give me that chance - I'd be living it up and aim to be fluent after nine months.........and stay!  

I want to learn Swedish because I like the country. I went to Iceland and made an effort with that language. I think a passion, coupled with an 'ear' for languages is the secret.
I am sure there are people out there that love coming up with mad mathematical equations......Each to their own I guess!


----------



## thecelt

so...no updates on gaelic then??? lol

Did you know that Basque is that hardest language in the world to learn? I didnt know that till the other day...heh who would have thought ey?


----------



## thecelt

Hey, out of all those languages, you'll probably find welsh the hardest to learn. I've been learning welsh for some time now and im still making the classic mistake of complaining about my welsh dictionary because its missing words out...when infact im just forgetting about the *mutations* at the _beginning_ of the w ord. Well good luck! Welsh is a beautiful language.


----------



## badgrammar

Alright, I hate to spilt hairs, but Basque is the most difficult language to learn for people of all languages, or Basque is the hardest to learn for native English speakers?  Is it equally a hard for Jaanese, or Greek or Tamul speaking people?





			
				thecelt said:
			
		

> so...no updates on gaelic then??? lol
> 
> Did you know that Basque is that hardest language in the world to learn? I didnt know that till the other day...heh who would have thought ey?


----------



## BasedowLives

a lot of basque people don't even know basque...

chinese sentence structure is pretty similar to english.  i haven't tried any in depth study of it, so i can't see why it's extremely  hard other than the fact it sounds nothing like any other languages i know.


----------



## Josh_

elroy said:
			
		

> I don't think anyone can make any sort of educated or informed claim about what the hardest language to learn is unless he's studied every single language in the world.
> 
> That said, I would just like to point out that I have yet to meet one person who has studied Arabic as a foreign language and knows it (I use the word "knows" to include both "speaks" and "writes/reads," which are vastly different) with even a relative degree of fluency. Maybe I just haven't met enough people yet.    If you're out there, I want to meet you!


  I guess you must have meant _personally_ met because there are many people who have learned Arabic as a foreign language and gained fluency.  Here are two:

Eckehard Schulz is a native German speaker.

Karin Ryding is a native English speaker.

   I just used these two because I have books written by them. 

I am a native speaker of English, from a small town in Wyoming, and have gained mastery of the Egyptian Arabic dialect. I started learning Arabic about 5 years ago. I, then, went to Egypt to learn the language and lived there for 6 months. I got to know, and eventually married, an Egyptian woman who I had met on an earlier (tourist) trip to Egypt. We have now been married for about 4 years. She does not speak much English and thus Arabic has been the primary language of our household for the past four years. I would say that I speak Arabic 99% of the time at home and maybe 85% overall in my life. 

I, personally, have found the Egyptian dialect to be easy. That also might be because I had a reason to learn it. I will guarantee that anyone will learn their language of choice faster and more efficiently sitting in a café with a beautiful woman/handsome man (who is a native speaker of the respective language) than they will in a structured classroom.

There is significant diglossia in Arabic. That is the everyday colloquial/slang form of a language is different than the formal written form. There are stark contrasts in Arabic between colloquial and formal. That said, I have been learning the formal form of Arabic for about 4 years also, but have been systematically learning it for 2 years. Now, saying 100% is fluency, I would consider myself fluent in Egyptian colloquial, but only about 60% or 65% in formal written Arabic. I understand the grammar, but my problem now is the vocabulary. I believe vocab is the biggest obstacle in any language as you have to memorize 1000’s of words. While formal Arabic is decidedly more difficult than the colloquial form, I have still found it to be fairly easy. I have not had many difficulties with the grammar. Of course, my background in colloquial Arabic has helped. And love interests aside, I now have a general interest in learning the language (recent world events and whatnot), which helps when learning anything. You will obviously learn more and learn faster if you are learning something that interests you and you want to learn about.


Not to get too far off topic, I would also like to say that, like others have said, hard is a relative term. If someone is learning French, for example, but does not like the language and has no interest in it, he/she will generally find it difficult whereas someone who really has a passion for the language will be more likely to find it easier and thus learn it faster. Also, like others have said languages related to the native language will most likely be easier than significantly different languages. I, personally, do not think there is a hard languange.  I believe that any language is attainable by anyone.  The key is putting enough effort into it. And given the right impetus, such as a love interest, or some other profound interest for the language of choice, learning a language can even become downright easy.


----------



## Brioche

BasedowLives said:
			
		

> a lot of basque people don't even know basque...
> 
> chinese sentence structure is pretty similar to english. i haven't tried any in depth study of it, so i can't see why it's extremely hard other than the fact it sounds nothing like any other languages i know.


 
The principal difficulties with Chinese are the tones, the homophones and the writing system.

Hearing the different tones is nearly impossible for some people.

Mandarin Chinese has a very restricted sound system. Most "words" are only one syllable, and a word can end only in a vowel,  or vowel +n or +ng.

In round figures, there are approximately 1,700 possible syllables in Chineses, as against about 8,000 in English. 

So lots, and lots and lots of homophones in Chinese.


----------



## irisheyes0583

On a lighter note, one of my good friends (a guy) tells me the hardest language to learn is the female language.  I'm his interpreter...


----------



## Laia

Claytor said:
			
		

> I’m sure the same could be said of Basque, Inuktitut, or Zhuang. While Dutch is more popular and more important than those Languages, it is relatively unimportant as a second language. It is not important in business, science, or politics. Therefore, only those who choose to live in your great and beautiful country have much of a motivation to learn your language. It is (in theory) the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn. Why do you think the Dutch speak English so well? By the way it should be fairly easy for a German to learn too. With Dutch it isn’t a question of difficulty so much as opportunity and need.


I thought I answered here... but right now I don't find my reply... What I meant... no language is more important than another. Maybe English is more useful than Basque, but never more important.


----------



## Claytor

Tones and homophones are problems for beginner learners of Chinese.  They are not, however, what causes great difficulty for advanced students of the language.  The difficult thing for advanced learners is thinking like a Chinese person.  Let me offer an anecdote.  The most accomplished language student I’ve ever met was a guy who lived in China.  I’ll call him K.  A New Zealander who lived in China for over 12 years, K can be mistaken for a Chinese person on the phone.  He’s white so he can’t be mistaken in person.  K is fluent in Italian, Spanish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Shanghai-Wu, and German.  He can get along in at least 7 other languages.  When we would meet French people in China he would not just be mistaken for a French person they would literally not believe he wasn’t from France.  He has never been to any country other than New Zealand, Australia or China.  He didn’t start studying languages until middle school and his parents both only speak English.  It took K more than 6 years in Country to gain Native level fluency in Chinese.  He says that it would have been impossible for him to gain that level of fluency without living in China. This is not true for any of the western languages he has learned. K says that his Italian is better than his French and both are still better than his Chinese, and his German and Spanish are almost on par with his Chinese.     *BasedowLives, **it is interesting that you bring up the fact that the basic sentence structure is the same.  It is interesting to note that even though there are technically more differences in the sentence structure between English and say Russian than English and Chinese, Russians express themselves more similarly to English speakers than do the Chinese.  If we were to quantify it the differences I think we would come up with a combination of word usage, syntax and the concepts of time and motion most of all.  It can seem almost unnecessary to translate individual words because (except for nouns) they will almost never be used the same.    One does little to advance his Chinese until he can learn words in Chinese rather than from a translation. This may be said of any language, but it is especially true of one that uses words so differently as Chinese.   Also there is the fact that written Chinese and spoken Chinese are very different creatures.  *


----------



## nycphotography

Another factor, not yet mentioned, is the availability of study materials!  At least for those of us who have to self-study.

I posit that it is MUCH harder as an American to learn Cantonese than Mandarin, simply because almost ALL the materials available are for learning Mandarin.  But neither of those are as hard as learning, say, Basque or Housa or Igbo, as there are only the occasional resources available.

Once in country, or in classes, or paired with a native tutor, I'm sure it gets easier.  But even when I was in Hong Kong, most of the materials were for helping Chinese learn English, and very few were available for the reverse.


----------



## Claytor

Very good point NYC.  As a side note Cantonese is probably going to be harder anyway because of the more difficult morphology and additional tones.


----------



## Claytor

Laia said:
			
		

> I thought I answered here... but right now I don't find my reply... What I meant... no language is more important than another. Maybe English is more useful than Basque, but never more important.


 
I think your point is largely semantic, but what better place for that than this forum?  I think a more accurate distinction is between a languages importance and value.  There are certainly some languages that are more important than others for a host of reasons (number of speakers, use in politics, trade and science, the opportunities the language offers to its speakers).  I think this is evidenced by the fact that you speak or at least read and write English.   However, one language is not intrinsically more valuable than the other.  Take the extreme case of an extinct language.  An extinct language certainly was just as valuable as any other language especially to those who spoke it.  However, its importance waned and thus was lost as a spoke language.  In any case it was not my intent to insult anyone or their language.  I was merely stating a fact as a reason why most foreigners don’t learn lesser used languages well.  I do see the value in less important languages.  I speak a language that has no use outside an area smaller than Lichtenstein.


----------



## Brioche

Claytor said:
			
		

> Tones and homophones are problems for beginner learners of Chinese. They are not, however, what causes great difficulty for advanced students of the language. The difficult thing for advanced learners is thinking like a Chinese person. Let me offer an anecdote. The most accomplished language student I’ve ever met was a guy who lived in China. I’ll call him K. A New Zealander who lived in China for over 12 years, K can be mistaken for a Chinese person on the phone. He’s white so he can’t be mistaken in person. K is fluent in Italian, Spanish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Shanghai-Wu, and German. He can get along in at least 7 other languages. When we would meet French people in China he would not just be mistaken for a French person they would literally not believe he wasn’t from France. He has never been to any country other than New Zealand, Australia or China. He didn’t start studying languages until middle school and his parents both only speak English. It took K more than 6 years in Country to gain Native level fluency in Chinese. He says that it would have been impossible for him to gain that level of fluency without living in China. This is not true for any of the western languages he has learned. K says that his Italian is better than his French and both are still better than his Chinese, and his German and Spanish are almost on par with his Chinese. ***.  *



Such a person would be_ one in a billion.
_
I have never met a person who learned English as an adult who could speak it with true native ease.


----------



## irisheyes0583

Brioche said:
			
		

> Such a person would be_ one in a billion.
> _
> I have never met a person who learned English as an adult who could speak it with true native ease.



I have. It is absolutely possible. My friend (Brazil) started learning English at 16 or 17 through TV and music and by 19, spoke it with such proficiency that when he came to visit me in the States, no one (and I really, truly mean not a single person) was able to tell that he wasn't from the U.S. He can mimic just about every English-language accent that he's heard (English, Australian, New York, Boston, etc.) with such success that he fools natives of that particular dialect/accent. So, it can be done... if only we were all so lucky!


----------



## annettehola

That is (and was) EXACTLY my point. And THAT is exactly what I was speaking about when saying that the constituting element in languages is MUSIC.
Annette


----------



## Brioche

irisheyes0583 said:
			
		

> I have. It is absolutely possible. My friend (Brazil) started learning English at 16 or 17 through TV and music and by 19, spoke it with such proficiency that when he came to visit me in the States, no one (and I really, truly mean not a single person) was able to tell that he wasn't from the U.S. He can mimic just about every English-language accent that he's heard (English, Australian, New York, Boston, etc.) with such success that he fools natives of that particular dialect/accent. So, it can be done... if only we were all so lucky!


 
I'd like to hear him imitate an Australian, and fool me!
It's not just accent; it's vocabulary, pronuciation and choice of words.


----------



## badgrammar

Brioche said:
			
		

> I'd like to hear him imitate an Australian, and fool me!
> It's not just accent; it's vocabulary, pronuciation and choice of words.



Being so fluent as to be competely and totally bilingual, indistinguishable from a native speaker, also has another very important factor, that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet:  Being culturally "fluent".  Meaning understanding the cultural influence behind what is said and what you're saying.  

For example, if you begin learning a language at twenty, you may learn the language inside out, but it would be hard to "catch up" on 20 years of popular culture (events, tv and radio, stars and wannabe stars, politics, comedians, sports) that you were not around to experience. 

I've been in France and submerged in the language for the past twelve years.  I began learning it at the age of 10.  My French is excellent, I can pass for a local at times (when my concentration is at its peak and I don't talk extensively).  But there are things I don't understand because I did ot grow up here, and my cultural background does make me different from a French person, whether I like it or not.

But I don't understand this thing about wanting to claim "total bilingual" status, being indistinguishable from the natives.  IMHO, who gives a Flying Wallenda?    (note: if you are a non-native English speake and have to ask what this means, then I guess you do not "qualify" for the perfectly bilingual award).

From the first steps you make towards communicating or understanding a language, I say you "speak" it.  When you are comfortable and efficient at speaking, understanding, reading and writing, then you are "bilingual".  Some are more bilingual than others.  A French friend told me a while back "You're can't really be considered bilingual, because you have an accent".  Whadeva! Definitions schmefinitions.

Anywho, I still think Turkish is the hardest language I have ever tried to learn... Ama bir gün türkçe konusacagim ve belki bir gün ki onlar gülmeyecekler! Yavas, yavas, ögreniyorum.  I know I will never risk being mistaken for a native speaking Turkish!


----------



## BasedowLives

Brioche said:
			
		

> I'd like to hear him imitate an Australian, and fool me!
> It's not just accent; it's vocabulary, pronuciation and choice of words.


haha, yeah...i met an australian and we got to talking, and he did an imitation of people from the USA, and i did an imitation of people from australia, and we both said that we didn't sound anything like the target accent.


----------



## ProudOfBeingTurkish

I think French,Japanese,Chinese,Russian and my native language(Turkish) are the hardest ones.I know Greek a little but I don't think that Greek isn't as difficult as the other ones which I mentioned above.If you know Greek alphabet,there is no problem.
I said Turkish is hard to learn because sometimes I can't understand the grammar of my language although I'm native speaker of Turkish


----------



## rjuracek

Hello!  I don't consider myself a linguist, but I love learning new languages, and fortunately my teachers/professors not only cultivated my love of languages but many of them gave me a lot of important tools to learn them:
1) Don't worry about the alphabet so much.  I can only speak for myself, but the alphabets have alwahys been the least imposing aspect of a language because after seeing the letters enough, even if you can't pronounce them well, you can recognize them.  It is simply a question of time and practice which depends on your base language and the language your studying.   
2) See the logic behind the grammar.  I could go on about the difficulties of declinations, verb tenses, aspect, but basically to master a language I think what is the most important is the ability to see the logic behind the grammar.  If you can think abstractly and see WHY Czech nouns get all of these endings in a certain case, or why you use the imperfective for negative commands in Russian, etc. then you'll be well on your way.
3) Like ANY ACTIVITY on the planet, you need to be motivated.  Whatever it is that motivates you: your ethnicity, cultural pride, you like a challenge, you want to travel there, you have a girlfriend/boyfriend/friend/relatives who speak this language, or just fascination, it has to be strong enough to overcome the difficulties of the language, because in the end I find the biggest challenge is always just keeping up with it.  
5) Patience and dedication.  Right now I'm in Freiburg, Germany and there are days when I absolutely despise the prospect of speaking German even though I know that I speak the language very well and I've always enjoyed it.  The same was true when I was in Olomouc in the Czech Republic.  I'm a quarter Moravian and so speaking Czech is a matter of ethnic pride for me, but still there were days where you would have had to use a cattleprod to get me moving and using/studying Czech.  Understand that it even takes kids raised in these languages years to master them (English native speakers, could you have read Dickens easily when you were 8 years old, even though you'd been speaking ONLY English for almost 6 years at the age when language acquistion is at its highest?) so cut yourself some slack when you mess up cause YOU WILL.  Most people, especially speakers of less commonly spoken languages or languages with reputations for being difficult, will probably be happy to see that you're trying (yes there are some exceptions, but like a Russian friend of mine said, "There are assholes everywhere.  Just don't let them bother you.")  Just find ways to have fun with it.  Also, if you are surrounded by native speakers and you're not a native speaker, you will inevitably feel like you can't speak--get a better point of referance.  For me, while I was in Olomouc I thought I couldn't speak Czech at all, but when I arrived in Germany I met a few Czechs who were studying in Germany and I spoke better than I ever had, not because crossing the border rocketed my abilties, but because I felt more confidant in the language cause being surrounded by people who couldn't speak a word of Czech showed me how much I had learned.
6) Learn at least a little about the culture and the history of the language's speakers.  You can't understand the term "Army-brat" unless you were either raised in the US or have studied American culture deeply (you have no idea how many times I've had to explain that term).  And then there are idioms, cliches, proverbs, etc. that a grammar course will not teach you, but are vital to comprehension of a language.
7) Play to your strengths.  If you learn through visual aids, ask your teacher for visuals or get visuals for yourself.  If you're an audatory learner, get tapes, music, or movies; if you're a hands-on type of person get out there and start trying out your skills.  Find out how you learn the best and try to learn that language as much as possible through that way.  Like for me, I have an incredible capacity for language learning, but I can't teach myself anything and so I NEED human interaction.  Seriously.  I am amazed and extremely jealous of people who can teach themselves anything.  I can absorb grammar like a sponge, but I need to have another human being there in front of me explaining it to me.

I hope this helps people, and please, feel free to add, amend, whatever to this list cause I'm sure it's not complete or accurate for everybody in every situation.  And finally, my listing for the hardest languages (at least that I personally speak or have studied):
Georgian (this language also has a lot of glottal sounds like Arabic, which for an English speaker are just plain weird; there are 12 parts to a single verb; consonant clusters can go on for 8 or more letters; there are six cases; six tenses; it has it's own alphabet found only in Georgia; it has no existing relatives except for a few non-written languages also spoken basically only in Georgia; and it's nearly impossible to find resources for it in the West)
Czech (normal problems of Slavic languages plus ř, and the fact that there is such a huge discrepency between spoken and written Czech; also very difficult to find resources for Czech)
Russian (normal Slavic language difficulties, but nowhere near as hard as it's been called, at least for me, but yes lots of exceptions or very subtle shades in meaning between words that can really get frustrating; but if you're serious about it you'll never lack for resources, it's actually the second most published language in the world behind English, or it was at some point)
German (if you can survive the first two years, you're basically good to go cause you've probably encountered most of the hard stuff, at least the hard stuff the Germans actually still use)
English (hey, it's my native language so it isn't hard at all)


----------



## JLanguage

badgrammar said:
			
		

> But I don't understand this thing about wanting to claim "total bilingual" status, being indistinguishable from the natives. IMHO, who gives aFlying Wallenda?  (note: if you are a non-native English speake and have to ask what this means, then I guess you do not "qualify" for the perfectly bilingual award).


 
Man, guess I fail the English profiency test. Never heard anyone say "Flying Wallenda" before, and although there are numerous common versions of that idiom, I don't believe Wallenda is one of them.


----------



## irisheyes0583

JLanguage said:
			
		

> Man, guess I fail the English profiency test. Never heard anyone say "Flying Wallenda" before, and although there are numerous common versions of that idiom, I don't believe Wallenda is one of them.



Agreed.


----------



## nycphotography

JLanguage said:
			
		

> Man, guess I fail the English profiency test. Never heard anyone say "Flying Wallenda" before, and although there are numerous common versions of that idiom, I don't believe Wallenda is one of them.


 
The flying wallenda's were a circus act.

http://www.wallenda.com/history.html


----------



## annettehola

rjuracek, you've simply said it all. How well put, and how true. I can't add anything, I only want to say, that, as you say, *motivation* is essential. And another essential in my experience is: *atmosphere*. You can learn anything if you are in an environment where you feel well.
I really enjoyed what you wrote. And I agree with it all.
Annette


----------



## cindy6

nycphotography said:
			
		

> I posit that it is MUCH harder as an American to learn Cantonese than Mandarin, simply because almost ALL the materials available are for learning Mandarin. But neither of those are as hard as learning, say, Basque or Housa or Igbo, as there are only the occasional resources available.



While what u said's true, Cantonese is harder than Mandarin largely because it has 9 tones rather than the 4 of Mandarin. Besides, Mandarin follows modern written Chinese fairly closely while Cantonese does not (both in terms of grammer & vocabulary). If that's not bad enough, a large portion of Cantonese speakers use the traditional characters (definitely more elegant rather than the simplified ones.


