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 have learned Polish for 50 years now, and I still have problems..
I think the assumption here is misleading, because you are generalizing an ability to learn a foreign language. There are many factors why would be easier or difficult to learn another language. Of course, for native English speaker is always difficult to learn another language, simply because the English alphabet lacks complex sounds and grammar. For example, the Armenian alphabet has 39 letters, very rich and complex grammar. It’s much easier for us to learn another language, ie Russian or Polish, than vice versa. I speak Russian, English, Spanish and Armenian (native).
I see some of you saying Polish language is not that hard. That you know some Polish or that someone can learn some Polish, say something in Polish and he/she will be undrstood. Yes, that might be true. But this is not what “speaking Polish” is.
You say that the Slavs from Czech or Russia will be able to communicate with a Polish guy with no problem. Sure. But this is because some words in those languages have the similar root and similar (rarely the same) meaning. But this is not “speaking Polish”.
And i’m not talking about the accent or pronounciation. One will probably never be able to have perfect accent in the foreign language if he/she didn’t learn it since childhood. So let’s not judge that.
Speaking Polish (correctly) is all about the word endings and using the correct word, term, gender, case etc. Use the wrong ending, and yes, you will be undrstood (maybe… sometimes), but you do a mistake, no matter the pronounciation. Ok, an example. When i say in English “Me be happy” – is this speaking English? Sure, people will get what i mean, but i would not consider me someone who can speak English. The same for Polish. But the difference is there is a way easier to make a mistake in Polish.
Ok, that is my somewhat privete definition of speaking/not speaking a language. But then i must say i have NEVER heard a foreigner speaking Polish correctly, and i mean just in terms of using the correct words, no matter the accent. Even one. Not in person, nor in tv. End there are lots of outlanders who live in Poland for tens of years, and yes, they are pretty good in Polish, but still they make errors. Errors which Polish kids age 10 do not make.
OK, i don’t know if Polish is the hardest. I don’t know all the languages in the world, so how would i know that. But when i hear people from other countries trying to speak Polish i belive it is very hard. Not the basics, like “Me be happy” (Ja być szczęśliwy), but the correct way – “I am happy” (Jestem szczęśliwy), not to mention triyng to say something more complex like “I might have been happier” (Byłbym szczęśliwszy).
And i’ll sooner see everyone on internet like each other, than hear a non-Pole saying “szczęśliwszy” correctly 😉
What about Welsh and Gaelic (Irish)? Welsh was always the most indescribable for me.
I am Welsh (though I have never lived there) and I don’t know more than a few words, even though I have a fluent mother and I’ve tried quite hard. I would say that WELSH is incredibly hard, seeing as languages come easy to me – I Speak English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Flemish and German.
I’m Polish – born and raised for 20 years. My mom paid extreme attention to my grammar and I still run into some issues sometimes when I don’t know which case is correct for what I’m trying to say. I speak English fluently and it is 100 times easier than my native language. I may not know a word here or there but grammar is beyond easy. I have no experience with Asian languages but I can communicated in Greek and took German and French classes – none were as difficult as my native language even in elementary school 🙂
Polish is the hardest language I ever learned.
Harder than Mandarin Chinese.
Italian and Spanish are the easiest by far.
Holy subjectivism, Batgirl!
Personal claims much? Are there any scientific, peer-reviewed studies behind these radical conclusions or is it just another autocentric blogger?
For someone who claims English to be such an easy language, the author has yet to write one sentence properly.
This post is full of cringeworthy mistakes an average, anglophone junior high school student from US wouldn’t make. Marek, you have screeching problems with grammar and even spelling in English. You seem to think in a synthetic language structure (Polish?) and just dress up your phrases in a costume of words borrowed from English.
May I remind you that English is analytical, with three articles and prepositions – the scourges of typical Polish speakers who never grasp nor even notice those concepts.
If this is how you teach and learn languages, you really shouldn’t make any claims about any languages of the world, especially since you seem limited to the few most common European ones.
Which Chinese language are you even talking about? I guess one of the official ones – Mandarin or Cantonese? Have you studied any languages of China?
Have you ever heard or studied Greenlandic, Basque, Georgian, Swahili, African click languages, Welsh or the 88 dialects of Philippines?
The difficulty of synthetic Polish is on the same level as synthetic Latin or analytical German, which has three genders, 5 cases, changing sentence order and guttural pronounciation (which most Poles don’t learn easily either).
Polish does not have 7 genders, just 5 theoretical, which are just 3 in practice (no Pole ever differentiates inanimate and animate objects when speaking).
