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.
As far as writing/reading goes, Chinese is a lost cause. Yeah, it’s perhaps easy-ish to learn to speak it, but the ideograms are practically arbitrary (yeah, academics may argue otherwise, but it’s not helpful if you forget one). If you do forget one, you need a dictionary, even if you remember the sound of the word! That’s why Chinese ex-pats who don’t read Chinese daily have a bunch of dictionaries around them all the time.
In phonetically written languages, you may make a spelling mistake, but people will still understand what you wrote. Even in Japanese if you forget a logogram you can write it out phonetically. In Chinese there’s no standard phonetic system, homophones are used instead so transcriptions are not even close to being unique. It’s a mess.
Ideogram? They’re called characters. It’s extremely hard for foreigners to meet reading and writing but most Chinese children have it drilled in through practice from a young age, and by their early teens are able to read and write practically every character, including some traditional script.
That’s not entirely true. In order to be considered a fluent Chinese reader and writer, it’s generally stated that you need to know roughly 3,000+ characters. People who study at university usually know a helluva lot more; somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000. Though, in total, there are a LOT more characters out there. Or at least, this was what my Chinese teacher told us when I was studying in Beijing.
The other thing is that learning to read and write Chinese is merely a case of pure memorization. I don’t actually think that this should be considered “difficult”, so much as ridiculously time-consuming.
Then again, I will admit that this point is rather moot as I don’t think that any one person in the world knows every English word. And funnily enough, did you know that there are more words used by Shakespeare (across his whole oeuvre) than the Bible? Just a fun fact. Haha.
Characters as a form of written language can appear as one of three types; ideograms (where a character represents a word or idea), logograms (which denote a syllable), or pictograms (a more basic representation of words). Chinese characters are primarily ideograms.
Yeah, and then they struggle as English majors at university to pass their normal compulsory Chinese exams at age 21. Of course, they read and write most characters, but not enough for high standards – let’s mention for outsiders that there may be more than 80 thousand characters and most have several meanings.
Oh, and they ARE ideograms, but, perhaps because ‘ideogram’ sounds too high-level, coming from Greek, they are commonly called ‘characters’, which I hope you also have, to accept this fact I mean.
Well, they are only partially ideograms. There is a strong phonetic component in the vast majority of Chinese characters. Some are pure ideograms (e.g., ming^2 明 “bright”, which is a combination of the characters for sun and moon), but most Chinese characters consist of a “radical” (most often seen on the left but can be anywhere) that has something to do with the meaning of the word, and a “significant”, which most often is another simpler character that rhymes (sort of) with the way the character is supposed to be pronounced. Often the pronunciation is that of 2000 years ago, and the pronunciation of the word may have drifted significantly away from the current pronunciation of the significant. Examples: ‘ma^3’ (horse), written 马 (my computer gives me the simplified characters) rhymes (with a different tone) with ‘ma^1’ (mother), written 妈 with the ‘horse’ character as the significant on the right and the character ‘nü’ (woman), written 女 as the radical on the left. In this case, the tone has drifted but not the pronunciation. However, often the pronunciation is significantly different in the derived word from the (current) pronunciation of the significant.
Understanding this can be of significant value when attempting to learn the Chinese writing system. It’s far from perfect as there’s not a clear system as there is with alphabets and syllabaries. But it’s better than nothing, and it also illustrates why calling them “ideographs” does not describe their true nature.
For my money, the most difficult language I ever attempted was Navajo. I can’t compare it to Polish, which I’ve never studied, but I have studied the related language Russian and I would say that for this English-speaker, Navajo was much more difficult than Russian.
I don’t agree on something you wrote. “Often the pronunciation is that of 2000 years ago”: no, not true. At least not the pronunciation of Mandarin. It is more than enough to see the way Chinese words were adapted to Japanese, which, thanks to its syllabic writing system (the hiragana) gives us a good phonetic transcription of Chinese words in different periods of time. In fact, some Japanese sounds derived from Chinese are almost unrecognizable. The point of pictograms-then ideograms-then characters is giving the idea of the meaning. The characters that indicate a sound relate to other character-sounds that the reader already know and interpret in his / her dialect. For this reason even sound-character are read in a completely different way in different dialects, which means in different areas and eras of Chinese history.
I didn’t mean, literally, 2000 years ago. I meant that the pronunciations of the characters has drifted over the years; the phonetic component that might have been pronounced very similarly centuries ago in two characters has caused them to drift apart so that they are not so similar today.
We do know a good deal about how Chinese was pronounced hundreds of years ago, thanks to the work of linguists who know Chinese dialects and also Japanese.
I really don’t know what you are disagreeing with.
as a native Chinese, I learnt to write and read traditional Chinese (which has, in 80% cases, much more complicated characters than simplified Chinese, e.g. 郁vs 鬱) from the age of 3 to around 15.
My experience is that up to this day, I still forget how to write a character for approximately every twenty/ thirty words I write, because a lot of these characters do not have a ‘meaning’ in its structure, but I have absolutely no trouble with reading and recognizing complicated words.
A very interesting idea, but there are some other languages, some of them mentioned by other people, for example the rest of Slavic languages, incl. Czech, Slovak, sorry for the shortcut – former Yugoslavian languages, Bulgarian; how about Albanian?!? Icelandic, Danish (because of crazy pronunciation)? Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian? And Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian – wouldn’t want to have to learn those, nor Welsh 🙂 I am a native Polish-Russian speaker, fluent in Slovak, English, once spoke German pretty well with masters in Finnish, it’s easier to learn every following language, so maybe Chinese next… 🙂 and people, please take this article as an invitation to an interesting discussion, don’t get angry and wound up 🙂 everybody is entitled to a hypothesis.
Albanian? Not even a bit? I’ve been learning it for a month and went to Albania, had no issues communicating nor understanding simple conversations. Pronunciation? Easy, no extra hard to pronounce sounds to be honest…
Well, what seemingly makes Polish so difficult to learn is also what makes it easier to understand in many ways – one does not need to rely on the context to infer such basic (from our Western point of view) information as the speaker, gender, case, tense etc. From a simple sentence “Idę do szkoły” one can infer a lot of information (first person singular, present tense…), which makes it easier to comprehend without additional context. Let’s compare it to the Japanese “学校へ行く” (gakkou e iku; roughly: [I/you/he/she/it/we/they] go[es]/will go to school). Without more context one cannot say who goes; the tense itself is non-past (so, dear author, yes, there are tenses…) – the info that we are so used to getting from a sentence is really vague. However, one can say that the form of the verb is plain (as opposed to polite), which tells quite a lot about the social connections between the speaker and the listener (for example: they know each other well – friends or family; or the speaker is a boss talking to his/her junior/subordinate).
What I mean to say is that it’s rather awkward to compare the level of difficulty between languages that prioritize different types of information, or that belong to totally different types. Polish is synthetic, English (as well as Chinese) is analytic, Japanese is agglutinative. Of course they differ in terms of morphology!
I would also like to add one more thing: indeed, the Japanese writing system is difficult, but, paradoxically, it is the writing what makes the language easier to understand. The Western approach towards writing as a record of speech (thus making writing a secondary medium of expression) is not as easily translatable as one might think to, for example, the languages which use the writing system that originated in China.
Well, maybe polish is not the easiest language to learn but I can’t agree with the author in many places.
