The hardest language to learn

[Matteo Martini]

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

In Japanese, you have three alphabets (kanji, katakana, hiragana), but two of them are fairly easy to learn

 

[IMST]

Polish strikes me as the hardest one that I have any knowledge of whatsoever. There is no word order. At all. Grammar is entirely due to suffixes, which I have difficulty discerning to begin with. Since I'm generally pretty musically intelligent this seems much more insurmountable than the tonal languages do.

 

[genesplicer]

I would say English, simply because it has so many, differing rules. Unlike most other languages, which have a single linguistic root, English comes from many roots, with many vocabularies and many, often mutually exclusive linguistic rules.

For example, the plural of house is houses, but the plural of mouse is mice. That is due to the multiple language base of English. To learn all the rules and when to apply them, as opposed to others, is very difficult.

My linguistic professor explained that English exists only because Norman conquerors were trying to get dates with Saxon Barmaids...

 

[Almo]

There is not a single hardest language, in my opinion. It depends on which language you already know. For example, Chinese would be VERY difficult for me, but not as tough for a Japanese person.

But for the sake of the Poll, I'm putting Chinese since it is so utterly foreign to me in its grammar, pronounciation and writing.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

However, I'd consider Japanese even more difficult. Besides the linguistic problems, you have two different writing systems that are used in conjunction with each other. Learning to write Chinese or Japanese is difficult; but at least with Chinese, you only need to learn one writing system.

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.

Chinese is undoubtedly the most difficult language as far as the written language is concerned. They have no alphabet, and alot of the characters cannot be sounded out. If you've never seen the Chinese ccharacter for a specific noun, for example, there is nothing you can do. Even if you are a native speaker, you are out of luck until you get your hands on a dictionary.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

English is tough too, because all of the exceptions.

Plus, English has the most nouns of any language, I believe.

 

[badnewsBH]

Too lazy to read all of this. Anyone say Klingon yet?

Not sure what's hardest, but for me, *any* language that's non-English is nigh on impossible. I constantly try to translate from English, making the whole effort pretty much a waste.

 

[Olowkow]

I've studied quite a few languages, but only two in depth. I taught French and Spanish for 5 years in high school and college. Pretty close to native accent in both I am told.

My wife speaks Thai as her native language. Now, the hardest languages for me are Thai and Chinese. I have had a lot of Chinese friends over the years and learned a fair amount, but I am no good at the tones unless it is an expression I have memorized.

In Thailand, I used to watch CNN and pick out a fair amount, but it just fascinated me that (for example) every time the announcer said "song kram", ("war"), he would get the tone right. Crazy, I know, but as a native English speaker, it is so tempting to tie tone to emotion or question intonation etc., not meaning. Then there is something called "sandhi" which shifts tones depending on where they come relative to other ones.

I have American friends who speak pretty good Thai and Chinese. I'm jealous!

Chinese grammar is no problem, since there are no tense endings, verb conjugations, or plurals. But there is a really different approach to things like relative clauses, and the use of particles for tense and questions.

So, the hardest language I ever played with was an African language called Kanuri, from the Chad lake region. The morphology was unbelievably extensive and the phonology, while not mysterious was complicated. I don't think I could ever master this. Many of the Amerian Indian languages and Eskimo (Athabaskian sp?) are really something else. Oh, yes, Swahili...they have something like 22 noun classes or genders and all adjectives have to agree as I recall: kisu kizuri (good day)

For me the bottom line is whether you can be exposed to full immersion in a language. That is, if you hang out with a native speaker (preferably several) long enough, you will learn any language quite readily. Learning in a classroom is always much more difficult.

Currently trying to learn some Japanese. Loving it! Sugoi!! Just something about SOV that makes sense to me. Not sure why.

 

[bignickel]

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.

Hmmmm. So... how does Japanese rate in difficulty when it comes to reading?

 

[shuize]

Actually, Japanese is probably the easiet language there is as far as the writing is concerned, especially for an English speaker. You can become proficcient in writing Japanese in a weekend.

I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

Japanese is not anywhere near as hard as Japanese people would have you believe. But the statement that writing can be mastered in a weekend is complete garbage.

 

[BPScooter]

I suppose we'd be better off by separating spoken lingos from written. I always tip my hat to the intrepid linguists that tried to capture phonology, grammar, syntax back in the bad old days of Victorian scholarship. You know, the guys in pith helmets with guns that had a few geeky scholars in tents that were working on translations or insect collections. Bad old days for militarism, colonialism, etc. but there were always a few eccentrics that, what, saw Rosetta Stones and realized what they were.