Well, I haven’t read all the 12 pages of comments, so maybe there was a similar question already … but I am really curious: what do you think about Slovenian language? If you even know it. Around 2 million people speak it, maybe even a bit more, so it counts as a worth-speaking-of language by your criteria. We have only 6 cases and 3 genders, it’s true, and verbs with only 3-4 tenses are easy to learn even compared to English, BUT besides singular and plural we have dual that foreigners find extremely difficult to learn. AND with nouns, there are hundreds and hundreds of exceptions to declination patterns that I have no idea how foreign speakers learn to speak. So for every single noun you basically have to learn 18 different forms to go with it.
And about Polish – I am sure there’s no universal rule about how difficult a language is to learn. I understand a lot of Polish, especially written, but also spoken, even though I never studied it – because it’s a Slavic language and close to my own, so it’s not a difficult one from my perception. I understand southern Slavic languages even better, almost without any problems, and I can also speak them to a certain degree (grammar of these languages is generally less complicated than Slovenian, no dual for example), again without studying them, ever – but I doubt that any English speaker can say that Croatian or Serbian language is really easy for them. People from Slovakia and Czech republic would laugh at this statement (for Polish language being the most difficult to learn) even louder – Polish is even closer to their languages than it is to my own. For people speaking Chinese as their mother tongue I’m almost sure that for them learning Korean is easier than English (considering the easiest language on your list – it is quite easy, but I’d say Spanish is easier to learn for example, for me!). The closer the grammar system is to your language, the more words are similar – the easier it is for you to learn it! And there are personal “preferences” there as well, I think, every person is unique …
Nonsense 🙂 if it is harder than Czech, how comes, that all czechs understand and are able to speak to some extend polish whereas most polish have no clue what czech words mean when they hear it? Very similar grammar. Though russian is probably the most complex of all slav lang.and the mostly stem from that, discounting the cyrilic problems. Who is the author?? Has no clue
Hi there, it’s been extremely interesting to read the article and all the comments underneath. My native language is Polish, studied English Linguistics at the university including Old English and Middle English (which are said to be related to Icelandic), learnt Russian at school, took 4 years of Latin (saying took on purpose – I did not learn the language to speak it, I learnt it to understand it and to get the base for other European languages), later I learnt German. Learnt Norwegian for two years to some extent, could speak it but since I haven’t used it – I forgot most of it. Then came Serbo-Croatian. Tried Finnish for some months – on my own. And now learning Moroccan Arabic and I can both speak and write Arabic now.
From my experience it was intuitively easy to learn Russian. English was the hardest. It was my first non-Slav language and everything was new, lexically there are very few similarities, and I just needed to cram vocabulary and read a lot. Grammar was logic to a large extent, though the logics was different than in Polish. It was difficult to learn English – because it was my first fully foreign language – and I guess that is the point here. It does depend on what your background is and it does depend if the following language belongs to the same group/family as the language that you learnt before. The first foreign language is always the hardest. People who are native English or any other language speakers when they learn one Slav language, the next one is easier and faster to learn. So English then for me was extremely difficult.
German was easier lexically – lots of things were a bit like in English, more than Polish anyway, but the grammar was more complicated with the 4 cases.Though, had to spend more time learning before I could make a flow of speech than in English.
Latin was okay because passive knowledge is nothing in comparison with forcing your brain to produce a sentence.
Old English made my brain fold more, massive work, but still I could connect it to English and German and simultaneously studied Norwegian, which was fairly easy for the same reason.
Serbo-Croatian was more intuitive again, but I needed to refresh my Russian for it as it is more similar to Russian than Polish. Or actually what happened was that learning Serbo-Croatian refreshed my Russian.
I was shocked when I was exposed to Spanish once to notice that I understood what they were talking about, not in a great detail but still, understand a foreign language without learning it?
Then came Finnish and I learnt lots of vocabulary which was a challenge as lots of words do not resemble anything that my brain learnt before but what made me gave up was the grammar. I could not figure out the difference between two or three cases that in other languages constitute Accusative (English also has cases although the are mostly invisible – apart from some pronouns – I like him – him is in accusative). Also adding more than one postfix was braintwisting. I was simply unable to make a single sentence correctly without learning it by heart from the book before but mind you – that was totally opposite from total immersion technique – I did not know anyone who’d speak Finnish, I learnt only from books, cds and internet.