English for instance is much more complex than Spanish, taking the phonetical, social factor as well as the transparency of the language structures. It’s slightly more difficult in grammar, but it’s quicker to learn the basics which are sufficient for the day-to-day verbal communication. This does not come from a deep analysis but a practical and personal experience.
Additionally languages don’t exist for their own sake. They’re here to help us express ourselves as human beings immersed in the culture of our countries. Therefore analysis of the languages need to take into account how far are we culturally from the country who’s language we want to learn.
To close this topic if only like to mention that this language difficulty issue did not previously exist. Before the fall of the Babel tower everyone spoke POLISH!
Yes this article is obviously euro-centric in that it goes into more detail when describing European languages, even the smallest ones such as Finnish, while it only mentions the biggest non-European languages like Mandarin or Arabic, and at that, in very broad and often incorrect terms. The parameters used to measure difficulty are also questionable. Different languages emphasize different aspects. While some are agglutinative (words are put together to increase complexity) like Somali, others are fusional (affixes are attached to a single stem word to describe entire context) like Tigrinya, and others are analytical (a plethora of auxiliary terms, tones and syntax variations are used to describe context) like Burmese. While some languages are more complex in their expression or reflection of status/rank/hierarchy, like Khmer, others are more complex in their portrayal of tense as well as distinguishing the hypothetical from actual through subjunctives, like Hebrew. Like many people have said before me, difficulty in learning a new language is more influenced by how similar your native language is, than by any inherent characteristics of any given language.
Hi there,
As far as I know, Japanese and Hungarian are the hardest to learn. I am hungarian, I have University degree (economics), I speak french, english, a bit of german. I think it is very difficult to express yourself correctly on our language, because you have to use the right sequence of words. Even I don’t use it the way I should. This language is completely strange and differs from any other language in Europe. So, if you want to chellange yoursel, learn hungarian! 🙂
A funny article!
I’m a Polish native speaker and I’m proud of it. In fact I managed to speak fluently this so complicated language in my high school times – exactly at 16 years indeed.
However I’ve found it recently – watching American or Australian TV series, that the fluency in English is hardly achievable for modern Anglosaxon citizens even after 21 years of their age. And how we can easily understand after this age limit they start to drink alcoholic beverages openly and it makes this effort in no way easier.
So I have to disagree with Japanese and Chinese being on the same level. I am fluent in Japanese and English but know some information on Chinese. Chinese has an infinite number of characters in writing (because they keep making them) and Japanese has a finite number, which takes people their entire lives to learn. That itself makes it extremely difficult for reading/writing but also, Japanese DOES have tenses, long words, changeable verbs, and gendered language, which is why you can’t put Japanese and Chinese together really. I just think you should change that false information on Japanese…
I’m not t saying that this research is entirely wrong but there is a clear misconception about how Asian languages are portrayed here if the Asian languages are so easy to master then why is it that most of the Europeans find it difficult to pronounce even the simplest of the words without an ascent. but anyways the whole point is where is Greek Sanskrit these are not dead languages, and if you consider Chinese and Japanese to be easy to learn when they have more characters then any other language I guess you must be a genius to say so but anyways all i got from this post was BIASED
If the sheer number of letters in a language is to be the basis for gauging whether a language is difficult or not, sure… Chinese and Japanese win. But when it gets down to it, that is just pure memorization rather than application of complex grammar systems. When you’re forever having to evaluate and re-evaluate which version of the same word you would be saying (as in the case of conjugating verbs and declining nouns etc), it really mucks up your head until you finally get used to it.
Chinese by comparison has concrete grammar. So you learn a grammar rule, you apply it, and you’ve pretty much got the hang of it in a short while. Getting your head around having to conjugate every verb you come across, making sure that it’s not only in the right tense, but also for the right subject takes a lot more getting used to.
It just depends on what you consider to be more “difficult”. For my part, memorization isn’t “difficult”, just a major time-sink. Remoulding the way my mind wants to express itself through intricate grammatical gymnastics, I find is more challenging.
Agreed. Chinese grammar is very easy to learn. My Chinese teacher pointed out at the end of the first year that with one minor exception we had already learned all the grammar of Chinese. This is an unusually short period of time.
Sorry, but being able to speak a language is not equivalent to understanding its grammar. Memorize the appropriate words (and equivalent writing!!!) for any given piece of information, situation, or social nuance, is even more important. You have learnt a language when you can actually speak it fluently, with only your accent giving you away as a non-native speaker. From that point of view Mandarine is a heck of a difficult language. Not for the grammar, but for the need to memorize all words and related written character. Sure, for ordering a beer you need one day of training, but for discussing and writing about academical stuff you never end studying it. The same applies to Japanese, which, alas, has such a messy written system (with each single character having up to 10-15 different readings) that grown-up Japanese people with hight degrees are often unsure of how to read them (please ask two different Japanese-speaking persons to write the fairly common word gokiburi – cockroach, and see the results…)
I really don’t understand what your complaint is. My comment was from my Chinese teacher, an academic who knew Chinese both as a fluent speaker and as a person who knew the nuances of Chinese grammar. I am quoting her. That’s what she said, and from my further study of Chinese and use of it in China and elsewhere I agree with her.
If you are saying that after one year I could not speak Chinese fluently, of course you are right. But this does not contradict what I wrote. Grammar ≠ fluency. Grammar ≠ vocabulary. Grammar ≠ 听力.
come on people….
I’m Portuguese i speak Polish, Spanish, French and English.
Due to my nationality Spanish and french was honestly a walk in the park. For a polish to learn russian is like from me spanish.
Each Language has it’s own difficulty some pronunciation other the number of consonants etc grammar. Well FUCKING HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
For me of course Polish was hard, but try to teach a Polish to have a good Portuguese pronunciation or any of you out there.
Polish IS a hard language, Portuguese has a difficult pronunciation, and we could go on and on trying to talk about what each language has, but at the end of the day What matters is communication.
If you are determined to learn a language and speak correctly with a good pronunciation you will achieve it.
I would love to hear you saying Szczebiot dzieci i skrzypienie drzwi przeszkadzało nieszczęsnej skrzypaczce w głośnym ćwiczeniu gry na skrzypcach.
Or
Rozrewolweryzowany rewolwerowiec wyindywidualizował się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu 🙂
I studied Polish for two months only, and can read that. Sure you will hear, and probably laugh, at my Italian accent, but I could read that, and you would understand the meaning.
The fact is: the article above overstates the importance of pronunciation in language learning, for the reason that Anglo-saxon people have a lot of problems with pronunciation. In the end, for a grown-up person, learning the vocabulary is the bigger PITA, and from that point of view, obviously, the closer the language, the easier you will learn it.
And, emh, well, since I live in Japan, and study Japanese and Chinese, I can tell you that NO, for a European person Polish is not as difficult as Japanese or Chinese (including writing, that is). Not even close…
I’m relieved to see the overwhelming majority of commentators here have pointed out the reasoning flaws quite well. Perhaps one thing should be added: A language’s difficulty level always needs to be evaluated in the context of the native language(s) as well as the number and variety of previously acquired languages which make up a learner’s foundation. Thus I believe an absolute model as suggested in the above article hardly serves any useful purpose. However, it is good to see your obviously avid interest in linguistics — A commendable trait, despite the premature nature of the degree of certainty conveyed up there.
