“These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases” – what’s actually so difficult in it? When you say “talosta” you just add the affix to the stem, when you say “from the house” you do the same, only the affix goes to another position. The real difficulty comes not from the amount of affixes, but from the peculiarities of their usage. In this respect “z domu” is two steps more complicated as 1) you have to put the noun into the Genetive, and 2) you should use the right ending for the Genetive.

I fully agree with what you have written: my comment was just to re-habilitate the agglutinative languages like Finish, Hungarian and Estonian you had mentioned as the hardest to learn. This difficulty is mostly psychological: the sentence in them consists to a great extent from the same components you find in English, they are simply written together. In Finnish ‘talo’ is the house, ‘talo-sta’ – from the house, ‘talo-ssa’ – in the house, ‘talo-i-sta’ – from the houses, ‘talo-i-ssa’ – in the houses… Of course, there are more complicated forms, but the overall structure is very transparent and modular. Forget about noun cases, these are basically the same combinations of words with modifying particles you are used to in English If you can keep in memory “house”, “-s”, “from” and “in”, you can do so for “talo”, “-i-”, “-sta” and “-ssa”, just don’t forget to join them according to the Finnish order. The Polish and other flective languages are another story, as the words there are much more compact, and there is often no such transparency. That’s why I suggest to move Finnish etc. below Polish in your list.

Why haven`t you included Serbian? It`s one __very__ hard to learn language. It has seven cases, three genres, 15+ tenses, very hard-to-learn grammar…. Just wondering….

The problem with the Old Irish is not in the grammar but in the irregularity. The history of this language is a good example of the language evolution in general: the more or less typical Late Indo-European grammar in the Common Celtic period (evidenced by the Gaulish, Celtiberian and Lepontic inscriptions), then dramatic phonetic changes (3-5 centuries) which created numerous variants within each grammatical pattern, then a period of some stabilization (5-9th centuries), and then a collapse at the time of Viking invasions: the language changes rapidly loosing most of its morphology and irregularity (like in the Old English, only the latter was much more regular). If we ask about the reasons, the most obvious are those related to how children learn to speak: at some point the irregularities become too intolerable, and children introduce more normalized forms, while in some periods children accept the nuances of the language they are offered to learn.

I think Slovak language is one of the most difficult language… A lot of exceptions…

Do more research, but Serbian is definitely far more complex than Russian! I agree that you should find out the facts, but he fact is that Serbian is NOT easier or as easy as Russian!
Best Regards,
Stefan Borovic

I agree with Stefan Borovic when he says that Serbian should definately be included. My mother tongue is English, but I also learned Serbian ( because my mother is Serbian) and I know how hard it is! I’ve personally experianced learning Serbian as a second language and noticed that it is a difficult task. Even now, after spending a ceratin amount of time of my childhood in a public Serbian school, I can hardly “guess” if I should use accusative or genitive case because they are too similar, but at the same time distincively different. The stress of the Serbian language is something impossible to learn. Whenever i come to Serbia, people laugh at me because my pronunciation isn’t right!

If literary analyzed from an ortorical point of view, one can comprehend the complexity which is weaved into apprehending the Serbian language. If one naive and unlearned being such as yourselves truly regard Russian as the most difficult language, I have two very sophisticated words for you.

I would say that you should not make any changes on the list prior to having made that decision by yourself. My “trustworthy words”, as they seem to be regarded by other readers of this blog, should just make it easier for you to find out the facts, and not primarily influence your opinion! One advice – listen to others…

BUt not as much as you do!

i have quite a bit of knowledge on this topic, and therefore i consider myself the most competenet to give my professional views. I deduce from all your previously discussed language thoughts, that the main clash on this web-site is whether Serbian or Polish is generally more of a challenge to apprehend…and i must say that from my professional opinion, the clash is non-existant, because all the complexeties present in Polish, are considerably harder in Serbian, which proves the fact that all Serbian-speaking individuals are truly geniuses. I believe this best portrays the evident stupidity of some people on this web-site, as either Finnish or Serbian, from my professional opinion, are not easy languages to learn the grammar off, let alone speak fluently…thank you for listening to a strictly professional opinion…i shall part now…farewell…

Gosh… First I was afraid, I was petrified, but then I killed her and she stopped speaking that freaky language! Bro… She kept saying: Dubocica Leskovac Mikica je kralj!?!?!?