Now for the last few years I have been the Moroccan dialect of Arabic called Darija. And while Finnish was difficult grammatically, the lexical richness of Arabic is so vast and the same words change the meaning completely even into something that you would consider an opposite meaning, depending on the context and knowing the person’s intention prior to hearing the words that it is mind blowing. Learning a different script takes only a few days, it is like learning signs when you do your driving license course – twenty something signs, each with a different distinct meaning – sound. One letter-one sound system is great. The little diacritical signs above or below letters are very consistent too. I can read without knowing what I am reading. The logics of grammar often resembles Polish more than any other European language, only there are many more forms you can create from a verb,not only participles and tense forms, each must be learnt separately – there are some rules but there are more exceptions from the rules that the words derived according to the rules, so just learning by exposition is doing the job for me. What I spend ours on is learning vocabulary. I love verbs as after knowing a fairly logic and simple grammar gives me the fastest possibility to communicate and make my sentences. While to learn a new word in French (that I am learning on and off – as it is necessary to know in Morocco) takes me about 3-5 times to see the word, with Arabic I might need 8 or more times to see it (when I learn from flash cards for example). The funny thing is that I learn a word in about four or five stages. Most verbs are made of three sounds and first my brain remembers the meaning of the verb with connotations, but not the verb, then I remember the most distinct sound of that verb, then two sounds, then all sounds (and it does not matter if it is 3 or more) – at that stage I might swap the position of the sounds for example, and only after two or more times of forgetting it and learning it again – I can say I have learnt it. So for me both Arabic and Finnish are the most difficult, though for different reasons.
Now, many children are bi or trilingual. Those children make their sentences later in all of the languages. They usually start with the language which is more dominant in their life. Monolingual children start speaking as early as their brain will allow them too. I started speaking with full sentences when I was less than two years old, but I know people who did not speak until they were 4, some people have problems with pronunciation and that is why the speech therapists have their jobs. I don’t think that in Poland we need more speech therapists for each thousand kids than somewhere else.
You were talking about reaching the level of fluency, we would have to determine the scope of vocabulary to be used – 3000 or 5000 or 10 000 words? I can seem to be fluent with a language when I know 1000 words and grammar). Fluency is no indicator for the knowledge of a given language – it is only an indicator how many neural connections your brain built and it can happen due to the nature of your brain or due to amount of practice or both. We would need loooooooooooooads of statistics on a huuuuuuuuuuuuge sample of people learning their native languages, their first foreign languages (with a distinction if it is within the same family of languages or not) and divide people into several types of learners (people learn in different ways – some people need very little to be able to communicate and some need much more before they decide to open their mouth and try).
I hope what I posting now contributes to the discussion,
all the best with learning!
For everyone who think that Polish is for them easy to learn please try to tell
“W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie, że chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie” :]
Napiszę Ci coś po walijsku i tak samo się zatniesz ;]
No właśnie, bardzo szacowny przykład dałeś kolego 🙂
Jak ktoś chciałby powiedzieć, że polski jest łatwy, to niech za ortografie się weźmie hahaha
First of all, the standard for language difficulty is the US GOV. Foreign institute which has specific standards which is the hardest language to master.
In that study, Japanese and Arabic are the hardest, followed by Finnish and Estonian.
Now the catch is the for Arabic, and Japanese it is difficult to master reading and writing NOT speaking. The same applies for Chinese.
But let me tell you, I am fluent in several languages, and Finnish takes the prize. It is unbelievably difficult to speak because of there no prepositions and there are a number of cases and if you don’t get the case of the noun and verb correctly, you miss the meaning of the sentence completely.
And no, only knowing Estonian will help, since Finnish is unrelated to any other language.
There is nothing to be proud of that Polish is the hardest language to learn, because nobody will learn Polish, and in next millenia it might be first language to die. And is not that tourists will learn how to speak polish, but polish will need to learn english to comunicate with those tourists. Of course Polish is not learned on the major scale like english, russian or french and because of this Poland is not that popular destination; people have even problems with pronounciation “Na Zdrowie” (Cheers).
The pronounciation is really hard, Polish accent (if there is any, ex. in comparision with italian), anyway it is very funny to hear from a stranger words like “Dzisiaj jest piątek” 😉
There is nothing to be proud of that Polish is the hardest language to learn, because nobody will learn Polish, and in next millenia it might be first language to die. And is not that tourists will learn how to speak polish, but polish will need to learn english to comunicate with those tourists. Of course Polish is not learned on the major scale like english, russian or french and because of this Poland is not that popular destination; people have even problems with pronounciation “Na Zdrowie” (Cheers).
The pronounciation is really hard, Polish accent (if there is any, ex. in comparision with italian), anyway it is very funny to hear from a stranger words like “Dzisiaj jest piątek”, no matter which day of the week is 😉
This article is rubbish lol Italian and Spanish are much harder than English for example…this is just one of the many things I could have said!