This article made me furious as a Japanese language teacher. You also seemed to have missed that all important skill taught in school, research!
Let me just clear something for you about the Japanese language:
Japanese DOES Have verb changes-and MANY of them. Japanese has highly complicated grammar and for anyone from an English speaking background it is in fact opposite to composition of an English sentence. Not to mention there are many phrases that do not mean what they mean but are culturally appropriate in certain contexts -VERY CONFUSING for students.
Kanji (the most complicated alphabet in Japanese) has over 5000 characters and unless a Japanese person completes very high level post grad degree level study you will never be able to recognize more than approx. 3500. To ride off a students ability to remember how to recall and recognize this amount of characters shows you have virtually NO understanding of the complexities of learning a language. Oh and this is only one of the three alphabets in the Japanese language.
European language classes within their first year of study can hold conversations, this is not the case with Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese making it a much steeper learning curve than a European language due to the characters and the complex levels of language formality.
I totally agree! I am currently learning Japanese in school and it is really difficult for my classmates who only know English. I’m Chinese so I can relate Japanese to Chinese sometimes, but it does get difficult at times. Also, sometimes English speakers just don’t understand the difference in cultures affecting the language.
The fact is: the author of the article does not know Japanese (nor Chinese, as a matter of fact).
Not only in Japanese verbs are conjugated according to time, positive/negative action, potentiality, etc, but also according to the social status and situation of the speaker. Now, this last bit is much harder to understand for a European person than any “complicated” verbal system.
Plus: in Chinese you can start forming basic sentences early, but you progress slower and slower the more you are into it. With Japanese you can’t even start forming basic sentences early, because you need to restructure the entire sentence backward, and then adapt it to the social context (which means the same thing can be said in three-four different ways, depending on the person you are talking to).
As far as I am concerned, and among the languages I have studied seriously / studied a bit and “kind of studied but not seriously” (which are, in total: Ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, Finnish, Icelandic, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, my first language being Italian), the most difficult one has proven to be Japanese.
Dear Beth, I think you need to learn the meaning of alphabet, as in Japanese there is no alphabet. Hiragana and Katakana are bisyllabic, and Kanji (Chinese characters) is even more clearly not an alphabet. If you want to sound an expert in languages, do learn the basics first.
Said this, I also agree with you that the article was not well written, it puts together Japanese and Chinese and then refers to “intonations” that are a peculiarity of Mandarin and Cantonese, but not Japanese.
I also disagree from your statement that “Japanese has highly complicated grammar”, it has not if compared to languages such as Latin, German but even Italian, Spanish and English! (just think of how many verb tenses and forms are in the English language).
When you refer to the “word order” of sentences, you are in the realm of syntax and not grammar and, it’s true the “Japanese way” is different from English, but very easy to learn and produce.
I have no objection about difficulty of Polish, but I have to mention that this article is inaccurate, because according to U.S Defense Institute, Korean is the most difficult language for English speakers to learn.
I enjoyed reading the article (though would argue that Czech should be up there too), however disagree with the statement that language is *only* about ears & tongue, while holding little importance for the written part. Consider the deaf or mute: language is thus visual for them. Consider the blind: language is sensory. Now consider the human memory: it is prone to forgetfulness & error. An efficient way to evolve & learn, even communicate across cultures & physical barriers, is via written form. I may speak Chinese yet I miss so much when I can’t read it in a book, on the web when shopping for something or type it to a friend in China over e-mail. When passing information down from generation to generation, when you find a 200 year old science or history book, there is no mistake about what was once said. We can then build upon that more accurately & efficiently. Language is not only about ears & tongue. Ears & tongue are only about the part of language that is about ears & tongue. It has its limits. Just as melody is only one part of music, once we began making instruments, the limits expanded, just as the written notes had a wider reach of sharing. Cavemen realized a need to ‘put it in stone’. Look how much we can learn about them/ourselves because of those pictures. Comparing a written form in a negative way to some ‘Elite’ & holding less regard for books & skillful writing (even this article has many errors that I, if I was a student of English also learning from this article, would take bad example from) seems to be a trend in our generation. What is wrong with trying to do (whatever you do) as best you can? Maybe if we spent less time on Facebook we would have more time to learn the language at hand. Most people (even if they aren’t government employees or elite) *can* make the time, if they really want to.
I agree with many of the points Romina made. Also, if the difficulty with pronunciation is one of the main issues the author has with Polish, the formula he provided is missing pronunciation and phonology. And where is that taken from? Where are the values he provides taken from as well?
I lived and worked in South Korea for a year and also tried to learn the language. I don’t agree that tones have little effect on your ability to communicate. I tried to practice tones with colleagues and my students and … nothing. And I’m not linguistically challenged. I learned English (still speak it with an accent, mostly in the vowel sounds), had a good command of German, Spanish, and Russian, and rudimentary Czech. But when it came to tones, I couldn’t get them. I know that Poles can be patronizing to people who are trying to learn Polish and will correct you on your pronunciation or grammar, but use that to your advantage.
Why should Czech be there? It is basically a rural version of Polish with many German loan words… Just read about the history of Czech writing….
Czech is a rural version of Polish? Are you nuts?
You wanted to say that Polish writing looks similar to Czech writing in 14. century?
It seems a lot of people who have found the time to comment on this article, havnt found the time to read it. At least not fully. It was plainly stated that this piece was not comparing regional dialects of main language groups.
Im Irish born and living in finland, which is, by the way is a bi-lingual country. It is really tough to learn the language. I found a faster path to learn by spending more time speaking than learning from a book. That being said , I went to full time language courses for a year and a half before braving the public. The national works and employer dept say that new comers to finland and the language should expect 15 years to be fluent enough for everyday use. Finnish cannot be picked up by just being around native speakers in public.
Good luck and a sincere thumbs up to those who wish to try.
Speak for yourself. Estonians have picked up Finnish by just being around native speaker.Not only that, many of us picked it up their language by watching Finnish tv alone. Call us an exception but don’t say it can’t be done.
Honestly debating to know which language is the most difficult has always sounded kind of silly to me. Of course some languages might be more complex than others. But it mainly depends on the languages you already know. It’s much easier to learn French when you are a native English speaker than when you are Korean for example.
But all that doesn’t really matter. Every language learner knows that what makes you successful or not in learning a language is your motivation. You can learn any language if you are motivated. I learnt both Spanish and Korean together, and I speak better Korean. Although Spanish is definitely easier to learn as a French than Korean.
You can learn any language as long as you are motivated. The most important is to really want to learn that language and enjoy the process.
I’m native spanish and french speaker, I got to learn english, german, slovak and polish and truth be told, I think Hungarian or Finnish can be more difficult. I agree that Polish pronunciation is the hardest I had to face (sz/s`; cz/c`; dz/z`) but as far as I know, hungarian or finnish grammar are far more complicated than Polish’s.
