What is the hardest language to learn?
- Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven cases, Seven genders and very difficult pronunciation. The average English speaker is fluent in their language at the age of 12, in contrast, the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age of 16.
- Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – The Ugric languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root word. However, anyone arguing Asian languages like Korean trump Uralic languages in complexity, really needs to hit the books and do more research.
- Simply Arduous: Ukrainian and Russian – Second language learners wrongly assume because these languages use a different script (Cyrillic) that it out ranks Polish. This is not objective, as an alphabet is only lets say 26 letters. It is really the pronunciation and how societies use the language that influences ranking. Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet, but easier pronunciation. (the Poles use a modified Latin alphabet which does not have a neat orthography fit to the sounds of their language). Slavic languages have sophisticated case and gender systems, also something that approximates a complex tense system with aspects of time-verb relationships.
- Challenging contender jockey for position: Arabic – Three baby cases which are like a walk in the park compared to the above, but the unusual pronunciation and flow of the language makes study laborious and requires cognitive diligence if you want to speak it.
- 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 in NYC that has even authored an the authoritative book on modern Mandarin says people meet Chinese very easy. This same teacher, if multilingual yet could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even one of the easiest language to learn. Despite prideful proclamations of armchair linguists, to verbalizes Asian languages in general are not top ranked 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 – People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
- 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.
- Some people cocooned in innocence, go around parroting linguistic relative difficulty ranks by looking at a list created in the ivory towers. This list might be based on the number of hours required to achieve a degree of fluency, or intermediate conversation in a language, in an academic environment of teaching, in contrast to most people in the real world. This simplistic one variable model is simply wrong. I suggest a more robust model.
The following is support for my argument.
The way you approach this is a simple equation that illustrates hypothetical rankings of variables importance.
Formula for difficulty in a language = O*(G+V+(w*.1)+(A*2.0)+S+V(1.5))
O= Openness of the society to communicate in their own language to a foreigner as opposed to English.
G = Grammar, specifically the number of exceptions in each cases
V= Verbs Conjugation complexity
P= Pronunciation and Phonology.
W=Complexity of the written language, including script and alphabet variation.
A=Average number of syllables in each word. Do not underestimate this as the working memory for the brain to hold bits of information in your brain is manifold more if you are considering a language with a long orthographical constructions.
S=Speed of the language.
V=Vocalness of the people speaking.
If you can assign an O factor as the major determinant variable then you have your answer. The openness of a society to transmit their language on a person to person, on the street level day-to-day experiences is what really makes communication hard to easy to absorb. I can attest to this after living in Europe for about a decade.
Are you a citizen of Stratos or trying to speak to you boyfriend or girlfriend?
What good is a theoretical understanding of a language, if in reality you can not practice it to fluency beyond the classroom. Lets separate the academics from real people, when trying to analysis the question.
This is not just a ranking of the hardest language to learn mind you, rather a ranking for realistic, practical people who are in the trenches of life and want to learn a new language for communication purposes. Not a ranking for academics who are living on Stratos, the city of clouds or lost in the labyrinth of the stacks in their university library.
I have not considered languages that have under one million native speakers. Even through humanistically important on equal par with all other languages, they are too remote or inaccessible for any real life learning. Patois dialects are excluded. These are important languages, just not for the average person. I also have not considered extinct or ancient languages which have even a more alien grammatical structure.
People write me and say hey Mark here is a language that has a hundred cases and sounds mostly like whistlers, and people often talk backwards, certainly this must be the most difficult. My reply how many people speak it? Similarly, you might say well there is a language spoken by some children on my block, they made it up. For me unless there are a million speakers does not pass the cut.
My reply to the FSI’s rank of the number of hours needed to learn a language -Anti-glottology at its best
There is an annoying mythology of language difficulty, that is perpetuated by Foreign Service institute. How many hours it takes to achieve various levels in a language after academic study. This is no valid. Unless you are 18-21 and a full-time student at a university and giving equal or greater weight to written language as compared to spoken, then that is bunk.
Who has the time to study in the ivory towers a language university or prepare like a diplomat except someone in some cushy government job? It is not the real world. Speaking is much more important than writing and reading.
Written language for the masses only came into significance in the last 100 years, in contrast to the 7 millions years of Homininae communication when there was first a divergence in our evolutionary tree and changes in our heterochrony gave us the capacity for prolonged language acquisition. Further the written language is in the process of a strange de-evolution with rise of texting messages and ADD. Lets be honest here, few people can study like an egghead, rather they want to just communicate.
Example of how people learn in Africa and the Middle East
When I was in North Africa (several times) I was amazed people could talk in the open market in several languages with little effort. They never opened a book or wrote in a foreign language. Language is about speaking. It is about communication not something you learn in a book. How long was it like that? The first one million years of human evolution from Primates until about 1950 when world illiteracy went from less than 1% to over 50%. So for tens of thousands of years for most humans, language was about the speaking, that is it. For a few thousand the landed elite and first estate class has some form of written language but this was not most people. Lets be real language has nothing to do with a book, only the tongue and ear. Therefore when FSI or any other person assets Chinese or Asian languages are hard, they are not if you strip away the crazy characters to a non-Asian person.
The worst thing about the modern communication
It irritates me that one person will state something on the web and it is recycled by every content mill blogger ad infinitum. People take ideas for fact without looking at them objectively. I call this the flat earth syndrome of language learning. Just because an expert says it does not mean it is true.
Aristotle believed the heart was the center of human cognition and the brain was an organ of minor importance. For centuries people took this as fact.
That does not mean the academics are wrong, and Asian languages are not more difficult for an English native speaker to achieve a level of mastery, but look at this objectively.
Modern linguistic snake oil salesman
Also when someone says on the web, you can learn a language in three hours or even three months, and they are trying to sell you something, I would say, ‘I have some swap land in Florida to sell you that will appreciate in value any day now’. I would like to personally like to call them up and test their fluency in Polish. My point is the web is a great place but discern sensation seekers and academics from someone like myself who is linguistically challenged, yet has dedicated his life abroad to learning foreign languages.
How linguistic science is different from physical science
Despite my quantification above, there is no way you can objectively measure linguistic ranking or difficulty like the hard sciences like physics or chemistry measure a phenomenon in a vacuum. Even in physics things are tested, regression are run and retested. There is debate and paradigms are challenged every few decades.