About Polish, fluent at 16? Are you kidding me? haha I can’t waste my time a second more, I’m sorry!
I am a Genius!
Pozdrowienia z Polski
Can you tell me why don’t you say a word about Portuguese, 3rd western language, 6th in the world, official in 10 countries? Your map is odd with an enormous blank space in South America’s Brazil…
I disagree with the construction of this pyramid engish and german are from the same languagegroup and english is based in majority on german… so fail.
Polish hasn’t 7 genders
there are only genders he she and it
so next fail
I’won’t relay om this article…
Chinese is not only Mandarin folks! Many languages spoken in China have tone sandhi, some of it quite complex like Amoy Min (Hokkein) which has a complex system, with every one of its tones changing into a different tone when it occurs before another, and which tone it turns into depends on the final consonant of the syllable that bears it. Tone sandhi is known by linguistics to be very difficult for non native speakers to learn.
Amoy has tones in isolation, and the changes they undergo when they precede another tone.
Amoy has five tones, which are reduced to two in checked syllables (which end in a stop consonant). Within a phonological word, all syllables but the last change tone. Among unchecked syllables (that is, those that do not end in a stop), tone 1 becomes 7, 7 becomes 3, 3 becomes 2, and 2 becomes 1. Tone 5 becomes 7 or 3, depending on dialect. Stopped syllables ending in /p/, /t/, or /k/ take the opposite tone (phonetically, a high tone becomes low, and a low tone becomes high), whereas syllables ending in a glottal drop their final consonant to become tone 2 or 3.
I’m learning Polish and find it very easy to learn.
The author of this article refers that there’s seven cases, seven genders… Well, there’s no articles.
And very difficult pronunciation? Very difficult pronunciation for whom, English speakers?
From what I see, this is an opinion article based on his own experience, rather than in facts. Not to refer all the languages that are not included.
The author also writes that English is a basic language to learn. Well, maybe! Most people I know learned English to a certain level, but are hardly fluent in the language. If you can’t be fluent in an alien language, why do you demand that others are fluent in your own language? To speak proper English can be a tricky thing, and even some native English speaker s cannot speak it properly.
I know a lot of people who would put Esperanto as the easiest language to learn. Yet again, I think this is an opinion article based on the authors experience, as such, each person could give any language as easiest or not.
The biggest mistake in this article is to ignore that Polish is part of a bigger family of languages – Slavic languages – which are very similar to each other.
Lets for example analyse a phrase made famous by Borat.
Polish: Jak się masz?
Czech: Jak se máš?
Slovak: Ako sa máš?
As such, how can you say that Polish is harder than Czech or Slovak? You base that assessment in the fact that Polish is the only language that you have learned? Hmm!
Perhaps Czech and Slovak is even more difficult than Polish, because of it’s 10 monophthongal and 3 diphthongal vowels.
Hello Tiago Menezes, perhaps the article is exaggerated and the guy who wrote it got a little too carried away. You did mention that you are currently learning the language and you seem to believe that the pronunciation is not difficult and the language is easy. W takim razie powiedz mi dlaczego nie napisalas czegos po Polsku zeby wszystkim pokazac jaki latwy nasz jezyk jest? Ja do dzisiaj nie potrafie prawidlowo pisac po Polsku a ty muwisz ze to jest takie latwe.
Your English is good 🙂
As the article was written in English, in my opinion, it only makes sense that my answer is in English.
If readers are to follow your line of thought, perhaps some of its Chinese or Japanese readers should reply to it in their own alphabet (in order to demonstrate it’s difficulty) and then, I’m sure this would be a more interesting forum, with very little people understanding what their peers are saying – ridiculous!
I believe there is a reason why this article was written in English, and I guess it’s because it’s target audience is an English American one.
Writing such an article about a language, saying that this is THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN, can in fact be detrimental to the language, as it might put people off from attempting to learn the language.
Whatever!
I’m Polish native, speaking English as second and Greek as third language. Spent long hours to prove to the Greeks that it is not such a difficult language among others.
I found Greek quite easy to learn, (maybe because I find similar ‘logic’ to my mother tongue – hard to explain this). I just wonder where Greek is situated in relation to those languages mentioned in a pyramid. Would be happy to learn.
Although, I’d like to think of polish as being the hardest language to learn, I think it’s bollocks.
Every Indo-european language is fairly easy to learn for Indo-europeans. They all share similarities and culture. There are significant differences, though.
