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.
Hello guys, my name is Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz and I am from Chrząszczyżewoszyce 🙂
Hi Grzegorz!
My name is Anrzej Paszczyrzyn from Szczebrzeszyn 🙂
Jednak uwazam ze polski nie jest az taki trudny. 🙂 I am egyptian btw. I think the grammar is hard to that extent that native speakers make a lot of mistakes themselves. 🙂
Vejko’s summary below is excellent. To put it more directly, this article is a load of crap.
Note:
– Czech with 7 cases in singular and plural is very similar to Polish but gets no mention.
– Zulu changes both ends of the word and can put several English words in 1 word. Now this is a difficult language (for English speakers)
– Japanese, though”easy” has a complex set of rules depending on speaker and listener’ relative status.
The difficulty of learning a language depends largely on your starting language and your objective. Polish is easy for Russian speakers. English is very easy for almost everybody to start talking.
peter
Chrząszcze Nieboszyce gmina Łękołody
You mean “Chrząszczyrzewoszyce, powiat Łękołody” 😉
I think that this article is one large pile of feces tauri. Very biased, very unscientific, and it only compares indoeuropean languages with the only exception of Arabic. My personal opinion is that difficulty in learning a language depends on grapsing grammar principles – and within the indo-european group, they are pretty much the same. Difficult languages? Try language isolates, like Haida, with exotic, complex grammar rules and impossible pronuciation, or Caucasian language group which frequently have more than 60 consonants, or click languages of Africa, some with more than 80 different click consonants. Polish? Yeah, right.
Actually there is one more language group represented here, besides Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Namely the Finno-Ugric language group. Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian are all Finno-Ugric languages which do not belong in the Indo-European language group. A rarity in Europe.
Since you went into all that trouble to do this “research” which clearly is wrong for anyone who actually has a brain and can think, I wonder why isn’t Greek in your list?? Was it forgotten or is it a dead language like the Egyptian. Or it maybe it scares you because half of the Polish vocabulary has Greek roots, almost like any other language in the world.
Do your reading first and then pretend you are a polish patriot
I am a Greek also. Please ignore the comment above (by Γεώργιος Κυριάκου) , it comes from a typical attention-seeking, aggresive Greek who claims to be the center of the universe – well, we re not. we re a hole inhabited by illiterate people trying to feel superior because of things that happened 2500 years ago in the lands we live in now.
Anyway, Greek language IS difficult – though not THAT difficult to learn, exactly because of its affiliation to other indoeuropean languages. I d put it somewhere between German and Russian, and definitely above French or Spanish.
I tried to learn Polish once. Its grammar-syntax etc is no big deal. But speaking it… oh yes this is hard! All in all, this list makes no sense whatsoever and i see it more as a joke: your native language influences 100% the way you approach others.
Of course this comment is coming from a Greek. You Greeks never cease to amuse with your slender viewpoints.
You are correct that Greek should be on the List, as should Turkish and Bulgarian (since we’re talking of the region). However saying half of the Polish Vocab comes from Greek is only idiotic, but shows the caliber of your knowledge.
Hi George,
of course Greek language has a different level of difficulty compared to Polish and unarguably it should be listed here. But saying that half of the Polish vocabulary is Greek is not very accurate. Just to let to know Polish has only 5-10% loan words from Greek.
This is certainly an interesting post – although perhaps more for the huge debate it has sparked regarding everyone’s own individual conformation-biased opinions. The truth is, you can never attempt to make a truly accurate graph like this unless you actually go about learning all the languages.
I also feel that there is absolutely nowhere near enough emphasis on the importance of reading and writing being taken into account here (the irony being that here we are all communicating by text).
Chinese and Japanese are dismissed in these rankings due to having ‘easy grammar and no genders’ – but the fact is that learning all the hanzi/kanji takes an obscene amount of time. The Official Japanese list of Joyo Kanji (which is the government list that essentially donates ‘Kanji you need to know to be able to read a newspaper’) contains 2,136 different symbols. Every single one of these will also have AT LEAST 2-3 ways of pronouncing it, all of which you have to learn the contextual use for.
Now, I know I’m applying my own Asian-language confirmation bias here – but this is undeniably a huge amount of information to process, and I would argue is far more of a ‘mountain’ to climb than grammar forms and pronunciation.
Anyway, I’d like to hear some other opinions on this. Is my highlighting of reading/writing naive and overstated? Let me know!
I haven’t gone through all opinions here, but what I’ve read seems to have left out the important factor of where we look at it from, and then the difficulty of understanding spoken language.
Coming from Hungary, English was difficult enough for most of us at school, but true enough, compulsory Russian was insurmountable for most. Strangely, for memory resistance on the word level – I still remember a lot of grammar and grammatical words, but could hardly remember more than 50 words – after a decade of learning. But about a decade later, I managed to get to a basic working level in Bulgarian, a very similar language! Of Italian and French, I only scratched the surface and childhood German made almost no impression on me.
Later, much later, Chinese looked like impossible for more than a year while living there, and having a couple of teachers there and back home also bring in the difficulty of this: if people are able to divest their knowledge of their mother tongue on others. Chinese have no such knowledge yet, they have no clue how to teach their language. The average Chinese teacher has no grasp of any methodology of language teaching. Their course-books are written exclusively in Chinese, which sounds normal, but what can the foreigner do when all he can understand of a conversation is where the text of one speaker ends and the other speaker starts? Pronunciation is not normally given, meanings of new words are explained in the same Chinese characters as the text. And the average Chinese, when I didn’t understand their answers to my questions, began to write for me … not realizing that that’s the most difficult aspect of their language by far. The average Chinese university student (!) still struggles at passing their Chinese language exam around age 22. Talk about the Polish getting fluency of their mother tongue around 16, which I don’t believe in the first place, testified by Slawek from Wroclaw below.
Reading has always been an important aspect of my learning languages, and there I broke down, and still do with Chinese, a decade later. Besides, the various pronunciations of each and every character make sense only if one has the context. But that’s difficult to get if one doesn’t hear what they’re saying. The speech is fast, contains a very limited number of variations (I’ve read somewhere that there’re only about 7 or 8 hundred sound variations in standard Mandarin, that is, ‘putonghua’). Now there was the problem for me: which of the hundred meanings of each sound pattern means what? Italians may speak the fastest in the world, but with their long words, that’s nothing compared to the quite similar speed of Chinese where every syllable may be vital for understanding. The thought-speed of Chinese if outstanding. And that understanding depends on hearing which of the melodic pattern each syllable carries. Here is thus the next problem: we can’t hear what we haven’t heard for a few decades in our mother tongue. Besides, melody is used for general concepts on sentence level in Europe. How can one get used to a rising pattern at the end of a sentence, meaning a question in Europe – simply because the last syllable has a rising tone? That was one of my many difficulties.