So are you telling me, that in not a social science but a humanities like Language that because some government organization for a very specific program makes a statement fifty years ago, everyone including people on the Internet take it as fact and recycle it ad nauseam?
Evolution of phraseology and variance from linguistic universals as a measure of difficulty.
Departure from universal grammar and linguistic universals and structures is that are natural constructs of the human brain could be a measure of difficulty with some objectivity, however, how you measure it I have no idea how you would do this. Typological universals and other measures are left for future research.
Why Asian languages are not hard – Palaver about Asian foreign language acquisition
No grammar to speak of, no cases, not complex plurals, short words. People argue they have tones but these are subtle pronunciation differences and in my experience I am understood when I speak Mandarin for example with poor pronunciation easier in comparison with Polish. I know author and teacher of Chinese in NYC and he says most of the people who walk in off he street learn Chinese pretty fast. He has a book called Easy Mandarin. It is only the written language that is hard.
Errors and omissions statement
Yes I know in the image I typed Finish and Hinidi, need to fix this, when I get my computer back from Amishland. I am writing an Amish language program. Also the scope of this article can not be comprehensive because the proliferation of languages, for example, I need a follow up to cover, Turkish, Greek, Armenia, Georgian etc. When writing you have to make choices to make a point rather than cover ever detail, however, these are worthy for discussion in the comment area.
Back to Polish – the trophy winner
When you speak of Phonology, sound approximation from the native language to the target Polish ranks near the top as the tongue twisting, multi-syllabic mixing of consonants and vowels are unmatched by any shorter Asian word, even with tones. I stated at the top that the average Polish learner is not fluent until the age of sixteen. It sounds like a bold statement but read on.
Yes Poles can communicate before that, but subjectively, for such an intelligent population of people (and Poles are highly intelligent and educated) proportionally I have seen an inordinate amount of Polish youngsters struggle with their own orthography, pronunciation, grammar at disproportionate levels compared to say English speakers.
Factor out any genetic differences by comparing Polish Americans who are identical genetically to Poles in Poland, yet learn English as their native language at a different rate than Polish as a native language. My daughter who is bilingual finds English much easier than Polish. There are differences in the rates humans learn languages based on the complexity of the language, and this is seen in native speaker language acquisition.
Examples and references that back up my theory of modern of linguistics that give a better understanding of how people acquire a second language:
- In social linguistic acculturation Model or SLA, was proposed by John Schumann and focused on how an individual interacts with the society. Some societies more easily transmit culture.
- Gardner’s socio-educational model – Similar to above and deals with the inter-group model of “ethnolinguistic vitality”.
- Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky developed a theory of zone of proximal development.
I want to know your feedback and research so they may benefit second language learners.
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!
I made and uploaded 6 videos on youtube that help native Ebglish speakers to learn Polish.
The videos contain the phonetics for native English speakers.
The link to my channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/zoolog106?feature=mhee .
I bet you will learn Polish. It’s not so hard to learn Polish when you know the phonetics.
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
I have heard on mulitple occasions that English is extremely hard to learn because of all the grammar rules, tenses, words, first person, second person, third person, homonyms, antonyms, synonyms, contractions, etc. that you have to learn about.
Even though there are no word genders that you have to worry about, there are still TONS of grammatical rules.
I guess it just depends on where you’re from in the world.
Spanish is the hardest language to learn in the world, at least for me.
In my opinion learning Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Finnish seems so hard for most of the people 🙁 but for me English is also hard. I said that because is said that English is the easiest language to learn but it is not!! maybe at the beginning but then it’s becoming harder and harder especially phrasal verbs.
Phrasal verbs are nothing more than a verb, broken up into two words. Many foreigners get hung up on these but if you think of them as just a verb, it is nothing to be concerned with.
yeah pronunciation in Polish is terrible – it can be hard even for Pole. Maybe very popular sentence: w Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie isn’t hard to say, but “zrewolweryzowany rewolwer” or “w czasie suszy szosa sucha” are extremly difficult for everyone: both Pole and foreigner. By the way, Wiktoria, też mam 13 lat 😉 (Wiktoria, I’m also 13 ;))
zrewolwerowany rewolwer not zrewolweryzowany sorry 🙂
Hi everybody! Ludzie!!! Polski jest bardzo łatwy. W ogóle nie wiem o co Wam chodzi!! Pochodzę z Mongolii, przyjechałam do Polski mając 12 lat i po roku nie miałam żadnego akcentu i nie robiłam błędów ortograficznych. Może to przez to, że mama mi kazała dużo czytać i przepisywać teksty. Co prawda nie rozumiałam jakichś technicznych lub specjalistycznych słów. Nową maturę z polskiego na poziomie podstawowym zdałam na 91%, a z polskiego byłam w liceum jedną z dwóch najlepszych uczennic. Teraz już kończę pisać magisterkę z ekonomii na Uniwersytecie Warszawskim. A więc, no matter what you want to learn, if you are good enough and have strong will it is always easy to learn any language to the perfect level. I am Mongolian living in Poland since 12 years old and have perfect Polish accent and I am told to speak Polish even better than most of ordinary Polish people. I graduated best high school in my town and now making Master Degree in economics at Warsaw University. I know I am not like Albert Einstein, but just love learning languages and reading books!
Now have you heard of Mongolian language? If no, it is worth attention! Good luck guys!!
Jenny: “to Jan van Steenbergen, apparently you haven’t learnt Polish not Russian if you say such things.”
On the contrary, I’m a professional translator and I’ve studied both languages at university. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with that remark. All I am trying to say is that the question how easy or hard a language is, depends pretty much on the learner.
The more I look at this post, the more I feel saddened at your assumptions. No language is hard, and no language is easy. What I managed to garner from the blog post above is simply that of a person’s baseless opinion, not fact.
I completely agree with this guy above. He speaks many languages, and has managed to become pretty good at Czech in a matter of two months, and is now attempting Hungarian. I absolutely love his mentality towards languages.
When a clever linguist comes along he will be very happy to list the reasons that categorise languages as hard, but your average Joe also has something to say on this. Together their arguments include:
– Similarity to your native language
– Grammar complexity
– Tones
– Different writing system
– My friend Dave told me
– I’m learning it and my task is the hardest, even if – I have no basis of comparison
– I spent six years studying it and can’t speak yet! This proves that it’s super hard
– It’s my native language, and my ego is weak so I need validation, and speaking the “world’s hardest language” does the trick!