----------



## zarzuela

I believe Finnish is one of the most difficult languages to learn because it is not related to any other language.


----------



## annettehola

Zarzuela, this cannot possibly be. All languages - perhaps except for computer languages and volapyk - are interrelated in my opinion. No language spoken by people is a closed entity. No language just sort of fell down from the sky, totally unrelated. This I cannot believe in. As for Finnish, I don't know that language, but I imagine it is related - at least in some sense - to Russian. It is also considered a Scandinavian language, but I, a Dane, cannot understand it. It seems to be a very local language but I don't think it is totally on its own in the linguistic world, if you see what I mean. 
All for now,
Annette


----------



## TrentinaNE

According to Wikipedia, Finnish is part of the Uralic family language, which includes Estonian and Hungarian. That relationship has always fascinated me, because if you look at the map at the linked site, those three areas are not contiguous. 

Elisabetta


----------



## Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

annettehola said:
			
		

> All languages - perhaps except for computer languages and volapyk - are interrelated in my opinion. No language spoken by people is a closed entity. No language just sort of fell down from the sky, totally unrelated.


That's logical, but there do exist "language isolates" - languages that are so radically different from everything else that scholars have so far been totally unable to link them with others. Basque, which is said to have been where it is long before Indo-European speakers settled in the area, is probably the most famous example. Korean is another - it's been linked to Altaic languages (Turkish, Mongolian etc.), but there's no agreement on this.

Moreover, the relationships between the assumed proto-languages of the various families are problematic. Did they all split from an even earlier source, or did some of them actually arise independently?

And as for "hardest languages to learn" - that will necessarily differ based on what the learner is already familiar with, and naturally the hardest languages will be the ones most different from the learner's native language, or any other language he has learned to think in. So, how about some American Indian languages? Some are apparently polysynthetic to such a degree that a verb may stand for an entire sentence...


----------



## tmoore

My daughter ,american born,had the oportunity , thanks to my husband's job, to live in Southeast Asia for 9 years, went to chinese school, where she learned to read and write mandarin, coming back to the US she took spanish. She found out that at least for her, mandarin was a lot easier than spanish. ( Those spanish verbs drove her insane!)


----------



## tusenfryd

Hi!
I don't know what is the hardest language to learn...
Maybe, my mother tongue: Italian, it is very difficult for a lot of people and, at the same time, it is very simple for others!
We have a lot of "dialects" and some of them are incomprehensible for us (Italians) as well, if we were not born where that dialect is spoken.
I think that every language might be "impossible" or might be "easy" to be learnt...it'a a matter of a lot of things: where you were born, why you want to/must learn a new language, if you consider it a pleasure or a duty, if you can make a lot of practice...and so on!
I think that nothing is too easy or too difficult. We have to pledge...

Bye!

PS: any correction is accepted


----------



## Hakro

Claytor said:
			
		

> Yes learning Chinese Characters is time consuming, but it is simple. The tones are difficult at first, but become fairly easy after a little time, and the grammar and morphology are otherwise simple. The true difficulty expressing oneself beyond a middle level fluency in Chinese - - - is that we think very differently. As a result, we express ourselves very differently.
> - - -
> In short I would say that the language with the most closely related culture is going to be the easiest and the one with the most foreign culture will be the most difficult.


Congratulations! There is the absolute truth of the hardest laguages to learn. Think, for example, about Eskimo language (is it Inuitian?). If I remember right, there are 28 different words for _snow_. You have no idea what's the difference between these expressions and you'll have no use for these words unless you live there. On the other hand, its practically impossible to translate your ideas into Eskimo language because there are no words nor expressions for most of them.

Byr the way, in Finnish there are less than a dozen different words for different types of snow, so it's three times easier to learn than Eskimo language.


----------



## Hakro

> I believe Finnish is one of the most difficult languages to learn because it is not related to any other language.





			
				TrentinaNE said:
			
		

> According to Wikipedia, Finnish is part of the Uralic family language, which includes Estonian and Hungarian. That relationship has always fascinated me, because if you look at the map at the linked site, those three areas are not contiguous.
> 
> Elisabetta


Did you know that the Finns and the Hungarians have no racial connection between each other. It's only the language. It means that one Fenno-Ugrian nation that wandered more south than we Finns, mixed with other nations and disappeared, but their language survived. For some reason that nobody knows, the apparently bigger and stronger nation took this language their own. So neither Hungarian nor Finnish should be too hard to learn.

There are other Fenno-Ugrian nations, very small, living in the Russian area, but they seem to be condemned to disappear.


----------



## Hakro

> Originally Posted by *boelo*
> _I think my own language (DUTCH) is probably one of the most difficult ones. Don´t know any non natige speaker that speaks it correctly_





			
				Claytor said:
			
		

> I’m sure the same could be said of Basque, Inuktitut, or Zhuang. While Dutch is more popular and more important than those Languages, it is relatively unimportant as a second language. It is not important in business, science, or politics. Therefore, only those who choose to live in your great and beautiful country have much of a motivation to learn your language. It is (in theory) the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn. Why do you think the Dutch speak English so well? By the way it should be fairly easy for a German to learn too. With Dutch it isn’t a question of difficulty so much as opportunity and need.


In my opinion, Dutch is impossible to pronounce for a foreigner but otherwise quite simple a language. I have read that during WW II the Dutch resistance chose their passwords from thos Dutch words that were absolutely impossible for foreigners. On the other hand, I have made small translations from Dutch without ever having studied that language

I've been also told that Dutch is not a language, it's a throat disease.

A friend of mine who was born in the Swedish-speaking coastal area in western Finland went to work in Amsterdam for a year or so. When he came back he said he had learned to speak Dutch quite fluently. I said, "Why not, as you spoke so well German when you started." He said, "No, I found more similarities between Dutch and the Swedish dialect of my native place that between Dutch and German."
Isn't that funny?


----------



## Claytor

annettehola said:
			
		

> Zarzuela, this cannot possibly be. All languages - perhaps except for computer languages and volapyk - are interrelated in my opinion. No language spoken by people is a closed entity. No language just sort of fell down from the sky, totally unrelated. This I cannot believe in. As for Finnish, I don't know that language, but I imagine it is related - at least in some sense - to Russian. It is also considered a Scandinavian language, but I, a Dane, cannot understand it. It seems to be a very local language but I don't think it is totally on its own in the linguistic world, if you see what I mean.
> All for now,
> Annette


 
There is one living language that is not a part of any language family.  Vietnamese is an island of a language.  It is not a part of any larger language family as far as linguists can tell.


----------



## Shahdee

I would say slovak and czech languages can be difficult for foreigners (because of the declesion).
And as I was looking at some other languages I found Irish and Finnish to be really tough.

On wikipedia there is a big article about slovak language for those interested


----------



## Dalian

Claytor said:
			
		

> There is one living language that is not a part of any language family. Vietnamese is an island of a language. It is not a part of any larger language family as far as linguists can tell.


 
Vietnamese is one member of the Austro-Asiatic family. Other languages that fall into this family include Muong (a dialect in Vietnam), Khmer (the language of Cambodia), etc.

Finnish is a Uralic language. Hungarian and Estonian belong to the same family. 

A better example of Language Isolate may be Basque, or Ainu, an almost extinct language spoken in isolated areas in Japan.

Regards
Dalian


----------



## urizon9

The most difficult one is Italian because of its grammar.I`ve looked into Finnish,Hebrew,French,Dutch,Spanish etc.-nowhere I see so many sensless rules as in Italian.In five years I learned to speak perfect Russian for example but Italian-I try as hard as I can but I`ll never get it!Con saluti,urizon9.


----------



## morpho

Basically, your native language determines what foreign languages are difficult to learn.

A native English speaker, for example, would have a *relatively* easier time with languages such as Dutch, German, and Spanish -- while having a *relatively* more difficult time with languages such as Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic.

One has to consider similarities and differences in several aspects of two languages to determine relative difficulty: writing system, gender marking, inflections, declensions, etc.


----------



## MindStorm

It's hard for me to decide wich language is the most difficult, because I don't know them all. But Imho russian is one of the most difficult languages of the world. I'm evaluating it not from the point of counting letters in alphabet and such stuff, but from the point of the language structure. for example, learning kanji characters is hard for me, but japanese itself doesn't seem supernatural for me since I know russian. I think very few people can master russian, except the children of course. But with all the difficulties, it also gives you the great powers to express your thoughts. Also, russian is very rich on synonyms, and if you are going to read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, you should learn russian first.
I know czech a bit, and it isn't far behind the russian.
Also i've heard that Hungarian and finnish are more difficult than russian, but I don't have any expirience in those, so I can't say much about them.
The only thing is clear to me-the japanese isn't the hardest language to learn. Also, I don't know about arabic, but if it is quite comparable to german (i've nothiced some posts about something like that before), it isn't a problem either, because german isn't that difficut. So that's my position.


----------



## Tobus

Mandarin Chinese actually is still kind of basic with regard to tones (4 tones plus a neutral tone). Take a look at Taiwanese or Vietnamese, I heard they are much more difficult in this regard (Taiwanese is actually one of the Chinese dialects if I'm correct).


----------



## CrazyIvan

Tobus said:
			
		

> Mandarin Chinese actually is still kind of basic with regard to tones (4 tones plus a neutral tone). Take a look at Taiwanese or Vietnamese, I heard they are much more difficult in this regard (Taiwanese is actually one of the Chinese dialects if I'm correct).


 
Whether Taiwanese is a dialect of Chinese can be seen in two different way.

1. If you define "Chinese" as all languages spoken in China, yes, Taiwanese is very close to what people speak in southern part of Fukien province, which means, Taiwanese is a dialect of that language. I just quote some of my words from other discussion to clarified this.

2. If you define "Chinese" only as "Mandrin", I will say Taiwanese is a very different language. Taiwanese to Mandrin is just like Cantonese to Mandrin. I know Mandrin well, but I still cannot understand Cantonese at all, same thing for people only know mandrin to understand Taiwanese. So, in that case, it should be another language.

well, i found a more thorough description of Taiwanese and please 

click here


----------



## sugasweeti

i bet vietnamese is pretty hard. you have to have a viet tongue to really pronounce the words right easily. at least that's what like, everybody, says. um... yea.



			
				modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker. My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols. Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters. However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


----------



## sugasweeti

or dutch, polish, or arabic. did u ever notice that there are, like, no arabic-english dictionaries on the internet? mmmmm hmmmmm. yup yup yup yup yup. (sigh)


----------



## sugasweeti

smarty-pants!!!!!!! 
=] jk



			
				Dalian said:
			
		

> Vietnamese is one member of the Austro-Asiatic family. Other languages that fall into this family include Muong (a dialect in Vietnam), Khmer (the language of Cambodia), etc.
> 
> Finnish is a Uralic language. Hungarian and Estonian belong to the same family.
> 
> A better example of Language Isolate may be Basque, or Ainu, an almost extinct language spoken in isolated areas in Japan.
> 
> Regards
> Dalian


----------



## sugasweeti

vietnamese. definitely vietnamese. no doubt. don't argue wit me. yup yup yup. mmmhmmm... of corse im rite.


----------



## macta123

I suppose 
 Chinese and Japanese. 

But, if you have the passion and commitment no language is a problem.


----------



## Vertigo

GERMAN is by all means the hardest language! I thought it would be a breeze before I started to learn it, however it's one of those languages where you think your doing well, then you hit a snag,or slump and you forget it all, you get angry and depressed and you lose all motivation and self esteem. Enough about my life lol. Even though German is hard I still want to learn it, awesome language, culture and accent.

Russian is another one, it makes me panic just looking at the characters


----------



## vince

I'd say Chinese languages other than Mandarin are hard, especially since most of them cannot be written down, so you have to rely entirely on listening to speech and alphabetized transliterations. I guess a lot of people are initially fooled by the propaganda that "all Chinese languages are merely dialects because they have the same written form". The large number of tones is very confounding.

Spanish is one of the languages that are the easiest to pronounce, as well as its regular pronunciation. Grammatically it may be difficult for learners from non-Indo-European analytic languages that aren't used to verb conjugations and gender. Luckily there are few irregular verbs and gender is predictable to a degree.


----------



## QBU

Where are people who speak silbo living? I never heard of it.
It seems to me that French is quite difficult to learn when it comes to writing. I teach elementary school children and they have a hard time writing their own language. The amount of mute letters one has to write to spell corectly needs thinking about grammar all the time when you start to write the language. Later on it becomes automatic. As I am writing this, I wonder if our mind is not formated by it inasmuch as we tend to pride ourselves on reason (Descartes and all).. May be I am stretching things a bit. What do you think?
Catherine


----------



## QBU

A couple of after thoughts:
May be this requires an altogether new thread: influence of languages on the way the mind works and vice versa.
Hey Cuchuflete, 
There is a good idea here: write a man/woman dictionnary.


----------



## tmoore

No se si esto es cierto o no, pero he oido decir que el Vascuence es uno de los idiomas mas difciles, sabe alguien algo a este respecto?


----------



## broud

Hello,

I was thinking about that statement of proximity or similarity.  Is it always true?

For example, I'm Spanish, so French is much closer and similar to me than English.But even with our REALLY bad accent, most people I know find English easier than French.  

And what about Italian? I myself can't understand a word when they speak Italian (that's a problem of mine, I can't understand English speakers either. Not even when they speak Spanish and everybody else understands them) , they can understand my Spanish with little effort and my friends understand them too. But, anyway, Italian becomes fairly difficult in language schools ...


----------



## danielfranco

I only speak Spanish and English (and judging by the reception some of my posts get, neither one very well), but I was reading the other day about the *!kung* language of the San people of Africa. Apparently, it's the oldest language and that "!" symbol means you have to click your tongue. So they go around clicking tongues and speaking words with (are you ready?) *one hundred and twenty plus phonemes!!* So what, you may say... Well, Spanish has, what? twenty-two or twenty-four phonemes? I forget... And English has like forty-four, right? So just imagine that...
Bueno, bye.
Dan F


----------



## Mutichou

lauranazario said:
			
		

> I suspect any language that does not utilize the same alphabet/characters you are used to must be particularly difficult. Not only do you have to learn a new set of "symbols", but words as well.


It depends on the language. For example, I've learnt ancient Greek for one year, and the alphabet was easy to learn. I think cyrillic alphabet isn't hard to learn, too.


			
				Whodunit said:
			
		

> 1st Chinese --> over 100,000s of symbols, plus some temporal form etc.


I began Chinese this year. You don't have to learn 100,000 symbols, "only" 2000 are frequently used. But Chinese writing is still difficult. Grammar looks easy, but pronounciation is very difficult: many sounds used in Chinese don't exist in French (my mother tongue) or English... And the four tones are also hard to say and hear.
Japanese is also difficult because of the three writing systems: hiragana and katakana are relatively simple, but kanji are hard (like in Chinese), and have many pronounciations... And grammar is also uneasy.


			
				Whodunit said:
			
		

> 2nd German --> the hardest grammar I think of, my native language, and it's even really hard for natives


I reckon German grammar is quite odd (position of verbs, etc), but I don't think they are very hard.


			
				alc112 said:
			
		

> Para mí el más dificil es español


Everyone thinks his own language is the hardest.  Well, I've been learning Spanish for one year, and I think it is quite easy.


			
				munchkin5000 said:
			
		

> I don't now about anyone else, but i find french impossible!


I agree  French is my mother tongue, and I believe it must be very difficult to learn: spelling (mute letters), conjugations, pronounciation (especially nasal vowels), grammar (many rules with many exceptions)...


I believe there is no most difficult language: it depends on your mother tongue.
My mother tongue is French:
-English is quite easy to me, since a great deal of words come from French;
-Spanish isn't very hard because grammar, conjugations, vocabulary are similar (like others Romance languages);
-German is a bit harder because of its grammar and its vocabulary;
-Chinese is hard because it's totally different.


----------



## aussiepete

Marc1 said:
			
		

> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.


 

zaogaole, wode diannao buhui xie hanzi, 
buguo haihao, wo keyi xie pinyin.
wo tongyi nide shuohua.
wo xiangxin ruguo ni xihuan yige difang.
jiu hui nage yuyan xue daole.
wo xihuan xue zhongwen
lianxi xie hanzi hen hao wan
nimen dou yinggai shi yi shi
xue zhongwen bu tai nan.

oh too bad, my computer cant write chinese characters,
oh well thats ok, i can write in pin-yin
i agree with what you said
i believe that if you like a place
you can learn that language
i like studying chinese
practicing writing chinese characters is fun
you should all give it a try
its not so hard


----------



## Honour

I couldn't definitely say which one is the hardest but i could say that english and any romance(latin) based language is not hard. I have only studied english and french at school (high school and university) and after then i have learnt spanish (i have to indicate that i lack of practice) by myself. Even, i try to catch italian conversations on tv. 
Besides, i think Turkish is not one of the most difficult languages. (Keep in mind that my opinion on Turkish couldn't be objective and may be biased) I admit that there are many verb conjugations and suffixes but anyway almost all of them are regular. The only problem for a foreigner may be vowel harmony. Finally, even though i can't speak i know that there are incredibly long words in german.


----------



## COLsass

I think English is the easiest language to learn because English is everywhere, including this webforum.  But like any language, English has idioms up the wazoo. (hasta en el orto, au cou?)

I read through all this and can't believe no one mentioned how annoying phrasal verbs in English. I would just about freak out if I had to learn the difference between:

Take in
Take off
Take on
Take over

etc.

A wonderful thing about language is that it keeps the mind young and fresh.  I had a professor in college/university who spoke 12 languages fluently and was 85 years old and highly intelligent and active.  The mind needs puzzles to keep it going, so keep learning languages!  Imitate him and pick up Hawaiian over the summer...

Russian: cyrillic is phonetic and loveable, grammar fun to memorize, vocab drives me bonkers.
French: reminds me of English because of contractions, spelling, and consonant elisions.
Spanish: A breeze to read, but why must those prepositions and subjunctive occur in the most random ways?
German: Can't wait, start this weekend!


----------



## badgrammar

Which language is the hardest to learn all depends on your mother tongue.  For an English speaker, Turkish is very difficult.  Not necessarily because of the many conjugations (which are ALL regular, I don't think there are any exceptions at all), but for a few other reasons.

First, you have to integrate the concept of an agglutinative (sp?) language, where words are modified using countless suffixes that you insert into and attched onto the words, create single words that express numerous properties.  A word is often like a mini-sentence, for example:

"Dün arkadasimdaydim" = "I was at my friend's house"

Dün is yesterday.  Then:
arkadas - friend
im - my
da - at
(y)dim - I was

The suffixes  (or morphemes) are all very logical, I'd even say mathematically precise, but there are so many infinite variations it boggles the mind.

Second, there is no equivalent way to use the verb "To be".  There is "olmak" but you cannot use it like "to be", not in the simple form we know in English, German, Spanish, French.  And we use the verb "to be" quite a lot in those languages.  (Je suis, Yo soy, Ich bin).  So you have to wrap your head around the idea that the state of "being" has to be added onto it's subject.  It becomes the -dim for "I was" in the example above, or the "-im" in the word sahildeyim (I am at the beach).

But it has soooooo many more complex forms, and even if you can recognize it when it is used, it's quite difficult to produce it correctly.

Third, yes, vowel harmony is very tricky, even if the rules are extremely regular and have very few exceptions.

And finally, Turkish is really a very imagery-laden language, quite often you have to look far beyond the words to grasp what is said, like standing back to take in a painting as a whole.  If you just use a dictionary, you aren't likely to understand much at all.

In any case, for an English speaker, I assure you, Turkish is a difficult (but rewarding) language to learn.  Turkish apparently has far more in common with Japanese, and it is easier for a Turk to learn Japanese and vice-versa than for either to learn English.  But Japanese and Turkish are very difficult languages for an English speaker to master.

