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.
I must agree with this opinion:
“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”
I am a Pole and I don’t consider polish THE MOST difficult language. Although you can’t say it’s easy…;D
hear are some basic information about gramar and phonology:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology
polish-translators.com/grammar.html
for me the most difficult is arabic
I am Polish as well, and to be honest I DO consider my language as the most difficult one, though everything depends upon your motivation. Although I speak it fluently as a native and use it every day, I think it’s almost impossible for foreigners just to speak it well (forget about fluency!).
“Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language not until age 16.”
Polish language is as difficult for its native speakers as any other language. And Polish language is not the most difficult language at all. There are hundreds of more dificcult languages. Polish is just an average Slavic languages – same difficult as Russian or Czech. And 7 cases is not many at all.
I think many Polish children have problems with cases and Polish grammar and pronunciation. And have not the same fluent command over their language because it is a hundred times more complex. Everyone in my family speaks Polish and English and I can even see my daughter speaking English much easier than Polish.
@kenny
about the polish using the latin alphabet due to their religion, that’s not necessarily true, Bulgarian uses Cyrillic for their alphabet and their orthdox
“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.”
I don’t agree with this analysis of British and American English. As a Londoner, I would expect to hear either of these two sentences by English speakers:
Where have you been? ‘I have been to London’
Where were you? ‘I was in London’
The idea that all English people speak formal language of the type – ‘I have been to London, where I took tea with a friend. We had a most jolly afternoon’ – is complete nonsense. Yes there are differences between the two forms of English, but they are mostly alternative words (tap/faucet, skip/dumpster etc.) and some differences in word usage: ‘can I get a whole bunch of…?’ is more typically American and ‘can I have some…?’ is more typically English.
I’m also rather wary of using the term ‘British English’ as there are regional dialects. The English spoken in Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester or Liverpool is somewhat different to that spoken in London. Even within London, the working class ‘Cockney’ English isn’t the same as that spoken by many people from more affluent backgrounds.
Ok, so I read this whole thing and just had to post something that is true and will probably make you laugh, or at least shake your head.
I agree with Danielc about the British English thing with one exception. The proper American English would be as follows:
Where you been? “Mind ya friggin business”
Anyways, just a little levity for you.
As a side note, I am a “natural born american” and only speak English and I bet most of you have a better command of the proper form of the language than I do. God bless the American public school system!
No language is the hardest to learn, as it depends upon the ability of the learner to link vocabulary grammar and concepts to the learner’s reference language (often the first language in which he/she became fluent). Retaining the links depends on memory skills.
I learned to converse in Finnish in 3 months, to become reasonably accurate in grammar in 4-5 years, and I shall never attain absolute grammatical precision, (nor do 95% of the Finns). The very rapid first stage was accelerated by creation of visual tags and verbal puns.
“Koti” means “home”, so I punned “My home is a cottage” It was many years before I found that cottage was the same “koti” stem with a Germanic diminutive suffix added 😀
How about the time needed to learn one language and be capable to speak it fluently?
Really fluently a few years but at a reasonable communication level a year or less.
Interesting mixture of comments here.
I personally prefer Daniel’s attitude to learning languages, which is: they are easy if you committed, put the effort in and start practicing it from day 1.
It only took him 3 months to speak the ‘supposedly very difficult Hungarian’. Why? Because he ignored language rankings and just got down to doing it.
fluentin3months.com/hungarian-is-easy/
In my opinion listing languages by their hardness to learn is a waste of time.
I’m about to teach my English boyfriend my mother-tongue – Hungarian – but the first thing I’ll make sure he puts out of his mind, that it’s one of the most hardest languages in the world to learn.
What is the point in setting your frame of mind to that? BTW: Hungarian is in fact a very logical language – if Daniel from Ireland spoke it in 3 months why couldn’t you? (and FYI: he hasn’t spoken anything else apart from English until the age of 21!)
His blog is inspiring, check it out: fluentin3months.com/hungarian-is-easy/
It is Arabic, guys. I am Egyptian. I know English, French, Italian, Spanish, and even Polish (Of Course I speak Arabic as well.)I could easily say that Arabic is a very rich language! It has many things that nobody- unless your an Arab and speak it very fluently and correctly- knows about.
Guys, I have talked Arabic since I was born, and still, I make many mistakes in my words (though I’m the best one in school amongst my friends, and I can easily say that I am better than those who are older than me.) For example, if a word (Noun) comes at the beginning of a sentence it is called a ‘starter’.
Just before explaining further, I must make something very clear. In Arabic, and this happens in no other language, you must express each word. This doesn’t mean that you ‘define’ the word, or say a meaning, it means that you must say what is its job in the sentence. This is not easy at all.
Unlike English, you don’t just say ‘Subject’ or ‘Object’. There are over 1,000 expressions for the same word in one sentence. For each expression, the word ends in a different pronunciation. Some end in Duum (O sound), some in Kasr (I or Y sound), and some in Fatth (A Sound). Not only is it very hard to express each word (which I assure is extremely hard), but it is hard to memorize how each expression ends.
That is a very quick way to describe the grammar in my language. If you have easily understood the past part you can carry on reading. If you haven’t, well I could just say that Arabic is very hard, and is, in my opinion, the hardest language in the World.