I will have to agree with the people who contradicted the distinguished author that Polish is not all that difficult to learn. My mother tongue is Rumanian. I learned some Russian in school. I taught myself Czech and then Polish, which I mainly picked up by talking with native speakers and reading newspapers. As a matter of fact, after struggling my way to acceptable Czech pronunciation, I found Polish to be very easy. 99% of the people cannot as adults learn to pronounce as a native in ANY language. But a long life has taught me that that is not really necessary. As long as you can make yourself understood and do not sound like a circus clown (which many people unfortunately do). Obviously, Indo-European languages are easier to learn for a native speaker of an Indo-European language. The grammar is rather a good toolbox than a formidable enemy. Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian have 7 noun cases. Not that difficult to learn. Slovak, Russian and Bielarusan have (almost) lost the 7th case (vocative), except when invoking the Allmighty. There are a number of prepositions and each requires its specific case. Czech then runs like a machine. Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusan, too. You just have to learn the words. Russian is somewhat tougher because of irregularities (e.g. noun plurals and ablative/prepositional case) and also because of the large amount of sub-culture idioms. E.g. in a market no Russian asks “Skol’ko stoit?” (How much does this cost). They would go: “Po chem?” (what for one piece…). Bulgarian/Macedonian are a different ballgame altogether. Like Rumanian, Albanian, and Neo-Greek they have a Balkanic type grammar, i.e. no cases, enclytic articles, and a simple verb structure. Tenses are a real in Italian, Spanish (I take also in Catalan, Galego, etc.) and French. As for English, it is easy to master at basic level, but to speak it nicely it takes years of learning and you never quite graduate… It helps if your mother tongue has articles (e.g. Slavs have hard time using English articles, which they do not have in their own language). For the rest of us it still is tough to learn when to use “the” and when not to… The sheer amount of words and idioms is also crushing. So please! Leave Polish alone! Will you?
i think the article is really interesting, however the ranking is troubling. the degree of difficulty of a language is relative to what the learner knows. I have heard it said that Polish was the more complex but have heard this for many others..but what was their criteria for saying this? usually it is bias. I also think that this author to take into consideration many indigenous languages, or lesser-known languages, which I am told are quite complex. I have noticed that many of the more commonly studied European languages, will have some feature that is more difficult while another than is easier than others. And with some Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean, you also have the social aspect where you must adjust your register, which i think will add another degree of difficultly. Language has nothing to do with intelligence. When we learn our native language naturally we all acquire a grammar by about age 5, the rest of the development is about the individual and how much he or she reads, etc. The bias of this article is obvious. to say that Poles are more intelligent b/c their language has some complexity compared to other Euro languages is to assume that there is a correlation between language and intelligence..there is not. For example, someone who is multilingual usually is gifted with opportunity not more intelligence but more flexibility..
Then there is also the subjective barriers. For example, I have studied several languages and could never get French…i think that the fact that i do not like the sound of the language..or that i did not find it useful in my life…was a barrier to my learning it..There are so many variables in a languages difficulty. Now i am studying Turkish, and i find it extremely challenging b/c of the suffixes, yet it has no gender or articles, has regular verb conjugations, and it is phonetic, these are all features that make it easier than French or English for example. So i think it is better to say that a languages ease or difficulty is relative to what the learner knows.
The difficulty of learning a foreign language highly depends on your own mother tongue, and language group from which your language originates. You completely discarded these things. Russian is way easier for English speakers than, lets say, Chinese.
Also, you completely neglected the fact, that different languages have different ‘mentality’. So every European language, for a European person is easier than any Asian language, because we can simply understand the intrinsic logic of language better.
You put far too much emphasis on grammar, which in fact, for a lot of people is the easiest part to learn in a foreign language. Grammar can be learnt. Languages with a lot of exceptions, hard pronunciation and difficult writing systems is the real tough nut, because you have to work blood and tears to master them, and no logic and rules are there to help you on that task.
I myself speak 4 different languages from 4 different language groups.
This article has almost no sense. I’m portuguese and I ‘ve learnt Polish for 2 years (level B1.2) I can speak fluently in daily life. I use 6 of 7 declesion cases when I speak or write. And I know other portuguese people who also speak polish without many troubles. The Polish people are very talented, their country is great but come on, their language is not much difficult at all. It’s a slavic language so their language is similar to ucranian and almost equal to slovakian (even for a non native speaker like me it’s quite easy to understand almost everything in slovakian). Please go first to hungary and then take your own conclusions. In Polish few words have root in latin (altough just few), but there is logic, sense in all grammar and there are RULES. People say that there are a lot of exceptions in polish but problem is that native speakers do not know the rules of the language they speak because for them this is something automatic. Of course there are some exceptions also but not many. Every language has exceptions. Please look at phonetic rules in portuguese and you will see!! In Polish everything is read as it’s written. Maybe for british people it may be a bit more difficult but maybe because their langiage is too poor in terms of phonetics and they do not have many sounds. The 7 cases, all of them have rules, please look on a internet for a table, there are some of them simplified and you will see that you can say everything correctly just by looking to the end that you should add to the word depending on some verbs, prepositions etc. There are also tables where you can check which case should be used for each preposition. You can keep a table in your pocket and each time you neet to say something you just look at this and after few days you know it by heart. The conjugation has sense, the endins are the same for all verbs and the problem between niedokonany i dokonany, well, after a while you get familiar with the two forms for each verb. Most of them you can guess the right form and the conjugation endings are always the same.
There are 7 cases but the vocative is not used often, so we get 6. From this 6 one is the nominative so there are no changes. We get 5. From this 5 the dative, you use it mostly with the pronouns, so once you know (by practicing on daily life) the changes in the pronouns you don’t need almost anything else for a B1 level. You get 4. Ok, german has also 4 cases. So that’s all. You have Hungarian which is a mess, please go to Hungary and tell me if you can distinguish any word, even “police”. They have a lot of accents, they use many vowels in a row. They have a LOT of cases. The same with basque and finish!! These are difficult languages in europe because they do not belong to indoeuropean system. I can not say anything about Chinese or Japaneses because their system is completelly different so it’s hard to make comparisions.
W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzczcinie haha Stół w powyłamywanymi nogami Probujcie.
I sing the whole poem to my kids before bedtime 🙂
There are definitely verb changes in Japanese and there are genders in Chinese, even if it’s only in writing… Also, the sentence structure is completely different from English and most English speaking people find it difficult to learn these two languages because the culture is just so different. Oh, and don’t forget that there are levels of formality and respect in writing and speaking in these languages. Being fluent only in speech doesn’t mean you’re fluent in the language. Indeed, it’s easy to meet the speech in Chinese and Japanese, but if you are to be fluent in the language, meaning reading and writing as well, then it will take you many years. The main reason is because the Chinese language doesn’t have and alphabet and the Japanese having 2, but still including kanji (characters borrowed from the Chinese language). If you’re telling people to do their research properly, I think you should research properly before you write something.
i find it silly to find so many people arguing from the viewpoint that harder or more complex is better. the purpose of language is to communicate ideas and all languages serve that purpose very well. from this viewpoint a better language would be a SIMPLER less complex language. like english or spoken chinese. take german or finish spelling for instance. they are very straightforward with few exception. languages that have had spelling reform, also tend to be closer in written and spoken form. if a more complex language was better it would be harder to spell. polish fits this bill quite nicely, so does english, but i hardly find nonsense spelling to be a good thing in a language. i suppose it could be argued that it preserves the history of the origins of words or semantics or something but really it’s a pain in the ass. language should be easy. if you can make a perfectly good clock with 5 parts, why would you use 500? to be fancy and complicated? it’s just more crap to break! if you can communicate perfectly well with less verb conjugation and genders, and plural forms. that why add unecessary complexity to the language? i agree that polish is difficult and complex. i don’t think it’s the most difficult language to learn, and i don’t think difficult complicated languages are somehow better than regular rule abiding, concise ones.
