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!

The hardest language to learn

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 )

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!!

The hardest language to learn

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?

~*~*

The hardest language to learn

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

The hardest language to learn

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

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…

”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.

The hardest language to learn

Don’t be so fool people . 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

This is an interesting thing, I am theoretically taught about British English, but even me would say “I was in London.” xD

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.

The hardest language to learn

i think Georgian is very hard language to learn. compleatly different alpabet. dificult pronansiation, complex verb. anyone have any coments about this?

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.

The hardest language to learn

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.

The hardest language to learn

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!

The hardest language to learn

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?

The hardest language to learn

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).