While some of these points do have some merit and the first ones will be used in an argument, the last ones are actually the real reasons for arguing in the first place.
~*~* CONTINUED *~*~
Before you answer with “No, but you don’t get it, Japanese/Finnish/etc. is the hardest” just think about the following:
– Do you speak every single language in the world? All 6,000+ of them? All fluently? Great! Now I care what you have to say. If not, your basis of comparison is nothing more than theory and biased speculation.
– Are you me, in my situation, with my motivation, my passion and my native friends? No? OK, then stop presuming you know how I should think
– Are you ready to give me a list of 1,000 reasons why that language is hard? Of course you are – but aren’t you forgetting the 10,000 reasons why it’s easy? Every language is missing many many things that makes other ones harder.
– Have you been studying the language for decades with the most advanced learning materials? Sounds like fun(!), but tell me how much you can sing in the language, how much you’ve flirted in that language and how many times you’ve ordered lunch in that language?
~*~*
@Nor Chey
I actually agree with you. Even in a language so seemingly simple as Indonesian (my native tongue, and one most linguists dismiss as being one of the easiest in the world), there are little annoyances that sometimes make you want to tear your hair out.
Let me list them out to you to give you all a nice laugh.
1) Indonesian has one word for ‘she/he’. This gender ambiguity is really irritating, especially combined with the ambiguity of some unifriendship names. I once read an entire book without knowing the gender of the main character!
2) Because of the wide distinction between formal and informal Indonesian (and even then there are many forms of colloquial Indonesian), that means that there are two (sometimes three) sets of words for everything, and many, many ways of saying, a.k.a modifying, a word, especially in informal contexts.
3) It is a very expressive language — so expressive that sometimes nobody (not even us) understands why native speakers drop unnecessary words into each sentence. Also, additional words such as ‘sih’ ‘nih’ ‘dong’ modifies the entire sentence’s meaning entirely. ‘ngapain??’ means something completely different from ‘ngapain sih?!’ in nuances that are very, very difficult to describe precisely in English 😉 It’s easily understood though, if you actually hear it being said.
4) Let us not forget stupid pronouns. Like Japanese, we have many ways of saying ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘you guys’ that entails formality. Anda, Kamu, Kau, Lu/Lo are some for ‘you’ alone. And while I have seen some foreigners complain about Spanish dropping their pronouns, the pronoun is still decipherable from a Spanish sentence, no? In Indonesian we also drop pronouns because we feel too lazy to say them out. ‘Lagi mandi’ can mean ‘I’m showering now’ or ‘She/he/it is showering now’. Without verb conjugations or cases, context is actually very necessary here.
5) Indonesians murder their language on a daily basis, and that is a fact 😉 I do not know of any other language where you actually sound more native by murdering your own grammar. Especially with what we call ‘singkatan’, meaning abbreviations. Sometimes the language gets mutated to the point where even native speakers can’t comprehend. “jky ingt pt kyyh ,,typ ph gk” <– That is virtually unrecognisable! A friend of mine has this to say: 'It's like….Your civilization has developed to be so effiecient it throws away vowels [when writing]'. Haha!
6) What other language has cute words for describing body parts? Pipi, mata, kuku, gigi, dada, paha, bahu, bibir, lutut, bulu, alis etc etc. And yes, they DO sound as cute as you're imaginging. 😉
I do hope that my post has amused you enough. This just goes to show that every language, like/especially Indonesian, has its crazy aspects — and each language's crazy aspects cannot be gauged against any other language!
Doesn't it seem rather pointless comparing Swahili to Romanian, or Finnish to Mandarin? Obviously the differences will be too great to count, and therefore, forming lists of "most difficult languages" only manages to serve its initial purpose — to befuddle people even more.
My name is Pilėnas Grūdauskas, I’m Lithuanian and I speak many languages. Polish is that hardest language to learn? Are you sure? It is very easy language! Schematic, u don’t have to think much 🙂 I’ve was able to fully understand it after 6 months of learning. I speak Lithuanian, Latvian, Finnish, Norwegian, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish and Japense. I learn Hungarian at the moment nad it is quite easy if u know any other finno-ugric language (I know Finnish, that’s why it is easier learning Hungarian)
Hardest Languages? Finno-Ugric (HU, ET, HU) and Baltic (LT, LV)… Slavic languages are easy languages 🙂
I’m native speaker of Czech. I’ve been learning for 6 years English and for 3years German. Of course that im best at Czech, but.. i think Czech it’s harder to learn than English and German..
I’m from poland and i’m translate variety. So:
Iść -go
I – Idę
You – Idziesz
HE/She/It – Idzie
We – Idziemy
You – Idziecie
They – Idą
And learn this. Good luck
Finnish is by far one of the most difficult. It blasts Polish out of the water by far:
15 grammatical noun cases plus 12 adverbial cases.
Verbs have more conjugation than Polish.
Plus, for every verb, you need to learn 5 infinitive forms. Each verb has up 5 infinitives each (this is not counting the verb types!)
Case endings can be added to verbs (of different infinitive types)!
Each word can have up to 2235 forms: http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html
Case endings are added to the different stems of the word, e.g.:
Word for YEAR: Vuosi
Partitive stem: Vuot(+ta)
Essive stem: Vuon (+na)
Weak stem: Vuode (+ssa / ksi…)
In order to use cases correctly, you need to be able to understand which stem to use, and in order to do that, you must understand complex rules of consonant gradation!
I have learnt a range of languages from different linguistic families and I believ that Finno-ugaric languages (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian being the main ones) are some of the hardest in terms of grammar, and definitely more difficult than Polish (which I have learnt).
Pronunciation isn’t as hard as say, some Asian languages though.
Drew,
Just curious if you’ve ever tried learning Albanian:-)
The partitive genitive vs. accusative I’ve been told by another American who
managed to learn Finnish successfully, constitutes one of the biggest stumbling blocks for foreigners!
Appreciate your comments.