On the other hand, my American co-teacher with Spanish background (California!) had just come over after 6 years of working in Japan, with already native-like speaking skills in Japanese. A different learner type and also much younger than I, he was making better progress than me already, when half a year later he discovered that he understood most of what was written in the books of his students! Reading/writing was a synch for him from then on, he sat beside a student in a subject class and got used to the new pronunciation of each sign. He was talking in the streets in double quick time, and then went on to study Chinese literature at university. Which also means that we can try to learn all languages to make an informed judgement, but the previous ones always make the next one look somehow easier and easier, so our judgement will always stay prejudiced. And distorted by the advance of our age after a while.
Then I started to learn Dutch. I’ve easily discovered the similarity/similarities between this and English. They learn English – mostly, I suppose, as I’ve written about this in my blog, without being taught – very easily, quite unlike, as I’ve mentioned above, Hungarians. And Dutch doesn’t seem to be a difficult language for me either, still, I have my very weak points. I started to learn it in Hungary, with very good grammar explanations, but with the pronunciation of Hungarians. So here in class I was perhap the best in grammar, but, even after living here for over 4 years, I can’t hear what people are saying well enough. I understand the news people on TV, but others seem to use various speech patterns. I still haven’t managed to work out the rhythmic patter of Dutch speech, though I myself am understood. And I still make a lot of mistakes forgetting about their second! gender! We have none. Besides, just to underline what I’ve already said about ‘we can’t hear what we never heard before’, I still find it very difficult to hear and also to make the differences between the pronunciation of ‘h’, ‘ch’ and ‘g’, the latter being a completely terrible guttural sound for me. Aesthetically, Dutch is not a pleasing language to the ear at all. Which may not disturb others, but disturbs me no end.
Other people in class always had different problems. The Russians were desperately struggling with the concept of any articles – Russian doesn’t use them. Chinese struggle with rhythmic patterns – theirs is a language with stress on almost all syllables, so just like their English, their speech of foreign languages always sounds trudging, forced and without rhythm. Besides, they mix up ‘l’ and ‘r’ even after many years of use, which I don’t understand because their language has both distinctly. But not in the middle of words! Then African, Arabic or Iranian speakers struggle with the grammar, to a for me not understandable degree.
One final remark. The formula in the article stresses the importance of the cultural inclination of speakers of a language to pass it on to outsiders: openness. I’ve read in well-researched literature about the Gypsies, who tend to completely screen up their various languages against outsiders. Not a language under 1 million speakers by any measures, if their O is 0, isn’t theirs “the most difficult language” in the world?
I hope I’ve made my point. Hope to hear the opinions of others too.
I’m Polish, Russian and Ukrainian native speaker and currently I’m studying in Edinburgh so I know English pretty well and also I’m studying German on intermediate level.
In my opinion Polish is not the hardest language. For me Russian was a bit more difficult then Polish.
BTW: it’s a lie that Poles are fluent at 16 – they become at 8, sometimes even earlier.
Former citizen of Wroclaw here.
Pozdrawiam wszystkich!
Cheers.
Sorry Slawek but couldn’t resist…
“I’m studying in Edinburgh so I know English pretty well…”
Scottish cannot speak good English. Niether do the Yanks. They speak American and not English. ‘Queens English’ should be learnt in England.
For you Polish was easier, because you ARE Polish! How hard is that to catch for you?!
And yeah, this fluent in Polish 8year- old… Could you name this prodigy? 😉
The word is: FLUENCY, not “being able to commuicate and being understood”. I know a few foreigners here in Poland, British, Greek, German (for example) some of them almost 20 years here now. I am able to communicate with English, German in their language (10years of learning Eng, 5 of Ger), and make no mistakes. They, on the other hand after living here for 20 years now cannot say like five sentences in a row without mistake. Not a mistake that makes it impossible to understand them, not a pronaunciation mistake, but simply put: theirs sentences are incorrect.
Because we are talking FLUENCY here, right?
First of all: there is no way to assign a language to its objective difficulty, because that difficulty strongly depends on the student’s native language.
Moreover, studies show, that there is no significant difficulty difference (for English native speaker) between learning any indo-european but non-germanic and non-romanic language.
It’s been 20 years since I heard my first word in Polish and I never came across the statement, that we’ve got “seven genders” 😀 If you counted separately these ones that appear with plural nouns, because they happen to have a different names, then shame on you!
“Very difficult pronunciation”? Surely it cannot refer to Polish alveolar trill [r] “r” because the author listed Spanish (having the same sound) as “easy” and French (having uvular fricative [ʁ] “r”) as “average”. Then maybe because of our distinction between [ɕ] “ś” and [ʂ] “sz” instead of one English consonant [ʃ] “sh”? And I thought that English has got 12 vowels (instead of Polish 6) and 8 diphthongs (instead of Polish… none), all of which differs with the placement, length & roundness. Then I would deduct, that English phonology should be at least “difficult” for Polish native speakers and it clearly is not the case 😀
Sure, we have 7 cases (with one being used only while swearing and another one being in decline) but, hay! we’ve got 3 [sic!] grammatical tenses 😀
what about: “ą, ę, dz, dź, dż, z, ź, ż, ń”…
easy as well?
That’s the same case as I mentioned about “sh” vs “ś” and “sz”. In Polish we distinguish two sounds, whereas in English there exists one in-between consonant.
So there you have English [ʃ] “sh” and Polish [ɕ] “ś” and [ʂ] “sz”,
English [ʒ] and Polish [ʑ] “ź” and [ʐ] “ż”,
English [tʃ] “ch” and Polish [tɕ] “ć” and [ʈʂ] “cz”,
English [dʒ] “j” and Polish [dʑ] “dź” and [ɖʐ] “dż”.
I admit, nasal vowels can be tough for someone who doesn’t have them in their native language, but then why French is “average” with no note about their “very difficult pronunciation”? And they have twice as many nasal vowels! 😀 One even being a nasalisation of the sound which doesn’t exist in English, and second which doesn’t exist in Australian English.
The [z] “z” sound is the same as in English, so I see no difficulty here. And [ɲ] “ń” also appears in Spanish, Italian (both “easy”) & French (“average”).
@Michał
Re: I never came across the statement, that we’ve got “seven genders”
liczba pojedyncza (singular):
męski – męskoosobowy (1), męskożywotny (2), męskonieżywotny (3)
żeński (4)
nijaki (5)
liczba mnoga (plural):
męskoosobowy (6)
niemęskoosobowy (7)
What is the purpose of counting plural genders separately? 😀 Do you mean, that every noun should be described as having two genders at the same time?