I agree with @Frank Wellbinder that once mastered one of Slavic languages helps with learning another. Same with Germanic, Romanic, etc. However, difficulties begin when we start crossing groups and families.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure whether we can assess the hardness of any language so easily. I don’t personally think different groups of languages are comparable.
hi,
i read lot of comments with great interest. I’m Pole, but im not here to say to you ‘oh polish is really the hardest one’.
But anyway, I think that people which say ‘seven cases are not that bad and complicated’ have never tried to understand what these 7 cases really are. I’ll give you one simple example: To jest MUCHA (This is a housefly). Nie ma MUCHY (There’s no housefly). Przyglądam się MUSZE (I’m looking at housefly). Widzę MUCHĘ (I’m seeing a housfly). And other two forms: z MUCHĄ (with housefly), o MUSZE (about housefly) — silly thing here : MUSZĘ is other word and means ‘I must’. And what about.. hm… CAT?? kot, kota, kotu, kota, o kocie, z kotem… and so on…
and actually thats right what Mark is saying about kids. They often mix forms and says for example “kotowi’ cause its correct case in the context but its the form (ending) from other sort of nouns. They mix forms of words cause they know, they have noticed some rules but they dont know which word these rules really go with. Child talking is funny actually.
And unfortunately it’s true that when foreigner is trying to repeat some sentences in poland he/she cannot deal with pronounciation. Hi on polish is CZEŚĆ and trust me, if I didnt know someone is trying to say this word I would never guess by myself…
I can speak both perfect Polish and very good Russian. That is an absolute nonesense to say that if you speak Polish you can easily understand other Slavic languages. Russian is quite far from Polish as it belongs to a different group of Slavonic languages. If you want to drink and you say it with just one word, than you will be understood. Exactly like drink (English) – drinken (Dutch) – trinken (German). But exactly the same as it is not possible to understand a German conversation for an Englishman, it is not possible to understand a Polish conversation for a Russian. Or the other way round. Does not matter.
Czesc Mark,
Trudno mi powiedziec, czy polski faktycznie jest najtrudniejszy na swiecie. Ze swoich obserwacji wnosze, ze dzieci na emigracji (mieszkamy w Szwecji) znacznie chetniej mowia po szwedzku miedzy soba, niz po polsku, bo zwyczajnie jest im latwiej.
Dobra robota!
Pozdrawiam
”Immersion from birth is the best, but it takes kids 5 years before simple sentences are formed” oh please… 5 years? before simple sentences are formed? No way. Kids at the age of two can easily form a simple sentence. At the age of 5 they can have a conversation. Not to mention that at the age of 16 they’re already fluent as hell. Cuz, for me, fluent is communicating, using idioms, being able to understand wordplay jokes… Kids are able to do all this at the age of 12 or even earlier… Plus I do agree with what Frank W. said about polish being easy for Slavs. It is. We, Polish, (i am a native speaker, living in Poland) easily get to speak Russian, Czech (even though it sounds funny) etc. But what really made me laugh was that it takes 5 years before simple sentence is formed. And, if you take as a example your kids… don’t do it. Your kids are not the scheme. Cuz it sounds weird to make a statement out of few examples, not investigating enough (or maybe you’ve seen other kids speaking polish and thought they spoke wrong and you made the theory up, idk)
But all I’m saying is it is wrong to say something while not having enough proofs, materials etc. I, for example, formed my first SIMPLE sentence when I was about 2… of course i ed at pronounce but still! and it was “Szoruj dziadek do łazienki” and if you’re fluent in polish you’ll see that a word “szorować” isn’t exactly pefect for the situation but that’s a wordplay joke, we might say. So a kid of 5 years could easily form more that simple sentence. My brother is now 8 and he’s already fluent and his no different from his friends who speak at the same level. And they can already make jokes, get them and talk about many, many, MANY topics or ever watch Discovery Channel and undersatnd most, if not ALL of it. Unbelivable, I know.
When will people realize that rankings like these are utter bull. There is no ‘hardest’ nor ‘easiest’ language, children in all regions learn every language at about the same pace and what you subjectively consider ‘difficult’ is mostly given by what other languages in what language families you are already comfortable with. You cannot establish the difficulty by counting ‘cases’, much less by judging the ‘complexity’. Pretending that these are somehow objective and self-evident categories is just insincere and deceitful.