I agree that Serbian is a hard language to learn and it should be with Extremely Hard or very Hard but not Pretty Hard. I’m macedonian i tried learning Serbian (Serbian and Macedonian might be the same but the grammar is very very very different). In serbian you change your noun depending on your sentence which is really hard
e.g in my house = u mojoj kući. Come in my house = Uđi u moju kuću.

One sentence in english can be said in a lot of ways in Serbian which might confuse english speakers.
e.g I dance and sing in English
1. Ja plešem i ja pevam na engleskom
2. plešem i pevam na engleskom
3. na engleskom plešem i pevam

For those who claim that Serbian is the hardest language to learn I advise them to read:
on Polish (although, there are some mistakes!)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language

and on Serbian:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_language

QUOTATION: I agree that Polish may be difficult to learn. It requires special kind of perceiving reality (to think of the table as ‘’he’’ and of the glass as ‘’she’’ and of the sun as ‘’no gender’’ etc.) which, I imagine, must be difficult to teach and not only that. /QUOTATION

Also, the genders… For example, to think of a table (сто) as he, a glass (чаша) she, and of the sun (Сунце) as no gender/neutral gender.

P.S. I was really astonished when I`ve realized that the gender system is so similar, that even the words have the same gender in some cases (like the aforementioned three). Good luck!

A language hard to learn should be regarded, with modern standards, as an inefficient language — provided you can express what you wanna (I want some comments on that ) express.

My wife knows Russian and Finnish and recently learned Polish. She tells me polish wasn’t all that hard to learn, but Finnish was hard. I think what’s hard i also depends on what languages you already speak. Going from Italian to Spanish is not as hard as going from Italian to Russian (crossing language families).

Also, I think participants here mostly know of European languages, so I guess there are some really tricky ones to learn out there.

what about norwegian or any of the african languages?

Hmm, it’s difficult to categorize what a “hard language is”. Hard as in what ? And hard for who ? Japanese writing is easy for Chinese people and visa versa. Japanese grammar is also easy for Koreans. Swedes can understand Icelandic but it would be hard for me to learn. But maybe it would be easy for someone who already spoke three languages or who was naturally gifted at languages.

Men tend to be better at learning vocabulary and grammar rules and women usually have better aural skills. (Not always but usually)

I don’t consider myself naturally gifted at languages and I was always at the bottom of my Japanese class however I really enjoyed studying it.

Passion is the key and tends to negate the difficulty of a language at least in my experience.

have you tried learning arabic? the phonetics of it can be incredibly difficult for someone who was not raised speaking arabic, and this is the formal arabic, as the colloquial arabic spoken across the region can vary in so many different ways.

A note on being a bit more objective in your ratings…
I half agree, half disagree with your rating of English difficulty (“Basic to hard”). Yes, perhaps if you learn it to a “basic” level, it can be fairly easy; but so can other languages if learned to a “basic” level. (What is “basic” anyway? That’s quite subjective.) I think you should choose a standard level of language acquisition before ranking languages to make it more consistent when comparing them; you could, for example, choose to consider the amount of time and effort necessary to learn a language such that you cannot be identified as a non-native speaker. I think you should also give English more credit for its irregularities; you only mention spelling being difficult, but pronunciation can sometimes be a bit tricky (especially with the “ough” combination), and there are so many exceptions to rules (including irregular forms of verbs, most notably the many seemingly-random past participles).
Another note on objective ratings…
Is there any particular reason why you did not include an explanation of your ranking of Spanish and Italian as you did with all of the other languages? I completely agree with your ranking here, but it might be good to mention, for example, how Spanish is essentially a phonetic language (or simply that its pronunciation is easy), and that exceptions are fairly uncommon (and that there are even rules to often explain exceptions!). (Please excuse me for neglecting Italian in my examples, but I have not learned it.)

(Just for the record, I am a native [American]-English speaker.)

You’re an idiot. Check out Icelandic, Chinese, and Arabic. All are more difficult than Polish. I’m not even going to try to explain how they are more difficult, as the reasoning you presented for Polish being so difficult doesn’t make any sense. How about how governments and corporations rate languages? My salary includes foreign language incentive pay. Pay scales reflect that Chinese and Arabic pay more than Polish (Russian and Polish are on the same scale). Spanish and Italian are on the lowest rung (at least you got that right).