I agree, that the distinction between masculine personal and masculine impersonal meets the criteria of being a different gender (however I’d argue if one can say the same about animate/inanimate categorisation), but you would never find a Polish scholar who would agree with the number seven.
I think it is very “european” ranking.
Personally i find a language very difficult when:
– has tones
– alphabet that is not phonetic ( so basically you need to study forever characters)
– unlike the formula, i think shorter words are more difficult to memorize when you have to learn many (need to remember very similar sound)
-most important thing is which language is your native and which one you are trying to learn
For a german and a chinese learning finnish is a very different thing ( and viceversa)
Where is Portuguese language? I think you could fit Portuguese in the same Spanish level. They’re quite similar on case of talking about difficulties.
I agree. Where is Portuguese? I don’t agree that Spanish, Italian, English and if we add, Portuguese, are the easiest languages. There are sounds in our languages that some learners won’t be able to produce at all.
While I think it is good that you are breaking away from the idea that Chinese is the hardest language in the world, your characterization of it as an easy language clearly demonstrates your lack of understanding of Chinese language and culture.
Sure, basic conversational Chinese is easy because the grammar is based on word order and not inflection. This simplicity makes it easy to learn so long as you can pronounce tones and consonants etc. Real Chinese, however, is spoken extremely quickly, add to this the fact that the vast majority of words are only one or two syllables and the number of homophones is, as far as I know, more than any other language, and you have a practically incomprehensible language. I have native fluency in Mandarin and have a Master’s degree in Ancient Chinese but I still can’t understand the newscaster on TV.
In addition, most educated Chinese do not use normal conversational language, they use a language composed of idioms and highly condensed phrases extracted from their (at least) 3,000 year old literary tradition.
Sure, anyone can say “I six months study Chinese” in mandarin, but can you tell me what “dog bites lv dong bin, not recognize good thing” means?
This article was a good bit of fun, but I must interject that this is a completely inaccurate description of the Japanese language, which has a very complex grammatical system with numerous verb tenses, verb forms, postpositions, and it’s fair share of long words. You analysis about Chinese may hold some water (my friends who have learned Chinese have told me that is was much easier to speak than they had expected), but Chinese and Japanese are strikingly different languages. Even though the Japanese language has appropriated Chinese characters in their writing system, they are not in the same linguistic family, and are therefore governed by an entirely different set of linguistic rules.
I have studied 14 languages, mostly European but also Chinese. Of course Chinese was most challenging with the orthography, but I found Turkish to be the most difficult language in Europe, given the fact that it is not Indo European but also because of the complicated sentence structure. Often I tell my wife, who is Finnish, that Finnish reminds me of Turkish because of the need to reverse order, so one often looks far and wide to find the verb.
Well, Czech has got the same complicated grammar as Polish, and its pronunciation is very difficult as well.
As other people said, it is a biased article. It sounds as if Polish IS the best language in the world which is clearly wrong in an objective view.
However having said that I can understand where you are coming from. As a language enthusiast, languages you know or learn form the centre of your ‘language’ world. For me this would be Scandinavian languages.
Your article may not have convinced many people if Polish is the best language but it certainly does provide more information on the Slavic language family. It motivates language learners like me to explore Polish more, which I certainly will.
You can never say that one language is better than the other if you have not learned both. Even you know both of them, you won’t say either is better because you love them both. Because that’s why you are reading this article. You LOVE languages! 🙂
This article is incredibly misleading.
Other than the fact that it makes numerous claim without citing a scientific source which on inspection turn out to be false (i.e.. Poles can’t speak Polish until age 16), its claim that Polish is the most difficult language is bogus, as anyone who has studied Polish can attest. In my experience, as a native English speaker with some Russian, I found Polish nowhere near as difficult to learn as Burmese was. Also, his specific ‘argument (if you can call it that) for the difficulty of Polish is ludicrous: Polish has 7 cases? well, Basque has 12. Polish has seven genders? wrong, it has three? there are more exceptions than rules? wrong: this is a beginner’s complain, and you frequently hear the same from people starting Russian: the reality is that both languages are for the most part very regular.
There is no non-relative way to call a language ‘easy’ or ‘hard’. If you are a native Russian speaker, learning Ukranian and Polish will be easier for you than it might be for a native Chinese speaker, for the obvious reason that Russian, Polish and Ukranian have a lot of vocabulary, phonetic make-up, and grammatical structure in common. However, for a native Burmese speaker, learning to speak Chinese will be (somewhat) easier than it is for a native Russian speaker, because Chinese and Burmese, being distantly related, share features with each other but not with Russian. A language will be more or less ‘difficult’ depending on how similar it is to languages you already speak – this should be obvious.
However, languages do vary in terms of how ‘streamlined’ they are, and this can be equated with difficulty/easiness for learners. For instance, Indonesian, and to a lesser extent English, have simplified (but no less expressive) verbs and nouns than other languages, with minimal to no conjugation/declension. This is a historic process that takes places when a language becomes ‘international’ (ie used by many non-native speakers) and thus sheds its redundant elements, and is well-documented by historical linguistics
The most ‘difficult’ languages are those that exhibit the least ‘streamlining’, primarily languages that are non-written (writing historically leads to streamlining), isolated, and spoken by a small number of people. For example, many native Australian languages have over 20 cases/verb tenses; Najavo has no regular verbs – every verb is uniquely irregular and all its conjugations must be learnt separately.
I fully agree with what you wrote about what makes a language hard or (relatively) easy to learn for someone. However, it’s not true that writing a language necessarily leads to it being “streamlined” in the sense of losing grammatical complexity. The period when English simplified most was during the Norman era when the upper classes spoke only French while English was more or less an unwritten farmer’s vernacular. When English had its coming back as a language of learning and literature in the late Middle Ages, most of the changes (loss or gross simplification of verb conjugation & noun/adjective declension, loss of grammatical gender, etc.) had already taken place. Writing has (or can have) a conserving effect to a certain extent. Latin in its written form remained relatively stable for hundreds of years. In fact, English grammar hasn’t changed a lot in the last 600 years compared to the massive changes that took place in the 300 years before when it was unwritten. And that also means that most of the “streamlining” of English predated its international expansion. It might well be true though that so many non-native speakers picking up on English somewhat helped accelerate existing trends of development.
I’m fluent in Japanese and the article is completely wrong about no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar.
Not to mention the lack of acknowledging the absolute insanity that are honorifics. People living in Japan their entire lives still cannot do this properly most of the time. And to function in Japanese society properly, it is imperative. Japanese children do not know enough Japanese to read 100% of a newspaper until they are in high school.