I have mentioned before what we call a ‘starter’. A starter in Arabic- as I have mentioned- is the the noun that starts a sentence. However, the ‘starter’ could come as a fourth or fifth word in a sentence, and in this case, it is called a ‘late starter’. So, as you see, this is not ‘a piece of cake.’
To add, there are some words called ‘forbidden form exchange'(it makes much more sense in Arabic). These are words that are expressed in a different way. They are countless words and you cannot learn them all, you could learn the types of words which are like that, however, the types are also too much, and there are over 20 types or categories of words which are ‘forbidden from exchange’. So, as you see, it is very complex.
This was all only about two ‘expressions’ of nouns, so what would about the verbs and conjunctions and son on and so forth. This could get too complicated to understand if I carry on, and I could even find it difficult to even teach. Therefore, I will stop here with my conclusion, that Arabic is the hardest language in the world, and as some people think that they have learnt Arabic, I assure you, you know nothing about it. I, as an Egyptian, use Egyptian Arabic in my normal life, and rarely use the Classic Arabic unless I’m in class or studying or reading. Even as an Arab, I might read a whole poem from the early ages and would stare astonished, not being able to comprehend a single word; because for each word, you could find over seventy synonyms, and you can never learn them all.
If you have reached this far, I tell you Congratulations, you have just got a simple explanation about Arabic. If you want to learn Arabic, I recommend learning a modern form of Arabic, and I strongly suggest that you stay away from the grammar; because it is a whole Universe other than ours.
Don’t anyone is saying Arabic can’t be complex. I think the point here was that Polish is pretty much the most complex language, quantitatively speaking, since nouns, verbs, adjectives , adverbials all get conjugated in all strange manners, and in umptenth tenses. Arabic is nowhere near the complexity in terms of technicality.
Richness which you express, is highly present in most languages, although vocabulary wise of course, this as well can sometimes be ‘quantified’ to some degree. Eg. A Norwegian dictionary, next to an English Dictionary, next to a Polish dictionary will all be larger, respectively.
eg. One can not be ‘very fluent’ in a language. Either one is fluent, or one is not.
Yes, which is the case in point. Although Hungary is also catholic, you mention orthodox which derives from the east roman empire (Constantinople), Polish catholicism obviously from west Roman (Latin).
In which case, I would highly recommend you to avoid (American) “English” then, given they are the world’s public enemy #1. Going down the route of neo-nazi like concentration camps in principia and ignoring human rights through the Geneva convention, which was borne out of the atrocities of fascist-Germany, is extremely scary. And thanks to all their economic & military exploitations and invasions, look at global peace today. Yikes.
Chinese is the hardest lanuguage im in middle school and i have to learn cuz every word in english is short they make all of theirs log
@Magic Man. As I’m a bilingual Singaporean who’s fluent in both English and Mandarin Chinese, I beg to differ. I can condense long English sentences into shorter Chinese ones. Perhaps your command of Chinese is just not good enough for that.
For example： I gave him an inch, he took a yard -> 他得寸进尺。
9 syllables reduced to 5. I can give plenty more. Chinese is more efficient in convey ideas with fewer syllables and shorter sentences.
I am very fluent in Reiman and English was on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being way too easy and 5 being way too hard)
My verdict of English is: 3/5
I still have flaws when I speak English but I have now been learning English for 12 years now, and I still stuff up.
My two cents contribution.
Native tongue: Spanish.
Languages I’ve studied (1: dead easy, 5: dead difficult)
grammar pronunciation writing
English 1 4 2
Hebrew 1 1 4
Arabic 3 3 4
Polish 5 2 3
German 2 2 2
French 2 3 3
Italian 2 1 1
Most difficult language I’ve studied: Polish
Easiest: Italian and Hebrew.
I’m English but have lived in China many years and got my BA from a Beijing university. Am currently doing a MA in Chinese and Business.
I think your thoughts on the difficulty of Chinese are a little simplistic. Chinese is okay at the beginning but it gets harder the more your learn. Because of the difficulty of the reading/writing system most people only get to a intermediate level and get no further.
Also you have totally underplayed the importance of tones. Many people who learn Chinese in the west think they’re okay because their teachers understand them. This is normally because of the teachers exposure to westerners learning Chinese. Once these people go to China they get very frustrated when no one understand them because of their poor tones. There are also a great many people who have studied Chinese for years and lived in China for years but still have poor tones even if they have tried. You cannot ignore this when looking at the difficulty.
Accents is another area of note. China has a so many different accents (and I don’t mean dialects) and the majority of people (unless young or from the north east) still do not speak standard Chinese. So even if you have “good” Chinese, once you leave some of the north eastern areas you may feel like you can’t speak it at all.
There are other difficulties such as the sheer number of idioms, differences in spoken language and written language and even the occasional grammar point (e.g. many many people frequently miss use “le” ).
I am not claiming Chinese is the world’t most difficult language to learn but I feel the experience you have with the language does not leave you well qualified to properly judge it.
D.
I’m curious, the English in my message above has been slightly edited and now has some errors in it that were not there before. What was the point of that?
D.
I had a teacher named Ms. Krakowska who teaches World History. I was sort of her teacher’s pet haha. She always talked to her husband in Polish over the phone. It was way too fast. I asked her to teach me some words and they were pretty easy to pronounce. Some sounds were familiar. Somewhat. She teached on the Navajo Nation. She learned a few words in our language. She’d said it was a sophisticated language. Blah. I miss her. =)
The Polish language is a beautiful language. But it has come common aspects with Navajo believe it or not grammatically.