Most of the discussion in this forum misses the most important question – what is your definition of “to learn a language”. Some distinctions that come to mind are (1)just the spoken language or also its written form, (2) for basic every day communication or most sophisticated purpose, (3)intermediate level of performance (allowing grammatical errors with certain structures)or that close to the native speaker’s(virtually no grammatical errors), (4)to be used within social register or at professional/public events. Without specifying such criteria and without identifying the source/target language pair, any opinion on language difficulty can’t be valid.
Yes and no, Stefan!
Before such criteria can be established, the age-old question of what constitutes language “ease” vs.”difficulty” must be be established:-)
As a language instructor at the college level for umpteen years, lecturer both in German and English, I’ve found that many students arrived in my German program quite ill prepared to study a foreign language because most if not all (Americans exclusively) had nearly no knowledge of their mother tongue.
The issue then of making plain certain concepts such as gender and case became almost a Sysyphussian task, having to construct a ladder which would eventually lead them to grasp the idea of morphological mutations in a language which signaled relationship changes which were being indicated.
On those ever-so rare occasions that I had a breakthrough, it was chiefly amongst those students who’d by ideal coincedence studied Latin, or even a second language, prior to landing in first-year German:-)
Well, I find Polish language easy to learn and understand if you know Russian language. Another thing is to speek Polish as I can’t get used to pronounce these “sz, cz”. My native language is Lithuanian, not so easy also.
I am Polish and unless I was taught wrong during my education there is no 7 genders in Polish!!! There are three: feminin, masculin and neuter. :/ Can the author of this article come back to me regarding that? Maybe I don’t know something…
Male living, male not living etc. You learned Polish as a native so are not aware all of these differences and genders.
and by the way I am trying to learn Swedish and although it seems to be rather easy language because of clear rules and not many exceptions from them it can be a real pain too 🙂
Swedish is easy compared to Polish. Polish is on par with Hungarian but Swedish is a basic language to learn. Since I know English as my native language I could learn Swedish to a basic level in a couple of months. Norman Davies even confessed he knows French better than Polish.
Hungarian is way harder than Polish. Polish looks more difficult than it is because of the repetitive Zs, but once you get past the pronunciation and the basic case system, it’s actually alright.
Polish has 7 cases.
Hungarian has 18.
”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.”
Um…I think you’ve got your languages mixed up. I speak English and Japanese and Japanese DOES have tenses, DOES have verb changes, DOES long, complicated words and very hard grammar (if you don’t speak Korean as they are similar with their grammar structure).
Japanese has TONNES of verb changes! Past, current (and future), passive, causative, causative/passive, joint verbs and many more! Hmmm…maybe you should really check before you write all that.
As for difficultly of learning a language, that all depends on what you can already speak. E.g. as I mentioned before, if you can speak Korean, Japanese is easier for you. Spanish is easier for those who can speak Italian and so on.
I am tunisian and I think Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn. Even if they teach us arabic from kindergarten and speak it in official TV and radio, I still have problems understanding it , specially when it comes to arabic poems..
Arabic has many pronouns (for every person you have singular/dual/and plural! ) and so much crazy stuff i can’t explain..
I speak french and english pretty well. I think that French is very easy in pronounciation/spelling, but harder than english in verb forms, tenses, and genders.
I am learning now basic german and what i find a bit hard are the neutrum/maskulin/feminie genders, irregular verb froms and the dativ/akkustativ cases.
btw, my native language is derja (mix of berber/arabic/french)
Don’t be so fool people :D. The Finish language does not even have the future tenses ( my goodness, how can they live without future?) Those are the hardest language:
1- Hungarian
2- Portuguese
3- Polish
4- German
5- Finnish
Dear Mark
You have written: ‘British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English.’
May you describe the differences between The grammar of American and British English like for example using of tenses in everyday live?
I’m greeting 🙂
Piotr Lorenc
I have been to London – that is I have had the experience of being in the city of London. British English.
I was in London – American English. The simple tense is the primary tense in every language and many languages like Slavic languages do not need all these complex tenses as it does not convey a lot of information.
Do I understand you correctly that American English consists in breaking rules of British English? xD
Piotr L.
Yes British English is like speaking in a round about way for us Americans. Americans speak in a more direct informal but flexible way.
“many languages like Slavic languages do not need all these complex tenses as it does not convey a lot of information.”
Yes, that’s right, there are only three tenses in Polish, but the more complex a language is the swankier sounds xD So i will speak ‘I have been to London’ 🙂
Thank You!
This is an interesting thing, I am theoretically taught about British English, but even me would say “I was in London.” xD
I think that Polish’s not as hard 😛 the reason u say so is that all of the Poles like talking about their language as sth so unique n difficult…but I think Hungarian’s way harder wit its 34 cases
Some incorrect claims are being made by the author.
Firstly, Polish doesn’t have seven genders – there are 7 persons, (personal pronouns), not 7 genders (genders are male, female, and neuter.) And Spanish has 12 persons!
Serbian DOESN’T have many tenses- there are about 4 or 5, of which 3 are used in practice – one past, one present, and one future tense.
Spanish and Italian are NOT easy to speak well – I lived in Spain and few foreigners can speak it well. It has 12 personal pronouns, about as many tenses as English, and each tense can be formed in two different ways – indicative and subjunctive. Knowing when to use the subjunctive is an art in itself.
As for Chinese and Japanese not having tenses – all languages have tenses. They might be simple, but they all have them. Japanese uses a present and a past tense. It is difficult because there is a ‘formal’ Japanese, and an ‘informal’ Japanese, which, to a foreigner, are almost two different languages to be learned.
The most difficult languages in Europe might be Hungarian, which can have up to 18 cases for certain nouns. Also maybe Basque.
But the most difficult languages in the world are definitely NOT the European ones.
I’d say the two most difficult languages are Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. Sanskrit due to its cases, difficult grammar, and sentence structure that is completely unlike sentence structure according to Western logic. But since Sanskrit is not used in daily speech, the most difficult live language I know of would have to be –
Arabic (Classical Arabic, that is, not the dialects), is a problem even for Arabs, who often find it is the hardest subject in school.
It has cases, singular, plural, and DUAL (for two people/things), a ‘you’ for masculine and feminine (therefore 13 persons in total), three noun ‘states’, two ways of forming regular plurals, 25 ways of forming irregular plurals (which are more common than the regulars), FIFTEEN verb forms (different from tenses), etc, etc.