The author also severely undermines the difficulty and practice that learning characters creates. It takes an insane amount of effort to learn even 1000, which get’s you pretty much nowhere. Countless methods have be developed and considerable amounts of university research has been and continues to be devoted to this task. Any language with an alphabet is much easier to learn than one with a character based system.
As of today, to be passable in terms of an education, you must be able to read, write, recognize, and know the various readings of 2,136 characters. And the readings for a single kanji can sometimes reach 10+ for just one character. After that there are still some 3000+ characters left that add more functionality.
I’m not here to say Polish is not difficult. I had Polish neighbors growing up and I could barely understand them sometimes. But if you asked me to learn a language, and do so with complete fluency, and to pick the one that would be easiest. I’d take Polish in a heart beat.
Fluency for all languages (including signed languages) occurs around age five provided the child was exposed to language under normal conditions, has a normal brain, etc. All languages are, for all intents and purposes, equally easy to learn for an infant. They come equipped with cognitive software that basically works it out for them without the kind of conscious agony we go through as adults. I often equate it to the difference between using the calculus required to track the changing trajectory and speed of a ball to solve a word problem in class, vs. using the calculus required to track the trajectory and speed of a ball in order to catch it. One is automatic and unconscious, while the other is so painful it makes you want to pull your prefrontal cortex out through your nasal cavity.
As for second language acquisition (presumably adult L2 acquisition), using these variables to determine relative difficulty is utter nonsense. For one thing, the difficulty of a writing system is a non-linguistic component. I would imagine that from a grammatical point of view, an uninflected language like Chinese or Vietnamese would be marginally easier to learn regardless of the native language of the speaker.
Things like pronunciation and idiosyncrasies of grammar are almost certainly going to be easier or more difficult based on their similarity to the speaker’s native language. In English we don’t have a subjunctive form, so I found it nearly impossible to convince my brain that such a form was necessary. The stereotypical Chinese speaker of English leaves off many of many of the tense and aspect inflections (few though they are) needed for English. English speakers of Chinese grasp the lack of inflection just fine, but take years to grasp the tones. I knew an indian speaker who could not for the life of her understand what an article could possibly be for.
A speaker of a subject verb object (SVO) language like English or Spanish is probably going to find a VSO or an SOV language more difficult to learn than another SVO language and vice versa.
Pronunciation is going to be likewise made easier or more difficult depending on your native phonological inventory. If two sounds don’t contrast in our native language (in other words if the difference between two sounds cannot cause a difference in meaning in two otherwise identical words) our ability to hear the difference between the two sounds is drastically reduced if not eliminated. This is what lies behind the r/l confusion in Japanese. They contrast in English but not Japanese. English speakers can hear the difference, Japanese speakers for the life of them can’t.
I don’t know that anyone has come up with any scientific criteria for measuring what (if anything) constitutes phonologically easy vs. phonologically difficult sounds. Likewise for articulatorily easy vs. articulatorily difficult sounds. I’m an American English speaker and I have a gift for accents that can make me rather annoying to watch movies with. I find some Scottish English consonant clusters such as their pronunciation of ‘murdered’ quite difficult to reproduce. In fact, I suspect the scots burn an additional 1400 calories a day in tongue movement alone.
Many languages avoid consonant clusters like the plague–And why wouldn’t they? Do any of us really enjoy having to pronounce words like ‘sixths’ or ‘breasts’? Speakers of such languages often have difficulty with producing consonant clusters and frequently insert extraneous vowels or cut consonants to avoid them. And speaking a culsterful language is no guarantee of ease either. If the specific cluster’s illegal in your native language, you’ll still find it hard to produce and fairly unsettling in the language you’re acquiring.
In other words, I don’t know of a linguistic basis for ranking a language as being objectively the most or least difficult to learn. The amount and type of inflection does seem to play a role, but I think that’s dwarfed almost out of relevance by the degree of similarity or dissimilarity between two languages as a factor. Every language has a set of parameters along which it can differ from or be similar to other languages. The more different one language is from another, the more difficult it will likely be for speakers of one to learn the other. This is especially true of grammar.
“no verb changes”… no verb changes in japanese? Have you ever studied japanese language? There are plenty of verb forms, not only by conjugating, but by formal and informal language too.
It’s ok that the conjugation of the present and of the future are the same in every form, but you have more than 20 forms to talk with people that are youger tha you (or not so important socially), to talk people of your group, and a lot of people more important than you… from a teacher and parents until a politic and a emperror. It’s called Keigo. If you talk in a non formal language an important person, or a person who deserves respect, people will look to you in a disapproving way.
People learn only the medium formal form and think it’s only that stuff… that’s not quite all the Japanese Language.
And there are some others complications on the Japanese Language… you talk about the writing like it was nothing, even being hard. And the I ask you: “only the writing is hard?” What about know how to chat in an language that you can’t even read a menu of a restaurant or the paper news or even read an information outdoor on the street? Writing is a very important part of the language. And in the japanese language there are, other than the kanas alphabets, the kanjis (that came from the mandarin/chinese). All the Kanjis are picture images, draws that means ideas and not words… for meaning ideas there are plenty of reading forms and reading combinations… It’s more than hard.
Obviously great part of the analysis of the languages are from a outside view, not for your own experience. You haven’t even consider the portuguese on this, that officially are one of the harderts languages to learn… last time I saw an official publication about it it was in the 5th place.
Although I enjoy a good debate around languages and am interested in the opinion of others, it is stupid for people to get all worked up here on what is missing, what is true and what is plain wrong.
There are a lot of truths in this article, but also a fair amount of subjectivity.
In my opinion, the main factor in the equation should be a massive M, for motivation!
As long as someone has the motivation to learn a language, they will find it easy. This is because they won’t give up and won’t see it as work at all in the first place.
A nice article, but I do not agree with one thing, I mean the English language gets cases, but (in comparison to Polish) a different kind of declension (analitical declension). Maybe it is not observed in case of nouns because they get no endings, but it can be noticed while analysing a pronoun, for instance I-me, to me; he-him, etc. So that is why it is said: give to me (and not give it to I). You say for instance: I bought a gift to Mary. So what is it in fact if not Dativ? But created with a preposition. Then it is true that the Balkan languages are difficult. However, they are also so beautiful that I advice you to study them (and I am not from Balkans of course) 😉
Hej! A ja mówię po polsku, wcale nie jest taki trudny 😉
pozdro
“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.”
I recommend you actually try to learn a bit about those languages before you try to rank them. That description fits Chinese somewhat, but not Japanese at all. You’ll be surprised to learn that Japanese is actually quite similar to finnish. Japanese most definitely have tenses, complicated grammar (read up on keigo), long words and verb changes. The kanji making it hard to write and read is just a massive pile of difficulty on top of an already complicated language.
