What is the hardest language to learn?
Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish-Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation. Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language not until age 16. .
Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian-These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root.Pretty Hard: Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet but easier pronunciation. Serbian-Also similar to other Slavic languages with a complex case and gender system, but it also has many tenses. alphabet
Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese-No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher that says people pick up Chinese very easy, but he speaks several languages and could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even the easiest language to learn. Not the hardest language by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.
Average: French-lots of tenses but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
Easy: Spanish and Italian
Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.
So what – the hardest language to learn
So what is hard? Hard really means, it’s just a longer learning curve. Look I am in my forties and I learned Polish and I have problems with languages, in addition to having a bleeding in the brain. So if I can do it, the only thing holding you back from learning the language of your dreams is method and patience.
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480 responses to The hardest language to learn
hey guys! my names’s Wiktoria and i live in Poland, Wrocław. well i know that polish is the hardest language and someone from another country probably will never know polish as well as some Pole. im only 13 but i learn languages very fast, i know polish orthograpgic so well, i do not any mistakes, same with english. i also learnt russian ALONE cuz i love this language and Russia so much. if someone of us would want know polish, i can help you. it would be very nice thing, really:) if you’ve any questions or something like this write me
kisses :*
Greenlandic is an extremely difficult language. More than 20 words for “snow” for example.
It’s kinda funny when some english-speaker is talking about difficult pronunciation in Polish. Yes, it has some different sounds than english, but it has a high level of consistency between writing and corresponding sounds (at least one way).
In polish, if you have a certain letter or group of letters, they are always (there are very, very rare exceptions) read the same way. In english? Try to guess. The most notable example is “ea”. Quoting wikipedia – “‹ea› is used in many languages. In English orthography, ‹ea› usually represents the monophthong /i/ as in meat; due to a sound change that happened in Middle English, it also often represents the vowel /ɛ/ as in sweat. Rare pronunciations occur, like /eɪ/ in just break, great, steak, and yea, and /æ/ in the archaic ealdorman. When followed by r, it can represent the standard outcomes of the previously mentioned three vowels in this environment: /ɪər/ as in beard, /ɜr/ as in heard, and /ɛər/ as in bear, respectively; as another exception, /ɑr/ occurs in the words hearken, heart and hearth. It often represents two independent vowels, like /eɪ.ɑː/ (seance), /i.æ/ (reality), /i.eɪ/ (create), and /i.ɨ/ (lineage). Unstressed, it may represent /jə/ (ocean) or /ɨ/ (Eleanor).”
Polski jest zajebiscie łatwy hahah:D
Finnish (Suomi)
This lang sthe hardest in the world well second to be in fact!!
Why?
Finnish ang you dont have same meaning for 1 word, you must constantly chane the words around to talk.
Like this:
Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?
In Finnish you must change every word, you cant keep same form, meaning you must learn like a child to get it right, if you look Polish and other langs, you can cach words and remeber them, as for Finnish you cant, unless you have brains like a Sponge
well, polish is hard even too hard for some Poles cause when i read some comments in internet my eyes are like o.O
russian is not hard but lithuanian that is pretty difficult ! I shall say very difficult. My husband is from lithuanian it took for me ‘some’ time to learn his language but for our daughter is very simple, she can speak polish, english and lithuanian.
No to pozdrowienia i uczcie się języków obcych !
My native language is Russian. I don’t know Polish at all, but when I was in Poland, I talked in Russian, but they in Polish and we understood each other, not perfectly, but just some ideas
also I can read and understand something in Polish, as basically it is similar to Russian, but with English (Latin) letters.
“Eyjafajallajokull” vulcano. Go on, try and say it quickly!!!
Probably bit your tongue off, didn’t you???
I’d say Icelandic and Finnish.
I’m Irish and Swedish. Try Gaelic and old Scotish But nothing beats American English
for idioms (unique to regional areas.)
So personally, I think it is a challenging battle. I would say that the hardest in my opinion are Icelandic and Finnish, for different reasons. I love languages, I even make them up. So here are my reasons. (I am a native english speaker)
Icelandic: Yeah, I can pronounce and spell Eyjafjallajokull correctly (except for the accent, which i know is there too. But the phonology changes all the time, and the words just boggle my mind sometimes. Well, now Finnish…Finnish is wonderful because it uses this wonderful completely phonetic Latin alphabet. But…the grammar! Yeah, endless noun cases…and not to mention consonant gradation (which is a phonetic thing, yet the consonants are changed with the sound)! It is ridiculous, and lots of memorizing these different types of nouns is ridiculous. My main problem with noun cases: the partitive case…too many uses
I’m learning russian and finnish. God there both so hard. But I’m young 13 so i hope I have a chance at this =( There grammar is hard. I’ve been studying it for some while now and I get what makes something in a russian case but not what ending to use. Oh or why some words don’t exsist. After you learn the cases you still have the other stuff like the words they use in between to handle cause cases don’t explain that.