Gercek'te biliyorum... asla asla asla iyi Türkçe konusacagim 



			
				Turk said:
			
		

> I couldn't definitely say which one is the hardest but i could say that english and any romance(latin) based language is not hard. I have only studied english and french at school (high school and university) and after then i have learnt spanish (i have to indicate that i lack of practice) by myself. Even, i try to catch italian conversations on tv.
> Besides, i think Turkish is not one of the most difficult languages. (Keep in mind that my opinion on Turkish couldn't be objective and may be biased) I admit that there are many verb conjugations and suffixes but anyway almost all of them are regular. The only problem for a foreigner may be vowel harmony. Finally, even though i can't speak i know that there are incredibly long words in german.


----------



## Silvaninha

gaer said:
			
		

> Well, that would mean I must hate France, because I find French horribly difficult.
> 
> And in fact, I don't feel that way at all.
> 
> Gaer


 
I think perhaps he was talking about a language that you decide to learn because you love the country ... How well you are doing in learning a random language obviously does not determine whether you like a country or not.


----------



## Xaphirezst

Chinese is definitely the hardest language with their one character per word system >_<


----------



## amirandae

Actually I believe Sapanish to be a very difficult language. I am Spanish native speaker and right now I am studying it. Compared to others that I have studied, Spanish is really confusing! it has 15 tenses! the syntax is a pain and the irregular things are everywhere! and by the way, I do not hate my own country.


----------



## mikesz14

Jonathen Christisen said:
			
		

> What i think is the hardest language to learn is anchient egyptain.
> But most people say english is the hardest lanuage to lean



english ???? English is the simplest languege, which I ever heard.


----------



## mikesz14

paluszak said:
			
		

> Well, Russian is quite hard and not because it's written in its own script, but because of the complexity of Russian grammar. Somebody in this forum said that German grammar is difficult and no doubt it is, but comparing to Russian (and other Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian perhaps) German is plain and simple.
> 
> For me, Vietnamese is the most difficult language to learn and I have never heard about any foreigner really mastering it. I learned Vietnamese for a few years and I used to live in Vietnam, but it really beats me. Once you tried Vietnamese, Mandarin seems easy.
> 
> Jakub



zgadzam sie


----------



## Shu_Fen

modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker. My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols. Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters. However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


 
*I guess if it is to foreigners, Chinese, at least the writing script, should be the one.*
*In speaking, the official national language Putonghua (4 tones) is easier to learn than other dialects.  E.g. one of the provincial dialects in Fujian Province is Hokkien/Minnan (8 tones), very difficult.  M**y mother tongue/first language Cantonese (9 tones) kills even more people.  I heard that there are dialects with 11 or more tones.*
*Before 1949, north and south, in oral communication, caused troubles when doing business.  Yet, we only have one unified writing system (Chinese character/ideogram) and so we can understand each other in writing.*

*I gather that for languages employing alphabetically system like all European languages, even Korean, Japanese (their kanji can be represented by hiragana, katakana and romaji, these four writing scripts are officially accepted) and Arabic etc, they are not difficult to learn because once you are familiar with the "alphabets", you can read it out without knowing the meaning.  Chinese is difficult because each character carries meaning but not sound.  A learner has to recognize the face, know the meaning and learn the sound and also its usage.  Well, our ancesters had too much time to create such a wonderfully poetic legacy to us.  Chinese character itself is something contains rich culture and history, very interesting to learn but maybe not for the high speed more world.  Art takes time to mature well.*


----------



## ellas!

I'd have to agree that a lot of Asian languages would be hard for me, mainly because I know nothing about them. I've heard that Japanese isn't that bad but I'd be scared to start learning Chinese! My friend's Korean and just the accent is hard to understand/immitate well, let alone the writing of it!


----------



## adverus-1

*I think we might also include in that list of difficult languages the Scandinavian languages specially Icelandic. While the other Scandinavian languages have more or less evolved, making them easier to study and learn, Icelandic has changed very little. The language has been spoken since the first settlers arrived around 1000 years ago. Of course it's first name was probably "old norse". *
*The most difficult thing about this language are the declensions. Is not that there are many, Finish has many more, but is that there is an increadible lack of rules on how to use them. Basically you have to know how most of the words change by heart*.


----------



## adverus-1

*I was thinking and I realized that actually the whole concept about the difficult languages is very relative. Our interpretation of what is a difficult language is completely subjected to which languages we know. For example if you know Spanish you might argue that Italian is very easy language to learn, however if you are Korean, or Chinese, you might find Italian rather difficult to learn. So at the end there aren’t difficult languages it is all based on our previous knowledge of other languages. I think you would probably agree with this point, it’s quite logical.*


----------



## Roshini

Did anybody consider Thai to be one of the hardest languages in Asia? It has different characters altogether and each symbol, if I am not mistaken, means a different letter of the alphabet. Thats my opinion. 

Cheers.


----------



## tvdxer

Of "major" languages, I think the most difficult for an English speaker would be Cantonese, due to the writing system and 9 (!) tones.


----------



## the-pessimist

Edwin said:
			
		

> What of the person who hates the USA and UK but loves Australia? That's two strikes against English and one in favor of it?


 
In that case you should just look at where the language is from 

If it's English, so long as you like the English/British, you can hate the rest  If you hate the Engl/British, then you can class that as a 'hard' lanuguage to learn - but no doubt _one_ will end up learning it even if they hate every English speaking country in the world; purely because it's necessary in the current world climate.

Just my view  ......

In terms of languages I have tried - I found Arabic, Urdu and Mandarin the most difficult - but basically because they are the ones with a writing system unfamiliar to me (although I used the English syntax version of Chinese, *Pinyin*, when _I_ studied it) - and the rest of the languages I have studied are European languages.


----------



## LaSmarjeZ

I think that it depends on which is your mother lenguage, but I think that Arabic, Chinese and Finnish are some of the harder.
I'm learning Danish it can be really easy, but I it's impossible to write, there are NO rules!!


----------



## test0012

Artrella said:
			
		

> Chinese and Japanese, because apart from the meanings, grammar and so on, you have to learn the letters!! Although next year will try the Classical Chinese....


As a native Chinese speaker, Classical Chinese is hard to me, especially for those writings in pre-Christian era.

But I really enjoy this language, for its compact and beauty. Too sad it is not used since 20th century. 

For modern Vernacular Chinese, yes, it is hard, but perhaps not as hard as you have thought.


----------



## vince

Xaphirezst said:
			
		

> Chinese is definitely the hardest language with their one character per word system >_<


 You probably have Mandarin in your mind because that's what the writing system is based upon, but if you look at individual Chinese languages, southern languages like Cantonese are even harder than Mandarin. Mandarin has lost many tones and final consonants, so they are forced to make many multisyllable words to avoid having a billion homonyms. Whereas southern Chinese languages often have up to 10 tones and more monosyllabic words. So for people who only know non-tonal languages like English and Spanish, you'll have to be able to distinguish between up to 10 different pronunciations of "ma", all differing only by tone of voice. Cantonese also has many more verbal aspects than Mandarin. Imagine how hard it is for English people to learn the difference between the perfective and imperfective aspects used in most Romance and Slavic languages. Now multiply that ten fold! And combine that with the fact that most non-Mandarin Chinese languages cannot be written down as spoken due to lack of standardization of non-Mandarin characters, so good luck finding a book about them.


As for the easiest language, the easiest well-known language might be Spanish. There aren't a whole lot of irregular conjugations, just learn the rules and endings and go. The spelling system is almost completely regular and there aren't many difficult sounds. I think neighboring languages like Portuguese and French are harder, having more irregular conjugations, difficult sounds like nasal vowels, and in the case of French, less regular spelling.


----------



## lazarus1907

Xaphirezst said:
			
		

> Chinese is definitely the hardest language with their one character per word system >_<


I am not so sure about that. Japanese uses ancient Chinese characters, but unlike Mandarin, where most symbols have only one pronunciation, Japanese Kanjis have most of the time two or more pronunciations, and there are no fixed rules (that I know) to determine which one to use. Many common kanji can have over 20 different pronunciations.


----------



## lazarus1907

> As for the easiest language, the easiest well-known language might be Spanish. There aren't a whole lot of irregular conjugations, just learn the rules and endings and go. The spelling system is almost completely regular and there aren't many difficult sounds. I think neighboring languages like Portuguese and French are harder, having more irregular conjugations, difficult sounds like nasal vowels, and in the case of French, less regular spelling.


Eeeee... I don't think so, if you don't mind the opinion of a Spaniard who has taught Spanish to foreigners. Spanish has A LOT of irregular conjugations. Actually, nearly useful verbs are irregular. If I am not mistaken, the Spanish conjugation is one of the most complex in Europe, for we probably use more tenses than anyone else. I found German conjugation very simple compared to mine, for example.

But I give you that the pronunciation is one of the simplest (despite the feared "r" Spanish sound), and the spelling has few catches. I've managed to teach how to read Spanish correctly to some foreigners in less than half an hour (of course they didn't understand a word, but...). Phonetically, as you said, is simpler than Portuguese, and a lot easier and complex than, say French or English.


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## vince

lazarus1907 said:
			
		

> Eeeee... I don't think so, if you don't mind the opinion of a Spaniard who has taught Spanish to foreigners. Spanish has A LOT of irregular conjugations. Actually, nearly useful verbs are irregular. If I am not mistaken, the Spanish conjugation is one of the most complex in Europe, for we probably use more tenses than anyone else. I found German conjugation very simple compared to mine, for example.
> 
> But I give you that the pronunciation is one of the simplest (despite the feared "r" Spanish sound), and the spelling has few catches. I've managed to teach how to read Spanish correctly to some foreigners in less than half an hour (of course they didn't understand a word, but...). Phonetically, as you said, is simpler than Portuguese, and a lot easier and complex than, say French or English.


Irregular conjugations? Maybe a lot compared to English, but I think every Spanish verb that is irregular is irregular in Portuguese and French as well. So Portuguese and French have more irregular verbs. There are whole categories of strong verbs in German that are irregular, and in German and many other European languages there are many different ways to form plurals. Spanish, just add "s", in French you have to worry about al --> aux, Portuguese al --> ais, etc.  There are many of these "sound-changing" phenomena, like in Russian and German and Mandarin (tone sandhi). I can't think of any equivalents in Spanish except for logically putting in an "e" before "s" in the plural if the word ends with a consonant (e.g. al --> ales). the main obstacles i've been facing in learning spanish have been more subtle things like ser vs. estar, por vs. para, i think the conjugations in spanish are mainly hard to people from backgrounds that aren't familiar to them at all, like Chinese languages and English.

The trilled r is much more common than the English r, it's in many other European languages. I don't know many other languages that have the English r or the French/German r.

Just giving my humble opinion.


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## lazarus1907

I don't know what to say, vince. I have a list of 3104 irregular verbs in Spanish (34%), and quite a few of them have different root changes throughout tenses. I don't know how many irregular ones are there in French or Portuguese. And regarding tenses... I know from perfect bilingual friends that we use more tenses on average than any of those languages. The ser/estar issue is not as bad as some people think.

Apart from that, I don't think is a terribly difficult language to learn, and I sincerely encourage people to learn it (doesn't really sound like I do, does it?). Even though there are so many irregular verbs, through practice and intuition one ends up conjugating new verbs correctly without realizing.


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## vince

the root changes are usually logical, like parecer you can't have "yo pareco", you have to say parezco, then you know how to conjugate aparecer, conocer, agradecer, and dozens of other "irregular verbs". If it's not logical, then there's usually a rule, like stressed o --> ue, stressed e --> ie.

So the percentage of irregular verbs (34%) probably isn't indicative of how much memorizing you need to do considering how few _categories_ (i.e. separate conjugations) of irregular verbs there are.

How many Spanish irregular verbs are there whose French/Portuguese cognates aren't irregular?
compare conjugations of spanish haber, tener, ver, venir, querer, poder, decir, traer, poner to portuguese haver, ter, ver, vir, querer, poder, dizer, trazer, pôr

you have spanish yo hube ella hubo; yo tuve ella tuvo; yo vi, ella vio; yo vine, ella vino; yo quise, ella quiso; yo pude, ella pudo; yo dije, ella dijo; yo traje, ella trajo; yo puse, ella puso

notice the pattern? final e = yo, final o = él/ella

Then look at Portuguese:

HAVER: eu houve ela houve TER: eu tive ela teve, VER: eu vi ela viu, DIZER: eu disse, ela disse,  VIR: eu vim ela veio, QUERER: eu quis ela quis, PODER: eu pude ela pôde,  TRAZER: eu trouxe, ela trouxe, PÔR: eu pus ella pôs

I don't see any pattern here! In fact I keep confusing vejo (I see) with veio (He came), and viram (They saw) with vieram (They came)

no problem in spanish, because you have veo, vino, vieron, and vinieron that actually look like the verbs they come from!


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## avalon2004

Here's my two cents!
Every language can be hard in some way or other and I don't think that we can ever say which language is definitely the "easiest" or "hardest", in my opinion. Surely, though, the hardest language for an English speaker to learn is one that has nothing in common with Indo-European languages. I also don't think that the difficulty of a language can be determined by cases or verb conjugations, but rather by the way in which the speakers view the world. Languages reflect the way things have been perceived by groups of people, and if their views on life are radically different from what you're used to, then their language will likewise be very different. So in other words, English speakers are going to find the likes of Spanish, French and Italian easier than Quechua, Korean and Swahili because English speakers have more in coomon with people living in Spain, France and Italy (or wherever). 


As a result of that, I once tried to learn some Quechua and couldn't believe the sheer complexity of the language- other than a few Spanish words, it has nothing at all in common with English. I'd certainly imagine this is the case with other languages like Quechua, where the culture is so very different to that which we base our lives around.


So, "hard" languages for English speakers are those which display a whole different wave of thought. For example, whereas we say "I pass the ball to John", in another language this may become "living entity, person speaking-movement-concrete item, round shape-other living entity, receiver-event occurring at specific time". You also have to bear in mind that the above could be written all in the space of one word, in an order that we would consider back-to front..


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## Robbo

Some southern African languages (eg Zulu and siNdebele - language of the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe) have some sounds (eg so-called 'click sounds') that are very difficult for most non-native speakers. 

They also tend to change the BEGINNING of words to achive concordance.  For example, in siNdebele, the plural is formed by changing the prefix and must take account of the class of the noun:

river = umfula;       rivers = imifula.
fire = umlilo;          fires = imililo.
stone = ilitshe;       stones = amatshe.
tree = isihlahla;      trees = izihlahla.
dog = inja;            dogs = izinja.

This can make it hard to recognise words and particularly difficult when you want look up a word in a dictionary because you have to first discard/replace the prefix.


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## Marko1

Hi.  I think someone mentioned that Spanish was difficult.  From the point of view of a native English speaker, I'd have to say that, for me, it was one of the easiest to learn (although many say Italian is easier).  I have a difficult time, however, understanding Chileans or Spaniards as compared to, say, Mexican speakers.

I can't judge my own language objectively, but can only imagine what a chore it is for others to learn English spelling and pronunciation!  The fact that we have spelling bees atest to that; the concept of a Spanish spelling bee, would be somewhat silly, I think.

I studied German and Russian years ago, and would like to continue studying them in my twilight years ;-)  Some aspects of German will, of course, be familiar to us English speakers because of shared words and some grammatical similarities.  Russian grammar is challenging, but I love both of these languages.

I appreciate this opportunity to share my opinions.


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## surfingnirvana

Hmm.

Id say Native American, DEFINATELY!!!


I dont understand why so many people think that Japanese is hard.  People keep saying it has a hard writing system.  I know that writing is intricately involved into the language but the writing system isnt the language itself, so please ...I dont know I think writing should be kept aside from the language.  Even so, I find Japanese's writing not too hard.  Oh sure, it can be overwhelming, but, it is fairly simple.  For endings you use hiragana along with other primarily Japanese terms, katakana for foreign words and sometimes advertisements, and kanji for overall use.  Oh I am not complete, but I am climbing the mountain steadily enough, and if you try a little kanji each day, every time you see it you get a little feeling of satisfaction when you know what it means !!!!  ( Trust me, Im not saying its easy, I was addicted to romaji for a month into my Japanese studies before I began essential kanji and hiragana((btw, I LOVE hiragana, I think its great  )) ).  

Did you know it has only two irregular verbs?  Da and suru, thats all.  Very simple.  And it takes Japanese speakers maybe four to seven years to become fluent in English, but only two to three for an English speaker to learn Japanese?  

Oh, you have those tricky particles!  Ha versus Ga!  The many meanings of each!  But thats only if you try working against them.  I, for instance, love them.  I memorize them because each of them are like little characters helping to build the sentence.  My favorite are mo and ne .  

And then you have the whole SOV versus our SVO construction.  Well, it is a whole lot easier than Gaeilge!!!  I think that SOV makes lots of sense, its just a new way of looking at things.  

Japanese is also very easy to pronounce!  Well for most.  There is the tricky long vowels which stumbles many English speakers, but many people master it in no time.

And I dont see why people think Spanish is.  They have some irregulars.  But those are really...uniform.  I mean, you can came empezar and cerrar, but like somebody else said, its just a different type of conjugation.  I think Spanish is very enjoyable and it is one of my favorite classes!!!!

I also think Turkish may be, not because of being SOV, but because of the mega words.  To me it must be like adding numbers in your head, how can you say it fluently without adding it all up???

-Alejo


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## xolotl

Hello!

Cassually I found this interesting forum with an interesting question.

I was born billingually, on catalan and spanish. I don´t find them difficult at all. Knowing them makes me speak italian correctly, and understand many of its dialects.
I don´t find english or german difficults, but this is my personal opinion. Most of spaniards think that German is one of the most difficult languages (wether they know or not this language) Also many people here think French is aesy (I don´t), although they cannot read nor write nor talk it properly.
I also study hebrew, and find it so so easy...although it is quite different form most european languages. Hebrew and arabic, despite of their writing, are extremely related languages. 

What I actually think, is that Euskara (Basque Country language) is one of the most difficult languages to learn, if it is not your mother language. Maybe at the same level than Finnish or Turkish.

And I have to remember you, that in summary, Spain is a very poor country in terms of language knowledgment.

Thanks a lot.............................................................ignaxidixit


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## Robbo

Xolotl

Welcome to the forum! You make some very good points.  I hope you will visit often and share your questions and opinions.

Robbo


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## maxiogee

xolotl said:
			
		

> I was born billingually,



… with your mother swearing in two languages?


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## xolotl

thanks a lot ... obviously my mother has just one first language. What I tried to say was that I was grown up diglossically between two languages: spanish (my mother) and catalan (my father), with some conflicts for this reason. Anyway, I´m glad to be developed in this way.


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## MonsieurAquilone

Inuit looks very difficult.


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## optimistique

Marko1 said:
			
		

> I can't judge my own language objectively, but can only imagine what a chore it is for others to learn English spelling and pronunciation! The fact that we have spelling bees atest to that; the concept of a Spanish spelling bee, would be somewhat silly, I think.


It's not that bad. I think English's unlogical spelling and pronunciation is somewhat overrated as a problem (it's mostly only the English speakers themselves that say it's probably so difficult). There are only a couple of words which pronunciation would really not be derivable from its spelling, but that's the case in most languages. You just have to learn it, then you know. For the rest, it really isn't so difficult.


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## medeterian

badgrammar said:
			
		

> Third, yes, vowel harmony is very tricky, even if the rules are extremely regular and have very few exceptions.
> 
> And finally, Turkish is really a very imagery-laden language, quite often you have to look far beyond the words to grasp what is said, like standing back to take in a painting as a whole. If you just use a dictionary, you aren't likely to understand much at all.
> 
> In any case, for an English speaker, I assure you, Turkish is a difficult (but rewarding) language to learn. Turkish apparently has far more in common with Japanese, and it is easier for a Turk to learn Japanese and vice-versa than for either to learn English. But Japanese and Turkish are very difficult languages for an English speaker to master.
> 
> Gercek'te biliyorum... asla asla asla iyi Türkçe konusamayacagim



Ben iyi Türkçe konuşmayı sonradan öğrenen kişiler tanıyorum. neden sen de konuşamayasın ki?

I agree with your opinions about Türkçe (Turkish) and Türkçe-Japanese relation. And I want to add the American-Indians language to this pair. Maybe there could be more that I dont know. It is obvious that Türkçe and Japanese have grammar rules and many words in common due to the fact that Türks had lived in middle-asia before they mgrated. Some Linguists say that a part of the emigrees settle in America through the Berring Channel. Others say that there was a trade path through Berring Cnannel which improved the relations between the American-Indians and Türk civilization.