Actually, as far as I know, Finnish and Hungarian are worldly recognised as two of the hardest languages ever. Finnish more than Hungarian. And they are far relatives, as they are both ugro-finnic languages.
And not only because of the cases. In Finnish (can’t say about Hungarian, but their grammar seems to be working in a pretty similar way) the words can be placed in ANY position in the sentence, for instance; they have no specific intonation while speaking: a question and an exclamation will sound exactly the same way, so you can’t rely on that but rather on the particles they put at the end of the sentence; the quantity of the vowels: for instance, aa and a have a slightly different pronunciation, almost impossible to hear for a foreigner, but of vital importance to the meaning of the words, and the most famous example of this is the difference between the words “tapaan” and “tapan”, the first meaning “I meet you”, the second meaning “I kill you”.
All languages are difficult in their own way. It also depends on our native languages and how easy it is for us to meet languages. I am Italian, and the Finnish language is COMPLETELY different to my own in everything: grammar structure, pronunciation, word orders and so on; yet after a month and a half living in Finland when I was 17 years old, I picked up the language quite fluently and people were pretty impressed. Other Italian people that were there too never did learn it. So this shows that it is a very personal thing really.
Still, Polish is indeed a difficult language, in fact it is recognised as the hardest of the Slavic languages; I’m going to start with that at University now in October and in a year or so I’ll let ya know 😀
As a French, and from my own experience, I could communicate easily in polish after one month of very good class, and kept getting better at it over and over. I never lived in the country more than a month, but made good friends there.
I live in Vietnam for three years now, and it is impossible for me to learn beyond basic communication. I think it comes form a few parameters :
– Tones are impossible for me to differentiate. My pronunciation in polish is quite good.
– Words all look/ sound the same : da is one word and with a different tone can have 6 different meanings. My memory doesn’t like that ban, ban, ban, banh, and ban – I cannot remember the accent sound similar but mean table, friend, bread, busy, dirty… My memory likes that pies (dog) look and sound different than lod (ice). Actually gender makes them even easier to differentiate.
– Culture. It is easier for me to share thoughts and ideas with polish people. We have close interests, shared culture, common humour and attitude. The vietnamese who I can share with speak well english, so it does not make it as necessary for me to learn the language.
– i’m older and lazyer…
Anyways, learning a language depends a lot on your mindset at the moment, the type of memory you have, the environment in which you learn the language, the appreciation you have for the languages, its culture, its people. And of course the way you are taught, definitely.
Wiec wszystko zaleze, I mysle ze generalizacje sa bzdury…
The following argument: “English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature”
Too poor. The same goes for every language.
I speak English, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish 🙂 Polish language I learned by watching polish channels on television. If you know russian before, its easier to learn polish, because there many similar worlds, just they are pronounced a bit different. Used to learn italian – very easy and nice language, but because of not using it I forgot it 🙁 Would like to learn Chinese, but neet to have chinese friends, to make it possible 🙂
I have to disagree with you. I am native Russian and it has the same 7 cases as Polish. Also, alphabet is 33 letters, not 26 as you wrote. It really depends on your mother tongue, but for Russian speaker it is very easy to learn any other Slavic language as the grammar structure and vocabulary are very similar. I lived on Slovakia for over a year and was fluent by the end of the term without studying the language at all. I know many people who studied Polish (giving it as an example as you like it that much) less than a year and than did Masters degree in Polish. Therefore, you can’t say it is the hardest language to learn. Maybe, to English speaker, but definitely not to anyone being able to speak any other Slavic language. In my opinion, Hungarian is a lot more difficult and very unique and rich language.
Yeah, yeah, Spanish may be very easy to speak, but it’s difficult to speak right. My mom, who’s German, moved to Spain in 1962 and she still isn’t able to use some verb tenses. You have a lot of unwritten rules of context and emphasis, plus probably more dialects and accents than English.
To start with – if you do not use the correct tone – or if you think you are pronouncing the tone but are in fact not pronouncing the tone – in chiense you will not be understood!!
They have 4 (actually 5) tones in Mandarin chinese and 7 in cantonese! Unless you come from a tonal background (such as vietnameese), this language is not easy to learn!
Not to mention they have a lot of sentences which do not contain verbs which for English speakers is very difficult to get your head around! Their sentence structure is usually the opposite way to english as well. Not to mention they have a multitude of sounds we do not differentiate in english but they do in Chinese and it takes a long time to differentiate the sounds in Chinese for a non-native speaker.
Japanese – i agree is not as difficult although the particles and counters can get really complicated.
I do have to admit though – it is easier to read kanji/characters rather than read a phonetic language. It only takes about 5 min to learn each kanji and once you learn the meaning it is easier to read (as meaning –> pronunciation) rather than trying to remember each and every letter or kana (japanese).
I studied 6 weeks intensively in country in china and by the end of it – whilst my reading and writing skills were quite good (mostly forgotten now), all I could order was a cordial chocolate when I was talking to people. In contrast – 2 weeks of intensive study in italy and I could order pretty much anything and sustain conversation with the shop keeper. I will definitely return to Chinese latter but for now I am onto Japanese 😛
And english is easier than italian? Italian is by far an easier language to learn than english – italian (for the most part) is regular whereas english is not. And english still does have some (rare – admittedly) cases where gender is important. e.g. the difference between blonde (for a female) and blond (for a male). I don’t see where you have got your ‘facts’ from but maybe to comment you should study all the languages you have mentioned (including some other difficult languages) and come back and rewrite the article.
I also thought estonian was the most difficult language to learn as it has 17 different noun declensions or something?
You may think it takes only 5 minutes to learn each Kanji, but try coming back to that kanji one week later 😉
Kanji learning is a constant investment of time more than anything. You have to use or regularly encounter a kanji many times before it really sticks – and when you stack that up into the 1000s of Kanji that you need to read a newspaper it is no mean feat!
Hello,
This is certainly an interesting read, however I believe your map is somewhat wrong. According to the map used only people in Poland speak the language, but there are numerous Polish communities around the world.
Toronto boasts a large Polish community as do its surrounding cities, while 1/3 of the population of Chicago is Polish. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a large emigration from Poland to what is now Manitoba. Furthermore Poles throughout history have migrated all over the world, and founded communities that still exist, such as the ones in Brazil.