Given the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), there must be harder languages to SPEAK than others. From an outsider's perspective, of course. A Spanish speaker learning French is probably going to have an easier time than a Spanish speaker learning Welsh, on purely spoken terms. Very foreign, that Welsh.

A reader, on the other hand will be stymied by alphabets. No matter how related my native English is to Greek or Russian, I will not immediately be able to make sense of a written utterance in those languages without instruction or study. That was my reaction to the Edgar Rice Burroughs conceit in the original Tarzan books, that somehow the young Lord Greystoke was able to use his immense native intelligence to learn how to read English--as little bugs that moved around--mangani this or that. Stick me with Arabic or Hindi and I will die of old age before I figure it out from the written symbol. But given some time to try to communicate verbally, and some time to connect that with a written word, well, yeah, I think I could probably learn to function .

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

Japanese is not anywhere near as hard as Japanese people would have you believe. But the statement that writing can be mastered in a weekend is complete garbage.

Well, when it comes down to it, andything that can be written in Kanji can also be written in Kana. And, I know Kana can be learned in a weekend, because that is how long it took me to learn it.

Of course, you can't really learn to write Japanese in a weekend, because you have to know what to write! I was just trying to make the point that people are mistaken when they think Japanese must be harder than Chinese because it has three character sets as opposed to Chinese only having one.

But katakana, especially, can be learned in a weekend by an English speaker, and then they'll have access to a fair number of words and their meanings. Try doing that with Chinese!

 

[scratchy]

English, I still have a hard time understanding Bush.

Paul

No at all, i thing english mucher eesy lern!

 

[bigred]

I've heard linguists talk on this and the overwhelming fav seems to be Chinese FWIW.

 

[technoextreme]

A computer language. *rimshot*

 

[Tatsu]

Any polysynthetic language like Inuit or Cherokee sounds almost impossibly complex to learn unless you are taught from birth. Just the thought of a language where you can create a word on the fly to describe a unique concept, and that another native speaker will automatically understand, amazes me. Of course, having never actually tried myself, I can't offer a deeper opinion than that.

 

[Anders W. Bonde]

What makes Danish difficult to learn are the numerous and illogical exceptions in grammar and pronunciation. There's also a very wide gap between spelling and pronunciation, made worse by the fact that Danes are very, very sloppy with their pronunciation - and it's only getting worse. We've got nine distinct vowels, but the younger generation (and worse, their teachers and many other language "professionals") tend to fuze many of them into a few woolly ones - even to the extent that they thus mix up both spelling and meaning.

I reserve the right to correct Danes when they're too sloppy with their own language...

On another topic, I think it is generally easier for Danes to understand Swedes and Norweginas than the other way round - this may well be due to the Norwegians, and especially the Swedes, being musch crisper and more consistent in their pronunciation than the Danes.

Nynorsk, as far as I am concerned, is a rather silly artificial language created in spite simply to separate Norwegian from its Danish past. IMO, it's a mess. Bokmål is very similar to (written) Danish. Norwegian pronunciation is much more tonal than Danish, with Danish being much more similar to German than the other Scandinavian languages.

It could be argued that Norwegian and Danish are different dialects of a common language, but Swedish certainly is gramatically quite different. Then again, even in tiny Denmark, we have many different dialects, a few of which I find difficult to understand.

 

[Colorama]

I speak them all. I just don't understand any of them...

 

[Mobyseven]

Another vote for Chinese. I'm a native Strine speaker, but I'd still rank Chinese above English. Hebrew isn't actually that hard, and I'll never understand why people think Japanese is hard - Japanese is one of the most logical languages in the world, and the writing systems are not really that hard. Certainly the number of kanji one has to learn could be a bit overwhelming, but the same could be said for a new word in any language, and the beauty of kanji is that it means you can often figure out the basic meaning of words that you haven't seen before (even if you still need to check pronounciation).

 

[Mobyseven]

I'm not sure if you're trying to be coy by suggesting that hiragana and katakana are the only real Japanese characters or if you're actually ignorant of the nearly 2,000 standard kanji needed to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. Hiragana and katakana probably can be mastered in a weekend. But if that's all you know, you're little better than the average Japanese pre-schooler and by no means proficient in writing. Here, people will judge you on not only your knowledge of kanji but your calligraphy as well.

I tried calligraphy in Japan, and got promptly shown up by a room full of fifth graders...