Therefore, let us stick to our languages, because nations history & culture goes with them. But to “communicate ideas” without borders we should pick the easiest language in the world, which spreading doesn’t involve spreading certain culture: Esperanto 😀
Yeah, and then all the cultural connotations, customs and their appreciation, the joy of discovering the cultures and lives of others, appreciation of the variety of humankind and the like would all be lost, if we accept that “culturless” communication is possible at all. You seem to be a dinosaur, Michal, and remind me of the father of a school-mate of 45 years ago, who used to propose Esperanto to whoever was listening, with a faint sadness of acceptance of defeat on his face, not that of the belief of a prophet. Ever since, you’re about the first other who comes forward with this idea. I guess it was just a joke, to bring in a new colour, right?
Not at all, Peter 🙂
There is no loss of customs, nor cultures in the vision I’d suggest. Today’s globalised world penetrates every place on earth on every possible level of life with the English-based culture.
Undoubtedly we do need a lingua franca, but I am pretty sure, that a constructed language (such as Esperanto) would do much less harm to national heritage and culture.
PS I wouldn’t say I’m a “dinosaur”, rather than a “sentimentalist” 😀
I completely agree with Ricardo, and Basia – every language has tongue twisters!
Polish, with its only 3 tenses – past, present and future and the lack of articles is surely not the most difficult language to learn. OK, it may take a while for the beginner to come to talking level, as for that you need the cases, but isn’t this the same also for languages like Russian, Czech (which by the way has far less vowels) etc? In my opinion the cases make Polish an interesting language, and according to my experience the problems of Polish natives who have problems to distinguish letters like ż and rz are no problems for foreigners, as they learn the language differently.
It was stated in the article, that the openness of people to help with their language plays an important role. In this aspect Poland is excellent as well, and as soon as a foreigners tries to speak the language, they are more than happy they do not need to switch over in German, English or another language they know. I was told that it is almost impossible to learn a language like Finnish, Swedish etc. as everybody would switch over to English, as soon as they realize they are speaking with a foreigner…
Besides, there are no dialects in Polish (except for very small areas), so the language is a lot easier to understand for non-natives than even English or American (these are 2 main dialects, and have you ever traveled England, where the dialect changes every few kilometers, not to speak from strong dialects like in Northern Ireland)…
I certainly cannot agree to the fact stated above. I learned Polish in a much shorter time than English, and I speak both languages at least with the same fluency…
Pozdrawiam,
Maya
what are you talking about? Polish don’t have a dialects? Polish people have many of them and many people are talking in those dialects. what about Śląski, Wielkopolski? we have even other language as Kaszubski is considered as their own language.
maybe Polish has only three times (but being logical on this planet there are only three times and other things are just types of those times and in Polish we have it too!) we have two types of past time: complex and simple. and Polish has pluperfect but it’s not used anymore only in speeches or something.
about Asian languages I’m studying Korean and i think hangul (their alphabet) and sound of their language is not difficult at all… maybe difference between can bring problems but when Koreans are speaking fast they don’t distinguish those too. their grammar is simple as it is organized pretty well. from Asian languages i would say Thai is really difficult one and Vietnamese could be more difficult than Chinese because they have 6 tones.
this types of arguments are useless because it’s personal thing about difficulties of languages. for some people one thing can be hard for others another thing is hard. but i can say one thing. maybe you can’t be fluent in any language as u study it later in your life but your pronunciation can be almost perfect and it will be hard to distinguish if you are native or not. in polish it’s a problem. there is a miracle when non native speaker speak fluent polish even if it’s Czech or Russian or any other sloviac language speaking person. and that’s a fact.
I have to disagree again, being fluent in Polish, Finnish, speaking Swedish, English and German as well, that although Polish has 3 named tenses, all the tenses you know exist in form of different words or prefixes and suffixes. Perfect, future perfect, future continuous, continuous, etc. So instead of three forms plu two sffixes or auxillarry verb, you have to learn many words. And it goes like that with any othe aspect of the language.
But learner hase to reach some level first to notice the wider horizon.
Looking at Polish and Poles i truly believe that the language is a reflaction of nation’s character. Poles just like to make things complicated.
As a German learning Polish, I must say that it is not that hard. Yes, the pronounciation is hard in the beginning, but it is much more exact than english or german. Every character is only spoken in one way and not in many like in german and english. When I started learming Russian, I had no problem with the grammar (as it is similar to polish grammar) but with the pronounciation. So many different ways to pronounce the characters… uff! I have no scientific proof, but I would disagree that the polish language is the most hard to learn. It has a consistent, reliable pronounciation, many international words and a grammar that is logical most of the time. Of course there are exceptions, but they are in every language!
Bzdura, język polski jest najłatwiejszy ;]
Popieram w całej rozciągłości 🙂
I ja rowniez. 🙂
How can it be that there are seven genders in Polish or in any language?
Masculine, Feminine, Neuter… the other four are in the mind of the author of this article.
Every Polish child is taught in primary school, that nouns can be divided into three grammar genders, which are (as mentioned by Piotr) męski (masculine), żeński (feminine) & neutralny (neuter). However, forms appearing with feminine & neuter nouns in plural form are the same in Polish, and therefore plural genders got a different name: “męskoosobowy” for the form connected to masculine and “niemęskoosobowy” for the form connected to feminine & neuter. You can see, that there is no sensible reason to count these as 5 genders, as there is no reason to count genders of a language having masculine-feminine-neuter both in singular, as in plural form as 6.
But why — you may ask — isn’t plural masculine just called masculine (męski) and plural non-masculine just called non-masculine (niemęski)? Here things get a little bit trickier.
There is another surface of noun categorisation — if you will: masculine nouns can either be personal (osobowe) or impersonal (nieosobowe), and masculine impersonal nouns can either be animate (żywotny) or inanimate (nieżywotny). Membership to a certain category of a given noun is as natural as it possibly could be, thus (as far as I’m concerned) there are no exceptions.
Masculine impersonal nouns in plural form happen to behave exactly as feminine and neuter, and that’s the origin of names “męskoosobowy” (masculine personal) and “niemęskoosobowy” (not masculine personal). One can also find another regularity: masculine animate (both personal and impersonal) nouns have got accusative form equal to genitive form, and masculine inanimate nouns have got accusative form equal to nominative form.
Traditionally dictionaries only mentioned about the membership to one of the three genders, but now the Council for the Polish Language recommends to present more detailed information, i.e. to distinguish five of these grammar categories.
And now you have all the data 😀 Children are taught there are three (masculine, feminine, neuter), I’d say there are four (masculine personal, masculine impersonal, feminine, neuter), and the Council sais there are five (masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, neuter).