Being a computer science engineer, I can say that Türkçe has a really strong mathemathics base. It provides a good basis for computers to morphologically analyse Türkçe. It means that computer programmers can produce more powerfull systems when they work on Türkçe or Japanese as the natural language instead of Latin based languages.

Considering the effect of the mother language on human thinking, we can say that people whose mother language is Japanese or Turkish are more fit for designing mathemathical models, computer programs and other tasks that require a mathemathical speacialization.

In addition, I didnt try to learn a language that is difficult to me to learn

Sevgiler...


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## badgrammar

Very interesting observations about the mathematical qualities of Turkish and the effect that must have on thought organization.  I had not thought about the way a language could affect computer programming.  It is almost like each morpheme could have a particular, constant value, and these values can be precisely combined and calculated...  That probably isn't the logic behind it, and my example may not even make any sense, but I can definitely see what you mean!  

I also think that is something I like so much about the language - it is more of a left-brain challenge than any other language I've studied.  It seems to stimulate areas of my feeble mind that I rarely use in my more language and communication based occupations.



			
				medeterian said:
			
		

> Ben iyi Türkçe konu?may? sonradan ö?renen ki?iler tan?yorum. neden sen de konu?amayas?n ki?
> 
> I agree with your opinions about Türkçe (Turkish) and Türkçe-Japanese relation. And I want to add the American-Indians language to this pair. Maybe there could be more that I dont know. It is obvious that Türkçe and Japanese have grammar rules and many words in common due to the fact that Türks had lived in middle-asia before they mgrated. Some Linguists say that a part of the emigrees settle in America through the Berring Channel. Others say that there was a trade path through Berring Cnannel which improved the relations between the American-Indians and Türk civilization.
> 
> Being a computer science engineer, I can say that Türkçe has a really strong mathemathics base. It provides a good basis for computers to morphologically analyse Türkçe. It means that computer programmers can produce more powerfull systems when they work on Türkçe or Japanese as the natural language instead of Latin based languages.
> 
> Considering the effect of the mother language on human thinking, we can say that people whose mother language is Japanese or Turkish are more fit for designing mathemathical models, computer programs and other tasks that require a mathemathical speacialization.
> 
> In addition, I didnt try to learn a language that is difficult to me to learn
> 
> Sevgiler...


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## Robbo

I think the above stuff on Turkish and Japanese is fascinating and of considerable significance in developing machine processing of human languages.

If you're interested in computational linguistics (machine processing, automated summarization, computerized analysis of natural language and interpretation), have a look at:

http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/

The Computational Linguistics Group at the University of Wolverhampton includes researchers from Japan, Bulgaria, Rumania, France, Ireland, Russia, Vietnam and Britain.   I'm sure they would be interested in exploring Turkish contributions too.

*Robbo

*


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## medeterian

Robbo said:
			
		

> I think the above stuff on Turkish and Japanese is fascinating and of considerable significance in developing machine processing of human languages.
> 
> If you're interested in computational linguistics (machine processing, automated summarization, computerized analysis of natural language and interpretation), have a look at:
> 
> ....
> 
> The Computational Linguistics Group at the University of Wolverhampton includes researchers from Japan, Bulgaria, Rumania, France, Ireland, Russia, Vietnam and Britain. I'm sure they would be interested in exploring Turkish contributions too.
> 
> *Robbo
> 
> *


Thanks for the information Robbo. I have just applied them for a project proposal on Türkish language. I appriciate the work carried out in the projects.


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## _Hawk_

What many have said about Arabic is correct. 

Theres pretty much two types of Arabic.

1- The written Arabic, which is always formal. It is spoken in the formal way at universities, speeches etc.

2- The slang and dialects or "street" Arabic if you will.
 Thats the Arabic you hear people talking in. If you are observant you'd notice how different people may speak Arabic differently. It would sound a bit different.

People in the same country would have different dialects since they come from different cities or areas, but they'd usually completely understand eachother. 

In Saudi Arabia you have Jeddah ( Hijazi ) accent ( a bit influenced by Egyptian accent ) , Riyadh accent, Southern accent, and bedwin accent. ( dialect may be more accurate )
Then you have Kuwaiti accent, UAE ( United Arab emirates accent ), Yemeni accent, Morrocan accent, Syrian accent, and Egyptian accent.

Sudanis have their own accent too.

I ( an Arab from gulf )find it hard to understand the Morrocan accent if they didnt try to make it easier for me to understand if we spoke. Their Arabic would sound like French to me although they'd be using words I know.

If I ever went to Morroco however, I'd probably be able to understand them within a month or so.

When all these Arabic speaking people read newspapers, or go to religious lectures at Masjids ( aka mosques ) , they'd be reading and listening to the formal Arabic that they'd all understand. 

Thats one of the reasons some find it hard to learn Arabic.The street Arabic is never taught, and doesnt have rules. 

Learning the formal ( and real ) Arabic is very possible. Theres two year degrees offered at some universities that teach it. One then can learn a little street Arabic from whatever country, and be able to read newspapers, understand what is said on TV etc.

I really dont think its that hard. Although it certainly isnt the language you can learn from a booklet without actually being taught and for a decent amount of time.

Thats why  most foriegners who dont learn the language at any academic school have formed their own "broken" Arabic, we understand them and they understand us ( usually but not all the time )

A friend of mine lived in China for about six months. He took private lessons and learned a bit and said it wasnt that hard. He mentioned that Japanese would be harder to learn. I have no idea on how accurate that is, but in my mind right now, Japanese is the hardest to learn.

One important thing many of us bilingual people here probably have  noticed is that the more languages you learn, the easier it becomes in picking up and learning a new language.

Learning enough of a language to get by on the streets is probably easy whatever the language may be. I remember meeting a guy whos mother tongue was Farsi. He spoke many different languages but without the ability to read or write in them.

He did pretty much makeup his own Arabic, the Arabic that would make an Arabic teacher pull out his hair, but he certainly was able to communicate and get his messege through when he spoke.

I think it would be safe to say the hardest languages to learn are the ones that are most different from your native language. ( in terms of letters, how familiar/foriegn one is to the usage of feminine and masculine with objects and nouns)


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## Aldin

Did you try Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian
It's a tonal language.
For example:
Gore gore gore.(The hills are burning stronger)
or Alija(male name) and Alija(female name).
I think that languages using clicks(Zulu and Koisan languages) are the hardest to learn.


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## kanojo_

Japanese, without a doubt.
It is not the written language that intimidates me (the two alphabets are pretty easy to grasp only there are approximately 2000 kanji to learn to comunicate fairly well in Japan but still, I can tolerate that haha) it is the HUGE difference in thinking compared to Europian languages that makes up the most complicated grammar I've came across to. There are a lot of conjugations, special expressions depending on who you're speaking to, not to mention the sentence word order and the particles. There's just too many of it. 
I'm still loving the language though and I'll defenitely keep on learning. I guess the real trick is to be patient and determinated. That way, no language can be so difficult to not learn at least the basics if not even gain fluency.


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## tokyowalker

japanese for sure  s the most difficult to learn ..with all the kanjis and the different spelling of them ....


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## Tensai

Korean, Arabics

I have not studied both languages at all, but it seems to me that those two are very difficult.  And quite frankly, looking at so many Korean characters gives me a headache.


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## panjabigator

Tonal languages are menacing!  Panjabi is a tonal language, but it isn't that bad.


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## ukuca

I think most people would agrree that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn, it demands another kind of a semiologic memory. I wonder how Chinese people learn to write in Chinese. Do they know every script for every word? In daily life an ordinary person do not use more than, let's say 2 thousand words, so it seems 100.000 word is a very big number to remember.


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## vince

ukuca said:
			
		

> I think most people would agrree that Chinese is a very difficult language to learn, it demands another kind of a semiologic memory. I wonder how Chinese people learn to write in Chinese. Do they know every script for every word? In daily life an ordinary person do not use more than, let's say 2 thousand words, so it seems 100.000 word is a very big number to remember.


There should be a thread that explains this

but many (I think more than 50%) characters are compound characters
they are a combination of two or more simplier "symbols"

Usually, either the "symbols"  give a clue to the meaning, or to the pronunciaiton

So it's rarely fully brute memorization

But it's still vastly harder than alphabet systems.


----------



## Why Not?

modgirl said:
			
		

> What, in your opinion, are the hardest languages to learn?
> 
> For reference, I am a native English speaker.  My second language is French, and my third language is Russian (though I don't speak well at all).
> 
> To me, an Asian language, such as Japanese or Chinese would be most difficult because of the symbols.  Also, I find it difficult to distinguish Arabic letters.  However, orally, I think that the throat languages, such as Tuvan, would be the absolute hardest!


Well, think of your childhood: How much time didi it take you to learn your own alphabet?

In fact, it is not much harder to learn foreign alphabets, at all, even though they might consist of far mor symbols than the alphabet you are used to.

One should, however, exclude languages like Chinese, but languages which use letter based alphabats like our European languages (or even Thai, which consists of 44 vowels and about 32 vocals) are not difficult to learn as to writing words and being able to read them. Just take some time and "draw a bit", just like a little first year schoolchild, it really works!!

What I think is most difficult about learning tone languages which might be languages which use quite complicated alphabets (or alphabets which consist of quite a lot of letters and signs), as well, is to learn how to use the different tones (such as Chinese or Thai - in Thai, for instance, there are 5 tones and in Chinese, I think, as well). Being a European you simply might not be able to hear any difference between a syllable spoken in one tone or another!!! Well, after a while you get used to it, but it takes some time - and, above all: You MUST be able to forget your fear to possibly disgrace yourself when you try to imitate the sounds of native speakers, in general and in particular in tone languages, I think!! Just imitate, you need not at all to be able afterwards to explain how you "produced" a particular word or sound. Adults seem to be very keen on being able to explain how they do things. Forget about it!!! Just do it and play with you vocal chords and any muscles that may be concerned. And: forget about sounds that, to your ears, might sound strage or even unacceptable!! (Some guttural sounds might do.)

Have a try!!!


----------



## vince

kanojo_ said:
			
		

> Japanese, without a doubt.
> It is not the written language that intimidates me (the two alphabets are pretty easy to grasp only there are approximately 2000 kanji to learn to comunicate fairly well in Japan but still, I can tolerate that haha) it is the HUGE difference in thinking compared to Europian languages that makes up the most complicated grammar I've came across to.



Check out Basque, Finnish, Estonian, and Magyar (Hungarian). They also involve completely different thinking compared to other European languages like Slovenian, English, and Italian.


----------



## paluszak

vince said:
			
		

> Check out Basque, Finnish, Estonian, and Magyar (Hungarian). They also involve completely different thinking compared to other European languages like Slovenian, English, and Italian.



Check out Chukchi - it's (still) spoken in Chukotka (just across Bering Strait from Alaska) and it's so weird, that Hungarian, English and Hebrew seem almost the same in comparision. It's one of the few so called polysynthetic languages (English, Polish, Arabic etc. are fusional, Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish and some Native American languages are agglutinative, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese are isolating and polysynthetic languages are completely different), I will not elaborate about them here, you can find some more info in Wikipedia or google something out.

Vietnamese is the most difficult language I have ever tried to learn myself. Pronounciation is hard, true, but grammar is a killer.

J.


----------



## vince

I was just bringing up European languages that are as different conceptually from Slovenian as Japanese is. That is, you don't have to go far to witness extremely different languages. Of course if you travel around the world you will see completely different languages. Check out Niger-Congo languages in Africa, or Austronesian languages that stretch from Madagascar to Hawaii, or languages of Native Americans.


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## Blackleaf

The hardest language to learn only depends on your native language.

For English-speakers, learning Arabic or Chinese or Japanese would be MUCH more difficult than learning German or French.

However, for Chinese people, learning English would be MUCH more difficult for them to learn than Japanese.


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## TimLA

I vote for the African language "Bushman" (The Gods Must be Crazy).
The "clicks" of the tongue at the back of the throat are absolutely impossible - and even more complex than Tuvan throat-singing .


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## Setwale_Charm

Estonian is not all that hard. It is easier than Finnish. The really hard ones , I find , are the languages of the North Caucasus: Chechen, Abhaz, Tabasaran (the latter one has 48 cases of nouns!!), also the languages of Amerindians, I guess. Some Polynesian langs have mind-boggling grammars. South African languages like Xhosa present real difficulty in the way of pronunciation: the number of tongue clicks. The grammar is not particularly complicated. The main difficulty in Japanese and Chinese is hieroglyphics, I suppose.
However, it all rather depends on the individual. I found German to be one of the hardest languages in my case


----------



## Namakemono

kens said:


> The written language _is_ very difficult, but I think katakana and hiragana are superior to the Latin alphabet (romaji) because, as soon as you read a word written in either katakana or hiragana, you know exactly how to pronounce it.


 
That's not true. Spanish uses the Latin alphabet and we know how to pronounce a word when we read it for the first time. However, that's not the case with English and Danish.


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## venenum

As a native speaker of Croatian, I can say that it's a fairly complicated language. I wouldn't call it the most difficult to learn, but also not the easiest. As a Slavic language, it has the infamous Slavic declensions - 7 cases, the conjugations aren't all that nice, too. And in addition, the accent system is terrible, say some foreigners that tried to learn it. First you have 4 types of accent - low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. And you have an accented syllable in the word. It's normally unmarked. And while you change the form of the word (declension or conjugation, gender or number), the accent can spontaneously "jump" to another syllable, and change its type. Totally irregular occurance. Even the natives can mix this up.


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## zena168

Even though I grew up knowing Chinese but having gained fluency in English made me realize how difficult Chinese must be for others to learn. There are so many ideographic characters that one needs to memorize in order to master a minimal fluency. And so many different but close sounds one must learn to distinguish. The amount of complexity in the written and spoken language reflects the long history that is still with the Chinese people. Chinese speech is occupied with many of the old proverbs that can’t be translated by its literal meanings to foreigners. So it’s impossible to be very fluent without knowing the history and the many cultural stories. There are so many different dialects in China but they’re able to remain unified because of the complex ideographic system. This is also why so many other Asian languages borrow from the Chinese characters. I believe the language will be extremely difficult for European adults to adopt since the culture and the writing system is too different to begin with.


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## Chazzwozzer

medeterian said:


> Ben iyi Türkçe konuşmayı sonradan öğrenen kişiler tanıyorum. neden sen de konuşamayasın ki?
> 
> I agree with your opinions about Türkçe (Turkish) and Türkçe-Japanese relation. And I want to add the American-Indians language to this pair. Maybe there could be more that I dont know. It is obvious that Türkçe and Japanese have grammar rules and many words in common due to the fact that Türks had lived in middle-asia before they mgrated. Some Linguists say that a part of the emigrees settle in America through the Berring Channel. Others say that there was a trade path through Berring Cnannel which improved the relations between the American-Indians and Türk civilization.
> 
> Being a computer science engineer, I can say that Türkçe has a really strong mathemathics base. It provides a good basis for computers to morphologically analyse Türkçe. It means that computer programmers can produce more powerfull systems when they work on Türkçe or Japanese as the natural language instead of Latin based languages.
> 
> Considering the effect of the mother language on human thinking, we can say that people whose mother language is Japanese or Turkish are more fit for designing mathemathical models, computer programs and other tasks that require a mathemathical speacialization.
> 
> In addition, I didnt try to learn a language that is difficult to me to learn
> 
> Sevgiler...


Good point! For those of you who want to learn how Turkish works: A Mathematical Modeling on Turkish

To be honest, I highly doubt if I can learn Japanese. When I hear a Japanese speaking, I feel like they are repeating the same word, I just cannot distinguish words wheras Latin-based languages sound more intelligible to me. Is it just me or Japanese is not actually an easy language for Turks after all? Since I know so many Japanese who speak Turkish well, as well as, Turks speaking Japanese, I believe there must be a reality in the claim that Turkish and Japanese are related, though.


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## Blackleaf

Italian is quite difficult.

They have hundreds of ways just to say "the" - il, i, lo, gli, l' (masculine), la, le, l' (feminine) [[and there are probably others that I have missed out]]. I also found out that some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural and vice versa. Mercifully, us English people only have to say "the".

And Finnish is so difficult it's a nightmare.


The Finnish language does not distinguish gender in nouns (like English) or even in personal pronouns (unlike English): 'hän' = 'he' or 'she' depending on the referent. This causes some unaccustomed Finnish speakers to muddle "he" and "she" when speaking languages such as English or Swedish, which can be a source of confusion. 


Cases 

Finnish has FIFTEEN noun cases: four grammatical cases, six locative cases, two essive cases (three in some Eastern dialects) and three marginal cases. 

Example - 

talo - house 

talon - of (a) house 

taloa - house (as an object) 

talossa - in (a) house 

talosta - from (a) house 

taloon - into (a) house 

talolla - at (a) house 

talolta - from (a) house 

talolle - to (a) house 

talona - as a house 

talonta - from being a house 

taloksi - to [role of] a house 

taloin - with the houses 

talotta - without (a) house 

taloineni - with my house (s) 



Imagine having to speak a language where every noun is spelt 15 different ways.


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## ireney

I think we should start talking about "Which is the most difficult language to learn withing each family group?"

Blackleaf try Greek 

P.S. For a Greek by the way it is easier to learn a language with three genders. It comes more naturally to us than wrapping our admittedly thick heads around the idea that genders are a) not all there b) not all that important.


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## Namakemono

kanojo_ said:


> There are a lot of conjugations


 
It has less conjugations than English (and English doesn't have a rich conjugation system to begin with). I think verb conjugation is the easiest part of the Japanese language: it's that simple. Spanish and Italian verbs are far more difficult.


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## DrWatson

Blackleaf said:


> Imagine having to speak a language where every noun is spelt 15 different ways.



Well actually if you want to speak Finnish like an average Finn, not all of those are needed:
1. Excessive case (11th in the list) doesn't belong to the official list of grammatical cases; it's only used in some Eastern dialects, as you wrote.
2. Abessive, Comitative and Instructive (three last) are quite archaic and usually not used in everyday speech except in some established phrases. Instead we use prepositions and postpositions to express the same things.

Finnish is also a mathemathical language (like Turkish according to medeterian and Chazzwozzer). There are close to no exceptions in the grammar or spelling.

On-topic: The most difficult language I'm learning is probably Chinese. It's not the grammar, it has seemed easy, but it's the pronounciation. There's only one [s]-sound in Finnish, in Chinese there are 9. But I believe I just have to train my tongue more.


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## hohodicestu

Hi,

I think the hardest language to learn is Chinese or Japanese because of the characters.  Since the alphabet doesn't exist in those languages, symbols are used to represent letters. In order to write a small document, many characters are needed and of course there are a lot to memorize.


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## semisa

All European languages except English seem to me rather difficult because of the complexicy of the grammar and even pronounciation...


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## zena168

Someone should’ve started a poll with this because now I’d really like to know which one was considered the hardest from the two hundred and some replies.


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## badgrammar

Someone should really put this thread out of its misery, because it is totally pointless - *there is no one language* that is the heardest to learn - *it all depends on who's learning it and the language they speak*.  

Does anyone disagree with that?  Can we please put that up on some monumental billboard-sized post that will cover up this whole lot of utterly uselss speculation about which one, single laguage is harder than the others to learn...?  

Someone, please, stop this thread!!!

(Sorry, I stopped smoking and may be a llittle grouchy, this post is not directed towards any of the posters here in particular)


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## Blackleaf

semisa said:


> All European languages except English seem to me rather difficult because of the complexicy of the grammar and even pronounciation...


 

English is the most difficult European language in terms of pronunciation.


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## Namakemono

I think Danish pronounciation is even more difficult.


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## ForzaItalia

Ok then, put Danish and English together and hey presto you get Geordie - now that's incredibly difficult!


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## semisa

Blackleaf said:


> English is the most difficult European language in terms of pronunciation.


 
when I say pronounciation,I mean there are certain vibrantes that I cann't make it...like rr in spanish whatever


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## Setwale_Charm

Blackleaf said:


> English is the most difficult European language in terms of pronunciation.


 
You probably mean in terms of the accord of spelling with pronunciation. 
The English pronuciation itself is not that hard, there are few if any sounds that do not exist in other langauges. 