There is NO WHERE to learn finnish cases. Like why there in that case (I mean in depth). They have way to many cases it just makes me angry!
My native language is Polish, but I also speak in Ukrainian because of family who are Ukrainians. Now im trying to speak fluently in English, but I am only one year in England, so I will be a better in converstaion after 2 more years. Will see. I think Polish is well hard to learn, when I speak with my Polish friends, English pople always look at us and says that we speak so fast and when they are listen us, they have impression of noise in our mouth. Haha, its interesting how Polish language sounds for English friends
Can I learn spanish on my own? Or better not?
Yes Spanish will be easy to learn for you as Polish is a complex and rich language, if you move to something like Spanish it will be no problem.
Hey ! I’m for Polish and… Polski jest łatwy dla Polaka a wy się nigdy nie nauczycie mówic bardzo dobrze .. trudno
Gramtyka POLSKA jes bardzo łatwa
odmiania czasownika SPRZĄTAĆ – CLEAN
1.I- sprzątam
2.you – sprzątasz
3.hi, she,it – sprząta
haha a to tylko l.poj.
Ni nauczycie sie nigdy !!
Polska jest zajebista nie dość, że wygrała woje i miała papieża polaka to jeszcze ma najtrudniejszy język któego sie nigdy nie nauczycie
Polish the hardest language to learn? That is like saying that playing the violin is harder than playing the piano. Which is nonsense, of course: even a three-years-old can’t play out of tune on a piano, but when it comes to real playing, a pianist has a lot more notes to take care of than a violinist. Both instruments are simply different.
Before drawing this kind of conclusions one should first answer questions like:
- what makes a language difficult?
- difficult for whom?
- learning to what level? (basic, advanced, perfect, etc.)
- do you mean the spoken language, the written language, or both?
It’s often taken for granted that a language with cases is harder than a language without cases. I’d say, cases CAN make a language difficult for a person who is not used to them. Same goes for grammatical gender: Polish has three genders (not seven, I’ve no idea where the author got that information), the same as in Latin, Greek and all other Slavic languages. From that point of view, Polish might indeed be hard for someone who is monolingual in English, however, if you already know f.ex. Latin, then the Polish case system is peanuts. I should add that the Polish case system is practically identical to those in Russian, Czech and Serbian; you can’t say that one is harder than the others, and if you know one, you basically know them all.
My experience is that every language has its own difficulties, and every language can still be learned. Being Dutch myself, I have learned several other languages, including Polish and Russian. All I can say is that Polish was easier for me than Russian, and both were easier for me than… German! Polish has a rich phonology, and of course, it does have its genders and its cases well, but several other elements are particularly easy to handle. Please consider the following:
- Polish has many consonants, and many of them don’t exist in English; however, the system is pretty straightforward, and all that’s needed is some practice.
- Vowels, on the other hand, are very few and very simple. Compare that to English, where virtually every simple vowel is subject to diphthongisation, vowel length, etc.
- Word order is fairly free in Polish.
- Stress falls on the penultime syllable almost by definition. If you know how to pronounce Polish, you can read any text aloud without any mistakes, without knowing even a single word in it. You never have to learn pronunciation and orthography separately.
- Polish has a very limited number of tenses and moods.
- There are a lot of rules, but there’s little irregularity.
- In comparison to Polish and English, many other languages are truly alien. That can be said of Japanese, for instance.
Besides, language learning is an individual process. Some people prefer learning auditively, others visually. Some people love tables, others hate them. And let’s face it: some people have a talent for learning foreign languages, others don’t. What is good for one person is bad for another, and there is no universal method of language learning that is good for everybody. People are different and languages are different, and how difficult a particular language really is for a particular person is pretty much a matter of finding the right teacher.
Sorry but I have to disagree.
“Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese-No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy.” I’ve been learning Japanese and most of that is simply not true. Japanese essentially has only two tenses, perfective and imperfective but there are countless verb forms (I think what you mean is that it’s not conjugated differently for each subject). Also, words are NOT all short. (Hazimemasite? Hidaridonari? Irassyaranakatta?!)And if the grammar was as easy as you say, people wouldn’t write entire books explaining the countless uses of wa and ga (for example). I’m not here to say that Japanese is in fact the hardest language, but if you’re going to argue that Japanese is not then you need to at least have the facts right.