To me Polish is an easier language than German, because it is very difficult to remember the gender of German nouns, whereas Polish nouns have endings that tell you which gender they are. Yes, there are some regularities in German gender, but the language is full of exceptions in this regard. Now as for spelling, English is much harder than Polish…English is full of homonyms…and English is also full of sounds that are spelled in different ways…as in ‘trough’ or ‘fish’…moreover note the difference in pronunciation in ‘trough ‘ and ‘ through’ and ‘thorough’…Polish doesn’t do stuff like that. Also, one of the most common words in English, that needs to be used constantly: ‘the’…uses the ‘th’ sound which is very difficult for foreigners to say and to differentiate from the ‘f’sound. Furthermore, English has American and English spelling , as in ‘centre’ and ‘center’ to the extent that books published in England have to have different editions than in the U.S. Just on Saturday I was speaking with a native Polish speaker in English…and she tried to say the word ‘dawn’, but neither I, who was raised in the U.S., nor my wife, who is a native-born and speaking Australian who does not know Polish, could understand her. What she said sounded like ‘don’…Now the Polish -origin person has lived in Australia for over 20 years and has consistently worked with Australians for many years. Then there is the problem of the extent of English as opposed to extent of Polish words. Do you know the meaning of that important English word ‘meretricious'(I saw it in one of Anita Brookner’s novels.) When I looked up the word in the dictionary, I found the word had a very useful, significant meaning, which is probably why Ms Brookner had used it. The Polish equivalent, which I don’t know, because I was raised in the U.S., is I suspect more directly understandable and less arcane in that language. I’m sorry no other example comes to mind, but many complex concepts are easier to grasp in Polish, because they are formed from combining simple Polish words and not from Latin or Germanic words…O! here is an example…wspolczucie[wspol=common; czucie=feeling]…sympathy…any Polish child would understand it the first time he or she heard it, not so for an English nativer-speaking child. In general, feel the writer of the comment does not seem to have grasped that what is easy for the native speakers of a language is difficult for the non-native speakers. Try to pronounce “u” or “r” in French. Also, in learning a foreign language, it easier to learn a language that is similar to yours…eg, Spanish or Italian is easy if you are French, but Russian is quite a challenge.
He probably meant masculine, feminine, neuter,personal, impersonal, animate, inanimate.
In my opinion that is highly improbable 🙂
I am pretty sure he counted it as five singular genders (masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, neuter) and two more plural genders (masculine personal, non-masculine personal).
Learn a Khoisan_languages and judge the relative scale of challenge.
The article is too euro-centric and error-ridden to be taken seriously, even if it raises some interesting issues. My native language is English and I am fluent in Finnish, German, Russian, Swedish, and Estonian. Additionally, I have a working to rudimentary knowledge of French, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese, Dutch, West Frisian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Japanese, Latin, Esperanto, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Hungarian, Vepsian, Saami, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin, Visigothic, Yiddish, Old and Middle English, Tok Pisin, Old High German, and Old and Middle English.
I want to fake issue with two claims made in the article.
1. The claim that Polish, and by implication Portuguese, are notorious for being languages with ‘shikshteen shyibilantsh’. Learning to pronounce and hear them simply requires intense articulatory and auditory training for the sibilantly/shibilantly challenged. A program that produces visible sound spectrograms in real time will help define the boundaries between the sounds. I might add that even if they are not sibilants, the two English fricatives spelled ‘th’ as in thigh, ether, and teeth [voiceless], and thy, either, and teethe [voiced] cause every bit as much stress to speakers of most languages as the hissing and hushing sibilants of Polish and Portuguese.
2. The claim that English has ‘little or no grammar’ is a shocking display of ignorance. The grammar of a language is the traffic rules, behabioral norms, and work assignments for the various componnts and subsystems of a language The facts that everyone speaking English knows that “I don’t like cats” is a legitimate and polyvalent English sentence, whereas “Do cast not me liking do do” is not, or that “I don’t like cats” is the generally accepted norm in spoken English, but that “Cats, I don’t dig ’em” and “I utterly detest felines of the domestic variety” mean the same thing but are socially or stylistically marked, suffice to demonstrate that English has a systematic and comples grammar, even if it is based more on ordering and sequentiality than on inflection and word form changes. The standard university grammars of English run to about 1500 pages and they demonsrate, among other thing, that “She was wòrking oút in the garden”, a statement about what she was doing in the garden, and “She was wórking out in the garden”, a statement about where she was working, are completely different sentences.
That’s a very good article. Indeed I could fully agree with the comparison of these languages. I speak Polish , English and German. With the first two fluently and german intermediate for now. I can admit Polish seems extremely hard to learn and true, english being very easy to learn for communication ( flexible and clean alphabet with no letter accents as well as more vowels than consonants in a word ) but very hard when you want to speak it very good and fluently. Still Polish is at top for its hardness – to all learners of Polish language , try this:
“Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzeszynie” ( a cricket whizzing in grass in Szczebrzeszyn ) or for example the word “Ręka” ( hand ) would have even more than 10 declination in Polish language: Ręką , Ręce , Ręku , Ręki , Rękę , Rękoma , Rękami , Rąk…..and so on , good luck for all learners ! 😉
I believe that Czech ranks right up there with Polish in terms of its difficulty. Czech has 7 cases, and an r similar to one that exists in Polish, that is so difficult Vaclav Havel could not even pronounce it properly!
Czech “r” is exactly the same as in Polish 😀 It also exists in many different languages and just takes some practice.
Among different Czech sounds I’d choose your “ř” as nearly impossible to learn using fluently 😀
“Třista třicet tři stříbrných stříkaček stříkalo přes třista třicet tři stříbrných střech.” ^^
If the author is actually trying to judge inherent difficulty of languages (note that I don’t agree with most of his points), then there is a way to do this, contrary to what many have said: how hard is it for a pre-literate human, i.e. a baby, to natively learn the language?
Holding constant a whole bunch of stuff having to do with family life, and taking the median speed at which a child learns a language would give you the easiest and the hardest languages. The author in fact does seem to indicate he something like this in mind, based on his remark about when the average native speaker of Polish becomes fluent.
This still wouldn’t tell you necessarily which language was best (or worst), because perhaps we as a society prefer a certain kind of language over others. The easiest and hardest metrics I proposed just tell you time-to-learn (TtL) of the language, whereas we may care about the expressiveness, explicitness, difficulty for second-language learners, or many other criteria. All languages would fall somewhere along a certain set of continuums based on such criteria, and we could only say we preferred a language more FOR A CERTAIN PURPOSE.
Native Estonian here. It is pretty interesting to see my language put up so high in the difficulty scale 😛
Grammar is hell, and I still don’t know or remember all the details that I learned in school. I don’t even remember what all the 14 cases are haha, but at least the pronounciation system is incredibly simple, there’s no letter bending going on like in english… every letter no matter what word it appears in is almost always pronoucned same, exceptions are L, N and S which can be pronouced in more “high pitched” manner, I don’t know the correct grammatical term for this…
Those stacked consonants in Polish and other languaces aren’t so easy for me, my language is filled of vowels and several non tonal sounds in a row don’t just happen.
i’m somewhat amazed at how you have no African or Asian languages (other than Japanese and mandarin) on here…I understand you cannot be expected to classify every language with more than 1,000,000 speakers but I am severely disappointed in this myopic focus on the languages of Europe–the smallest continent in the world.
the facts listed below are from Wikipedia but I’m sure they are generally accurate lists of NATIVE speakers of various languages of the world (in order of my interest)
Xhosa – 7.6 million speakers
Kiswahili- 15-25 million speakers
Haitian Creole – 9.6 million speakers
Yoruba – 28 million speakers
Twi – 11 million speakers
Hindi – 180 million speakers
Gujarati language 66 million speakers
Indonesian 23 million speakers
Punjabi 100 million
Farsi 6o million
Urdu 65 million
Wolof 4.2 million speakers
Aymara 2.2 million speakers
The author knows the “stats” of a lot of different languages, but seems not to understand that every language has different areas of complexity. For example, sure, the case system of English is nonexistent except in pronouns, but our prepositional verbs can be a nightmare for those learning the language. The author also didn’t seem to realize that the overall difficulty of a language has a lot to do with what you already know: Polish is easier to meet for a speaker of a Slavic language than for a native Swahili speaker. It’s not just a matter of sound system, grammar, and vocabulary, but cultural assumptions and values.