Regarding 17 ways to say the numbers 1-4 in Icelandic:
ONE einn, ein, eitt, einum, einni, einu, einnar, eins
TWO tveir, tvaer, tvö, tveimur, tveggja, tvistur, tvenna, tvennar, tvenn
THREE þrir, þrjár, þrjú, þrjá, þremur, þriggja, þristur, þrennar, þrenna, þrenn
FOUR fjórir, fjórar, fjögur, (fjaggra), fjöggura, fjórum, fjarki
SOME NUMBERS WHEN PLAYING CARDS fimma, friendshipa, sjöa, nía, tía
…and I wouldn’t be surprised if I left out a few here and there.
I’m not proud of having learned Icelandic, I’m merely saying it can be done to a near-native level, much like the vaunted, on-so-impossible-to-learn Polish.
17 ways to say 2 in polish: dwa
dwie
dwoje
dwóch (or dwu)
dwaj
dwiema
dwom (or dwóm)
dwoma
dwojga
dwojgu
dwojgiem
dwójka
dwójki
dwójkę
dwójką
dwójce
dwójko
12 ways to say the number 1 in polisch:
ONE- jeden, jedna, jedno, jedni, jednego, jednym, jednemu, jednej, jedną, jednym, jednych, jednymi
TWO- dwa, dwie, dwoje, dwóch, dwoma, dwóm,
In Englisch you say it with just one word.
I’m Polish and I support the thesis that the difficulty of language learning is a personal opinion. Czech/Slovak/Russian/etc. is easy for me, because it’s similar to Polish. English is very easy, because it’s just very easy. And German is quite easy because I know English very well and it helps (the same with learning Dutch).
I think that we, the Poles, just think of our language to be the most difficult – and this article supports this trend, I guess. Anyway, the author is somewhat right about Poles mastering the language at ~16. I’m not sure if it’s 16 (there’s no exact age), but kids learn how to use the language really long and still they can make somehow basic mistakes (wrong cases, wrong endings, wrong spelling or wrong pronunciation). In comparison, I can’t imagine English kid making analogical mistakes in endings, because English has no such thing as endings/cases.
Polish is difficult, but there’s just no such thing as the most difficult.
I am of Polish decent and I speak French, English, German and Russian. My mum learned Polish after meeting my dad and I know lots of foreigners who moved to Poland and learned the language. It is quite difficult but I totally agree that it would be straight forward to another Slavic speaker. Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese or Greek would be very challenging and would depend on the persons culturals background and what languages they speak already.
As a native Turkish speaker, I am dissapointed for the fact that none of the Turkic languages are on the list. Thus let me add it to the list by myself: They would be on the second level along with its agglutinative counterparts.
Apart from that, I must say this list is purely for a english native speakers, although being a good observasion. I agree on Polish as someone who is learning it but again it depends on individual. For example, most of my friends who have been to Finland had no problems with learing Finnish since its structure is like Turkish.
Likewise, for Slavic people it is not as hard as for other people to learn Polish
Linguistically correct if you look at it from a the perspective of a foreigner.
I’m Polish and I definitely do not agree that people in Poland become fluent in Polish at the age of 16. We speak correctly usually at the age of 7-8 and then we also have a wide range of vocabulary. Of course there are people who will never reach ‘academic level’ of language, but it’s a matter of lack of proper education, not complexity of the language. I assure you, that there are plenty of 8 years old kids who could impress you with their vocabulary. With an average 8 year old kid you can often freely speak also about science and abstractive subjects.
I agree that my language is not the easiest one, but I think Chinese intonation is also not as easy as you explain. There are people who are not able to learn Chinese because they don’t even hear the difference between different intonation
I’m Polish and I definitely do not agree that people in Poland become fluent in Polish at the age of 16. We speak correctly usually at the age of 7-8 and then we also have a wide range of vocabulary. Of course there are people who will never reach ‘academic level’ of language, but it’s a matter of lack of proper education, not complexity of the language. I assure you, that there are plenty of 8 years old kids who could impress you with their vocabulary. With an average 8 year old kid you can often freely speak also about science and abstractive subjects.
I agree that my language is not the easiest one, but I think Chinese intonation is also not as easy as you explain. There are people who are not able to learn Chinese because they don’t even hear the difference between different intonations.
Guys, you should read “Through the Language Glass” by Guy Deutscher. There are some extremely interesting insights on whether or not the complexity of language is something that can be actually “measured”. My own example: Finnish language is spoken as it is written, where as Polish isn’t. Then again, Polish has 7 noun cases, where as the amount of cases in Finnish is 14, so twice as much. If we are estimating which one of those languages is harder to learn, which of those facts has more weight, and on what grounds? And for whom?