Do you speak Navajo?
What I think is that Arabic is the second hardest language in the world learning just based on spelling.
I think that I will add my own opinion.
To learn a language is a hard task but only when you think that its hard.I speak Russian as an native language,Hebrew and English as second languages and I speak all of those languages fluently without an accent(or at least a noticeable accent)and of course I can understand most of the text I read in those languages(even a native English speaker encounters words that he doesn’t know)
I have started learning German about 4 months ago and I found to be “eine sehr einfache Sprache”(A very simple language) because the cases(in my opinion) are a complete joke!
If you are having a hard time to learn a foreign then I consider to change your attitude,motivation and maybe even the resources that you use in order to get better results with the language that you are learning.
Now something about Polish.
I find it to be a simple language for me since I am a native Russian speaker, what I mean is that it has many words that are exactly the same as in Russian and the pronunciation is very similar and natural to me.
But it is all because it is a similar language to my native language.
In the end the difficulty of a language only changes the learning curve but everything is possible but it also depends on the person.
I’m Ukrainian I’ve lived in the Middle East my whole life and I speak Arabic perfectly and many different dialects of it. However I find the actual and original Arabic hard with all of its grammar rules and tenses. Ukrainian and Russian are spoken wise; Writing wise however when it comes to grammar its very hard, with all of its prefixes and suffixes and all those weird things, they make learning the language itself very hard.
Całkiem ciekawe, a mówi tu ktoś po polsku? 😉
yes…. Ja mówię po polsku 😉
I’ve read a post where there was a comparison between
Croatian (Serbo-Croatian) and Polish in terms of forms of numerals.
It was stated Croatian has seven forms of number ‘two, while Polish has seventeen.
Being a native speaker of Serbian (or eastern variation of Yugoslav – so the rules apply in case of western variation – Croatian) I must point out to that as an understatement. Serbian, like Polish, has seven cases, and it distinguishes, again like Polish, three genders. However, in case of numerals, Serbian has two additional phenomena that in English could roughly be called ‘numeral nouns’, and ‘collective numerals'(the latter is present in other Slavic languages as well). Numeral nouns derived from the number two (dva, dve, dva) are ‘dvojka’, ‘dvojica’, ‘dvojac’ (all mean ‘the two’ – the two of them (two men) – njih dvojica (‘njih dva’ is irregular), but the two of them (two women) – njih dve; the two of them (man and woman) – njih dvoje – ‘dvoje’ is a collective numeral).
Cardinal number ‘dva, dve, dva’ has its own declension (masculine and neuter form ‘dva’ shares the same forms).
N dva, dve, dva
G dva, dve, dva
D dvama, dvema, dvama
Acc dva, dve, dva
V dva, dve, dva
Ins dvama, dvema, dvama
L dvama, dvema, dvama
Declension of the collective number ‘dvoje’:
N dvoje
G dvoga
D dvoma
Acc dvoje
V dvoje
Ins dvoma
L dvoma
Declension of the numeral nouns ‘dvojica’, ‘dvojka’ and ‘dvojac’:
N dvojica; dvojka; dvojac
G dvojice; dvojke; dvojca
D dvojici; dvojki; dvojcu
Acc dvojicu; dvojku; dvojac
V dvojico; dvojko; dvojcu
Ins dvojicom; dvojkom; dvojcem
L dvojici; dvojki; dvojcu
Collective numerals are derivable from other numerals too and always refer to mixed-gender groups (2 – dvoje, 3 – troje, 4 – četvoro, 5 – petoro etc.). Numeral nouns are also derivable from other numerals (2 – dvojica, 3 – trojica, 4 – četvorica, 5 – petorica etc. – used for groups of men only; 2 – dvojka, 3 – trojka, 4 – četvorka, 5 – petorka etc. translatable to English as ‘a group of two’, ‘a group of three’, ‘a group of four’, ‘a group of five’ etc. regardless of gender)
Apart from that, digits also have their respective names, which also belong to the numeral nouns group. ‘One’ is ‘jedan, but ‘Number (or digit) one’ is called ‘jedinica’, ‘number two’ is ‘dvojka’ (like the numeral nouns for groups), ‘number three’ is ‘trojka’, ‘number four’ is ‘četvorka’, ‘number five’ is ‘petica’ (pay attention, since from this number on, it is not the same as above anymore, i.e. ‘number five’ is NOT ‘petorka’!)
Now we could recount the forms… 🙂
Though we do have a fairly simplified tense system when it comes to everyday conversation (present, future, future conditional (in Serbian only! Croatian has different syntax when it comes to this tense), and perfect tense, with aorist (very short action in the past) being used occasionally). Imperfect is used in literature for the most part, and not in everyday speech.
Oh yes, and the perfect tense distinguishes genders in both singular and plural (Russian distinguishes genders only in singular, and has one common plural form). We’re lucky we don’t have dual, like Slovenes. 🙂 Enjoy languages!!!
I am obsessed with learning new languages. I speak English as a first language, but also speak Latin, Old Norse, Gaelic, and am trying my hardest for Japanese. I’ve been told to start young as that is when learning languages is the easiest, so I did being that I’m fifteen. Latin is stupidly simple, 6 cases/declensions, and 3 Genders, Gaelic is just weird altogether, and Old norse is so freely structured that as easy as the grammar is (which is practically non-existent)it can be confusing.