The lexic is huge – there are over a hundred words for ‘wine’, more than ten for ‘camel’, etc.
The writing system is such that you have to know some grammar to be able to read, since the short vowels aren’t normally written.
The pronunciation is almost impossible for a non-native speaker, since it uses gutturals that normally only people who grew up speaking the language can produce.
So Polish, whilst being hard (not much harder than other Slavic languages, which are all about equally difficult), doesn’t even come close to Arabic.
Sorry. But I think we sometimes tend to forget that a world exsits outside of Europe.
Do not have time to in detail explain this, but you are incorrect. For example, You have male living in Polish and male non living. Neuter living and neuter non living etc. These are genders. Each one acts as a separate gender and has a separate set of rules.
Arabic on the other hand has only three small little easy cases. It is not that hard of a language even though it is intimidating at first for a westerner. It is something that can be learned as the grammar is not that complex.
Chinese and Japanese, these languages’ bark is bigger than their bit. A guy I know who teaches Chinese in NYC says people learn it very fast as there is little grammar. I study Chinese as does my daughter. I know languages outside of Europe believe me.
Only a beginner in Chinese would say that Chinese is easy. I is perhaps not as difficult as you thought, but if even doctoral students can’t write their own language properly, it can’t be an easy language.
For reference: Why is Chinese so hard
/pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Write is not the same as speak. Remember, languages were spoken for the first 100,000 thousand years of hour existence and only written by post people in the last 70 years. In my mind speaking is a the language, written is more difficult. But if someone is fluent in a language but does not write it does not mean anything.
i think Georgian is very hard language to learn. compleatly different alpabet. dificult pronansiation, complex verb. anyone have any coments about this?
Estonian Finnish and Hungarian are the second hardest, because estonian has a words jäääär. Try to say that, or try to learn 14 dec and then say its easy. English is the easyest because im only 13 and i speak like a true american with out an accent. And i have learned English only 3 years.
I’m from Poland and in my opinion polish is very hard to learn. I’m 21 and sometimes when I watch professor Jerzy Bralczyk (linguist) TV program – about polish language – I feel like watching sc-fi or fantasy.
Here you have some samples of polish language (I don’t know will you see polish diacritic marks):
1) Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzeszynie
2) Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, gmina Chrząszczyrzewoszyce, powiat Łękołody.
Another thing – gramatical form of numeral “2”
English – one form – two
Portuguese – two forms (depending on gender) – dois/duas
Croatian – seven forms – dva, dvije, dvoje, dvojica, dvojice, dvojici, dvojicu
POLISH – seventeen forms – dwa, dwie, dwoje, dwóch (or dwu), dwaj, dwiema, dwom (or dwóm), dwoma, dwojga, dwojgu, dwojgiem, dwójka, dwójki, dwójkę, dwójką, dwójce, dwójko
Even we have problems (many) with our own language.
Example: official name of Poland – Rzeczpospolita Polska or Rzeczypospolita Polska? Both form are correct. “Poszedłem” or “poszłem” (it means I went but it also depends on gender – girl will say “poszłam” but when w want to say that she went we have to say “ona poszła”, it “poszło”, we “poszliśmy” and a lot of other versions depending on genders, tenses etc.)
This plenty of Polish launguage cause that Polish student don’t like this subject in school.
Anecdote: In war beetwen Israel and Arabic countries (in 1967 I suppose) Egyptian intelligence servic couldn’t break a code of Israel pilots – they spoke Polish. I don’t know if it is all true but it could be – today about 300’000 people in Israel speak (know) Polish.
I remembered a film clip from Polish comedy about second war ( Polish prisoner of war is interrogating by German officer)
youtube.com/watch?v=ftrqO-jkMpE
This is one of my favorite scenes in film, because it is so true about how hard Polish is. If you are a foreigner and want to learn Polish it is much harder than one syllable words of Chinese, believe me.
I found Hungarian very hard.
I went on translator and translated a few words from Polish to Hunagarian.
English- Polish- Hungarian
Pole Polek Lengyel
Hungarian Wegier Magyar
(As etnic
group) Wegier
Poland Polska Lengyeloszag
Hungary Wegry Megyarorszag
English people are Germanic.
Polish people are Slavic.
Hungarians are Altan.
Slavs are: Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs,Croats,Bosnians,Kashubians,Silesians,Slovenians,Moravians, Macedonians,
Germanic’s are:English, Scottish, Irish, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Austrians, Switzerland, Dutch, Danish, Sweden, Norwegians
Altans are:Hungarians, Fins, Estonians and some other ethnic groups.
Hardest language in the world. . .Ojibwe. Ojibwe spoken by the Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota, USA. Ojibwe uses a huge system of affixes. A single word of 85 characters could mean “the man went to the store to buy food for supper”. Ojibwe does virtually everything super complex only thing it lacks is tones. A verb can be expressed some 6,000 ways.
Though difficulty of a language is difficult to determine accurately, no human language is impossible for someone to learn.
Other complex difficult language include Basque, Georgian, Icelandic, some rare African tongues,and Hungarian (though I’ve heard the grammar rules are pretty consistent). . .
Actually Chinese (Mandarin) and other tonal language such as Thai or Hmong do not have tenses that are expressed. In Thai I could say ”Yesterday, I go store” here Yesterday functions as tense indicator but often “I go store” can mean either I am going to the store or I went to the store.
Finally just for anyone who knows nothing but English. English is not the hardest language to learn.
Thanks
Estonian has 14 cases and has many homonyms with a same expression and written same way. it has allways been hard to explane native english speakers that.
for exsample: car
nimetav (nomanative (who?) auto – eng.- car
omastav (genitive (whos?)) auto – eng.- car
osastav (allot (what?)) autot – eng.- car
sisseütlev (illative (where?)) autosse – eng. in a car
seesütlev (saing in (where?)) – autos – eng. inside of car
seestütlev (elative (where?)) – autots eng. from car
alaleütlev (saing to a area (to where?)) – autole – eng. on the car
alalütlev (saing on the area (where?)) – autol – eng. on the car
alaltütlev (saing from the area (from where?))- autolt eng. from on the car
saav (become (to who?)) autoks – eng. become a car
rajav (making way to (to where?)) autoni – eng. to the car
olev (is someone/something (who?)) autona – eng. car (ex. i am a car, it is a car)
ilmaütlev (saing with out (whit out who?)) autota – eng. with out a car
kaasaütlev (asing with (with who/what?)) autoga – eng. whit a car
and homonyms. for axsample:
tee – as a tee
tee – as a road
aas – as a lea
aas – as a loop
puur – as a drill
puur – as a cage
post – as a mail
post – as a post .. etc.etc.etc
Sorry.