W takim razie jestem zachwycona, że znam język polski “od urodzenia”… 😉
Pozdrawiam,
Monika
[ In this case, I am delighted to know Polish language “from birth” … 😉
Regards,
Monika ]
Hey, I’m a Pole and as far as I can agree that number of cases and gender dependent endings can be a pain for foreigners, I cannot say it’s the hardest language to learn.
I think Frank gets the point here – the more alien the second language is (both grammar and pronunciation wise) the herder it is to learn it.
I speak English, German and… a little bit of Tagalog and the last one is the hardest to grasp for me – even though the grammar is not that complex there are nuances not seen in any of the European languages. Words order, pronunciation, etc…
I also cannot agree to the opinion that Poles require pure pronunciation to understand you. Of course we can spot a foreign accent of non-natives in few seconds but this works for any natives to non-natives convos.
Also if we measure fluency by proficiency in using all cases – it’s true – for some it’s a lifetime challenge but if we take 12-years old Pole and 12-years old Brit – to me they lingual skills are same but each language holds different challenges for the speaker.
Cheers.
Funny thing you listed French and German as fairly easy to learn…. I am polish and here in Poland most people find both French and German very hard to learn… because of all the tenses (French), and articles in several cases (German). So it’s really hard to say which languages are really the hardest or the easiest to learn. However, I agree that English, Spanish and Italian are relatively easy compared to others.
As for Polish, there are so many ways of communicating one thought – here’s an example:
Kasia washed hair.
Kasia umyła włosy.
Umyła Kasia włosy.
Włosy umyła Kasia.
Umyła włosy Kasia.
Kasia włosy umyła.
and so on…
And the best thing is that they are all perfectly OK and mean exactly the same 😀
The only good form is: Kasia umyła włosy. Inversion can be done only for special reasons e.g. in poetry. The form Włosy umyła Kasia is also good but its meaning is NOT the same. So you are an example of a Pole who do not speak perfectly Polish and this is an evidence of how difficult our language is.
“Difficult pronunciation” depends on to what extent you are used to distinguishing and pronouncing particular phones. For example, i don’t have problems with Polish pronounciation, but I thought I would break my tongue when I tried to get a grasp of Norwegian. (OK, I’m cheating – I’m Polish 🙂 For English speakers pronouncing and distinguishing between sz and s’ can be a problem – both could be transcribed as ‘sh’, but the former is much harder (tongue flat), while the latter is much softer (mid-tongue raised high) than in English. Same with cz and c’ (ch, as in cherry, the above rule apply as well).
A number of phones could be a sort of an objective measure (there are about 30 consonants and 8 vowels in Polish), but it depends on regional pronunciation, dialects, and even – whether you treat allophones as one sound, or as more (for example, “m” in “mięso” is not quite the same as in “masło”, but you have to know there is a difference to notice that; most Poles would in fact pronunce them differently and still claim it’s the same sound).
What surprises me though, is where did you take 7 grammatical genders from? I counted only 5 (masculine-personal, masculine-impersonal-animate, masculine-inanimate, feminine, and neuter).
Polish was my first language and I was born in the United States. My family speaks Polish in the household. I know 5 languages now, going on 6. I still cannot full grasp the Polish language and still make mistakes while in the other 4, it is too easy! The fact of the matter is, if you don’t know the language FLUENTLY, you have no idea what you’re talking about. From the vowels, to the syllables, to the word structure and tense, it is HARDER THAN ANYTHING ELSE. Especially if you do not have the right sound to your words.
Frank, get a life and stop commenting on this thread. You’ve been doing it for a few months now, give it a rest. It is not your opinion that will change this article especially since most people disagree with you. You clearly have something against Poles and you should probably stop trying to make a point that has no value. OKAY BYE.
Łatwiej mówić niż pisać, bo liter nie widać
Nikt nie sprawdzi czy w słowie nie schował się „byk”
Lecz wystarczy dyktando, a zaraz się wyda,
Kto bałagan ma w głowie, kto porządek i szyk,
Rządek i szyk.
Wiec pisz, pisz, pisz i myśl, myśl
Ołówek gryź, uszami strzyż, uszami strzyż
Żółta żaba żarła żur,
Piórnik porósł mnóstwem piór,
Rzęsa w rzece rzadka rzecz
Słówka w głowie? – Błędy precz!
Halo Hela!- w hucie huk
Żółw ma czwórkę krótkich nóg,
Żuraw żubra żwawo źgnął,
Aż się dziób w ósemkę zgiął!
A jak się to pisze? Ja piszę jak słyszę,
Ja nie wiem „o” z kreską „zet” z kropką- czy bez
Janek poznał wyjątki i dostał dwie piątki,
A Ola ma gola i powód do łez, powód do łez.