However, I disagree with the statement of “Japanese is fairly hard”. Japanese is extremely hard. Much harder than Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese and almost all the Indo-European languages (save Polish and Basque. Yes, it for the most part has small words, but those words are more often than not, grammar particles used just to tell you what the previous word’s function was. Also, reading and writing can take upto a decade to learn considering it has three writing systems, however two of which are fairly simple. Translating back and forth has proven to be a challenge for me with billots as well, because the fundamental difference between lingue orientis and European languages, is that in Europeanlanguages, the message being conveyed can be translated directly into another european language just by converting a word and its place, however, in Lingue orientis, one must’nt convert just the words, but rather the underlying meaning of the sentence and convert it to the most accurate interpretation. For example: ‘Ginkou ni dou yatte ittara ii desuka?’ is practically impossible to translate literally, but the closest would be something like: ‘What do if I go to the bank is good?’, however the actual meaning is:How should I go to the bank? On top of this, the language is spoken extremely fast, therefore even if you know all the grammar rules and vocabulary, one has no hop of understanding if they cannot understand fast. Furthermore, there are a number of honorific and formality systems which are a whole other language on their own! Example: informal ‘to be’=da, formal ‘to be’=desu, humble/very formal ‘to be’= de gozaimasu. So there ya go! In my opinion japanese is the 2nd or third hardest language to learn for a native indo-european speaker.
watashi wo kiita ni arigatou gozaimaa.
Good Day: Konichiwa (kon-ech-ee-wah)
Good Morning: Ohayo Gozaimasu (Oh-hai-yoh Goh-zai-mass)
Is my cat cute?: Watashi no Neko kawaii desu ka? (Wa-tashee noh ne-koh ka-wai-ee dess kah)
I disagree with Chris. Japanese kanji words are mostly from chinese so if you know chinese Japanese is actually not as difficult as you think. Chinese is hard to master because every single word has a different meaning and adding an additional stroke can change the meaning, as well as saying it in different tones. thank god there isn’t past tense in mandarin chinese.
Darn, the Polish language is realy hard. I am 23 years old Polish man and I can not speak my domestic language fluently. I make plenty mistakes in grammar and that language has many dialekts which are separate languages as well.
I hear many Polish people make mistakes all the time in grammar. I have lived in Poland for many years and make a lot of mistakes. It is a very hard language to learn, even for native speakers of Polish.
Polish people come back to Poland after living in the US and people can tell they have been abroad because their Polish has changed. It is that complex. If I go back to the USA my English will not have changed enough for people to tell I am abroad.
I think the old languages like Pashtu, Sanskrit and the Basque languages are difficult to learn. Language one learns quicker when one is of a young age and there is no limitation to that. I was born in Bombay, India and learnt 4 languages by the age of 5. The reason was that I was in constant touch with people speaking Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati and Urdu. When at the age of 5 I went to an English school, I started learning English. The reason one learns a language easier at an early age is only on the muscles of the tongue. For that reason except I think in English they say “What tongue you speak”. A child has soft tongue muscles and as age increases the tongue becomes harder and the making of strange sounds becomes difficult. I used to speak the above mentioned 4 languages like a native but now I have been away from India for 40 years and although I understand it very well the problem is speaking my tongue does not form the words correctly. Those who wish their children learn different languages, they should encourage them to learn at an early age. I speak 7 languages and am learning Russian pronunciations of which I find difficult, the reason I think is age, I am 62. I agree that Italian is the simplest and even then Spanish.
Some of you said Estonia is easy. Believe me, it isn’t. I’m estonian and even I have trouble with it. We have 14 different cases and every case has 3 different forms. And all those words where are letters ö, ä, ü, õ – some of you can’t even pronounce them. Try to pronounce ‘Jüriööülestõus’ or ‘jäääär’. Was it easy?
I agree that Polish is difficult 🙂
Gratuluję nauczenia się polskiego, sam uczę się angielskiego od około 13 lat i od niedawna japońskiego, więc mam już jakieś porównanie mojego języka z innymi i muszę powiedzieć, że nie wyobrażam sobie uczyć się polskiego, gdyby nie był to mój ojczysty język.
Także gratuluję i jednocześnie współczuję, to musiała być katorga xD
I czuję się dumny, że polski jest uważany za najtrudniejszy język, haha xD
Polski jest łatwy, zależy jak komu wpada nauka językowa. Z dyktand miałem same 4 i 5 i zawsze zastanawiało mnie jak można popełniać błędy gramatyczne np. “pomuc” przecież to nawet dziwnie się wymawia “u” zamiast “ó”, aż się głupio robi.
Pozdrawiam:)
To nie jest błąd gramatyczny, tylko ortograficzny przecież.
I totally agree – Polish is extremely hard. If you dissagree – try to learn it. And while learning don’t forget that impossible is nothing 😉
Skoro nam się udało nauczyć tego pięknego języka, to dlaczego innym miałoby się to nie udać ;p Nie ma co ukrywać – możemy dziękować, że to nasz język ojczysty… bo przypuszczam, że nauka polskiego dla obcokrajowców naprawdę jest katorgą ;p I tak, tak, i jeszcze raz tak – zdecydowana większość Polaków nie posługuje zupełnie płynnie i poprawnie językiem polskim. To chyba mówi samo za siebie o poziomie trudnośći 😉
“większość Polaków nie posługuje się zupełnie płynnie i poprawnie językiem polskim”
I’m Italian and I’m studying Russian and Hungarian. Well, I think that’s not true that Hungarian is insanely difficult; I’d even think it’s easier than Russian.