However, few people realise that English is the world`s richest language and crossing the bridge between basic knowledge and mastery takes a lot of time and effort. Most people never get to that stage when they begin to realise the richness and complexity of English.


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## Namakemono

The English pronounciation _is _hard as it has lots of sounds that don't exist in other languages, and the relation between writing and sound is sometimes random. For example, Spanish and Japanese only have five vowels (I'm not sure about Italian).


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## TonioMiguel

Namakemono said:


> The English pronounciation _is _hard as it has lots of sounds that don't exist in other languages, and the relation between writing and sound is sometimes random. For example, Spanish and Japanese only have five vowels (I'm not sure about Italian).



I would have to say Italian would be hard if one did not start within an alpha numeric language.  For me, many of the phrase I understand due to my background in Spanish.  In fact, portugues is easy for me to understand and sometimes French.

Yet, French is not a highly phonetic language and neither is English.  Spanish for me is by far one of the more easier languages.  The only hard concept for me in Spanish is the subjunctive since we naturally use it in English without thinking about it.  I have never studied Arabic, Japanese, or Chinese so I refuse to say these languages are the hardest.

There may not be a hardest language but if our affective filter is high like Krashen suggests, this may be what makes a language difficult.  They say the earlier the language is taught the better a child learns.

I know I may say English is easy but I started with English.  I have seen many Hispanics struggle with learning it so I cannot even come close to thinking English is one of the easier languages.


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## Riccardino

Namakemono said:


> The English pronounciation _is _hard as it has lots of sounds that don't exist in other languages, and the relation between writing and sound is sometimes random. For example, Spanish and Japanese only have five vowels (I'm not sure about Italian).



Standard Italian has 7 - a different e and a different o in addition to the spanish e and o


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## Setwale_Charm

Namakemono said:


> The English pronounciation _is _hard as it has lots of sounds that don't exist in other languages, and the relation between writing and sound is sometimes random. For example, Spanish and Japanese only have five vowels (I'm not sure about Italian).


 
 Try Chechen. Lao, Khmer or Xhosa for a change


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## [jessica]

i think the hardest language would be spanish 'cuz the ortography is very difficult... spanish is my native language and i still getting a lot of mistakes in ortography, also there is more articles, the word "the" had more meanings, in spanish it would be "el, la, los, las"

(i don't speak english very well, please tell me if i write something wrong or if i make a mistake )


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## languagestudent

> i think the hardest language would be spanish 'cuz the ortography is very difficult... spanish is my native language and i still getting a lot of mistakes in ortography, also there is more articles, the word "the" had more meanings, in spanish it would be "el, la, los, las"


How can you say the Spanish orthography is difficult? It's the easiest thing in the language. I've never seen a written language that are so similar to the spoken!

To me the hardest languages are Chinese, Arabic (although I master Arabic cause I'm native) Japenese... But of course it depends on so many other things; I think a Chinese would think Japenese is much more easy than e.g. German..
The Danish pronounciation is hard, but in the other and the grammar is real easy (I'm native Danish speaker too)...
I also think French are quite difficult with all their conjugations, and hard pronounciation. German are difficult but not that much (maybe because Danish and German are similar to each other?) even if the grammar are quite annoying..


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## LuvDancin

I would go with Asian languages too. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese ... But maybe I find it so hard, because they are so foreign to me. And so far away. 
I believe slavic languages are pretty hard to learn too. I find them very similar, but for example people in Serbia don't understand me when I speak Slovene. I find that really weird hehe. 
I'm starting to learn Greek this year and I'm hoping it's not that hard as it sounds like.


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## )o(Akasha)o(

I would say German. I am trying but I just don't get it!


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## avalon2004

I would say that Georgian looks a very difficult language because its whole verb and noun system bares little similarity to that of other languages. Also, phonetically there are lots of words that sound as if they consist purely of consonants. Plus the Georgian alphabet is like nothing I have ever seen before and I can't believe people actually use such intricate looking letters..


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## Setwale_Charm

avalon2004 said:


> I would say that Georgian looks a very difficult language because its whole verb and noun system bares little similarity to that of other languages. Also, phonetically there are lots of words that sound as if they consist purely of consonants. Plus the Georgian alphabet is like nothing I have ever seen before and I can't believe people actually use such intricate looking letters..


 
 I would agree here. The Georgian alphabet though is not all that hard, I learnt it in 30 minutes which I spent in the tube , but the grammar...  However, Georgia comprises many nations and one of those (which is, by the way, now struggling to join Russia) are the Abkhaz people. And THAT`s the language which I gave up upon the second sentence and advise only to admire from a distance but never try. I can think of very few languages in the world as difficult as this one. 
 The problem is that it is hard to evaluate the degree of the complicatedness as most people have not tried all that many. The other point is that it is a purely personal matter. What is difficult for one is not necessarily that for another.


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## beberia

Turkish is the hardest I think.
So many rules, and differantiations.

Selamlar...


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## sergio11

vince said:


> I'd say Chinese languages other than Mandarin are hard, especially since most of them cannot be written down, so you have to rely entirely on listening to speech and alphabetized transliterations. I guess a lot of people are initially fooled by the propaganda that "all Chinese languages are merely dialects because they have the same written form". The large number of tones is very confounding.
> 
> Spanish is one of the languages that are the easiest to pronounce, as well as its regular pronunciation. Grammatically it may be difficult for learners from non-Indo-European analytic languages that aren't used to verb conjugations and gender. Luckily there are few irregular verbs and gender is predictable to a degree.


I'd say all Chinese languages are equally difficult for us Westerners, including Mandarin.   For what I have heard, Chinese languages are not dialects but languages.  That the writing is the same is not a reason to consider them dialects, because the languages don't have any similarities between them.  If we had the same writing as them, would we say that English is a Chinese dialect? Because, in principle, we could have the same writing; every language in the world could have the same writing as Chinese: you see the ideograms and read them in your own language (at least, that is what I have been told).  However, although it would make each other's writing understandable, it would not make it easier to learn.  Chinese and Taiwanese people fluent in speaking, reading and writing their language at the university level have told me that no matter what, it is vastly more difficult than English.  They told me that any sentence you can think of, is easier to write in English than in Mandarin, even for Chinese university graduates.  

I tried to learn some simple phrases from my coworkers.  I learned how to say "good morning", "good afternoon", "how are you?" and "I cannot speak any English", but eventually gave up.  It is so, soooo, sooooo difficult, it is unreal. Part of it is because it is not only the words as we conceive them in Western languages but the intonation, that changes the meaning of the words and phrases. If you don't have a very musical ear, you are dead.  Maybe I should give it a rest and try again? It will be more important as businesses move to China.


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## Marselles

If we want to know which is the hardest language on earth, we must think that we know none and we must check their grammatical elements and compare with each other, we must compare all the aspects and then we will find our answer. We cannot say that chinese because we speak english, what could be the opinion of a chinese fellow, as I already said, we must compare them all, I would like to have answers about my opinion. I only speak english, spanish and french, for me french is the most complex of these three, because it has lots of elements that change, more than spanish wich is harder than english by the way.


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## Lugubert

I have tried several languages, with varying results. In some ways, I found Arabic harder than Chinese, but that might have been because of the respective teachers and that I saw no immediate practical use for Arabic.

Alphabets/syllabaries are no obstacles for me. They rather drive me. Sometimes i think that I collect writing systems, not languages.

There are three groups that I (so far) haven't dared to start learning: Japanese, mainly because of the multiple readings of one and the same kanji, Turkic languages, and Dravidian languages. All very different from any other language that I've tried. Come to think of it, Tamil would be very insteresting. I must find a bookshop in Chennai and buy a few dictionaries when I get there in November, just to be prepared.


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## Marselles

In order to find a definitive answer I think we must put in a chart what we know about all the languages known and then compare them all, I mean, lets write about their grammar and all their characteristics, this is the only way if we wanna really know which is the hardest one and why, I am gonna start with this characteristics of spanish.

"Spanish is a language easy to read, it words are readed always in the same way, no matter the words that are next to them, it has 27 letters and one type of accent. It also has two articles: la, el, las, los. this one has masculine and feminine types and singular and plural forms. una, uno, unas, unos. This one is the same the ones in purple are f. and the ones in blue are m. it has regular verbs and a little group of irregular, to conjugate a verb you must change it depending on the pronoun which you work with.

verb: To be "Ser"
present-----------past-------- pastparticiple--------future
Yo soy------------era ----------he sido--------------sere
tú eres------------eras---------has sido-------------seras 
el es--------------era-----------ha sido-------------sera
ella es------------era-----------ha sido--------------sera
eso es------------era-----------ha sido--------------sera 
nosotros somos----eramos-------hemos sido----------seremos
ellos son----------eran---------han sido--------------seran
ustedes son-------eran---------han sido-------------seran

It means that for each one you learn you must also know the way for every pronoun, you can realize that it changes. when asking or answering there are no other rules, you only need to write or speak with concordance." 
Lets start with these characteristics first, follow my example fellows, it could take several days but it will work, send information about the languages you know and we will determinate which one is the hardest.


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## !netko!

I'm not sure about the hardest ones objectively. However, as a Slavic speaker I guess I'd find learning non-Indo-European languages very difficult because I agree with everybody who said that the hardest languages are the ones that are the most different from your mother tongue. None of the European languages are usually a problem for Slavic speakers but it doesn't seem to work vice versa. 

I agree, Spanish is wonderfully simple to read. Italian is also easy to read (a bit less than Spanish, IMO, but still). Pronunciation and accent in both languages is also not difficult. French pronunciation is difficult. 

English, on the other hand, I learned as a kid so it comes naturally now but when you think about it, the spelling makes no sense whatsoever.

Also, Asian symbols scare the hell out of me (especially when people say ''you *ONLY *have to learn *10 000* symbols!!!)


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## kanojo_

!netko! said:


> (especially when people say ''you *ONLY *have to learn *10 000* symbols!!!)



Hehe, that's a bit of an exageration as to successfully read a Japan newspaper(and understand about 90% of it) you need approximately 2.500 characters and in China about 3.000-3.500 if I'm not mistaken.


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## john_riemann_soong

> In English you have silly spellings like "knight"


OH COME ON

That's the Old English pronounciation "c-niht", which was especially pronounced as it was spelt. Old English is precisely so irregular because it's a merger of Norman French (a descendant of Old French) and Anglo-Saxon.



> Hehe, that's a bit of an exageration as to successfully read a Japan newspaper(and understand about 90% of it) you need approximately 2.500 characters and in China about 3.000-3.500 if I'm not mistaken.


Not a difficulty - the strokes are like characters, if you think about it. 

When I started French, I was shocked at the idea that "you must learn the gender of every single noun you pick up" ... but usually you remember the gender because when you come across it, one stores the gender with the word - I mean, if you can remember character order, you can remember its gender. In the same way, if you can remember the spelling of a word in the Latin alphabet, you will mostly remember how to read and write a character. Some characters are formed from combining other characters. The difficulty is probably only slightly elevated: most likely you have to learn 250+ fundamental characters and radicals. The rest is just a combination of them. 

That's not really difficult, considering that the average (well-read) 12-year-old Chinese/English bilingual here would know about 14,000 characters + 60,000 English words.


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## BlueWolf

!netko! said:


> I agree, Spanish is wonderfully simple to read. Italian is also easy to read (a bit less than Spanish, IMO, but still). Pronunciation and accent in both languages is also not difficult. French pronunciation is difficult.



Actually if we talk about pronunciation, the discussion is more complex than this. For example, Italian and Spanish are different under this point of view. Spanish is simpler to read than Italian (in Italian accents are written for example), BUT Italian is simpler to write down than Spanish (b and v are equal, many words begin with h which is silent).

I'd say the simplest language doesn't exist anymore. Maybe the primitive languages were very simple once, but by now each of them has thousand years of evolution.

The simplest languages are the closest to your native language. You can say Spanish is hardest than English, but I'm Italian and I can understand it without having studied it. While after I studied English for years, I'm still  not very fluent.


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## Nuclear Grenade

Wow, I suddenly feel smart. Some of you said that Japanese was the hardest language to learn.
I think the difficulty has to do with your motivation.
In Highschool I studied French and Spanish and I hated having to learn them, so I don't remember squat. In college I learned Japanese because I wanted to. It wasn't easy at all but I was motivated because so few Americans know it. I know about a few hundred of the Kanji characters. They aren't impossible to learn if you have a system worked out for memorizing them.
I now live in Korea and I am having an easier time learning the language because 1.I live in a town with nothing but Koreans so I am immersed in it, 2.Neccessity, I have to learn it to get by, 3.because there are some similarities between Japanese and Korean and after learning one asian language, it's not as intimidating a task. They are not intelligable to one another but if you know one of them, you will notice some links.
Anyway, I think the hardest language in the world to learn is Navajo.


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## panjabigator

Language difficulty all comes from background.  Romance languages are easier for Romance language speakers than say Chinese.  Cantonese, I presume, would be easier for Mandarin than Hindi.  And English would be easier for Dutch speaker than would be Sindhi.  Probably pretty obvious though...


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## john_riemann_soong

Tamil would probably be easier for Mandarin speakers than Hindi, heh. 

Which is why it's important for us to teach our children at least two different languages from two different language families (as in totally genetically unrelated, ie. Austronesian versus Indo-European, etc.) ... that way they will be the most flexible.


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## Gvcc1girl

Difficulty of learning a language is a rather complex combination of foreign-language-learning capability, learning style, drive/motivation, and perception of the learner.

French, German and Russian are my background.  I was gifted at French-- but German and Russian, my goodness, what a battle!  

Having learned Cyrillic and dabbled in Japanese Kanji, my foreign language learning obstacles have not really been in non-Latin character sets... rather, grammar.  

I'm a visual learner, and unfortunately a Type-A personality... which means I can learn a foreign alphabet/character-set once I memorize the visual image, but am hopelessly relegated to wanting to know "why" something is the way it is...effectively doubling my required effort to assimilate the grammar rules of a particular language.

Although many institutions and individuals categorize languages and claim that one language is more difficult than another, my own experience with multiple language families has made me a believer that it is not the language that should be categorized into a particular difficulty-level, but rather, the individuals that are categorized into levels of foreign language learning capacity.  

Odd take, I know.


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## georgiacia

I have always heard English was one of the hardest languages to learn, and I agree. English has more words than it's counter parts. For example, French has less than a 100,000 words, and english has approximately 988,968 words, plus or minus a handful. The English language is also constantly changing and advancing. There are lot of errors people make with this language because the words are so similar. It can drive a non-native speaker nuts. Trust me I've met a lot of foreigners who struggle with the language. 

The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore 'agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'.


Common errors in English...

Most people first encounter “obtuse” in geometry class, where it labels an angle of more than 90 degrees. Imagine what sort of blunt arrowhead that kind of angle would make and you will understand why it also has a figurative meaning of “dull, stupid.” But people often mix the word up with “abstruse,” which means “difficult to understand.” 

When you mean to criticize something for being needlessly complex or baffling, the word you need is not “obtuse,” but “abstruse.” 

If you drive too fast, you exceed the speed limit. “Accede” is a much rarer word meaning “give in,” “agree.” 

Even though the prefix “ambi-” means “both,” “ambiguous” has come to mean “unclear,” “undefined,” while “ambivalent” means “torn between two opposing feelings or views.” If your attitude cannot be defined into two polarized alternatives, then you’re ambiguous, not ambivalent. 

People often encounter these two words first in college, and may confuse one with the other although they have almost opposite connotations. “Aesthetic” (also spelled “esthetic”) has to do with beauty, whereas “ascetic” has to do with avoiding pleasure, including presumably the pleasure of looking at beautiful things.

St. Francis had an ascetic attitude toward life, whereas Oscar Wilde had an esthetic attitude toward life. 

There are four distinct words here. When “affect” is accented on the final syllable (a-FECT), it is a verb meaning “have an influence on”: “The million-dollar donation from the industrialist did not affect my vote against the Clean Air Act.” A much rarer meaning is indicated when the word is accented on the first syllable (AFF-ect), meaning “emotion.” In this case the word is used mostly by psychiatrists and social scientists— people who normally know how to spell it. The real problem arises when people confuse the first spelling with the second: “effect.” This too can be two different words. The more common one is a noun: “When I left the stove on, the effect was that the house filled with smoke.” When you affect a situation, you have an effect on it. The less common is a verb meaning “to create”: “I’m trying to effect a change in the way we purchase widgets.” No wonder people are confused. Note especially that the proper expression is not “take affect” but “take effect”—become effective. Hey, nobody ever said English was logical: just memorize it and get on with your life. 

The stuff in your purse? Your personal effects.

People get exasperated (irritated); situations get exacerbated (made worse). 

There are tons more of these common errors...


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## georgiacia

English is also a more sensible language. Which may make it easier to learn. However, there's no doubt it's complex.


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## languagestudent

English is hard, but I won't say it's one of the hardest languages. Just look at all the people who speak it!

georgiacia wrote:


> I have always heard English was one of the hardest languages to learn, and I agree. English has more words than it's counter parts. For example, French has less than a 100,000 words, and english has approximately 988,968 words, plus or minus a handful. The English language is also constantly changing and advancing. There are lot of errors people make with this language because the words are so similar. It can drive a non-native speaker nuts. Trust me I've met a lot of foreigners who struggle with the language.


You say the English vocabulary is huge? That depends which languages you compare English with. And yeah, it IS - comparing to one of the 'poor' languages as Danish. But if you compare it with Arabic - which has more than 4 million words, and that's just the Standard Arabic - it's not the big issue.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language


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## languagestudent

English is hard, but I won't say it's one of the hardest languages. Just look at all the people who speak it!

georgiacia wrote:


> I have always heard English was one of the hardest languages to learn, and I agree. English has more words than it's counter parts. For example, French has less than a 100,000 words, and english has approximately 988,968 words, plus or minus a handful. The English language is also constantly changing and advancing. There are lot of errors people make with this language because the words are so similar. It can drive a non-native speaker nuts. Trust me I've met a lot of foreigners who struggle with the language.


You say the English vocabulary is huge? That depends which language you compare to. And yeah, it IS big - comparing to one of the 'poor' languages as Danish. But if you compare it with Arabic - which has more than 4 million words, and that's just the Standard Arabic - it's not the big issue.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language


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## Blackleaf

languagestudent said:


> English is hard, but I won't say it's one of the hardest languages. Just look at all the people who speak it!
> 
> But if you compare it with Arabic - which has more than 4 million words, and that's just the Standard Arabic - it's not the big issue


 
Absolute rubbish.

English has by far the largest vocabulary and this year will become the first language to break the 1 million mark.


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## Blackleaf

> English is hard, but I won't say it's one of the hardest languages. Just look at all the people who speak it!


 
What has the number of speakers of a language got to do with how difficult it is?


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## languagestudent

Did you check the link?


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## languagestudent

> What has the number of speakers of a language got to do with how difficult it is?


If it was that difficult how should all those people be able to learn it? I'm not refering to native speakers.


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## GenJen54

Blackleaf said:


> Absolute rubbish.
> 
> English has by far the largest vocabulary and this year will become the first language to break the 1 million mark.


 
The size of a language's vocabulary has nothing to do with the ease or difficulty of learning it. 

Further, with regards to English, how many of those words are "borrowed" from other languages, and how many of those are specific to scientific study?  If one is to compare vocabularies, one should compare them from a practical standpoint, including only those words which are commonly used by the majority of that language's people, not just make a tit-for-tat accounting. 

I would contend that idiomatically, English is a very difficult language to learn since there are so many nuances in use. However, other languages, such as Finnish, which has no common tie to any specific language family, are more difficult because there are little reference points from which to learn.


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## zebedee

Blackleaf said:


> Absolute rubbish.
> 
> English has by far the largest vocabulary and this year will become the first language to break the 1 million mark.



MOD NOTE:

Blackleaf, I'd like to take this chance to ask you to re-read the Word Reference Guidelines and digest the meaning, especially the parts in red.