While this migrations begun several centuries ago and continue to this day, often their final destinations change due to the political and economic situation. Poles can really be found anywhere, and last year a study showed that Polish is Ireland’s second language, however one that is not recognized as being official, English being the first. So your map should show a large population of Poles, or red dots on the Isles, as Poles have also settled in the UK. In fact Poles have chosen England and its surrounding neighbors during and after WWII. Which brings me to the subject that you can not omit South Africa, India, Palestine, Australia. After the “liberation” of Poland a lot of Poles fearing that their repatriation would result in being sent to the Gulag or executed chose South Africa, India, Palestine, Canada, United States, and Australia as their final destinations and new homelands. While some Poles did escape from the Soviet Union with the establishment of the Polish army, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, some were not given the choice to travel to Tehran with the new corps and were left behind, only to be joined by new prisoners. SO in other words there should be a prominent number of dots in Siberia, despite the fact that Gulags officially did not exist.
Just my thoughts.
Well….for me Polish language is NOT so hard…I m french native speaker and I studied polish at the university: 4 years then 1 year in Poland, and when i speak with someone from Poland, that person really thinks i am myself from Poland!
Each time i travel to Poland, Nobody asks me where i am from…at the custom office they re always surprised when they see my passport with my french name!
Same for russian: i studied it at the same time as polish and i have to say that russian is really easy to learn!!!!
The hardiest language to me is english! I cannot prononce the “TH” correctly…
I may have a slavic mind….or people who try to learn polish are maybe lazy…
I would like to add a small language: Basque. I am from the Basque Country, a region placed between France and Spain. Basque is the oldest language in Europe, this sentence sounds arrogants, but it means that it is not related to any family. Linguistic haven’t be able to find a connection with any other language and the latest studies suggest that its origin is in Africa, while the rest of European languages come from Asia.
Unfortunately, due to the dramatic history of Spain in the XX century (internal massive emigration, Civil War and Francoist Dictatorship) Basque was banned and almost dissapeared. In the 1970s there was an effort to save the language. Nowadays its presence is increasing but Basque is still in risk.
My father was born in Spain and my grandfather didn’t teach language to my mother becasue he was constantly investigated by the francoist police. For this reason i was born in a non-speaker family. I have learnt Basque in my adolescence and I have to say that it is very difficult to learn. I don’t know it is more difficult than Polish, Finish or others, in my opinion that is diffiuclt to quantify. i tried to learn Polish when i was an Erasmus student at Lodz and i have to say that it was very difficult to learn.
I only wanted to show you another small language.
Simply for information – Some Georgian linguists think that there is some similarity between Basque and Georgian…
Georgian belongs to the Kartvelian (“Kartveli” = “Georgian” in Georgian) language family which is part of the Ibero-Caucasian language group. It is not related to any other languages. Georgian alphabet is one of the ancient alphabets 33 letters and corresponding 33 sounds.
I’ve been reading comments on this article for quite a while and find it interesting that people claim that languages from the same groups are easy to learn if you’re a native speaker of one. That might be true to some extent, that is when you’re talking about being able to communicate with others. However I’ve been living in the Netherlands for over 4 years and consider myself to be fluent in Dutch. Yet any Dutch native speaker can tell that I’m a foreigner. My mother tongues are German and Polish. And I know many many Dutch people can speak German. Some even fluently. But they do make mistakes and I’ve rarely heard a Dutch person say that they thought German was an easy language to learn. To understand, yes, but not to learn and speak correctly. I’ve learned four foreign languages in my life – English, Dutch, Spanish and Russian – all of which I can speak fluently. Yet I wouldn’t consider any of them easy. Sure I picked up Dutch much faster than Spanish but the end result isn’t much different. Just because I learned Dutch faster, my Dutch isn’t better than my Spanish. I’m not native in either language and I sure learn new things, new idioms, new grammatical structures in all of the languages I’ve learned.
What about the rest of the world’s languages? Is the writer concentrate only over European languages? Do he consider the rest of the World not worthy of consideration? It sounds like the XIX century’s arrogance of Europeans Scientist, incapable to to watch outside the border of the First Word: EUROPE.
I studied Polish for 3 months and I was able to walk in the street asking for any sort of information without using English, talking with polish family guesting me for the first time in my life in Gdansk. To me was very nice to learn Polish, using it for many years in relation with many Polish friends all across of Europe.
At the opposite, my hardest language to learn was Dutch, very difficult for the almost total absence of regular rules, continuous changing of rules, almost complete dependance of the speaking experience that frequently is secondary to the personal interpretation of rules by the speaker, totally changed way of breathing comparing to Italian, Franch, Spanish, Polish.
About Slavic languages, with the upgrading knowledge of Polish I was able to speak with Czechs, Croatians, Slovenians, Ukrainians.
With the Dutch, I just start to understand something of German, but still need to really study it.
I simply think that the relator of this article is completely naive or he simply collect a number of personal experiences between friends and acquaintances but or collect a number of popular articles from tabloids. It seams a very subjective interpretation of the problem, not really scientific or analytic research.
I even know many foreigners contesting the very hard work necessary to study Italian, exactly the opposite of what the writer say.
At the and, I don’t like this sort of articles, suited to the tabloids or hairdressers salons or to chat bar / pub
Hi all, its very interesting to see posts against polish language. Like mostly english language defenders. Most coments are based on common respect to polish(rather not accepting polish can be better) i know, for english speakers english is the best in all categories. We all know that. Im speaking german, french, rusian, polish and english. English is the easiest language. Dont need to be smart speak english but i found many eanglish native speakers dont know this language. Its all about national education level, how many hours you spend per week at scool to learn it. Anyway i wish to see alk if you in practise not theory.
Thank you.
Robert
As a native Polish speaker and a linguist I tell you :
Polish has only 3 genres ( like Latin or German ) which give two genres in plural, which you could mistakenly count as 5 in total, but in fact it’s only three.
Firstly, it took ‘you’ until the age of 16 to learn polish. That shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on other poles.
Secondly, if English is the most basic language, this article would have had perfect grammar and tense. It falls pretty low in that remark.
And lastly, when your article is entitled “Hardest Language To Learn”, and there is no mention of languages using dental, lateral and post-alveolar clicks… you’ve pretty much failed to grasp your own concept.
Mh, interesting, but you forgot most of the African languages. isiXhosa is an example of an extremely difficult South African language.
I’m not a linguist, but I enjoyed most of the things you wrote.
Granted, I do find the chart interesting, though otherwise I agree with Vjeko – it’s too biased. I’m going to go ahead and admit that I didn’t read the entire post, but that’s mostly because I became infuriated once I reached the point when you explain your “equation”.