It has no genders, the stress is always on the first syllable, the pronunciation is quite easy (but you’d have to know the pronunciation rules, which after all are not that difficult) and suffixes are much easier than cases. What might trouble you is that lexicon and grammar are very different from most Indo-European ones, but I have to say that the grammar is much less irregular than in Italian or Russian.
Russian pronunciation is slightly more difficult than Hungarian one; it depends mostly on the stress, which is totally unpredictable (but as you go on, you’ll be able to guess where to put it on new worlds). Plus, Cyrillic alphabet is a total joke. What’s really difficult are irregularities and motion verbs, that in Polish must be at least twice as hard, thought.
English, apart from the insanely irregular pronunciation, has a very simple grammar.
As for my native language… it’s really, really tough. Lots of irregular verbs, unpredictable accent, “e”, “o”, “s” and “z” might all be read in two different ways, there are about 8 verb tenses (and nobody uses them all!) against the 2 of Hungarian and Russian (plus the so-called periphrastic future), and crazy writing rules which drive insane not only foreigners, but also almost every native speaker!
So, we all should learn the difference between “difficult” and “different from our native language”.
My parents teach me Hungarian, but I live in Slovakia, so I know both languages well. These two countries are neighbours, but in the vocabulary are only some words the same. I don’t think that my languages are hard to learn, but my friends tell me they are hard. I learn in school English language, and at home Russian and Spanish. But I think everybody like learning languages with each other, where you can tell funny stories and not at home on their own. With love. Reni. Puszi 🙂
You will be a genius if you know Hungarian and Slovak and English. The languages are so different and equally difficult in their own way. Through in Russian and Spanish and you will never have to worry about anything in your life as both economically and on a personal experience level it will be rich. If you have a passion for languages, keep going at.
Polish is really complicated language. is many forms every words.
for example in english 1-house 2-houses 3-houses 4-houses etc..
In polish every verb,number,adjective,nouns can have about 20 forms!
In english two, in polish : dwa(houses),dwoje(boys),dwójce(things),dwójkom(girls),obojgu)girls and boys),dwie(girls in diffrent situation),dwum(people),dwójkę(number),dwójki(number ),dwoma(things,with boys),dwójką(number,with girls) etc…
And so many more forms of a word is in every word in Polish.
I think it can be impossible for forgeins to learn polish without teacher .
Nie zgadzam się z Tobą. Mam 21 lat i uczę się języka polskiego od około 7 lat. Jeszcze niestety nie nabrałem biegłości w języku polskim ale uczę się sam z książkami! Byłem 1 miesiąc w Polsce i wszyscy byli pod wrażeniem że sam się uczę języka polskiego. Moja sprawa jest to, że trudno mi jest by rozumieć język mówiony bo Polacy mówią za szybko=P. Gramatyka nie jest najtrudniejsza rzecz dla mnie. To bardzo piękny język i codziennie się staram żebym mówił lepiej po polsku=)
Gramatyka nie jet najtrudniejszą rzecz* dla mnie.
*Poprawnie: rzeczą.
A zupełnie dobrze byłoby gdybyś powiedział:
“Gramatyka nie jest dla mnie najtrudniejszą rzeczą”
Po prostu lepiej brzmi – tak by nativ powiedział 😉
Pozdrawiam
Well , you are not right:
dwa(houses),dwoje(boys)it should be dwoch,dwójce(things)it can refer to people,dwójkom(girls) most of cases its used is when some1 is poiting that he will go with dwojka people,obojgu it means both so its not form of two)girls and boys),dwie(girls in diffrent situation) what different situations , its for girls only and thats all,dwum(people)its for boys only,dwójkę(number),dwójki(number ),dwoma(things,with boys),dwójką(number,with girls) etc.
I’m italian and i’m pretty sure that italian is the easiest language in the world. It’s true we have two way to pronunce half of the alfabet and we use accents, but there are no more than two ways. If you speak both italian and english, french appears to be easy as well.
Few italian obstacles: letter R is hard to pronunce in our language and the rule of ‘GLI’ somethimes gets breaked. In most words it’s read like double L in spanish, in some world is read as is written like in the word ‘enGLIsh’
A well spoken italian sounds formal. For this i think it would sounds boring for a foreign, but most of us italian speak badly our own language for lazyness, or for a cultural thing. We think using loads and loads of useless words show how much we know very well our language.
Hardest – English is more average than hard for me. But i’ve ‘learned’ english chatting on internet, and not with study. So i know nothoing of english grammar (as you can see).
German is very understandable when you listen it because it has a very clear sound, but is very hard to learn.
My favourite language is norwegian. I love how it sounds and how it is written. I’m studing norwegian but i can’t find someone that can ‘talk’ with me in this language, so now i can just read and understand it a bit. Unusual letters like Ø, Æ and Å may scare foreign readers but they aren’t that hard to read and sounds of Ø and Æ is pretty intuitive. I find harder to read kj and ky because i can’t get the sound very well, and the letter O (without slash) is tricky.
I was really surprised to learn that native Polish speakers aren’t fluent at their language until they’re 16. Could you quote a source on that please?
