Most difficult language

[Datepalm]

Kirundi is kicking my ass at the moment. I still figure it's all down to familiarity - all European and Semitic languages look more or less manageable to me. Further afield from that, it gets hard.

[Zoë Sumra]

Of the languages I've tried, Thai was the hardest. Never tried Cantonese/Mandarin. (Arabic wasn't too bad.)

[Larry of the Lawn]

Yanomamo is supposed to be a breeze.

[Theda Baratheon]

I took Ancient Greek for a year and was terrible at it, lol. I don't actually know if it's a difficult language or not though, I only know I didn't like how quickly the course was going, how the teacher would make everyone read sentences in greek and translate them in class and because of this i stopped going for months and ultimately failed the exams it...twice. So all of it was my fault, really. I loved learning German in School; sometimes think about re-learning it and I didn't find French horribly difficult when we studied it in school for a year or so.

[King Tyrion I]

Japanese is still difficult. I wanted to start learning but the alphabet kicked me in the chest. Maybe one day.

The easiest language to learn so far is German. It, along with Arabic, are so guttural when spoken that's it's hard to miss anything. But when you start adding umlauts in German I start getting tone deaf. I still don't know how to pronounce the o-umlaut. The most fun letter to write is the double , of course.

:lol: If you had Skype I could tell and teach you how to pronounce the "o umlaut".^^

[drawkcabi]

Would it be any surprise to hear from America that English is the hardest language? I suspect not. Of all the languages I can speak adequately, I'd say Japanese was the hardest. Now if we can add in made up languages, it'd be Al Bhed or Vulcan.

I looked into Klingon a while back, and it seems designed to be maximally alien. Very cool, by the way.

So I nominate Klingon.

Klingon was actually the first language that came to mind when I saw this thread, heh.

Ok, I'll say Dothraki then. :P

[baxus]

OT: I'd wager Russian is hell to learn, that's what the people I know who tried to learn it say, at least.

It clearly depends from your cultural and language background, but I haven't found Russian to be too hard.

It can be learned rather easily if you have a solid background in some other Slavic languages.

On the other hand, it requires a bit of effort to learn how to pronounce words properly, or at least it did for me since it is rather more melodic (for lack of better word) than Slavic languages I speak.

[Aemon Stark]

I started learning French when I was 5 or 6 so in that sense it's "easiest" for me. That kind of background made learning and remembering basic Spanish pretty easy. German is certainly harder - even for an English speaker - because Modern English doesn't partake in cases to the same degree, but often German sentence structure sounds like archaic English.

Otherwise I've learned a bit of Chinese (Mandarin), and it isn't quite as impenetrable as you'd think. Might depend on how easily you can get the tonal aspect.

[Ser Lucious Left-Foot]

Basque is tough because nobody knows where it comes from and it isn't similar to anything, but other than that, the grammatical organization of the language is not that hard.

At the opposite, Romanic languages have pretty easy vocabulary to learn, and similar to each other, but some (especially French) have structures and rules and exceptions that can be a lot to handle if you want to be REALLY fluent.

I've tried japanese, and it was pretty unnatural to me, who's a native french speaker, but once you get the hang of it, it gets easier. The only and wrst problem is that it is hard to learn a new writing system, especially so diverse.

But the toughest language I've ever been confronted too is definitely Arabic. It's hard to read, and hard to write, hard to pronunciate, and not at all similar to my native language. But I'm making progress though. I'll probably never be perfectly fluent, but enough to understand and be understood.

[Littlefingers In The Air]

I took Ancient Greek for a year and was terrible at it, lol. I don't actually know if it's a difficult language or not though, I only know I didn't like how quickly the course was going, how the teacher would make everyone read sentences in greek and translate them in class and because of this i stopped going for months and ultimately failed the exams it...twice. So all of it was my fault, really. I loved learning German in School; sometimes think about re-learning it and I didn't find French horribly difficult when we studied it in school for a year or so.

I loved learning German. I found a couple of different issue with it, though. The main one was that there were multiple ways to say "the"; I think 15 (someone can correct me on this) and the professor wasn't the greatest at explaining the basic rules behind that.

I also struggled with some of the nouns having more than one gender; for example, das Golf and der Golf are referring to two different things. Once I picked up on some of those simple differences, it was pretty smooth sailing, but it took a while. No lie.

[klemenko]

With four cases and three genders in German you have fewer forms of "the" than 15 and many of them are repeated; basically there is der, die, das, des, dem, den = six forms.

French shares many features with English including big chunk of vocabulary, so it's not that difficult. As for Slavic languages, yes, they are very hard, events to native speakers.

[sj4iy]

I've studied Latin, Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin (I'm a native English speaker and Japanese is my next best language). I've also checked out a few other languages, and I think Finnish is the most difficult language I've come across...at least, from my position as a native English speaker.

[Artas]

In theory, shouldn't Frisian be the easiest language for English speakers to learn, as it's the language most closely related to English?

Whether it's a particularly useful language to know is a different matter, of course...

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

English is my first language and I've studied Latin, French and German up to A level (studying the latter two at uni). I took to both French and German fairly easily, but I find German just a little harder I think. It doesn't flow as easily as French.

[Ulthosian Stark]

Out of what I've heard, native Papua new guinea speak, of course theres variation but it seems really complex, lots of clicks and short syllables

[lessthanluke]

I studied Welsh and French in school and found Welsh way harder. I plan on learning it again at some point though just because I feel like I should speak it.

[Prue]

I didn't find spoken Japanese that difficult to learn either. The Kanji, yes. You'd have to memorise thousands of Chinese characters in order to read the newspaper. But the grammar is OK. Only two tenses. No declension. Easier than French. If your native language is very different, you have to learn a lot of words though as you can't guess them by comparing them with your own language.

English was the easiest foreign language for me to learn, as it's quite closely related to German. I'd agree that Finnish, Hungarian and Basque must be the most difficult European languages.

One thing I found a bit puzzling was that native speakers of English often think that their language must be really difficult to learn for foreigners because 'the words are not written as you hear them'. Hmm, nope. That's more of a problem for children who learn to write their native language for the first time, not for EFL learners, I suppose. If you learn English as a foreign language, you normally learn the word in its spoken AND written form at roughly the same time. And you know e.g. that "you're" means "du bist" in German, whereas "your" means "dein". Not that easy to mix up the words if you know they mean completely different things. So those kinds of mistakes are more of a problem for native speakers.

[Littlefingers In The Air]

With four cases and three genders in German you have fewer forms of "the" than 15 and many of them are repeated; basically there is der, die, das, des, dem, den = six forms.

French shares many features with English including big chunk of vocabulary, so it's not that difficult. As for Slavic languages, yes, they are very hard, events to native speakers.

You're right. I'm looking back at my e-notes from my German II course and it says there are sixteen different articles but that for the, many are repeated.

[Talleyrand]

Welsh/Gaelic because you don't even have the "this will be useful later" motivation to push you through

[HairGrowsBack]

European languages : Scandinavian languages are probably the most difficult (for me anyway).

Asian languages : I actually think Chinese is among the easiest, though it remains difficult for non-Asian students. Thai, Cambodian, Japanese or Korean the most difficult (that I know of).

African : Arabic seems hella difficult, especially the writing .