Polish does have prominent features (or stats) that make it look complex, but look under the hood of any language and you’ll find they just divide up their complexity in different ways.
After 20-30 years of intensive Hungarian learning maybe we wont realize in your first sentence that you are not a native Hungarian (maybe) 🙂 but i never met any non native Hungarian speaker how is speaking nearly flawless.
Hello,
that article, though probably a well-wishing one, contains a lot of misconceptions about the Polish language and culture. Polish culture, and in the past Polish-based multi-lingual multiculture, has always transmitted well and this is why it is the 1st or 2nd language of about 60 million people round the world. The red spot on the map suggests that Polish is limited to post-war Poland only. What about Polish speakers and bilinguals in the former non-existent Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, i.e., LIthuania, Belarussia, and Ukraine? Polish was accepted there without any polonising pressures ages ago. The three periods when Polish DID come across serious difficulties in transmission were the Partitions (1772-1995) and joint nazi-soviet occupation (1939-1945), and, to an extent, the communist occupation (1945-1989).
Regular Polish spelling is actually much easier to learn and write than English one, which is, in turn, idiosyncratic and allows spelling the same sound in a number of different ways. the problems with spelling faced by Polish teenegers emerge from the fact that they do not practise it, or read enough. As for English grammar, it must be remembered that it has been subject to profound grammatical simplifications over centuries as a result of language and culture mixing since at least the Viking invasions.
When it comes to write, french is very hard, 90% of native speakers make mistakes. On the other hand, polish is very easy to write as soon as you know the rules.
I think every languages has its own difficulties, and there is no absolute ranking.
Sorry, but every single language is easy to write if you know the rules. My friend speaks polish well, reads, but doesn’t write. Of course he can write but it has no meaning in polish.
Polish has a stupid accent. If you didn’t listen to polish when you were a baby, your polish is very funny and hard to understand for native polish speaker. I don’t even mention about these syllable dz, dż, cz, sz, dżdż and many others.
First of all, the article doesn’t explain why Swahili and Hindini languages are difficult.
I disagree with the article of putting French in the same level as German and harder than Spanish. I am Spanish and I speak English and I have learnt some French, Finnish, Swahili and at the moment I am learning German. French has more or less the same grammar as Spanish and being a Latinate language as Spanish is not difficult to learn it (if you already speak one of those). The only complication of it, is the pronunciation. Spanish has a lot of spelling rules that if you don’t learn it, would make your life difficult when writing it eg. “cien” means a hundred and ” pies” is feet. So centipede should be in Spanish “cienpies”. However, there is a rule that you cannot write “n” before “p” and have to write “m”. So at the end centipede in Spanish is “ciempies” and not “cienpies” that would be the logic. There are many rules like this one. I have never seen these rules in any of the languages I have learnt before. Foreigners find it difficult to pronounce properly the double “rr” and the “j” in Spanish. I always find it funny when I tell them to say “cerrajero”.
German is much more difficult than French, you have to be constantly thinking, which is the direct compliment of the sentence you are going to say, so you know where you have to put the akkustaiv and the nominative and the dativ in the sentence. Writing it, when you have time can be ok but to speak it (have less time to think what you are going to say) and have a conversation with a correct grammar can be a nightmare.
Swahili’s grammar is the opposite of I would say any European language but don’t have much knowledge to say all of the languages. You usually have the structure of the pronoun and then the verb. The root of the verb is usually at the beginning and when you want to change the tense, is the end of the verb what it is removed eg. the verb dance would be I dance, I am dancing, I danced ….In Swahili all verbs starts with ku eg. Kuhemeya, Kuenea, kuwika, Kuwa… Kuhemeya means to buy so to say “I buy” it would be ninahemeya. “Ku” has to be removed from the verb and add the pronoun and the tense at the beginning of the verb. “Ni” means I and “na” means it is in the present form. To make the sentence in negative of the first person, in singular, in present (I don’t buy) would be “Sihemeyi”. It is difficult to imagine that “ninahemeya” and “sihemeyi” are actually the same verb and comes from “kuhemeya”. This makes it very difficult for a person, whose native language is French, English… Because you have to switch off from what you are used to when conjugating verbs. AND making plurals is even worse because there are 6 groups and these are grouped depending if they are plants, people, things etc. Nevertheless, the complication comes that apart from learning that if a word belongs to that group has to change to that way, also the adjectives, the possessives, the prefix, pronouns, verbs… has to change too. For example making an adjective in plural would change depending of which group the noun belongs too. However, the pronunciation is fine because you say what you read and they don’t have any complicated phonemes, as other languages do.
I lived five months in Finland and it was ok because the pronunciation is also more or less fine and the basics like “my name is..” it is fairly ok. However, I know that once you get deeper in the language is horrible to learn it due to its complexity in grammar and rules.
I have Polish friends and went to Poland for holidays. I always like to learn the basic words like “hello, thanks, you are welcome….” . I don’t know how many times they have repeated me how to say thanks in Polish (Dziękuję) that up today, I still find it difficult to pronounce it correctly. It is so complicated Polish phonetics that I don’t even want to know how the grammar is.
Welsh and Basque are other languages, which are not mentioned and are very difficult to learn too.
It recals me the scene from old Polish movie, when Polish soldier is interrogated by SS officer:
-Name und Forename?
-Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz…
-?
-Geboren?
-Chrząszczyżeboszyce, powiat Łękołody
-???
In fact, it was “Chrząszczyżewoszyce ” 🙂
FIA: the seven genders in Polish is not exactly true. Like most slavonic languages there is “male (living)”, “male” (non-living), “female”, “neutral”. Polish has something, that could be translated as “unknown” when it comes to plural.
As a Czech, mostly I have no trouble understanding Polish, because once you speak several languages Polish just sounds like Czech person speaking with a lisp.
The fact, that their words are so long is because the language itself did not evolve as mush as the other ones, and they still keep stuff like “sz”, for which Czech has “č”.
Therefore, I think Czech is more difficult, with also seven cases, same number of genders, wicked exceptions in both and tenses that majority of Czech can’t even use. Polish just looks like it.
Tom
I am fluent in Polish as a foreign language and I can only confirm that it is extremely hard to learn. Even in Warszaw you will almost never meet anyone from a non-slavic background who can say a few sentences in a row without serious mistakes.
I’ve heard that for Japanese Finnish (my native language) is easier to learn than English because we pronounce the alphabets same way with Japanese. (exceptions are: y u & j) (I have Japanese friends and we’ve tested that vice versa.)
We have also many many same words but with different meaning,
like: kana, sika, kulkulupa, inari etc.. and some rules in Finnish language is easier to absorb if you’re from Japan.