I live in Poland. I am a Polish citizen. and a native English speaker. I have learned Polish and English. I can tell you without doubt that Polish native speakers at 15 are still learning subtle aspects of Polish grammar and vocabulary while English speakers are for the most part set in their language development unless they make a focused effort to develop. Polish is eons more complex of a language than English.
I’m Italian, living in Poland from 3 years and now I’m planning to take B2 certificate. At job I speak only polish and to be honest I really don’t understand why do you think that polish language is so hard. For me is a pretty easy language. Ok, the grammar is huge, but huge doesn’t mean hard. What I can say is that the polish language has a really hard numbering system but the rest is pretty easy.
I agree, Polish is extremely hard. Of course it depends from which country you are, but even though. Imagine now that people from China or Japan want to learn Polish. They must be sadomasochistic.
The coolest languages to learn are as follows, English, Polish, Crotian, Serbian, French, Italian and Spanish.
I speak Spanish, French, English and a little German, and frankly, the easiest language to learn was English. Spanish and French are alike, in both of them verb conjugation is very different for each of the pronouns while in english conjugation changes only for the third person. Furthermore English only uses one article for when referring to nouns (feminine, masculine or plural), while in French and Spanish you have to learn if an object is feminine, masculine or plural and according to that use the corresponding article. Among many other things. Spanish is not easy at all.
Polski jest bardzo trudny, nawet dla samych Polaków – to prawda. Co prawda ja takich problemów nie posiadam, ale moi koledzy i koleżanki mają trudności w pisaniu wypracowań(błędy ortograficzne(pomijam osoby z dysortografią), stylistyczne, o interpunkcyjnych już nie mówiąc).
Dla anglików i innych obcokrajowców najgorsza jest wymowa. Trzeba mieć duży talent do języków, żeby po godzinie płynnie powiedzieć jedno zdanie po polsku 😉
Japoński, wg mnie, nie jest aż taki trudny. Co prawda kanji i hirigana nie są proste, ale jeśli ktoś ćwiczy pisanie słówek japońskich codziennie, nie powinien mieć problemów z dalszą nauką.
I’m French and I am fluent both in French and in English and can read and speak some Spanish and Arabic (many french words have their origins in the arabic language. I am currently trying to learn Polish and dam it is difficult. The pronounciation of the alphabet is so different but more importantly the sound of the language when combining letters make it very challenging to learn. The great English explorer Richard Burton apparently spoke 25 languages and some 15 african dialects. He mastered languages by following a simple method. Immersing himself in new cultures through is voyages to new continents he was able to learn a new language within weeks. He stated in his memoirs that he would learn a thousand words a week for a month and repeat them constantly. (By some accounts he learned a lot of new languages in brothels, lol).
I don’t believe that there’s a single language that can be considered as ” the hardest language on earth” or whatever. I find the comment arrogant.
There are many factors that contribute to the learning of a foreign language. There’s ability, learner’s age, how much exposure to the target language the learner gets, how close the learner’s mother tongue is to the target language, etc.
Not everybody has the ability to learn a second language. Yeah, most people can say a few words here and there in a foreign language but that doesn’t mean they can speak the language. I speak three languages and I can say that nine out of ten people I’ve met who’ve claimed they can speak several languages , are just BSers, people who study a language at a basic level for a few years and claim they’re fluent but they can’t hold a two-minute conversation in the target language. Of course, I’ve also met a handful of people who are really fluent in one or two languages. But mod of these people have spent years in other countries and/or come from cultural backgrounds that support the languages they’ve learnt. There are also those who are exposed to many languages due to their geographical, political situations who learn one or more languages without even knowing they’re doing it (Catalans/Spanish, for instance).
Estonian is such a strange language, for example, One ä , two ää, three äää, four ääää, what the deuce?
To say Spanish is easy is crazy, it’s way harder than chinese…it’s even harder than French and certainly a LOT harder than English.
Let us not consider the genders, which English lacks, so we can focus on verbs:
“Go” ,for instance, has two forms in the simple present: go and goes.
In Spanish the verb “ir” in the present is as follows:
Yo voy
el/ella/usted va
nosotros vamos
ellos van
vosotros vais
tu vas.
In the past, we use “went” in English, whereas in Spanish we have the following:
Yo fui
el/ella/usted fue
nosotros fuimos
ellos fueron
tu fuiste
vosotros vais
“Have/has gone” in Spanish:
Yo he ido
el/ella/usted ha ido
nosotros hemos ido
ellos han ido
tu has ido
vosotros habeis ido
And that’s one of the easiest verbs…please, get a reality check.
You guys clearly haven’t experienced korean before… There exist various words whch mean pretty much one thing in korean; for example, there are about 15 words meaning ‘red’ (not as in synonymes, or in terms of dialects, but the genuine red itself!) and about 20 words in order to describe blue. The ways of conversation in terms of grammar differ by the ages of those who are having it, from extremely elderly, elderly, relatively less elderly etc) When it comes to expressing something, no other language can outrun korean.
Im a finn, and
it is SO nice to know that Finnish is the hardest langwige in the wearld being learned.
That would be hard to understand for English people:
tili – account
tiili – brick
They just cant realize there are TWO VOCALS, never herd of it!