The United States Defense Institute divides languages into 4 categories based on the number of hours needed to achieve fluency:
Category 3 (2nd Most Difficult) includes Polish, Russian, Greek, Hebrew etc.
Category 4 (Most Difficult) includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
There’s no absolute for language difficulty though so in the end it’s all opinion.
The hardest language i think is lithuanian. It is much harder then polish.
My native language is English and I found that after coming back from a stay in the Czech Republic that Czech is the hardest language to learn. They have so many tenses that if you think yo know how to say a word, you probably don’t because that word can be writen six other ways. Czech is also hard to read for English speakers because the letters are so different. The accents they have on their words are also hard to say; one person had lived in Czech Rep. for 4 years and still cannot say one of the letters right.
French is easy for English speakers I believe because the words are so similar but the grammar is the hard part- they have imparfait, future simple, passe compose, etc. They also have a lot of irregular verbs. I’ve been learning French for 8 years and I’m not close to being fluent in it.
English is the hardest language of all. It’s the be all and end all, because it’s the dominant language here in the world today. As for Polish, it would make more sense if it used the Russian alphabet as opposed to the Latin one, it just does not suit the Latin alphabet, like all Slavic languages – they should not use the Latin alphabet because that best suits Romance and Germanic languages only.
My native language is German and I’ve been told by foreigners that they find it the hardest (Western) language they know.
First our words; EIGHT SEPARATE noun plurals. Some have none Zimmer/Zimmer, Gebaeude/Gebaeude usw.. plus four cases, three sexes.
My friend from Australia says our sentences make her dizzy LOL
to Jan van Steenbergen,
apparently you haven’t learnt Polish not Russian if you say such things.
“Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?”
And in Poland? What do you think?
Hi how are you doing?
Hej, jak się masz?
Hi what are you doing?
Hej, co robisz?
And for example… Maybe word woman – kobieta.
Kobieta, kobiety, kobiecie, kobietę, kobietą, kobieto, kobiet, kobietom, kobietami, kobietach, kobieca, kobiecy, kobiecymi, kobiecą… And more.
farsi (persian) is the sweetest and easiest language in the world .
It is the language of poem.its soft and persian when they talk it is pleasing your ears and you want to listen to them,as if they are singing…….
oh so smooth language .you should try once and see if im right
I’m currently making an attempt to learn Polish with a complete grammatical approach to the language, meaning I learn as many of these mentioned regularities in the grammar I can possibly learn, before focusing on the lexical aspects. Jan van Steenbergen might not be that far off the track as some of you think. Polish is extremely regular, which I enjoy. Compared to Polish, German, which is often referred to as structured and regular, is way out of league. German is grammatically quite structured, but with a whole lot of exceptions, for example in the gender singular-plural declension as mentioned above.
But the question is if a language will be perceived as “hard” if it uses very complex rules that maintain little to irregularity – like Polish does – or if a “hard” language is hard, mainly because of the parts outside the grammatical borders. The English language is a better example than German here. English grammar is very limited – leaving a lot of work to irregular structures in order to make the language come together.
I believe there are two main types of talent in learning languages. Either you are better at learning the abstract grammatical structures, with less focus on the actual words. Or you are governed by the words of the language; that is, you have an easier time learning hundreds of phrases and words without thinking too much about the heritage of them.
Whikis said
“Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?”
In polish is like that
Hi how are you doing?
Cześć, jak się masz? or Cześć, co u ciebie?
Hi what are you doing?
Cześć, co robisz?
See? Polish is hard. But i think that an asian languages are harder.
I think polish is the hardest language to learn. Let’s see, Poland was wiped off a map for 123 years. There was no time for the Polish language to experience reforms. Therefore, the language is difficult. I learn languages super fast and I finally been getting it. Polish is a beautiful language, especially when spoken in the northern region such as Gdańsk, Sopot, and Gdynia. Do you want to know an even harder language than Polish? Try Kashubian. More sounds, more exceptions, and the inclusion of a schwa in their alphabet! GAHH! But for you who say the polish is not as hard as finnish, try saying this: STÓŁ Z POWYŁAMYWANYMY NOGAMI!! It is hard. I have used Rosetta Stone, and even lived in Poland for a month and I still have so much trouble with declension (grammatical noun position). There are so many exceptions to noun declension but has anybody who hasn’t tried declension ever think that there are three different genders in Polish. For declension, there are 7 different cases and three different ways to decline them depending if they follow an animate, inanimate, or proper inanimate.
Now, I know finnish is hard mostly because it doesn’t have a family of languages. It is in itself, a smaller language family. Anyways, lithuanian is hard too. Mostly because lithuanian wasn’t a geographic language on a map like german or russian. So it never went through reforms.