> The WordReference Forums Guidelines
> Mission Statement
> 
> I. WordReference.com provides Forums for exchanges about translation, word usage, terminology equivalency and other linguistic topics.
> 
> II. The Forums promote learning and maintain an atmosphere that is serious, academic and collaborative, with a respectful, helpful and cordial tone.
> 
> III. We welcome members who share our goals and philosophy, and agree to act in accord with the rules and guidelines of the Forums.



 Calling another person's opinion "Absolute rubbish" is neither respectful, helpful nor cordial. This is not the first time, either - you've had other posts deleted for rudeness.

 If you choose to use this tone further in the Forums, your presence won't be required. Please take this as an official warning.

zebedee
Culture Moderator


----------



## LaurentK

Je suis français, ma femme est irlandaise, nos enfants, 9, 13 et 14 ans, sont bilingue. Il ne leur viendrait jamais à l'idée de comparer leurs deux langues en terme de _nombre respectif de mots!!!_  Ils ont de la chance, ils sont dans une _win-win situation!_ Pas de compétition, pas de fierté patriotique à défendre! 

Ils auront certes à leur disposition, à l'âge adulte, un lexique anglo-français de taille très respectable... Mais ce n'est pas cela qui est important. Lorsque je les observe, qu'ils parlent entre eux, passant sans à-coups d'une langue à l'autre, je comprends que ce qui compte dans une langue, ce n'est pas les mots pour ce qu'ils sont, ni leur quantité ni leur origine. C'est le génie qui les assemble en son sein, les anime, les combine et forme un sens et des émotions uniques. Cette musique unique, la petite musique.

C'est l'oreille, le goût de la musique qui fait un bon traducteur. Qu'il sache qu'une bonne traduction est, au plus, médiocre face à l'original, en fait un grand traducteur.

Conclusion, on a mis nos enfants à l'espagnol, finie la récré! 
(et désolé pour les autres langues, ça viendra plus tard


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## Drama

well, in my book, there is no such thing as a " difficult language". it all depends on the motivation moving you ahead. once you`ve set your mind on doing something (  something you really want to know, in our case it`s a foreign language) just roll up your sleeves and go for it. It takes blood, sweat and tears but it`s really worth your while!


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## Setwale_Charm

Blackleaf is right. English IS the richest language. But that has nothing to do with the degree of its complicatedness for a foreign learner. since one never masters for proficiency more than about 55 thousand anyway. In any language. The rest is not known to most native speakers. Hence one of the threads I have opened,on the word "lief".


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## georgiacia

languagestudent said:


> English is hard, but I won't say it's one of the hardest languages. Just look at all the people who speak it!
> 
> georgiacia wrote:
> 
> You say the English vocabulary is huge? That depends which languages you compare English with. And yeah, it IS - comparing to one of the 'poor' languages as Danish. But if you compare it with Arabic - which has more than 4 million words, and that's just the Standard Arabic - it's not the big issue.
> Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language


 
I hesitate to articulate to any degree of accuracy to the words you speak.



You may be correct about the arabic language. However, Arabic could be an agglutinative language such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of 'words'. Moreover, the number of speakers has nothing to do with how difficult the language is. Most would say Chinese is a difficult language but look at the number of speakers. Here's a list of languages:


*Major languages of the world* (Number of native speakers) 

1. Mandarin Chinese 836,000,000; 2. Hindi 333,000,000; 3. Spanish 332,000,000;  4. English 322,000,000;  5. Bengali 189,000,000;  *6.  **Arabic **186,000,000;  *7. Russian 170,000,000;  8. Portuguese 170,000,000;  9. Japanese 125,000,000;  10. German 98,000,000;  11. French 72,000,000;  12. Malay 50,000,000 

Most non-natives only know the basics of English. Like I know the basics of Spanish. Which is a fairly simple language to learn.


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Why do you say that?

The common errors in English are not really difficulties as misconceptions - the irregularity of spelling compared with the sound is really the only issue in terms of picking it up.

But just look at the Chinese language - the phonology isn't particularly intuitive either, especially with all the divergent dialects.


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## georgiacia

English is my native language. I've have struggled with its grammar from high school through out college. I have some friends who speak bengali, and I have picked up their language. It is different I must say in the way they think. Some sentences don't even have verbs in them. However, I can accommodate to the language. I understand them when they speak. The writing is much like arabic, and I have learned some of the writing. However, when you get down to it English has changed dramatically and it always is changing. The rules are being modified all the time and we must keep learning it to grow in it because it's an international language. To me I don't know, but I think English is a more sensible language.


----------



## BlueWolf

Setwale_Charm said:


> Blackleaf is right. English IS the richest language. But that has nothing to do with the degree of its complicatedness for a foreign learner. since one never masters for proficiency more than about 55 thousand anyway. In any language. The rest is not known to most native speakers. Hence one of the threads I have opened,on the word "lief".



I don't think so. Maybe English has more words where others, but speakers tend to use less in my opinion. For many expressions English tend to use the usual well-known words.


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## maxiogee

Blackleaf said:


> Absolute rubbish.
> 
> English has by far the largest vocabulary and this year will become the first language to break the 1 million mark.



It would be interesting to do a word-use count on the average quality newspaper from various countries and see what percentage of their languages are unused at the end of a year. I imagine that there might well be a large amount of redundancy in that million words.
I attempt the prize crosswords in the magazines in the Saturday and Sunday editions of the London Independent newspaper. Their words are (usually) all in Chambers English Dictionary. I doubt that there has been much other use in the last year for "eurus", "musang" or "apochromat" in many native speakers' vocabularies. And it only claims over 215,000 references and over 300,000 definitions. Where are all the rest, and who uses them?


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## kuobo

My native language is Mandarin Chinese, but I learned English about 9 years back.  I personally feel that English is the easiest language to learn because it only took me about 4 months to go from having no English speaking skills whatsoever, to being a fluent English speaker.  Considering I live in the Jacksonville, FL (predominantly white and african american), if the locals don't have the slightest idea that I was foreign, I'd say I'm fluent.  Aside from that, I think German is relatively difficult to learn as well, because of conjugations and such.  Four years of German, I can only read and write German, but can't speak it worth a sh*t.  I've also noticed that most English speakers can't even attempt to speak Mandarin because I have absolutely no idea what they're trying to say.  In my personal opinion, since Chinese immigrants can speak English to an extent that most people can understand them, while English speakers attempting to speak Chinese are completely impossible to understand, I'd say Chinese is much harder of a language to learn than English.


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## georgiacia

That's like I said. It's a more sensible language. Maybe that's why it's easier to learn. Whereby, Chinese I could pick upon trust me. I can speak bengali and it's not hard at all to understand. Nevertheless, you must be able to speak English, write English, read English, and understand English in a complex manner. Furthermore, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin are from Germany and they speak English and German quite well. 

Remember English has acquired a large vocabulary and can replace most words with different words to which a non-native may not understand. 

Few reasons English may be hard to read for non natives.

The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
After a number of injections, my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Let’s face it - English is a crazy language. There is neither egg in an eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. You park in the driveway, but you drive on the parkway. You ship by truck and send cargo by ship. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And finally, how about when you want to shut down your computer you have to hit “START”!


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## Brno79

Surely the easiest language to learn is one which is very like your native language so the hardest are the ones which are least like your own? So basically it depends where you're coming from.


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## Outsider

georgiacia said:


> Few reasons English may be hard to read for non natives.
> 
> The bandage was wound around the wound.
> The farm was used to produce produce.
> The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
> We must polish the Polish furniture.
> He could lead if he would get the lead out.
> The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
> Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
> A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
> When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
> I did not object to the object.
> The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
> There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
> They were too close to the door to close it.
> The buck does funny things when the does are present.
> A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
> To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
> The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
> After a number of injections, my jaw got number.
> Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
> I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
> How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
> Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.


Yeah, what was that about it being a sensible language, again?


----------



## badgrammar

Brno79 said:


> Surely the easiest language to learn is one which is very like your native language so the hardest are the ones which are least like your own? So basically it depends where you're coming from.



That is exactly right, and I remain beffudled by the fact that people are still debating this question when the answer is so obvious, IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT LANGUAGE YOU ALREADY KNOW...  

I know, I could choose not to read this thread, but it never ceases to amaze me that this is a serious debate.

Isn't it time to end this utterly inconclusive and painfully futile thread?  

Cheers  !


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## georgiacia

I said sensible not logical.


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## Setwale_Charm

BlueWolf said:


> I don't think so. Maybe English has more words where others, but speakers tend to use less in my opinion. For many expressions English tend to use the usual well-known words.


 
 Exactly/ That`s what I am talking about.


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## georgiacia

Most officials do not use the most common words. Those who have a higher education tend to use more sophisticated words.


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## mirx

Marc1 said:


> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.


 

Well I am particularly not very fond of englishmen or americans, (or their countries or cultures) but I love learning and speaking english, to the countrary I find scandinavian cultures and languagues and countries absolutely fascinating, but ask me how to say *thank you* in finish.


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## BlueWolf

georgiacia said:


> Most officials do not use the most common words. Those who have a higher education tend to use more sophisticated words.




Dear georgiacia, that's true for any language.


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## Brno79

mirx said:


> Well I am particularly not very fond of englishmen or americans, (or their countries or cultures) but I love learning and speaking english, to the countrary I find scandinavian cultures and languagues and countries absolutely fascinating, but ask me how to say *thank you* in finish.



I find this quite offensive! No sorry. I find this racist and offensive. I didn't know you'd met all 60 million British citizens. Of course we are all identical with no individual personalities or regional differences. Sorry we disappointed you.
By the way, Finnish for thank you is 'kiitos'.


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## Brno79

On second reading I wonder if you realise that by placing 'particularly' first you make it emphatic and quite strong. If you place it afterwards and say 'not particularly' it's milder. It's still not nice.


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## invictaspirit

I would *HATE* to learn English if I were not already a native speaker.  

I offer my respect to anyone non-native here who considers they can read, write and speak English fairly well and my awestruck wonder and worship of the brain of any non-native here who considers they are more or less faultlessly proficient (especially in speaking).

I have spent most of my adult life in 'international' situations, whether at work or play, and I know a great many non-native speakers who have settled in the UK. I must have spoken to many thousands in the last twenty years. If I am honest, of all of these people, perhaps only 10-15 have spoken English totally fluently.

Reasons:

1. It's a grotesquely idiomatic language. This is why I love it, of course. It makes for great conversation, humour and literature. But from a learner's point of view this must be horrible. Even living in an anglophone country for many years does not guarantee proficiency.

2. All languages have some odd/rare phonemes. But I think English's huge profusion of vowels makes accurate pronunciation very hard for most. Sounds like the 'long O' in 'no' so' 'go' are internationally extremely rare and non-natives hardly ever hit it quite right.

3. Size of vocabulary and the huge number of nuances in meaning.

4. The bewildering array of English accents.

So...hats off to all of you.


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## Setwale_Charm

Brno79 said:


> I find this quite offensive! No sorry. I find this racist and offensive. I didn't know you'd met all 60 million British citizens. Of course we are all identical with no individual personalities or regional differences. Sorry we disappointed you.
> By the way, Finnish for thank you is 'kiitos'.


 

Oh please!! Don`t be like one of those always-complaining touchy adorers of excessive political correctness. (And they usually turn out to be ever ready to be judgmental about everybody else as long as their interest are not involved). Nobody can be blamed for not liking certain communities, that`s a personal matter, only for being aggressive towards them, that`s all. 
Mirx evidently means he does not like our national spirit and mentality which I can quite believe as I have similar likes and dislikes about other countries. I will never do any wrong to them however! So it`s perfectly OK with me what he says!


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## paulol

Setwale_Charm said:


> Oh please!! Don`t be like one of those always-complaining touchy adorers of excessive political correctness. (And they usually turn out to be ever ready to be judgmental about everybody else as long as their interest are not involved). Nobody can be blamed for not liking certain communities, that`s a personal matter, only for being aggressive towards them, that`s all.
> Mirx evidently means he does not like our national spirit and mentality which I can quite believe as I have similar likes and dislikes about other countries. I will never do any wrong to them however! So it`s perfectly OK with me what he says!


I agree (to a certain extent), although if an English or American person said "I particularly don't like *Mexicans*, their country or culture", he would most probably be accused of being racist (and have his post deleted). Good job we are more tolerant than that.

I think Mirx's point is an interesting one, though, because (as suggested earlier in the thread) if you don't feel any empathy or affinity toward a certain culture, it can make the learning of its language much, much more difficult.

I guess that geographical proximity and cultural influence (to/from the USA) overrides this in Mirx's case, though.


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## Setwale_Charm

paulol said:


> I agree (to a certain extent), although if an English or American person said "I particularly don't like *Mexicans*, their country or culture", he would most probably be accused of being racist (and have his post deleted). Good job we are more tolerant than that.
> 
> I think Mirx's point is an interesting one, though, because (as suggested earlier in the thread) if you don't feel any empathy or affinity toward a certain culture, it can make the learning of its language much, much more difficult.
> 
> I guess that geographical proximity and cultural influence (to/from the USA) overrides this in Mirx's case, though.


 Too true!! It is a very convenient tool that is employed by many in their own interest without much regard for their own behaviour towards others and that makes the situation extremely stupid sometimes. There is another side to it too. If you love some culture and nation, you might get into trouble with their historical enemies who still feel hostility for them. This is very true in the North Caucasus where you should beware of openly expressing empathy or dislike for any of the myriads of nationalities. You never know for sure that you are not talking to one of the clan that has been at daggers drawn with them for centuries. 
  As for empathy twd a nation and learning the language, I did not feel it all that much, the connection, I mean. Once you start learning, you get the taste of the language, more and more as you progress. The other point is that if you have trouble with self-organisation, you are less likely to experience problems with forcing yourself to study when you are in love with the culture. but in practice this usually means being in love with someone in particular of that nationality and that`s why you are learning the language at all. I was if not in love then greatly attracted by a business partner of my Swedish uncle s when I was a teenagers and that fact helped me master Swedish much faster , I believe.


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## Brno79

I hardly know where to start.

I'm touchy, excessive, judgemental and hypocritical. Wow. That told me! 



 I'm none of those things, believe me. Really I'm not. I'm just not comfortable with racial stereotypes. I had been thinking what paulol said to be honest. I managed to hold myself back from saying I'm Jewish because I feel too many of us use our Jewishness to avoid criticism and God knows we've proved we can be pretty racist ourselves! BUT would you really, honestly be OK with someone coming on and saying 'I hate Jews but it's OK to label and dislike a whole community because I'm not going to be aggressive to them'. That doesn’t make it right. Other people will be more than happy to do the aggression for you feeling supported by what your opinions. 

A general rule in public forums I feel is that it's fine to take the micky out of yourself and your own and it's OK to laugh at things in others when those people know you care for them. Friends take the micky out of each other. But I don't think it's right on a forum like this to say you just don't like a whole country, culture, community race etc. It's a sweeping generalisation. 

My big love is Russia and there are many things that drive me mad about the place. I would have no problem with someone saying I hate Russian bureaucracy or I hate Russian corporate corruption but if someone just said I hate Russians I would find that facile and I wouldn't like it. How is that excessive? I hate Israeli foreign policy but I wouldn't say I hate Israelis - my brother's Israeli! I think I just dislike negative generalisations more than you do.


I think you were being a bit unfair to be honest. Anyway, enough - I'm sick of this. I'm not enjoying this forum. I'm off. Bye


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## Easychan

In my opinion, The hardest language is the language that you don't know. Chinese is my mother language.So I don't have much troubles in speaking and using Chinese.It is very easy for me.But the students in China always said English is very hard to learn,especially the grammar.And maybe all of you will think that English is very easy to learn.


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## georgiacia

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - Name a language that has a word like this that means "Atoning for extreme and delicate beauty while still being highly educable."


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## Hakro

georgiacia said:


> Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - Name a language that has a word like this that means "Atoning for extreme and delicate beauty while still being highly educable."


In the Finnish Air Force they have the term "lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas" which means a "non-commissioned officer cadet learning to be an assistant mechanician for airplane jet engines".


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## georgiacia

Finnish is an agglutinative language of course it's going to have words like that; however, English isn't such a language and it's very rare to find words of great length. Here's another one. The word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is defined as "a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, mostly found in Volcanoes."


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## Hakro

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis seems to be a compound word, too, and it looks more like Latin than English. Instead, the Finnish word "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkään" is not; it means "also without his making unsystematized".


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## georgiacia

FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION = _an estimation of something as worthless._
_This isn't a compound word. _
This is the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Interestingly the most common letter in English, E, does not appear in this word at all, whilst I occurs a total of nine times. The word dates back to 1741. The _1992 Guinness Book of World Records_ calls floccinaucinihilipilification the longest real word in the _Oxford English Dictionary_, and refers to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis as the longest made-up one. Yeah, you're right about this word. It's latin based and compound. The word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis was originally a hoax.


Hey but if you come down to it the longest word in the world is SMILES. 

Because there's a mile between the first letter and the last one.


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## panjabigator

I think for me the hardest languages would be the ones built off of suffixes and prefixes...like the South Indian languages, Basque, and Finnish (I think).  Are those ergative?


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## georgiacia

Well Finnish is an agglutinative language, but I am not sure about Southern Indian Language Basque being ergative. I would have to go to the college library and do a little research on that topic.


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## zerduja

strangely enough I had a friend from korea discuss this to me on occasion.
He took 10 different languages courses from university and throuhout adulthood, his favorite was russian with english second.  He felt french was the far most difficult.


----------



## cutu

I think its depend what is your native language.
For example - native spanish speakers will find Italian, Fruilian, Portuguese, French, Baque and so on, easy to learn.

Native speaker of and far east ( cept - Sri Lanka = Sinhalese, and Cambodia = Kmher, maybe even Veitnamese speakers ) will find Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.. easier to learn.

India and its languages, are east for the indians, but I that by transcript its hard for almost every other person, cept maybe the Tamil language that is abit different I think.

Slavic languages will be easy for someone who already know atleast one slavic language, same goes for scandinavian languages, which i think will be very hard for native speakers of Hebrew and Arabic, to learn.

Now, language is not only a matter of letters, and vowels.
Languages has grammtical rules and lots more.
For Arabic native speaker Hebrew grammer isnt that hard, and so is the opposite, unlike other Native speakers.
Hebrew grammer laws are extremely hard and confusing, and even most of the native speakers cant speak the language right.
We do only have 4 times - Past, present, future and Tzivuy. but alteast 10 ways to make a verb for each gender at any time diferently , so thats 20 ( 10 for men and 10 for women ) thats 4 times plus, since its different in each time, Now thats almost 40 ways to make one single verb and its only one verb...
Now put nouns and every other form of grammatical ways to write ( or that discribe ) a word.. thats could put up for almost 130 ways to say one word, and its always difference.
IMPORTANT - Dont take me on the exact number, but its very close to what I said.

And for what I think are the hardest languages to learn :
most of these language might not be official official languages, but all of them are spoken by large number of people.
( not by Difficulty order ) 
1. Innukitut 
2. Slavey 
3. Welsh 
4  Scottish Gealic
5. Ga
6. Kmher
7. Maori 
8. Chinese
9. Sinhalese
10.Hebrew


----------



## Chipolata

Marc1 said:


> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.


 
A lot of Quebec people is very bad with English because (in my opinion) we have an allergic reaction to English-speaking canadians. I guess it's like a protection for us: we're 7 millions speaking French against 25 millions speaking English + 300 millions in United States. I've been forced to learn English but I couldn't do it right. 5 years ago I felt in love with a mexican guy and I learned Spanish very, very fast. Lately I've started to take English lessons with a Scottish friend. With her I don't have this canadian conflict so I've lost my allergy to English and I'm really enjoying my lessons... and this language... 

(Please correct my mistakes)


----------



## Chipolata

Brno79 said:


> Surely the easiest language to learn is one which is very like your native language so the hardest are the ones which are least like your own? So basically it depends where you're coming from.


 
Hum... Learning a language very similar to your own is not that easy... I mean, it's very easy to communicate, but speaking it correctly? I'm thinking of Spanish and Portuguese: in Mexico, we often see interviews with Brasilian football players: the interviewers speaks Spanish and the players speaks Portuguese. No problem. We all understand the conversation. But if the same players tries to speak Spanish, he'll often speak "Portuñol"...