Hungarians Fins and Estonians are Uralic.
Polish actually doesn’t have 7 genders. I am pretty sure it has just 5: Personal Masculine, Animate Masculine, Inanimate Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter. And I agree with a lot of what Fep commented earlier. You obviously have no studied Arabic much at all. You are right that it has only three cases, but it has other constructions that does not exsist in Polish that make it more difficult, and are not subject to easily discernable patterns (like going from singular to plural for example: kitaab – kutub (book/s), ‘usbuu3 – ‘usaabii3 (week/s), Saaygh – Saagha (goldsmith/s), ra’iy – ‘aaraa’ (opinion/s), and on and on. All of these different singular-plural forms must be memorized seperately.
Also Chinese has simpler grammar (compared to European Languages), but Chinese is actually hard to perfect. There is a reason why Europeans who speak perfect Chinese are very rare. Tones, which are used in completely different ways in most Indo-European languages are used to tell the diference between words, not shades of nuanced meaning. Because many Indo-European speakers are not used to this, it makes speaking the language well very difficult, although the grammar itself may be a breeze.
Hungarian, you are correct, is pretty difficult (I am Hungarian, fluent in Arabic, student of Turkish and studying North American Athapaskan Languages at the moment). YOu failed to mention one feature that others usually find difficult about my language. Hungarian has a seperate verb conjurgationfor direct objects which are definte as opposed to indefinite. Another feature is that while the hungarian verb has only 3 tenses, it makes use of phoneme particles which follow complex placement rules to give meanings that Indo-European languages use with seperate conjugations for tense, mood, and voice. That combined with about 22 cases (all with completely different declensions, not to mention forms which vary according to vowel-harmony rules) mean that the grammar is very very difficult. Of course, Hungarian does not have gender… does that mean that it is less difficult that Polish? Not necessarily, again there are other constructions which do not exist in Polish that Hungarian employs.
Another thing: You would do well to study a couple languages outside of Indo-European ones, just to get an idea of what is out there, since you are so confident labeling languages you are actually not that versed in. Navajo, for example, is considered one of the most difficult grammars to learn by many linguists (including Edward Sapir of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). Navajo grammar cannot even be well described in Indo-European terms. There are entirely new grammar constructions (“Object Handle-ability”) that needed linguistic neologisms to describe it. There is even some debate about whether Navajo actaully employs “nouns” in the formal (European) definition. The Navajo vowel changes for tone, nasalization, length, and its consonants include ejectives and gutterals. Take a look at “Navajo Language” on Wikipedia, and post back. Probably one of the most difficult languages I am attempting to learn.
Basically what it gets down to is how to judge a difficult language. If we are taking about the sheer number of consonant articulation points then “!Khosa” and the other San languages win by a landslide. 130 consonants more or less. These languages are almost impossible to learn past the age of 13. And I mean impossible, not exaggerating (I know plenty of people who have learned Polish or Slovak because of a girl/boy they were seeing). A close second would be the Northern Caucasian languages, they have an incredible number of consonants (up to 84 in some dialects): “Adyghe”, “Abkhaz”, etc. Some of the languages on this continuum are known to have the most complex consonant clusters in the world (most consonants in a row, without vowels) meaning that pulling off everyday simple sentences isn’t the difference between someone laughing because the case was wrong, but literally a toungetwister that is alost impossible to articulate without years of practice.
Is you are judging language difficulty based on grammar, sorry Indo-Europeans probably wouldn’t make it, most of these are analytic languages, somewhat fusional (like Polish and Italian) at best. Although Ancient Greek, Polish, Serbian and Ukrainian are very difficult, agglutinising poly-synthetic languages are much more complex and difficult (That includes Ojibway and other Souian Languages, Navajo, Mayan, and even the Northern Caucasian languages I’ve cited before, and many others). Arabic has a pretty difficult grammar (despite three cases, it does have an incredible and beautiful verb form system which cannot be easily categorised by Polish or European models) and consonant list which too is impressive.
So, while Polish may be difficult for you, please read a little about others. And keep studying that Chinese. I don’t mean any offence to those who speak Polish or anyone else. Polish is indeed difficult, but not the only game in town. Languages don’t all work the same way. Not all of them have gender distinctions, or vowel-harmony, so you can’t say one is harder than the other without finding out about what these “others” have instead. For example Polish has animacy (but only in Masculine), Navajo doesn’t decline a noun differently because of animacy, but instead orders words in the sentence based on relative levels of animacy. Meaning a sentence which says: “The bird landed on me” would be expressed as “On my body that winged thing which flies it landed” The heirarchy consists of about seven levels of animacy, and not just one or two. Check it out. Spend some time looking up some linguistic papers if you think the topic is really interesting. If it isn’t to you, then just stick to saying that Polish is probably the hardest language that you will attempt to learn in this lifetime. 😉
Much Love language-lovers.
One thing to clear up (since I am expecting a railing response about Polish gender): Polish makes distinctions between Gender, Animacy, and Personhood. However, Animacy and Personhood only apply to the Masculine case, in the sense that there are seperate distinction between a Masculine Personal, Masculine Animate, and Masculine Inanimate. There is no spoken or written difference between Neuter Amimate or Inanimate. Although there may be a table which writes them out, they are spoken and written the exact same way. You cannot tell the differnce between an Amimate or Inanimate noun in the Feminie or Neuter. Meaning that that information is not conveyed, and therefore does not count as a linguistically distinct gender category. That is why Polish has five “gender cases”.
For example, I cannot say that the Engish noun has a dual form and a plural: “The dual is to add ‘s’ to a noun… and the plural form is to add ‘s’ to the noun as well.”
Obviuously its an exaggeration. Instead, in English, anything above one would be considered plural.
Sorry to be pedantic. Just want to encourage an intelligent and encouraging reply, not a defensive or upset one.