Lastly, Croatian and Serbian are a lot harder than people realize because there is a certain intonation along with stress. There are rising sounds and falling sounds, along with the monotone sound.
Okay, enough ranting.
Do widzenia.
Gdańsk, moje miasto.
Nie ma lepszego kraja niż Polska!!!!
Marsz, Marsz Dąbrowski!!!
@Astunstana
I am just going to say this to you! Polish uses the latin alphabet because they are catholic. It’s called not being like Russia. Russia has done nothing but ruin Poland. Have you ever heard of the Katyń. The Russian slaughter of polish officers. April 10, 1940. Learn your history, 966 AD Mieszko the First was baptized and so was Poland. Get it straight. Let’s see…all western Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet. Why? Because they are Central Europe, not Eastern Europe.
Ale jaja!! hahaha
While I do believe Polish would be hard to learn for many people, I disagree with how ‘difficulty’ is defined. You’re stressing cases and pronunciation, but there are plenty of languages with more cases and more difficult pronunciations. The Khoisan languages of Africa has clicks, which I’d imagine would be hard for any one who doesn’t speak a language with clicks (which is virtually everyone else). Grammar? Greenlandic and other Inuit languages are intensively complex, polysynthetic languages. Yet, they are grammatically a world away from most European languages and shouldn’t even be compared.
But what bugs me most is that you (the poster) actually think it takes more effort to think in a language like Polish because of gender and case agreement. Cases, genders and verbal agreement are redundancies. Them being there is actually supposed to clarify meaning. For example, in Spanish, I eat is ‘yo como,’ while you eat is ‘tú comes.’ Now, in a language like Chinese, which requires basically no agreement, not even a pronoun, what could ‘eat’ in a sentence possibly mean? I eat? You eat? It actually requires more thinking than you would think.
I don’t think like you people! I didn’t learn Polish but I know for sure that it isnn’t the hardest language in the world. All of you talked very much about how hard are to learn you’re native languages. I don’t understand. It’s that something you must be proud of? I mean look at yourselves! You are fighting for the hardest language in the world? Why that? It’s not like it makes you people more wise or inteligent, right? I’m a Romanian, and I don’t know other languages besides english, but … Looking at you people makes me happy that I don’t know them. It’s stupid to be proud that you’re language is the hardest, this is what I think!
Polak / Polka rodzą się i uczą się tego języka całe życie bystrzejsi szybciej inni wolniej.
Gramatyka zasady gramatyczne odmiana to jest masakra dla obcokrajowca dla nas też widać to po młodzieży która smaruje z błędami .
Moim zdaniem Polak wie o co chodzi lub miej więcej dogada się z Czechem / Ruskim ale piszemy tutaj że nasz język jest trudny bo ma tą gramatykę wymowa masakrująca ale widzieliście znaki Arabskie (szlaczki) (krzyżyki) w Chińskim dla nas to jest masakra owszem my Polacy mamy zajebisty start uczyć się tych trudniejszych języków bo potrafimy wymawiać nasze skarby narodowe jak ja to mówie zmiękczacze i świstacze np ś ć ń ę ą co np angole tego nie potrafią więc nauka dla nas języka chińskiego lub japońskiego stworzy mniejszy problem niż dla takiego Angola .
Może ktoś da TRANSLATE
(przyznam się pisownia Angielski kiepsko )
I’m in the middle of learning french at the moment. I must say though, it’s not that hard. Hell the alphabet sounds just the same as english.
A= ah
B= beh
C= si
Till then,
Bonne journée à vous mes amis un peut tes leçons dans la vie de bien vous servir!
^^ lol at google translator
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Polish is the hardest language to learn — Language learning as an art and science Comment on The hardest language to learn : August 15th, 2007 at 02:26
[...] What is the hardest language to learn for English Speakers? Take a guess; it is not Chinese or Japanese. It is Polish. Polish has seven cases and Polish grammar has more exception than rules. German for example has four cases all which are logical, Polish cases seem to have no pattern or rules; you have to learn the entire language. Asia languages usually do not have cases, or at least like that. The Pronunciation is eons harder than Asia language as it usually has long tong twisting consonants. For example a Polish sentence might look like this. Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu. Further Polish people rarely hear foreign speak their language and with no accent or regional variation than pronunciation must be exact or they will have no idea what you are talking about. So the next time you have herd someone has learned Polish have some respect. Polish is the hardest language to learn. But the truth is I doubt you will hear a native English Speaker, speak Polish beyond a few phrases. Can it be learned? Yes you can Learn Polish. People do, it just takes humility. Close [...]
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