----------



## Bugg67

Finnish and Hungarish are the two most difficult languages in the world, although they are often the most over looked.   The grammer and the sentence structure.  For example, a indefinate amount is said with a verb and not a noun.  It's claimed to be nearly impossible for a foreigner to speak either of these languages well.


----------



## Bugg67

Oh, and as for where you come from, Hungarish and Finnish are from the same family with no other members.  Actually, I think there's one other one really close to Finnish.  But I live in Germany and my mother is Hungarish, and she says that Finnish would be extremely hard for her to learn, and I'm assuming it's vise-versa.  Because of that Hungarish and Finnish aren't based off any otherl anguages in the world, so they are different than everyone and hardest for everyone.  I think there's actually someone official you can find, but I'm not sure.  LIke I said before, it'd be almost impossible for an un-native speaker to ever learn these languages very well.


----------



## blindsay

This is getting out there, but my two suggestions for hardest languages would be two local languages from British Columbia, _ktunaxa, _and _Salish_ (_Salish _is actually a language family, and there are a number of related _Salishan _languages).

_Ktunaxa_ is an isolate.  One salish word has 11 consonants in a row, and yet in the old days they considered _ktunaxa _by comparisan incomprehesible and too difficult to learn.

There are only a handful of _Ktunaxa _speakers, while a few _Salish _languages are hangin in there.


----------



## sanznvagh

ENGLISH! APPARENTLY!
Ebonics sucks.


----------



## ferran

Marc1 said:


> The most difficult language to learn,
> is the one of a country you hate.
> 
> The easiest language to learn...
> The one from a country you love.



I could agree. I've been studying german for 8 years now and can hardly speak it. italian for 5 years and i can speak it very well and even spanish which i've never learned in a school! it's not that i hate germany but simply i don't have any interest in it. i like italian and spanish because of many things i've seen in spain and italy and i'm very keen of learning about them. and they sound better! german is so difficult, words are toooooo long and grammar... you know.


----------



## iFeXx

Kräuter_Fee said:


> Do you really think that Arabic is easier than German? Wow, then I have some hope... Arabic is my favorite language and if I learned German then that means I could learn Arabic.
> 
> I don't know what the hardest language is because I haven't studied them all. Of the languages I speak or I have learned (Spanish, Portuguese, English, German, Romanian and Turkish)... German is definitely the hardest.
> 
> Of those I don't know, I think (or used to think since I read Whodunit's post ) Arabic is the hardest... Japanese and Chinese must be really hard too, just like Russian...


 
Well I think German is, compared to the other european languages, quite difficult to learn. I've been learning Spanish, English, French for several years now and I'm sure enough to say that German got a much more confusing grammar and spelling. Though, I think that languages with different characters like the chinese and japanese are even more difficult, but I can't evaluate this for real.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

My candidate as hardest language based on my experience:  Navajo.  It is difficult for a speaker of almost any other language to conceive how complicated Navajo verb forms are, and what a (to an outsider's eye) convoluted process it is to create nouns to describe new ideas.

What would be an interesting question to pose is what is the _easiest _language to learn.  Maybe I'll check the previous posts and see whether anybody ever tackled that one.


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## JeSuisLeCiel

Actually Hungarian is the hardest...They have 12 different ways to conjugate a verb...


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## übermönch

If I'm not wrong Latin has 18. 


Bugg67 said:


> Oh, and as for where you come from, Hungarish and Finnish are from the same family with no other members.


You forgot Estonia!


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## Hakro

And you forgot the small fenno-ugrian languages, about half a dozen, that are still spoken in Russia.


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## pidgeon

German, german, german. I think that it is such an easy language to learn! There may be lots of grammar and tables, but once you have learnt them, there are not that many exceptions, unlike french where almost every verb is different. 
Also the pronuounciation in german is relatively easy, most words are said as they look, once you have the general accent. It is also quite easy to guess a german word once you have learnt the basic language as there are many similar words. 

It is very logical, unlike french or english where nothing follows a pattern, or is easy to pronounce!


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## joseluisblanco

Artrella said:


> Chinese and Japanese, because apart from the meanings, grammar and so on, you have to learn the letters!! Although next year will try the Classical Chinese....


Artella, I don't know anything about chinese, but I attended a course on Japanese language some years ago. From my experience and also from what my Sensei told us in the class, Japanese is a rather simple language, somewhat primitive. It is not really difficult, except for the kana and kanji (hanji). That may sound surprising to us, but instead of it, try thinking in the opposite, a Japanese trying to learn, say, Italian...


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## Anatoli

joseluisblanco said:


> Artella, I don't know anything about chinese, but I attended a course on Japanese language some years ago. From my experience and also from what my Sensei told us in the class, Japanese is a rather simple language, somewhat primitive. It is not really difficult, except for the kana and kanji (hanji). That may sound surprising to us, but instead of it, try thinking in the opposite, a Japanese trying to learn, say, Italian...


What did you find primitive in Japanese? I learned for a few years and I find it interesting, beautiful and difficult enough. Pronunciation is not hard. Grammar is different very from European languages, not too difficult, IMHO. Difficult are kanji, multiple readings, speech and grammar patterns (if you delve deeper).

The hardest languages from European point of view, in my opinion are Chinese and Arabic. Chinese because of the characters and tones, short words and you need a lot of practice to be able to distinguish them in a context, grammar is not hard but making sentences or even deciphering some long sentences may be daunting.

Arabic because of its grammar, root system, broken plural forms. Pronunciation is not easy but this part doesn't take years but weeks/months to master. I also find hard reading texts without vowels and looking up words in dictionaries - you have to take away one-syllable prepositions written together with the main word, determine the root consonants (take out prefixes/infixes/suffixes) and remove letters, which maybe just used to make it plural form, present tense or another form.  

Finnish is not as difficult despite many cases and vocabulary so different from other European languages. Case ending are often used as prepositions Suomessa (in Finland), Suomesta (from Finland). They usually follow clear patterns and there are not so many exceptions, it can be compared to German. I don't think German is too hard.

As a native speaker of Russian, I must admit it's a very difficult language, mainly because of the grammar but I know a lot of foreign people who mastered Russian within a year or two after studing in Russia without any previous exposure to it.


----------



## Anatoli

Hakro said:


> And you forgot the small fenno-ugrian languages, about half a dozen, that are still spoken in Russia.


Yes, I was just going to post.

*Finno-Ugric* languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages


As I said in my previous post, I don't think they are terribly difficult, just a matter of interest and exposure.


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## Hakro

Sorry, I missed your previous post. I was rather answering to Bugg67.

Both *Fenno-Ugrian* and *Finno-Ugric* are used for the same meaning. Google gives 3000+ examples for Fenno-Ugrian and 600+ examples for Finno-Ugric.


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## john_riemann_soong

Anatoli said:


> The hardest languages from European point of view, in my opinion are Chinese and Arabic. Chinese because of the characters and tones, short words and you need a lot of practice to be able to distinguish them in a context, grammar is not hard but making sentences or even deciphering some long sentences may be daunting.



Tones aren't difficult. I suggest for those who have a hard time grasping tones, they learn Singlish, a creolish dialect of English which employs English as its base system, but with overhauled grammar and vocabulary.

Singlish is a syllable-timed language, and it is semi-tonal. The semantics doesn't generally change too much if you change a tone (except for a few particles as well as attitude, and other than the general prosody of languages), it just sounds wrong, just like pronouncing "we is" or "you am" can convey the semantics across but it just sounds ungrammatical. 


Being an English dialect it's not that hard to pick up, but a lot of words and stock phrases have a set tone to them, conveying a stock attitude. It's really easy to remember the tones that way. It's like a stepping stone between English and other tonal languages, since most tonal languages are syllable-timed, like the Chinese languages. 

Many of the phrases come from Hokkien, Malay (Austronesian) - which borrows a lot from Indo-European as well (voften ia Sanskrit and Persian), and the occasional Tamil and so forth, and some Mandarin stock phrases. It may not or may include all the tones of Mandarin, plus a few extra. As a "native speaker" of this dialect I'm not sure how many tones we have: I could exhaustively list them all just to be sure but I didn't realise it was tonal until it was pointed out to me, and when that was, it was a really amazing realisation.


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## joseluisblanco

Anatoli said:


> What did you find primitive in Japanese? I learned for a few years and I find it interesting, beautiful and difficult enough. Pronunciation is not hard. Grammar is different very from European languages, not too difficult, IMHO. Difficult are kanji, multiple readings, speech and grammar patterns (if you delve deeper).
> Anatoli, I wasn't clear, perhaps. Please accept my apologies. I find it interesting, beautiful and difficult enough as well. But the point is that I had the fear that I wasn't going to be able to learn or understand the simplest basic matter about Japanese, and when I started to learn it, to my surprise it was not so difficult. This for the basic learning level. But, my teacher, Mrs. Kitagawa once said that Japanese is a rather simple language. I didn't see her anymore, so I cannot ask her for an explanation about this. About primitive, I probably misunderstood the meaning of this word in English. I didn't mean to suggest anything pejorative. Just descriptive.


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## Anatoli

john_riemann_soong said:


> Tones aren't difficult. I suggest for those who have a hard time grasping tones, they learn Singlish, a creolish dialect of English which employs English as its base system, but with overhauled grammar and vocabulary.
> ...


Tones or complex characters aren't difficult only if you grow with them or if you are exposed to both at early years of your life.

Understanding basic tones is not too hard, imitating basic tones individually with a good explanation is not hard either, achieving tone combinations in multi-syllable words is also achievable with more practice. What is really difficult is to remember and follow all the correct tones and keep your speech natural. I am not saying I am struggling but overcoming this obstacle takes a lot of effort.

I like looking at patterns, search for funny situations, memorise some phrases, etc.

My recent discovery - a longer phrase where each syllable is first tone, sounds a bit robotic 
* tā dāng chūzūchē sījī* (他当出租车司机)- he works as a taxi driver

No point in learning some dialect or another version of English, whic uses tones before starting Mandarin Chinese, IMHO, it's like having to learn French or German before learning English (because of some similarity). In other words, if you had some exposure to tones it makes it easier.

---
Thanks, Hakro for your reply. Something new for me.

--
Joseluisblanco, I notice both Japanese and Chinese speakers sometimes refer to their language as very simple and primitive, well, they are quite easy FOR THEM and everything makes perfect sense. It does make sense for you as well when you learn grammar and syntax but not everything is so intuitive as you want want. Spoke Japanese is famous for its incomplete sentences, where you have to guess what they want to say, either because they want to be polite and try not offend or want to make you guess:

*kyou-wa chotto..*.
きょうはちょっと。。。
Today it's a little ... (busy, inconvenient, etc.) - instead of saying - No, I can't make it today.
*ima kaeranakucha..*.
今帰らなくちゃ。。。
now if I don't go home... = I have to go home now.
kaeranakucha -> abbreviation of "kaeranakutewa ikenai" (must go home, literally "if I don't go home, it's no good)"


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Anatoli said:


> Tones or complex characters aren't difficult only if you grow with them or if you are exposed to both at early years of your life.
> 
> Understanding basic tones is not too hard, imitating basic tones individually with a good explanation is not hard either, achieving tone combinations in multi-syllable words is also achievable with more practice. What is really difficult is to remember and follow all the correct tones and keep your speech natural. I am not saying I am struggling but overcoming this obstacle takes a lot of effort.
> 
> I like looking at patterns, search for funny situations, memorise some phrases, etc.
> 
> My recent discovery - a longer phrase where each syllable is first tone, sounds a bit robotic
> * tā dāng chūzūchē sījī* (他当出租车司机)- he works as a taxi driver



What I find is that I cannot think about whether it's "falling", "rising", "fluctuating", 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and so forth (5th and 6th some Chinese dialects, e.g. Cantonese) ...  my command of Chinese is currently behind most of my Singaporean peers because of my childhood migration to the United States. 

To me, it doesn't help me to think about whether it's falling at all, because if I intentionally try to alter my tone I get it utterly wrong (ie. fourth tone becomes second tone). However, I find if don't worry about the tones at all and just observe how people say them, the attitude of the words get stuck in my head and I remember them better. To me, the semantics end up helping more than the pinyin inflections at times.

The thing is that I was never really exposed to "tones" in early childhood, or their concepts. We were never taught them as a concept, I guess it was just assumed. I find that if I borrow concepts from Singlish in regards to syllable-timing, then things are much easier.


----------



## Anatoli

You just confirmed that you acquired the tones by a lot of exposure. You don't have to know the theory behind tones if you are exposed a lot to them and able to distinguish and pornounce them correctly, anyway. However, I think you need to know how to read pinyin and understand tone marks/numbers for unknown words with new syllables, if there are any.

For a foreign learner who learns Chinese outside China, it is a different game.


----------



## tvdxer

One language that _looks_ really difficult: Hungarian.


----------



## Mirko_87

For me the hardest is Hungarian.......no doubt


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## joseluisblanco

Anatoli,
*kyou-wa chotto..*.
きょうはちょっと。。。
Today it's a little ... (busy, inconvenient, etc.) - instead of saying - No, I can't make it today.
*ima kaeranakucha..*.
今帰らなくちゃ。。。
now if I don't go home... = I have to go home now.
kaeranakucha -> abbreviation of "kaeranakutewa ikenai" (must go home, literally "if I don't go home, it's no good)"

Now I begin to understand what you did mean... I find it very interesting.


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## Poetic Device

I don't know why, but it is impossible for me to g rasp the idea of Polish.


----------



## boriicua_mamii

Hey everyone! I'm kinda new here (sheesh, *very* new) and i was _about_ to say that English was, in fact, the most hardest language to learn because they vary in many different dialogues (like ebonics) and has multiple names for words (adjectives, nouns, pronouns, etc.). PLUS... many foreigners have a hard time remembering the right prounciation and spelling of words without it meaning something completely different. For example, if a French person wanted to describe a 'cap' in writing, she might write 'cape' instead, beacuse you don't pronounce any 'e' letter at the end of any word unless it has an accent mark over it... well, that's what I learned in sixth grade French class (and i still remember it ). 

Well, of course that's my opinion. I've been told by people that English was the toughest language to learn in the world, but after reading some of these posts, I'm greatly starting to change my mind. 

Just wanted to say something though..... and Happy Thanksgiving!


----------



## Setwale_Charm

Poetic Device said:


> I don't know why, but it is impossible for me to g rasp the idea of Polish.


 
 Have you tried any other Slavic language then?


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## Hockey13

boriicua_mamii said:


> Hey everyone! I'm kinda new here (sheesh, *very* new) and i was _about_ to say that English was, in fact, the most hardest language to learn because they vary in many different dialogues (like ebonics) and has multiple names for words (adjectives, nouns, pronouns, etc.). PLUS... many foreigners have a hard time remembering the right prounciation and spelling of words without it meaning something completely different. For example, if a French person wanted to describe a 'cap' in writing, she might write 'cape' instead, beacuse you don't pronounce any 'e' letter at the end of any word unless it has an accent mark over it... well, that's what I learned in sixth grade French class (and i still remember it ).
> 
> Well, of course that's my opinion. I've been told by people that English was the toughest language to learn in the world, but after reading some of these posts, I'm greatly starting to change my mind.
> 
> Just wanted to say something though..... and Happy Thanksgiving!


 
If you think English varies a lot in dialects, check out German or Italian from north to south in both countries.

Welcome to the forum!


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## boriicua_mamii

oh right... woooow. heh, guess you're right about that .

and thanks!


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## PianoMan

I believe you have a point about the difficulty of English, it is one of the harder Western European languages to learn to the unreliable grammar and spelling.  However, I'd like to say in terms of writing systems, Mandarin is the most difficult.  One of the few languages without an alphabet or syllabry.  I do think though that a difficult alphabet to learn is the Thai script.  Either way, this is all through the opinion of an English-speaker and I bet people in Thailand could say the same about the Latin system.


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## avalon2004

As English is my mother tongue language I suppose I can't really say if it's the "hardest" language or not, but from experience I would say:

It is definitely the hardest language I have come across with regards to orthography. The spelling rules reflect the way people spoke five hundred odd years ago, and they haven't been significantly updated. Some languages have several ways to spell the same phoneme or also contain words with silent letters, but not to the same extent of English (that I'm aware of).

Pronunciation-wise it is also very difficult, far more so than several other languages I have come across. The evidence for this is that I have never heard any learner of British English with an accent that sounds 100% natural, no matter how long they have been studying the language (which is not meant to be an insult, by the way). English is full of little things that trip you up and give away that it isn't your first language. I suppose that is bound to be true of other languages, but probably not to the same degree.

English may well be the hardest language in terms of accents and dialects too considering the sheer number of places where it is spoken. It is difficult enough for native speakers to understand some accents, never mind learners!

I have heard it said that English also boasts the biggest vocabulary of all languages, which would imply there are more words to learn than other languages. However, even if that is indeed true (which no one could ever prove I suppose), I think there are languages that use a wider range of words on a daily basis than English and therefore the size of the English lexicon is irrelevant.

Regarding grammar, English is certainly easier than many other languages. I fail to see, for example, how a native speaker of a Slavic language would find English grammar particularly difficult considering the amount of verb conjugations and noun declensions used in their own language. Whilst I acknowledge that English grammar is quite irregular, there is little worrying to be done over tenses, gender, plurals or cases. If anything, word order seems to be the most challenging aspect because English demands a fairly rigid sentence structure (subject-verb-object in declarative sentences, often V-S-O in interrogatives).


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## Setwale_Charm

English is indeed the richest language.  But most of its riches only open up at a very advance stage of learning. In everyday life there is a limited amount of words and grammar employed. So one does not need to go through all the complications in order to become an intermediate speaker of it.


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## Outsider

avalon2004 said:


> It is definitely the hardest language I have come across with regards to orthography. The spelling rules reflect the way people spoke five hundred odd years ago, and they haven't been significantly updated. Some languages have several ways to spell the same phoneme or also contain words with silent letters, but not to the same extent of English (that I'm aware of).


I used to think the same, until I read a little about Irish spelling.


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## Setwale_Charm

Outsider said:


> I used to think the same, until I read a little about Irish spelling.


 

 Oh well. You just have to learn to live with it , as we do.


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## sushiisgood563

Hi, first time poster here 

I'm a native english speaker, who lived in Taiwan for a couple months, took classes every day, and I now live in Paris. I'm profficient in French. Ive noticed alot of people on this board saying Chinese is the hardest language to learn, and I just want to offer some of my personal insight.

IMHO, chinese is easier than French. There's no grammar, nothing conjugates. Also, they have less vocabulary, often using the same word to mean several things. (For example, Pao = Running. To say jogging, you just say Man Pao, which translates littearlly into slow run) The tonal intonation is tricky to pronounce, but trust me, if you live in a Chinese-speaking country for a month, you catch on reall quick. Lastly, its easy to undersatnd. You can count on most words being one or two syllables at most, and the tones make it easy to distinguish one word from another. 

French, on the other hand, has some quite tricky grammar. They have a relatively big dictionary, and while the intonation isnt crucial to the definition of your word, its crucial to being understood. Pronunciation is also tricky, because of the way its written, many beginners think French is actually similar to English. You learn later, however, that there are naunces that can be very difficult to get used to doing, because of the fact that its nearly like English. And perhaps worst of all, fluent French is very difficult to understand. There are liasons between almost every word, and the accent comes on the end of the word. (Unlike english, where we accent the first syllable). 

I'd say the only area where Chinese has French beat is the writing system. Recognzing the characters is easy, but writing them is like another language in itself. Nowadays, however, Chinese is modernizing, and its even possible to learn chinese using just the romanized pinyin.


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## Honolulu85

I think that Japanese is the hardest.  I have visited Japan several times and I only speak a few words of Japanese, it is hard.  

The characters (kanji)!!!  I would love to learn someday!!!


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## Setwale_Charm

The point is that everybody here talks about what is difficult to HIM/HER instead of actually evaluating the complicatedness of a language. Which is not wrong either since there is a difference between "hard" and "complicated".


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## GEmatt

Avalon2004 made an important remark about word order in the perceived difficulty of a language. Ultimately, no matter how difficult a language appears superficially, if it is structurally close to one's native language, then I'd guess it would be comparatively easy to learn. Once one has overcome the visual hurdle of a foreign script, and the tricks of pronounciation and grammar have been mastered, in terms of vocabulary, it's not much more than a matter of substituting a word in one's native language for a word in the new language, conveniently all in the same order.