Yes, putting such variables into number form and formulating it all together can immensely simplify the ordering process, and give you a neat, clean ordering of how difficult each language is based on said variables. What you fail to understand is the *qualitative* and not-so-quantitative nature of your “major determinant variable” – the “Openness of [a] society to communicate in their own language to a foreigner as opposed to English”
Seriously, where the heck do you find quantitative data like that?? I could go all sociological/geopolitical and say that said “openness” does not derive from a single “society” itself, but rather from each individual person, each separate geographical location, and so on.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived in Europe (care to specify?) for a decade if you can only “attest” to the “openness” of a handful of individuals and/or geographical locations you’ve met and visited. (Unless you’re saying you’ve met *everyone*…!) Doing so bases the “major variable” of your equation on a massive assumption – that the openness of the individuals you’ve met is approximately the same as all other individuals in a given country/society!! And how do you define and measure “openness” in the first place??
Another assumption you’re basing your argument off of is the “student” him/herself. How old is the student? (Language-learning is easier for children/young teenagers than it is for adults, I’m sure you’d agree.) Where is the student living? (Are they interacting with the language considerably and consistently? In what context?) My list goes on and on. These are factors that would also play into how “easy” it is for a “student” to learn a language.
Apologies if you mentioned/corrected any of the above arguments later on in your article.
Also, please check the word “Vocalness”. I did not understand what you meant by it at all, and I couldn’t find it in any of my usual online dictionaries.
Well, that there’s my beef! [‘Beef’, Noun: *slang*; a. a complaint. b.
an argument or dispute.]
Hi!
I can’t agree – I’m native speaker of Serbian, Croatian and Hungarian, and I may say that Hungarian is much easier to learn that Serbian or Croatian (I’ve teach many times Croatian language to Hungarian people, and Hungarian language to Croatian people, an there is no doubt). Only trouble is that you need a good teacher, who will explain to the students the logic of the Hungarian language at the very beginning (Hungarian is not an IE-language, so the logic is completely different), and after that everything become pretty easy. There are no genders at all, no cases(!), plural is simple, there are only present and perfect (with no variants; future is based on the present, so you don’t need to learn a new extensions), conditional is very simple, roots of the words don’t change when you pick the extensions on them, etc, etc, etc. What make some difficulty at the beginning, but in same time help much is that everything is very precise – that means, for example, you will use different word for “on” when you “moving something on” or “being on something” (movement or position). But, that’s very consequent, so when you learn it, you’ll be able to tell things exactly how they are, without to much words. This opinion will testimony opinions of many German(!) linguists who learned Hungarian: they say – with their really big need to find a logic in everything – that Hungarian is one of the most logical languages on the world!
On the contrary:
– Croatian and Serbian has 3 genders, 7 cases, 5-6 tenses in use (and couple of them which are almost forgotten, but just almost, so you have to know them), many declinations and conjugations, many variants of every rule, but also many exceptions (including “exceptions of exceptions”), etc. And at the end, Croatian have one difficulty more than Serbian: in some words “e” become “je”, in some “ije”, and in some stay just an”e” – most of the Croatian people has also problem with that, in their own mother tongue… (Just like English native talkers with English spelling). So there is no doubt that Croatian is harder to learn then Serbian.
– English is simple on one way, but also has a many difficulties (spelling is just the worst, but not the only). It is true that people may learn it a little bit faster and easier, but mostly just because it is everywhere, and many of the words become common in all the other languages (but this is funny – many English words are not really English, so the “English” words in other languages are often Latin, Italian or French, but nobody knows that…)
– French has maybe an easy logic, but it is terrible to pronounce or spell.
– Italian and Spanish are really easy, the German is just a little bit harder. Anyway, all of them have much more variants to learn (genders, cases, conjugations, tenses,…) then Hungarian
I’ve not just learn all the mentioned languages, but I’m in contact with many people who learned them, and couple a years ago I made some grammatical comparisons, so I’m really able to compare them well… And I’ll be always ready to proof that definitely the Hungarian is not the hardest of them to learn 🙂
Polski język najtrudniejszy dlatego, że sami Polacy to debile, którzy nie przestrzegają zasad i nie uczą się poprawnego władania własnym językiem. Jeżeli nie przestrzegają zasad, to robi się masę wyjątków, wymyśla synonimy, neologizmy itd.
Slovenian has 8 genders (3 females, 3 males, 2 netrual) + the only language in the world that besides plural and singular has dual (when 2 objects, persons are in question) and it is used all the time. So I do not agree that polish language is the hardest to learn, it is not easy for sure, but the hardest for sure not.
I disagree with some of your basic assertions. I am a native English speaker and have been learning Polish for a few years now. Though I can confirm that because of the semantic structure of sentence building, and the tense/gender system being rooted in the suffixes of words, it is tricky.
However, your assertion that pronunciation is a big factor for learners, and saying that it more difficult than Asiatic languages, which are largely tonal and require a huge amount of effort for western learners who are not used to one word having four meanings depending on the pitch you say it (for example), is rubbish. One of the strengths of learning Polish, I have found, is that at least all the letters ALWAYS sound the same. Unlike in English. Just because they’re are consonants beside each other doesn’t mean the phonetic pronunciation is difficult. Quite the contrary. Once you have the alphabet, you can pronounce all the words (if you can remember to tell your brain not to lapse into English pronunciations). I have heard it a lot more difficult for English people (I’m Scottish) due to the accent; lack of rolled Rs, for example. But it is definitely not as hard to pronounce the sounds as it is for many Arabic/Asiatic languages (from a native English speaker’s perspective). As I’ve tried.
Sorry bud, but this article is just one long diatribe of opinion. One I don’t share.
Hey! I’m Ukrainian and I do Slavic studies. So, I can easily tell you, that Polish is not the trickies Slavic language (after one-year course of comperative grammar of all languages from Slavic group). It’s difficult, especially for non-slavic speakers, but still. Try to learn Czech 😉 They have even more difficult sounds to pronounce (I mean ř, š, č, ž and other) and also long and short vocals. It’s not a problem to learn how to speak, but it’s almost impossible to learn how to write correctly.
Anyway, it’s very difficult to judge which language is the hardest to learn, because it’s depends a lot on your native language. That’s it! 🙂
Hi there,
I’m polish native and I also speak some English. I have a good background for German and Russian because these was the languages I started to acquire from only speaking and listening. Currently, I have no time to maintain that skills.
I can say that Russian and German are quite similar to Polish, comparing with English on the other side. Because the pronunciation. Cyrillic is not a big deal at all. Once acquired it can cause even a typo in Polish ( y spoken as u ).
I think that the first spoken language is very important for those calculations because it works as a grip for the next languages.
What about the South Caucasus languages? Bet Georgian is harder than Polish!
This post is just going to be another one lost in the whole thing, never to have its contents addressed by the author of the blog post who seems to be entirely concerned with talking about noun cases and verb tenses as opposed to other parts of the language.