Same in English!
is – wun vocal
least – two vocals
but how they understand this?
two NOUNCS! like
kuka – who
kukka – flower
WTF! KUK/KA it is pronouncing, just trying to continue the letter for a bit!
and
ä and ö extra letters
1.ä is a in and
2.ö is like e in fur (without r, of course)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzåäö
what about the verb spelling!yeah!
I eat – Mä syön
You eat – Sä syöt
He/She/It eats – Se syö
We eat – Me syömme
You eat (many peeple) – Te syötte
They eat – Ne syö
3x past forms
1 would-forms
eg. söisin – I would eat
1 future/maybe-form
syönee – Will maybe eat
and for all they have just eat afterposition
-ko or -kö
does it eat / syökö
there were verbs. Would you want to now of the nomines (nouns, nummerals, adjectives, pronomines)
PS. I spelled wrong because it was just and this cases work too!
this -nee thing (X would do Y) in usually unused but sometimes people talk it. So finnish have no future! /Suomella ei ole tulevaisuutta.
Go to google translator and write something to finnish and listen to it and try to repeat it! You know almost, almost how is it pronounced! The melody it just a little little bit wrong and computer have not breaks unlike Fins.
This is not spam, I’m telling how Finnish works.
I think Finish is a beautiful and crazy language grammatically. Pronunciation is easier than Polish but the grammar is like from another world.
NOW, THE NOUNS
1.1talo – house
1.2talot – houses
2.1talon – house’s
2.2talojen – houses’
3.1taloa – (do something to) house
3.2taloja – (do something to) houses
4.1talosta – from house
4.2taloista – from houses
5.1talossa – in house
5.2taloissa – in houses
6.1taloon – to house
6.2taloihin – to houses
7.1talolla – on house
7.2taloilla – on houses
8.1talolta – from house
8.2taloilta – from house
9.1talolle – to house
9.2taloille – to houses
10.1taloksi – (to become) a house
10.2taloiksi – (to become) to houses
11.1talona – as a house
11.2taloina -a as houses
12.1talotta – without a house
12.2taloitta – without houses
13.1taloineni – with my houses
13.2taloinesi – with your houses
13.3taloineen – with her/its/his houses
13.4taloinemme – with our houses
13.5taloinenne with your (many peeple) houses
13.6taloinensa – with their houses
14.1taloin- taloin| no sensible examples but the word book/kirja
Kirjoin on hyvä viihdyttää itseäsi!/With books it’s good to entertain yourself!
THIS FEELS HAAAARRRRDDD!!!
Extras is adjectives
kiva/nice
kivempi/nicer
kivoin/the nicest
NOTICE!
hyvä/good
hyvempi/nonsense
parempi/better
hyvin/very
parhain/the best
numerals:
NOTICEE!
1 yksi 1th ensimmäinen
2 kaksi 2th toinen
and now it’s regular
3 kolme kolmas
4 neljä neljäs
5 viisi viides
and so on
promines:
I/Mä
My/Mun
Me/Mua/mut
You/Sä
Your/Sun
You/Sua/Sut
HE/SHE/IT/Se
His/her/its/sen
It/sitä
WE/me
Our/meidän
Us/meitä
YOU (MANY PEEPLE)/TE
Your/Teidän
You/Teitä
THEY/NE
Their/Niiden
They/Niitä
THIS/TÄMÄ
THAT/TUO
THERE/SIELLÄ
HERE/TÄÄLLÄ
KUKIN/EACH ONE
KUKA/WHO
KENEN/WHO’S
THESE/NÄMÄ
NUO/THAT (MANY THINGS)
JOKA/which/that
MIKÄ/what
Se oli jotain sellaista, mitä en voinut hyväksyä
It was something I couldnt approve
KUMPI?/ WHICH ONE?
MIKÄ/WHAT
MIKÄÄN/NOTHING
I sincerely appreciate this, in fact I might do a seperate article just on Finnish. I think it is a great land way up north and people do not know about how difficult the language is. It is amazing. I try to explain to my American friends about cases and rarely do they even know what it is.
I’m sorry for my wooden English. In my opinion Finnish is hard, because of agglutination, similarly like in Japanese, Turkish, Hungarian.
In this way, even within one word You can to compress or rather to express whole sentence’s sense from most of other language, right.
It’s very specific and really hard for gramma exercises.
The most of all that, what make Polish so really really difficult is by very hmm “succulent” pronunciation, ok ?
Even russian Tsar’s administration tried with no success to write pl in Cirrylic.
Polish is not only very consonant or consonantly (ha ha ha) but it’s also characterisated by a friction in spelling, like in vibrationed -r+k+z.
For example polish surnames are usually much more harder to pronunce than those in other slavic cases.
Russian Zhukov, ukrainian Shevchenko, slovak Dubcek, slavic-balkan Mijatovic, Michajlovic, Stojkovski, Ibrahimovic, Egzebogdanovic, or bulgarian Lechkov, Borisov, Stoichkov are more or less easy, but polish Cwiklinski, Trzaskalski, Szczykiewicz, Oslizlok, Pietruszynski, Kondratowicz, Grzegorzewski, Wojciechowski, Zdziechowski, Dzierżyński, Piotrowski, Wróblewski,Frątczak, Skrzydlewski, Juraszkiewicz, you see alone.