The tough languages IMHO are those that differ structurally from one's native language. Most W. European languages (I believe) are SVO. Then take Korean, which is not only SOV but also heavily inflected, with markers indicating tense, mood, courtesy etc. all incorporated into the verb. It makes Chinese seem like child's play, by comparison (no offense).


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## BlueWolf

avalon2004 said:


> As English is my mother tongue language I suppose I can't really say if it's the "hardest" language or not, but from experience I would say [...]


 
No offence, but I've often noticed that everyone thinks his/her language is the most difficult in the world!  Every language has its own particularies but we notice only the mistakes in our own language and so we think it's impossible for anyone speaks our language as we do. That's probably right, but it doesn't mean it's the most difficult in the world.


----------



## PianoMan

sushiisgood563 said:


> IMHO, chinese is easier than French. There's no grammar, nothing conjugates. Also, they have less vocabulary, often using the same word to mean several things.


 
Indeed, I'm familiar with this an I think this is what makes Chinese one of the most fascinating languages, of course, your an expert on learning it, having been an English speaker exposed to Chinese for the first time, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the one thing that makes Chinese difficult is the vast character system.


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Reading Chinese is easy... 

Now, writing, on the other hand is slightly different: the other thing is that one of the ways to practice conversational fluency is through lots of writing, and well, that's really the only difficult thing about Chinese. 

Chinese has grammar _what_ (liao): just that it's a highly analytic language, composed of free morphemes. There are many ways to make an ungrammatical sentence. 

The tones aren't a problem, since the situation, time and place associated with each phrase are so distinctive, they usually come out spontaneously without having to remember what the tones are. 

It doesn't matter that there are thousands and thousands of characters, just like it doesn't matter that one has to memorise whether a French noun is masculine or feminine. It's likely that if you remember the word, you will remember all the things associated with it: pronunciation, tone, order, and the way it roughly looks like for reading, and the only hard part is writing. It becomes as easy as spelling.


----------



## john_riemann_soong

GEmatt said:


> Avalon2004 made an important remark about word order in the perceived difficulty of a language. Ultimately, no matter how difficult a language appears superficially, if it is structurally close to one's native language, then I'd guess it would be comparatively easy to learn. Once one has overcome the visual hurdle of a foreign script, and the tricks of pronounciation and grammar have been mastered, in terms of vocabulary, it's not much more than a matter of substituting a word in one's native language for a word in the new language, conveniently all in the same order.
> 
> The tough languages IMHO are those that differ structurally from one's native language. Most W. European languages (I believe) are SVO. Then take Korean, which is not only SOV but also heavily inflected, with markers indicating tense, mood, courtesy etc. all incorporated into the verb. It makes Chinese seem like child's play, by comparison (no offense).



Just because a language is not inflected or inflected does not make it easier or more difficult than another language which has the opposite properties. To substitute for the lack of inflection for example, Chinese mandates a certain type of order for things. 

Often what I see is a lack of poignancy - often "translators" in the career centres or schools in America in direct translation will end up using an absurd amount of characters (e.g. 15) just to say "welcome to our [insert venue here]!" (where a better phrased sentence will reduce it to six). To give an idea of how bombastic it is (and funny diction at times), it is rather akin to saying "a felicitous and cordial welcome to our great humble institutional abode of [learning/jobs/etc.]" in English.


----------



## karuna

BlueWolf said:


> No offence, but I've often noticed that everyone thinks his/her language is the most difficult in the world!  Every language has its own particularies but we notice only the mistakes in our own language and so we think it's impossible for anyone speaks our language as we do. That's probably right, but it doesn't mean it's the most difficult in the world.



Or it may be true in a sense that from all the languages we have studied our native language for the longest time, putting the biggest efforts into it. So, it is the most difficult language in the world for us, even though we have learned it the best. 

But with each language that we learn next, we may find it easier that the previous one. Russian is one the most similar languages to my native one, yet I had really hard time learning it and even now it looks really complicated despite gramatical and lexical similarities. Next I learned English which was quite easy on a basic level although it was nothing like Latvian or Russian. Still English is quite difficult on a higher level with many subtle rules and usage. 

And now I am trying to learn Japanese which was supposed to be very difficult as it is not an IE language. But with the exception of the writting system it surprised me as very orderly and natural and easy to learn. At least the grammar which I am learning now.


----------



## GEmatt

john_riemann_soong said:


> Just because a language is not inflected or inflected does not make it easier or more difficult than another language which has the opposite properties. To substitute for the lack of inflection for example, Chinese mandates a certain type of order for things.
> 
> Often what I see is a lack of poignancy - often "translators" in the career centres or schools in America in direct translation will end up using an absurd amount of characters (e.g. 15) just to say "welcome to our [insert venue here]!" (where a better phrased sentence will reduce it to six). To give an idea of how bombastic it is (and funny diction at times), it is rather akin to saying "a felicitous and cordial welcome to our great humble institutional abode of [learning/jobs/etc.]" in English.


 
True, true.. although my emphasis really was on the difficulty of SOV languages for SVO native speakers, rather than the inflections themselves.. The pitfalls of translation! Reminds me of signs like this one..


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## V3nom_is_here

The hardeds languages to learn are probably German and Russian ... not necesarilly in that order


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## chung

One of my teachers once told me that the hardest language to learn is the one that you are currently studying.

In my humble opinion about my native language...

English is hard because it's full of exceptions and its spelling is not phonetic. Yet English is easy because there are LOTS of resources for learning it, media in English is everywhere and you can find native speakers of English relatively easily for practice. It's debatable whether the disappearance of grammatical cases in English simplifies things, since the tradeoff is that English word order is very rigid. I know that some people whose languages use cases and relatively elaborate conjugations found it odd that modern English has done away with almost all of its cases and conjugations.


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## Calamitintin

Chinese is the hardest language I've ever learnt, but it is also the only non-European language...there must be a link 
++
Cal


----------



## Bunni

In my opinion, as a native English-speaker, Arabic and Hindi have been the most difficult languages for me out of all other languages I have attempted to learn thus far (a few Chinese dialects, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Swahili, Twi, Indonesian, and Russian). For Latin-based languages, I feel Portuguese may be the most difficult.


----------



## Athaulf

chung said:


> In my humble opinion about my native language...
> 
> English is hard because it's full of exceptions and its spelling is not phonetic.



In my experience, English spelling can be mastered to a near-perfect level if one spends several years using the language in reading and writing on a daily basis. It certainly is very hard at beginner and intermediate levels, but at least it can be overcome with a reasonable effort.  I have found some aspects of English  much harder. These are idioms and phrasal verbs, prepositions, and above all articles. 

Nowadays, I almost never have to look up words that wouldn't also baffle a typical well-educated native speaker, but I still find myself puzzled over the meaning of occasional phrasal verbs and idioms and unsure which prepositions to use in certain phrases (I've noticed significant improvement in these areas only since I actually started living in an English-speaking environment). I also still tend to produce sentences that are formally grammatically correct, but sound awkward and strange to native speakers because they differ from the idioms normally used to express the same thoughts.

And as for the articles, I have found them to be nightmarishly difficult. After more than a decade of studying and actively using English, which has included over three years of living, studying, and working in an English-speaking academic environment, this is the only area in which I still make gross mistakes all the time, and see very little, if any improvement with time. 



> It's debatable whether the disappearance of grammatical cases in English simplifies things, since the tradeoff is that English word order is very rigid. I know that some people whose languages use cases and relatively elaborate conjugations found it odd that modern English has done away with almost all of its cases and conjugations.


I would say that the morphological simplicity of English (i.e. its lack of cases and complex conjugations) in fact makes things harder, or at least more confusing for learners that come from certain backgrounds, such as Slavic languages. It makes people believe that English is wonderfully easy -- you just translate your native language word for word, only without having to worry about those pesky cases and conjugations, and voila! 

Of course, such English will be equally bad as if one spoke e.g. German or Russian without bothering with inflections at all -- and the syntactic rules for speaking proper English are in fact far more complicated than even the most complex and irregular tables of cases and conjugations. They are especially hard to grasp for people used to languages where information is mainly carried by complex morphology, with relatively loose syntax. They are not just hard to learn -- for a native speaker of such a language, it takes a while to recognize the very existence of such rules.


----------



## Rodrigo_de_Burgos

I would have to say American English. In American English, you have Spanish, German, French, Italian and well you get the train of thought, all mixed into one .


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## Lemminkäinen

Rodrigo_de_Burgos said:


> In American English, you have Spanish, German, French, Italian and well you get the train of thought, all mixed into one .



And you don't in British English?


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## john_riemann_soong

English articles throw me off French articles ... sometimes I think, there is a degree of optionability in boh, in order to cast a certain effect. 

English is sort of my half-native language. I spoke a dialect of English - Singlish - first (to the chagrin of my parents, as I picked it up from my peers). When moving to the United States, words sort of had a magic of being half-familiar, half-alien. Sometimes I think because I spoke a dialect of English first, I had a heightened awareness of words. I never liked the "silent letter" principle, because I never truly thought any letter was silent. I would not call it "non-phonetic". If one were to compare "al" and "ale", I wouldn't say that the "e" is silent, it just has an aftereffect on the "a", as though as if it were a dipthong.

Now that I know a bit of phonetics I know that the closed e in "ale", "cane" (versus can) is not a dipthong, but a vowel, but to my six year old self at the time, due to the way one was taught about vowels in school, (long a versus short a in a phonics approach, etc.), that was my perception.


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## GEmatt

The question may have been asked already, but I just missed it skimming through all the posts:  Has anyone mentioned sign language?  I don't know much about it, except that the 'signing' systems do differ from country to country - but not enough that fluent 'signers' cannot adapt quickly to the new language.  It might be analogous to great accent differences within one language, or to features observed in dialect continuums.

I'd love to know if anyone has more experience of this, as I'm guessing that, regardless of the country, learning the sign language of one's country of origin _as a person with hearing_ will represent a similar difficulty, both conceptually, and in terms of the precise gestures/body language involved...


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## AIkelle

SALVE:
 
I have to say that if you learn LATIN you can learn anything there is to know in the world. One simple verb can be conjugated in dozens of different ways (I'm not exaggerating!!!) I'ts madness. 

But, it "gave birth" to Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, etc. so, It must be studied.

Regards,


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## chung

Athaulf said:


> In my experience, English spelling can be mastered to a near-perfect level if one spends several years using the language in reading and writing on a daily basis. It certainly is very hard at beginner and intermediate levels, but at least it can be overcome with a reasonable effort. I have found some aspects of English much harder. These are idioms and phrasal verbs, prepositions, and above all articles.
> 
> Nowadays, I almost never have to look up words that wouldn't also baffle a typical well-educated native speaker, but I still find myself puzzled over the meaning of occasional phrasal verbs and idioms and unsure which prepositions to use in certain phrases (I've noticed significant improvement in these areas only since I actually started living in an English-speaking environment). I also still tend to produce sentences that are formally grammatically correct, but sound awkward and strange to native speakers because they differ from the idioms normally used to express the same thoughts.
> 
> And as for the articles, I have found them to be nightmarishly difficult. After more than a decade of studying and actively using English, which has included over three years of living, studying, and working in an English-speaking academic environment, this is the only area in which I still make gross mistakes all the time, and see very little, if any improvement with time.
> 
> I would say that the morphological simplicity of English (i.e. its lack of cases and complex conjugations) in fact makes things harder, or at least more confusing for learners that come from certain backgrounds, such as Slavic languages. It makes people believe that English is wonderfully easy -- you just translate your native language word for word, only without having to worry about those pesky cases and conjugations, and voila!
> 
> Of course, such English will be equally bad as if one spoke e.g. German or Russian without bothering with inflections at all -- and the syntactic rules for speaking proper English are in fact far more complicated than even the most complex and irregular tables of cases and conjugations. They are especially hard to grasp for people used to languages where information is mainly carried by complex morphology, with relatively loose syntax. They are not just hard to learn -- for a native speaker of such a language, it takes a while to recognize the very existence of such rules.


 
This is what I was thinking about when it came to English. Native speakers of Slavonic languages (except perhaps Bulgarian and Macedonian) in this case would find English grammar very weird, since we don't use aspect per se, don't give a damn about cases and grammatical gender (except for when we use pronouns - he vs. him, she vs. her, his vs. her, who vs. whom, who vs. whose), and can't shift word order that much in order to emphasize a point in English (as you can in some Slavonic languages).

English phrasal verbs are a killer for foreigners, but for me, learning the imperfective-perfective pairs of Slavonic verbs, or knowing which postposition or prefix joins to a Hungarian verb (in order to change the meaning of the basic verb subtly) are my killers when learning grammar.

Another thing that I'm sure would trip up some foreigners is the variable, unmarked stress of English words. For example, we say "com-pu-TA-tion", "com-PU-ter", "sham-POO" and "e-STAB-lish-ment". You can't predict where the stress will fall and just have to practice a lot to get it down pat. It's a real pain and makes life trickier for ESL students.

When I was learning Croatian, I found this feature of variable unmarked stress to be maddening since I can't really know how to pronounce a Croatian word properly on sight alone. I also need to hear it so that I can pronounce it properly. However, it also reminded me why foreigners who learn to speak or read English sound odd at first. Not only do they carry their accents from their native tongues, but their accentuation patterns often won't match with what is used in standard English pronunciation.

In contrast, I found that learning languages with fixed stress such as Polish or Hungarian to be much easier since I know that 95% of the time, Polish stress is penultimate, while Hungarian stress is always on the first syllable. (It's a little odd perhaps since my native tongue has variable stress.)


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## Setwale_Charm

chung said:


> This is what I was thinking about when it came to English. Native speakers of Slavonic languages (except perhaps Bulgarian and Macedonian) in this case would find English grammar very weird, since we don't use aspect per se, don't give a damn about cases and grammatical gender (except for when we use pronouns - he vs. him, she vs. her, his vs. her, who vs. whom, who vs. whose), and can't shift word order that much in order to emphasize a point in English (as you can in some Slavonic languages).
> 
> English phrasal verbs are a killer for foreigners, but for me, learning the imperfective-perfective pairs of Slavonic verbs, or knowing which postposition or prefix joins to a Hungarian verb (in order to change the meaning of the basic verb subtly) are my killers when learning grammar.
> 
> Another thing that I'm sure would trip up some foreigners is the variable, unmarked stress of English words. For example, we say "com-pu-TA-tion", "com-PU-ter", "sham-POO" and "e-STAB-lish-ment". You can't predict where the stress will fall and just have to practice a lot to get it down pat. It's a real pain and makes life trickier for ESL students.
> 
> When I was learning Croatian, I found this feature of variable unmarked stress to be maddening since I can't really know how to pronounce a Croatian word properly on sight alone. I also need to hear it so that I can pronounce it properly. However, it also reminded me why foreigners who learn to speak or read English sound odd at first. Not only do they carry their accents from their native tongues, but their accentuation patterns often won't match with what is used in standard English pronunciation.
> 
> In contrast, I found that learning languages with fixed stress such as Polish or Hungarian to be much easier since I know that 95% of the time, Polish stress is penultimate, while Hungarian stress is always on the first syllable. (It's a little odd perhaps since my native tongue has variable stress.)


 
  You are not the only one who finds Croatian?Serbian?Bosnian stress maddening. I hear that even from  many Yugoslavs as well. And aspects also exists in Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak. And as for stress in English, just remember the joke about Mmme Mitterand dreaming about a penis when she really meant 'app*i*ness.
   I guess Bahasa Indonesia/Melayu are the easiest in this respect. As I had written before, it is useless trying to attempt and evaluate the complicatedness of languages. One can at best evaluate the complicatedness of a certain aspect of langauge learning. For instance. I do not think I know of a language with more difficult pronunciation to me than Xhosa. That clicking at the back, clicking on the side...


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## Pedro y La Torre

Rodrigo_de_Burgos said:


> I would have to say American English. In American English, you have Spanish, German, French, Italian and well you get the train of thought, all mixed into one .



I'm confused by this what are you talking about. 

The hardest language I would say is Arabic, I've never learned it but I hear it's really hard to get a grasp of.


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## PianoMan

I could say that's true. But I don't understand how you get that multilingual train of thought mixed in American English, what exactly does that train of thought include anyway?


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## Québec-Jakarta

Personnaly, I don't know...  My native languague is french, I speak also english and I'm learning Bahasa Indonesia.  But I have a friend (he's American) who speaks fluently 6 languages:  english (of course), spanish, german, russian, arabic and chinese.  Now he's learning french and he swear it's the most difficult so far.  ???  It's a latin language, very close to english, but there's complications he never faced before, like gender, liaisons, etc...  If that's true, thanks God it's my native language!


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## PianoMan

Well, I'm learning French, and I honestly can't understand why he sees it's so hard, of course, people learn differently and have different opinions, but as far as I'm concerned, French is not too difficult to learn.  But seriously, after learning Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, it's a little unusual  for a native English speaker to consider French harder than them.


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## Arianton

If any of you get the chance you should get and read the book called "Language Myths". Since I didn't really read everyone's posts because there is like 18 pages I was just going to put my two cents in. I think that languages that don't have much study material or many speakers are some of the hardest languages in the world. I also think that languages that have a significant amount of speakers that speak your native language and they speak it well (i.e. Dutch speaking English) are hard languages to learn. Most Dutch will always speak English to you because they really don't have the time to sit there and wait for you to spit out the Dutch sentence you want to when they can understand English perfectly. Plus, most of the Dutch television is subtitled and is in English so it is hard to turn towards the television to learn it. One thing I found hard learning Dutch (it was easier for me because English isn't my native language) is all of their words that have multiple meanings and sometimes no meaning at all if isolated. Dutch is  very difficult for English speakers to learn.  Being Basque and speaking it I must say that  Basque must be close to impossible to learn because the verb system is hell. There are times that I mess up stuff...even my dad screws up and says things wrong sometimes.  I feel that languages with different alaphabets are difficult at first. I'm jewish and have a REALLY REALLY hard time reading Yiddish and Hebrew sometimes!


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## john_riemann_soong

That's curious ... relearning Chinese for me for example is a difficult task, but then I found that recognising each character (and writing them) wasn't that hard. But Arabic, which has far less foreign characters than Chinese - and actually has an alphabet, is very difficult (perhaps because of the complex orthography and calligraphy) ...


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## Anatoli

john_riemann_soong said:


> That's curious ... relearning Chinese for me for example is a difficult task, but then I found that recognising each character (and writing them) wasn't that hard. But Arabic, which has far less foreign characters than Chinese - and actually has an alphabet, is very difficult (perhaps because of the complex orthography and calligraphy) ...


I observed that as well. Maybe it's do with the amount of exposure to both languages?


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## panjabigator

Definitely.  I'd say the arabic alphabet is difficult for many because it's an entirely different direction in writing.  I have no exposure to Arabic, but I have plenty of exposure to Urdu which also uses the Arabic alphabet.  So learning to read and write in a language which you already speak was a lot easier.


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## john_riemann_soong

panjabigator said:


> Definitely.  I'd say the arabic alphabet is difficult for many because it's an entirely different direction in writing.  I have no exposure to Arabic, but I have plenty of exposure to Urdu which also uses the Arabic alphabet.  So learning to read and write in a language which you already speak was a lot easier.



Meh, Chinese classical works (not necessarily in Classical Chinese) are often written right to left, so I don't pin it exactly to that. And on the other hand I have a friend who picked up the Farsi alphabet just like that ...


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## Pipsy

I think English is the hardest language to learn. I tutor my French friends in it because I'm the only one that speaks it fluently, and it's very tricky, even for me! I learn new phrases/words all the time, and translation just messes with my head. It is is different to most other languages in its level of complexity. If you want to learn it only on a superficial level, than that's OK, but to be in master of the language is another thing altogether. It has the largest amount of words in it that any other language that exists... so no wonder it so compliqated.


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## Chaska Ñawi

And now, pulling my moderator tuque firmly over my ears: 

Eighteen pages and almost one year after the original post, the time has come to close this thread.  For those of you who have laboured through all eighteen pages, a twelve-step program is available to help you re-integrate into regular forum activity.

Cheers, 
Chaska Ñawi


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