-Bon desu !! 😉
this article is not only euro-centric, it’s EGO-centric…
you cannot grade languages on the basis of how difficult it is for YOU to learn it as a second language, because what is difficult for one person might be easy for another who has a similar language as mother toungue or simply a better memory to remind new words, or a better capacity to reproduce unknown sounds, or a quicker mind to absorb grammatical rules…
if you are talking about languages which are most difficult to learn as mother tongues for children, well the grading proposed in this article does not make any sense there either, for in order to make an objective comparison you would need to have similar contexts and teaching methods in all the different countries compared, which you don’t have…
if the author wants to make an apology of Polish people, why not: Poland is indeed a nice country with an admirable history, but please do not try to be scientific on this one, for the result is way too childish….
What are these statements such as ” a teacher in NYC told me that foreigners meet mandarine easily (!) or “all the people I know learnt Italian easily, even accountants” ????? Come on!!!
As Italian native speaker, I have hardly met any foreigner (even with romance mother tongues, let alone Polish) who could speaks Italian without making any mistake with the grammar (let alone the pronounciation). However, I met way too many people who think they can speak my language just because they learn “ciao bella” or some weird “grazie mucho” / “io hablo italiano”… 🙂
And what does “easy” or “difficult” mean, anyway? because if you want to reach a level where you can master all the nuances of a language as a (well-educated) native speaker, well… this is always extremely difficult, no matter what language you are talking about.
Languages are like human beings (they are human’s way of communication): they are all different and equally beautiful – with some we will find more confortable, others will give us more headaches, some we will never really understand… but no one is superior to any other!
a good day to all
I am bothered by the heavy emphasis put on the number of syllables in an average word. It isn’t that simple. Languages which encode a great deal of information in the form of morphology can have very long words that are built up from smaller parts according to basic rules. If you know the morphemes and rules for combining them, the fact that the words are long doesn’t make them any more difficult. In fact, this situation might be easier than if you have to memorize many small words which have little information encoded in their morphology and each represent a very richly detailed concept with no clues as to the words meaning encoded in its morphology. Polish has long words but this is because it’s a fusional language. Words are heavily inflected with small particles that “tag” them with pieces of syntactic meaning. These words can be broken into smaller parts and decoded. Also, consider languages like Mandarin. The words are short, sure, but tone must also be taken into account. Even some of the Scandanavian languages are pitch-accented which increases their level of complexity. There are so many factors mediating the relationship between word length and language difficulty that I can’t understand why it would be weighted more heavily than grammar.
Good point.
As someone said here, this article is rather “patriotic” than professional.
And regarding the leght of words, another reason in Polish is that often there 2 or 3 letters for one phone (is this the right term? I mean the smallest “sound” unit in speech).
Hi Mark,
Very interesting essay. I haven’t read all of them yet, but I just want to write a quick comment.
You know, a decade ago I would not had believed that Polish is the hardest language to learn. I am an avid language learner myself. Natively Indonesian, English was not even my second language (Javanese was my first, and it has its own characters too). I also have a Bachelor in Japanese Language and Literature, and I agree with you that as a spoken word the Grammar is not that hard. Then I also taught myself Italian, Spanish and French, the Latin-based language so to speak, once you speak one you can more or less understand the others, even Portuguese.
Then I had a girlfriend from Slovakia. She is my wife now. Guess what, Slovak is the most difficult language I have ever learned. And guess something else. as soon as I can get by with my Slovak, suddenly I could understand Czech and Polish too 🙂 I believe these languages came from the same root and that’s why I can understand them.
As I said, I haven’t read all of your essay, but what about Hindi and Swahili (or African languages)?
Regards,
Chris
Well, this was written by 100% Polish guy who only has American name and was born there.
So, I don’t find his article very scientific…..it’s more patriotic. 😛
Also, he wrote wrote that many people think that Slavic languages which use Cirilic letters (like Russian and Ukrainian) are harder than Poilish but it’s not true coz Rusian has 26 letters. Well it’s not truth, coz Russian has 30 letters ( and untill 1918 it had 4 more)…
One more thing, Serbian language also has 7 cases and uses both Cirilic and Latin alphabet with 30 letters. And it didn’t deserved to be in this ranking? C’mon….
But ok, Polish is not easy language to learn 😉
Greets and ciao!
I am in my mid 20s. I grew up with my family speaking Russian and Hungarian. Of those languages, Russian is my strongest. After spending an hour with a Polish friend of mine, I can easily read and understand Polish. While I have far from mastered the language, I know I can be fluent if I put a bit more effort into learning and practising it.
Hungarian, on the other hand, is far trickier. Reading it is easy. Understanding what I’m reading is much harder. I can generally understand when someone is speaking in Hungarian, but I am aware of countless grammar mistakes I can’t help but make when speaking or writing myself. I still don’t fully understand the 26 cases in the language. This is considering that I grew up surrounded by the language and went to Hungarian school every Saturday for over 5 years from age 8.
I also want to note that I find it hard to accept any of the arguments on language in this article simply because of the many grammar mistakes in it. How am I supposed to trust what a supposedly native english speaker writes about language in comparison to english, when this person doesn’t even fully grasp his or her own language? For example, in the following “sentence”, there is no verb: “Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet, but easier pronunciation.” Also in the same fragment, assuming the verb “have” was meant to immediately follow “Russian”, there should be an “a” either before “complex” or before “different”.
Please excuse any grammar mistakes in this comment. English is my third language.
My friend has been living in Poland from 3 years. His mother is from Poland. He speaks and reads polish, but if I use harder words or phrases (but easy for Poles) he doesn’t understand anything. Once he said: in Poland you have always two words which mean exactly the same: first derives from english (or another language) and second is our, polish. The second group is much much harder. Reading in polish is very easy, speaking is hard and writing is extremly hard.
I find it strange that Romanian, being a semi difficult verb conjugation language and having a very difficult noun declension system including the definitive article ending attaching to the noun (romanian has five cases, Nominative and Accusative are declined the same and Genitive and Instrumental are declined the same and an Ablative case all its own). However there are few rules determining declension and conjugation (depending on who you ask there are 5 to 7 different typical verb types and many more definitive article additions and rules), is it simply that they don’t have 1,000,000 speakers? Because as far as romance languages go, this one is probably the most difficult ones.
It has always been my understanding that Navajo is the absolute hardest language to learn, trumping all comers to the point it was used without any variation as secret code for the US during WWII. if your language is so difficult it can be used as military code, you’ve got a tough language to conquer.
As I noted earlier, Navajo was the most difficult language I ever studied. I didn’t get far.
You’re right about the WW II codetalkers, though one point that should be mentioned is that the language was very obscure at the time and it was unlikely that any of the allies’ opponents would have had effective access to anyone who knew the language. And, being unrelated to any of the languages that these opponents used, it would just have been impossible for them to “crack the code”, particularly in the 3 1/2 years that Americans were at war.
The Navajo nation was one of the largest Native American groups, if not the largest, so there were an adequate number of them to staff a large enough contingent to be effective in the war effort. That made the Navajo a very attractive choice for this strategy.
The codetalkers were officially a “classified secret” until fairly recently, although it wasn’t a well-kept secret; I learned about them from my anthropology teacher (who did field work on the Navajo reservation for many years and was my teacher in my aborted effort to learn the language). That was over 50 years ago.