This is a great comment on the hardest language to learn. You certainly did not offended anyone. I would still say even if the gender case does not change in two situation, it still exists and you must memorize those two and know that they belong to this gender in your mind to know when something changes or now.
That is another reason why Polish is so tricky, one minute everything is changing and agreeing and the next, you do not change it. As a learner of languages this is a distinct category in your brain. On paper if might see the same, but to speak it and process it it is the same.
Further to make the argument that any language pronunciation wise is harder than Polish, I would need a lot of convincing. Not only is ever word a tongue twister, but Poles will not understand anything unless the pronunciation is near perfect. They will just shut down. No comprehension nothing. Even grammar mistakes can though them off. This is because there are few to none who speak their language who are not Polish.They never herd their language use in that way.
While if I practice Chinese, even with my tones way off, Chinese people understand me no problem.
xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰcʼ meaning “he had in his posession a blackberry plant” in Nuxálk. Spoken in North America.
The ‘x’ is pronounced like a gutteral “kh”, the ‘ɬ’ is called a lateral: put your tongue in the l position but blow air around the sides of your tongue, the ‘c’ represents a “ts” sound, a anything with a ‘ after it, like p’ or c’ is an ejective, you have to simultaneously articulate the letter while making a popping in your epiglottis (sorry no way to explain that one better). If you can find a more difficult word in Polish, I would be surprised. This one has no vowels.
Another example:
kʼxɬɬtʰsxʷsɬχʷtʰɬɬtʰsc – “you had seen that I had gone through a passage”
chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí – in Navajo this is the word for tank, as in army tank. Navajo was one of the languages of the famous “code-talkers” of WWII… used for years by the American Navy and Army without being broken.
ǃqháa’ kū ǂnûm ǁɢˤûlitê ǀè dtxóʔlu ǀnàe ǂʼá sˤàa’
This is just an everyday phrase in the ǃXóõ language, spoken by San people in Namibia and Botswana. All the strange looking ‘!’ and ‘l’ symbols represent different clicking sounds which occur at the same time as other consonants occur -called “secondary articulation” in linguistics- as well as other gutterals and electives not seen in other languages. The language has between 58-87 consonants, 20-31 vowels and 2-4 tones, although there is disagreement on how exactly to classify because of difficulties learning and defining the language for anthropologists. With consonant clusters, the language may have more than 130-164 distinct sounds in the ‘alphabet’. Polish has about 36 different sounds (consonants + vowels) by comparison (sounds in the language, not letters in alphabet, since there are a few letters that stand for the same sound).
That should convince anyone. 😀
Also, I’d be surprised if someone could really understand you in Chinese, without using the correct tones. Different tones mean completely different things, meanings are not even close. Perhaps they are just being nice and nodding their head? I encourage you to continue your Chinese studies and get better at the tones even if people seem to understand you. Earlier you seemed confident at calling Arabic easy… something a real student who had actually been exposed to the language would never had said… I sense that you really just want to say that Polish is the most difficult language, but without rigorously exploring others. I also don’t think you understood my last post on Polish gender either, but no worries 😀 I’ll give you a challenge: Give me 2 words, Feminine Animate word and a Feminine Inanimate word. If you cannot define the word, then there is no Feminine Animate or Feminine Inanimate category, no matter what you think in your head.
I have been doing some reading of Polish, and the impression I get is that Polish is notably difficult for it grammar which always has exceptions that deviate from the rules. I have studied Ancient Greek in school and it seems about as difficult as that: lots of declining and conjugating (plural feminine accusative, singluar masculine personal dative), Which is very hard, and annoying. But still very possible. I suppose its very important to love the language you study, because that makes it a little easier. Best luck with it. Before calling Polish the hardest language ever, take the time to find out about others too. While the rules are difficult, Polish is not much different from other European languages in the way it works, and the way it makes you think. It’s nice to get another perspecive in another completely different language as well.
Actually, Arabic has 3 or 4 cases, but very many SITUATIONS in which these cases are used, which have to be learned. Yes, Marc, I agree that Arabic grammar is very logical, but it does have many ‘exceptions’. Also, speaking, reading and writing a language fluently is not just a question of learning the grammar.
Also, verb forms, irregulars, etc. plus a very large vocabulary, inability to read/write without knowing the grammar, etc… Very few people speak Classical Arabic properly… my Arabic professors with PhDs at university (they were non-Arabs) could barely speak it for 5 minutes.
Pronunciation is way more difficult than any European language, you practically can’t pronounce the gutturals if you weren’t brought up with Arabic… differences between words are huge… Qalb (with guttural q) = heart, kalb = dog. Polish can be understood, and learned, with relative ease, by most Slavic speakers… never studied it but I generally understand most of a text on the internet… Arabic is not understood even by sister language speakers (ie those that speak Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.) Most Tunisians, Algerians and Morrocans speak it very poorly even though they learn it in school!
Not wanting to offend anyone… but do you speak Arabic fluently, Marc, seeing you say it’s so easy?
And what about Sanskrit? I wouldn’t say Polish is more difficult than that!
Saying Chinese is the easiest language because of a simple grammar is being really naïve.
A quick search on the internet for hardest language will always have Chinese right on top. Finnish is also another very difficult language with 20 cases instead of just 6 or 7 and no similar language anywhere.
Chinese might not have a complex grammar but its tones that completely change the meaning of words make it really hard. The writing system is another big problem since you can’t just read words without knowing the symbol before. You can’t tell how to pronounce a word from looking at the symbol.
Not to mention Chinese has nothing to do with anything we (westerns) are used to.
Polish is a category 2 language for English speakers, Chinese is a category 3 language requiring double the amount of time to learn compared to Polish.
Stop making claims based on nothing.
Peace
Since I taught myself Polish and learning Chinese I think I know what I am talking about as a language teacher.
You are quoting recycled information from the Internet without basis to real life.
What about the Navajo language when i was in school i read about it
Native American languages can be complex.
This is what I found on Wikipedia;
“The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages. Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks, are “Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean”. The Foreign Service Institute considers Japanese to be the most difficult of this group”
Please note that the above applies to people whose first language is English and who may have proficiency in other languages.
According to the FSI report I read, Polish, Hungarian and Finnish ranked as category 2 languages (languages that would take 1100 class hours to gain some fluency)and the languages mentioned above ranked as category 3 languages (languages that would take more than 2200 hours). You may think this report is inaccurate but I think it is accurate.