Or Hrvatska, Srbija, Krk, Hradec Kralove and finally in comparison with very common pl words: zdzierżyć, zakrztusić, przejściówka, zmiażdżyć, roztrzęsiony, rozstrzygnięcie, zaczerwieniony, ukrzyżowany, uprzywilejowany, brzęczący, wiertarko-wkrętarka, Stany Zjednoczone (USA), Morze Śródziemne, mniejszość ukraińska, zakonserwować, wdzięczność, wykształcenie, błogosławieństwo, rozporządzenie, świadectwo, bluźnierstwo, przeznaczenie, przynależność, wytrzeszcz, wyszczególniony, gwóźdź. With no exceptions and necessary every letter in pl-words must be spelled.
Hello and one more time sorry very much !!!
I have a lot of respect for the speakers of the Finnish language, that is all I have to say. There are so many cases in grammar, Polish is easy for a Finish speaker (well not easy but more speakable) as your langugae is so hard, just like I know Polish girls learning Finish and do not find it as hard as I would bening a native English speaker.
According to the only objective source that I found, the five most difficult languages of 63 evaluated were Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, taking about 2200 hours to learn to read and write. Japanese was ranked as the most difficult of these, so according to this source Japanese is the most difficult language of the 63, which probably includes Polish.
I have been learning Japanese on and off for about 9 years and I think that it is an extremely difficult language, some say that it’s easy, I think, to encourage new learners.
First speaking a language is really what language is about as for a 30,000 years of history 99% of mankind did not read or write. Think about it until the last century everyone spoke and used Japanese but few read it. So I think Wiki or whatever source you use did not put proper weights onto the important of aspects of the language (reading, writing, speaking, listening). Are you saying these are all equal? I think speaking and listening is speaking a language, while reading and writing is nice but not required and Japanese is hard in this aspect, but not critical for communication. While to speak it grammatically and with pronunciation it is not as hard as Finnish or Polish for example.
Mark, I don’t know if someone has already mentioned it, but the US Gov/military/defense language institute claim that Korean is the hardest for a native English speaker.
But based on your example with Polish, it looks extremely difficult!!
I personally know Asian language teachers who say Asian languages are ly because of the writing and reading and this is why they get that reputation but the speaking and understanding is fairly easy. One guy I know teaches Chinese in NYC to non Chinese people, it is only the writing that is hard but writing is not ‘speaking a language’.
I got ahold of a commercial book (you can’t buy it from Amazon) for Mandarin Chinese / Portuguese that uses a similar methodology as the FSI books. I studied a few lessons, and paid to practice online. But then I started reading about China and how they execute people for small things and said “uhh oh… I’ll study a different language..” I’m no criminal, but some things there just scare me.
German is not a logical language. Hardly any language can be called logical. Certainly no language that connects gender to nouns is logical. The number of exceptions in German is enormous. There tends to be a large amount of antiquated rules involved as well. I am speaking as a native American-Engish speaker. The essay by Mark Twain: The Awful German Language, can give insight to what people learning a new language might feel.
I am from Romania. Romanian is not a difficult language.
I would say though that it is believed to be difficult mostly because it is unknown and not very popular.
Just as mentioned in the post above, it is, every now and then, illogical. Many irregular verbs and forms of nouns or adjectives.
I find it easy because:
1) almost 90% of the vocabulary is latin-based.
2) there are only 5 “special” characters but nowadays, Romanian people almost never used them (even in news or official texts).
3) apart from the Slavonic/Russian or Serbian influences it is very much alike spanish/italian or portuguese!
I like to write!
Romanian: Imi place sa scriu!
Italian: Mi piace scrivere!
Spanish: Me gusta escribir!
French: J’aime ecrire!
Where (are you) ?:
Romanian:Unde? / Unde esti?
Spanish:Donde? / Donde estas?
Italian:Dove? / Dove sei?
How:
Romanian: Cum?
Italian: Come?
Spanish: Como?
French: Comment?
We also have a lot of synonyms (not like in Polish) but you can forget one and never use it for years…nobody will notice.
On the other hand, when it comes to foreign languages:
English is very easy…most kids pick it up early in the childhood by watching cartoons/movies. Basic or even advanced conversational level is mastered before they begin studying it in school.
Spanish and Italian are learned just as easy for basic/conversational level. Even french.
Most Romanians will fully understand a phrase in french/italian or spanish and will be able to engage in conversation without having ever properly studied the language in school.
The grammar of these languages for whoever wants to master them is considered easy by most of us.
People older than 40/50 years old remember how to speak/write Russian as it was mandatory in school during the communism.
Although nowadays nobody tries to approach this language the older people think of it as “easy”.
Hungarian/Serbian/Polish/Estonian are not very popular in Romania…We also think of them as “hard” but we have no motivation in learning them.
German is fairly easy and attractive. It is quite popular in schools/high schools, after English and French.
Arabic – ?
Chinese/Japanese/other far eastern languages…are not very popular.
That’s about it.
I can end this post another example.
“Salut” – which is quite similar in french/italian/spanish
or
“Va multumesc pentru atentie”. – I thank you for your attention
Je vous remercie pour votre attention.
Grazie per l’attenzioni (or something like that 🙂 )
etc.
Hello,
I forgot to add something.
We all study from 1/2 up to 4/5 years of Latin in Gymnasium/Highschool depeding on the profile (sciences or humanist).
And, most important, Romanian is a phonetic language. Which, obviously, means that what you write is what you read:
You don’t write cough and read caf
You write “fereastra” and read fereastra (window) (finestra in Italian or le fenetre in French)…
Very important…