Wiec pisz, pisz, pisz i myśl, myśl
Ołówek gryź, uszami strzyż, uszami strzyż
Żółta żaba żarła żur,
Piórnik porósł mnóstwem piór,
Rzęsa w rzece rzadka rzecz
Słówka w głowie? – Błędy precz!
Halo Hela!- w hucie huk
Żółw ma czwórkę krótkich nóg,
Żuraw żubra żwawo źgnął,
Aż się dziób w ósemkę zgiął!
Hi
As a Pole I truly disagree with the author of above bol.locks.
Typical polish thinking, egoistic, naive and self-praising.
My lingo is the hardest, I am the most intelligent, religious, modest, hard-working etc…
Anybody can write similar article about thir own language and use similar arguments. Bit too subjective innit?
Typical polish thinking, egoistic, naive and self-praising- are u american? Grow up and pull yourself together. Don’t you know that only fools reproduce stereotypes? i guess not
I think you forgot to mention polish alphabet – we have basic 26 leters + polish signs like: ż, ź, ą, ę, ó, ł, ś, ć, ń and some so called “twosigns” witch represtent different sounds than all the other letters and are considered as indivisible units: sz, cz, dż, dź, ch, rz. All in all that summs up to 41 signs.
haha, it is really fun to listen to all of you. Some are patriotic and try to convincingly elaborate why their language is the most difficult and so on. Languages differ and so does the genetic dispositions of man. The approach to language differs from person to person when it comes to methods of learning and memory. To a person who has a very visual memory Chinese might be not so hard after all because they can memorise the pictographic writing system better (106,000 different kanjis btw) whereas if someone is an analytical thinker he might have an easier time with languages like Polish or Russian. When it comes to the use of exactness of language the overall intelligence plays an important role and German might be easier to master. You might read and understand Goethe but you are surely not likely to write like Goethe. You might understand how a fugua functions and be able to point one out if you listen to classical music but for sure you aren’t able to write anything remotely to what Bach did. A language is a set of rules applied to phonetic patterns to deliver information from entity to entity. You may be fluent in a language but the degree of efficiency depends on your intelligence. Therefore information is the essential principle of language and it doesn’t matter what language you use to deliver it. It matters much more of how efficiently you are able to deliver it in the language you are fluent in.
And as I said, one language known for it’s precision is German.
Z tego tekstu i komentarzy wnioskuje, ze malo wiesz o akwizycji jezyka, czy to pierwszego czy drugiego. Sprawiasz wrazenie zadufanego w sobie, przemadrzalego i klotliwego pacana. Za te glupoty co wypisujesz powinno ci sie zabrac dostep do internetu. Ale jesli zrozumiales ten komentarz to znaczy, ze jednak czegos sie nauczyles:)
… Japanese has cases verb changes, and long words — at least compared to Chinese (not compared to Finnish/German). It doesn’t really have cases or genders, but has “politeness” forms. Also its pronunciation is relatively easy for most foreign speakers — very little intonation, words are almost always spelled exactly like they sound with a few notable exceptions and regionalisms (e.g. nihongo o written as nihongo wo).
This is also a 6 year article, not sure why it’s getting shared so much now. Needs an update and some fact checks though. I only speak French English and mediocre Japanese, but I’m skeptical about the rest of the “facts” in this article.
Dear Poles – you argue that there are just 3 genders in Polish. Generally – yes. However, the truth is: there are three main genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Masculine nouns are also divided into animate and inanimate (this distinction is relevant in the singular), and personal and non-personal (this distinction is relevant in the plural).
As you see Polish is difficult indeed since Poles do not even remember about / are not aware of these distinctions.
Panowie, nie pierdolcie, proszę.
Język polski jest piękny, ale każdy język ma swoje walory, akcenty i przywary.
Nie zdajecie sobie sprawy z tego, ile dialektów regionalnych ma mój język – poczynając od kaszubów, a kończąc na hanysach.
Best regards,
M.
SC PL
I studied Polish for a year at the age of 25. It was my first foreign language other than a couple weeks of Spanish in high school before the program was cancelled. After a year, I was sufficiently fluent and accent-free that a professor at the Jagiellonian University refused to believe that I was not Polish. I have no Slavic, much less Polish ancestry. So much for your theory. This entire article is bizarre.
I was born in Poland but moved to America when I was 5. I have continued to use the polish language very often, as that is how I speak to my parents. However, now at the age of 26 I have a heavy accent and when I go back to Poland people immediately recognize that I am not from the area. There is no way.