PEOPLE, you can’t just say that YOUR native language (or second language or that language you learnt or learning and found to be difficult) is the hardest for people (specifically people whose first language happens to be ENGLISH) to learn as it depends on what their first language was originally. For example, it may be easier for a German person to learn English than it is for a Japanese person only because German and English are somewhat similar.
And the person who wrote this stupid blog cannot possibly determine the difficulty of learning other languages. Its stupid to say that learning Chinese or Japanese is ‘fairly hard’. This person hasn’t even specified why Japanese or Chinese is ‘fairly hard’ and instead sates that a Chinese teacher says that his own language is easier than Polish. Isn’t that obvious if you are learning another language besides your own? Does this person even know that you have to remember at least 2000 (even more if you are learning Chinese) characters to be able to read Japanese proficiently and that each character can have more than one pronunciation? Does this person even know that Japanese has a highly complex grammatical system dedicated to politeness and respect and that although Chinese may not have many tenses, they certainly make up for that in the number of aspects and counters they have.
SO don’t try and justify why YOUR language is the hardest to learn or why it is harder or easier to learn than other languages. The report above says otherwise and in the end it really depends on the individual person.I bet the person who wrote this was some nationalistic Polish guy (or woman).
Now if you have enough sense, you’ll realize this and stop this stupidity. Polish is just as hard (or as easy) as Finnish or Hungarian and any languages similar to those mentioned will be juast as hard. Every language has its difficulties.
But in saying that, I think that Basque, Nez Perez, Navajo, Obijwe and the Click languages of Africa will pose a few challenges for learners.
I would just like to say that although English may not be the hardest language in the world to learn, it is definitely without a doubt the most important.
Wikipedia is not the ultimate source of knowledge, but rather the largest receptacle of recycled information on the Internet. That information is wrong. You know, objectivity is the essence of intellegence and you need to consider all sides then just finding information and regurgitating and then regurgitating some more.
I mean according to the US government there were WMD in Iraq.
I am conveying my experience as a language teacher and learner of many years. I teach languages. I learn languages.
I guess my question is how well do you speak Polish?
Well, excuse me. I’m aware that Wikipedia is not the ultimate source of information but I would trust the FSI report more than your own personal experiences as a ‘language teacher’. The report by the FST has no political agenda behind it and it’s not like they published it so that they can justify a future invasion of China, Japan, Korea or Arabic-speaking countries. Invading a country just because it has a difficult language? You cannot compare the USD reports about WMD’s in Iraq with the report released by the FSI. Why would they lie about certain languages being harder to learn than others (specifically Polish)? There may be inaccuracies in the report but this study was monitored and involved more than one person. And don’t you think YOU need to consider that there may be different languages that are harder than Polish? Native American languages are as you said quite complex and I would say more complex than Polish. Nez Perce is a tripartite language for goodness sake.
I don’t speak Polish (nor do I ever need or want to) but I know enough about it to say that it is not the most difficult language to learn. Phonology and aspects of its grammar may be difficult but it certainly isn’t the most difficult. Ancient Greek is harder and even Classical Latin. They may have only three/two genders, but they are further divided into declensions and come with much more exceptions and irregularities than Polish. Have you heard of the Georgian Language? I reckon it’s harder than Polish. I read a book that said Polish only had five genders since feminine nouns are not marked for animacy. So what are the other 2 genders??
Some African languages (like Swahili) are said to have a large amount of noun classes (more than Polish’s seven genders).
OK I than we respectfully disagree with each other. You more ‘something you read out of a book’ and me from experience teaching and learning language.
And with regard to grammar, it is not only the number of cases that make a language hard. There are many other factors like pronunciation, native speakers willingness to accept foreign approximation of their language.
I disagree with the comment that Japanese grammar is “very easy” to learn. That is definitely not true. Here are a few examples of its complexity:
When counting something, there are words that are attached to the number, and the numbers themselves are sometimes irregular depending on the counting word. It depends on if you are counting long, cylindrical objects (“hon”), large, electronic devices (“dai”), people and animals (“hiki”), flat objects (“mai”), etc.
There are also five ways of saying “I/me” depending on the gender and level of formality. Verbs also can reflect formality. For example, all of these mean, “How are you?”
“Genki?” (informal)
“O-genki desu ka?” (somewhat formal)
“O-genki de irashaimasu ka?” (very formal, honoring the person you are speaking to)
And so on. Pronunciation isn’t so bad, but the grammar is a definite challenge.
Thanks for the discussion. It’s easy to disagree on the subject, especially on so vague a classification as “difficult,” but it’s interesting to think about it.
I’ve been studying Japanese for 10 years and am of the opinion that it is rather easy to gain fluency in daily conversation. Pronunciation is easy for the most part. And there are a fairly small number of stock phrases that are extremely useful, enabling beginners to carry a conversation very quickly. It’s quite difficult, however, to approach native-level. The complex writing system takes a long time to negotiate to the level where one could read a newspaper or a novel without much trouble. Without having the benefit of massive input from written information, one can’t learn as quickly. Any language using Latin letters, in contrast, I can at least “read” it even if I can’t pronounce it or understand it, which gives me a head start in learning.
As others have said, Japanese also has complexities like polite language. But furthermore, it has a very different style of communicating than English does. So even if you memorize the grammar and vocabulary, not understanding appropriate times to be silent or how to avoid confrontation, for example, can be very limiting as one attempts to master the language. One needs to develop a whole new way of thinking.
So is it easy or difficult? A complex question. What does it mean exactly to “learn” a language?
Honestly, Manbird (From Ugly Americans on Comedy Central), the most difficult and least popular language on Earth, has over 500 variations of one particularly offensive phrase (Suck My Balls!). It takes a firm grasp of deep throat resonance to get all the nuances just right.
JK!
The Icelandic language–even though a Germanic language extremely difficult for many English speakers–its use of archaic/primitive vocabulary and the very complex grammar make this a challenge for any non-native speaker.
Irish is a fairly hard lanuage to learn, Now of course Im talking about gaelic not english. Only 11 irregular verbs and no gender really but the verbs change depending on how many syllables are in it, also apparently it can be difficult to pronounce(its hard for me to say Ive been learning it since I was 4).