I have to disagree with you on that the only thing hard about Mandarin Chinese is the writing system. I find it to make the language much easier. Sure there are only 435 sounds, excluding the tones, which make it just above 1,740 sounds (the 5th tone exists in only certain contexts), possible in Mandarin. Sure, that may sound like all you have to do is master that short list of sounds which, unlike English or most other orthographical languages, doesn’t vary when combined with certain other sounds, but it actually makes it way harder. The reason is that so many of the characters have the same pronunciation. Just of the first couple thousand characters, the pinyin (or sound) shi is the sound for more then 70 different characters, and just under half of them have shì (the 4th tone) for their sound. When I talk to people, I often find myself in the situation where I understand the sounds of what the speaker is saying, but I no clue as to what characters the speaker is using; also sometimes I hear something and understand it to be one thing, but only find out that the speaker was using a different character (happens all the time when I watch TV).
The other part that makes Chinese pronunciation hard is that a lot of those sounds, even before taking the tones into account, are very similar. xue vs. shui vs sui is still even after a year of intensive study in China confused.
In the beginning it may seem easy because you are limited to very situational Chinese where the context makes it hard to not understand what you are talking about. For example, if you are in a restaurant and ask for a cup of water (给我一瓶水吧 gěi wǒ yì píng shuǐ ba) using other sounds (gěi wò yǐ pīng xué), it might take them a second, but they will recognize what you want. The same is talking about school and saying shuǐ xǐ instead of xué xí, they are forgivable mistakes at the easy level. Once where you are conversing about random topic, such as what you think of so-and-so’s new boyfriend, debating about purchasing a new bike, telling a story, and the sort, then the differences between things like qǔshèng (取胜 – win victory) and chūshēng (出生 – be born) make a lot of difference. Start removing the situations around you and get to the point where you start having to set up the situation yourself is where pronunciation becomes extremely critical. With the exception of the 3 or 4 rare sounds that only have 5 or 6 characters attached to them (I’m looking at you 佛), when speaking in properly, the lack of grammar makes it harder because when something is said wrong, the grammar cannot render it incomprehensible as the sound uttered represents a word, which though is out of context, is still a word (this is why I find the characters easier in that when I am looking at them, I can easily which characters go with what and so on and so for, but I cannot say which sounds go with what since they almost all go to each other).
All in all, the shortness of the characters is a difficultly since less time is spent on distinguishing the word/idea from other things. In English, the word morphology has 4 syllables while the Mandarin only has 2 (or 3 if talking about the grammar discipline), as does nearly every other word in most sentences. There isn’t a lot of time or stress put on individual words to make them more distinguishable from others as nearly every syllable is equal (with the exception of the 5th tone, which happens on occasion, and depends on a few characters). In English, what happens is that the main words of the sentence are stressed while the prepositions, articles, and declensions of them are spoken very quickly, lightly and given unequal attention in comparison. With the shorter words, there is less that can be distinguished from other words and the words cannot stand up on their own as words in the European languages.
Then there are the accents, which everyone has, many of which are mutually unintelligible to each other; plus the the tone sandhi (which are the rules on when the tones change depending on what other tones are being used in conjunction with it).
So far everything has mostly been about the spoken language.
Yes, at the basic level, the grammar is extremely simple. However, that makes the language extremely idiomatic and choke-full of exceptions and specific phrases for certain situations; so instead of being flat out wrong in your usage of the language (as in breaking grammar rules), it is far easier to sound very unnatural. I sometimes go to the movie theater here and watch and English language film. I often notice a great disparity between the English being spoken and the Chinese subtitles on the bottom of the screen. Not just in the vocabulary being used, but also the way the logic of the arguments are being laid out. The English says one thing, but the Chinese might invert the logic in way that doesn’t make sense in English. Don’t get into the difference in the Chinese translations of Western works and the original as it is far larger. At this point, such a thing is more cultural and all must be relearned.
I don’t mean to say that Mandarin Chinese is the most difficult language, but the way it was dismissed here in the article is completely ignorant and doesn’t address its difficulties, which are extremely different from European languages. It’s greatest difficulty in my opinion is that it requires you to rewire your brain and how you think to get it right.
By the way, I’m not a native speaker. I’ve been living in China for a while now studying Chinese there and started at the age of 21.
@Mark Biernat: Something is terribly wrong with your logic. You pointed out correctly that language was unwritten for most of the planet up until a few decades ago. If Polish grammar and pronunciation really were so hard that even native speakers can’t fully master it before the age of 16 (despite modern schools and virtually zero illiteracy in Poland), how come that all the grammatical exceptions and jaw-breaking pronunciations haven’t been forgotten or vastly simplified in the hundreds of years when 99% of the Poles couldn’t read and write their own language?
There are some other points that befuddle me. Where did you find that pseudo-scientific formula? And what’s the purpose of it? I’d like to see it in use, with real numbers for all those variables. How exactly do you measure the “openness of a society to communicate”? And why does the complexity of written language account for just 10% of pronunciation difficulty in a world that communicates through social media, e-mails and text messages? How do you get along in modern life without reading movie subtitles, filling in bureaucratic forms and understanding warning signs? Believe it or not, there are still a few billion people out there who love reading books. In other words, written language DOES matter a hell of a lot.
And then there’s that thing about “Asian languages aren’t hard”… Now this is an astute bit of insight! Could you please enlighten me as to what precisely you mean by “Asian languages”? Tamil? Tibetan? Tajik? Thai? Turkish? Telugu? Tagalog? Turkmen? And they’re all the same in terms of grammatical complexity, cultural implications, pronuciation and syntactical structures, right? You could as well claim that “European languages” are all the same anyway. This is simply eurocentric balderdash.
What about Sentinelese? Isn’t that technically the hardest language to learn?
Hi there,
okay I´m a Pole who grew up in Germany and speaks both languages among others.
Is Polish difficult? I guess yes.
Is it the most difficult? How would one want to objectively judge that anyway? Consequently there is imho no valid response to this question.
A detailed ranking of languages rather seems like an ego thing to me.
I´d rather only go as far as saying that there are languages which are difficult to learn, and those which are not so difficult to learn. Among those difficult ones there are of course some remarkably difficult ones.
Here is a link for Your enjoyment: youtube.com/watch?v=FOiXtWcQ8GI
Sorry guys but I have a few critics about that ranking. First, it ONLY concerns native English speakers : I am French, and because of that I have no problem with some pronunciations and sounds that you, English speakers, can’t even hear.
I lived many years in Ireland, and I could learn the basics of the Irish language (Gaelic) faster than any English speaker who never heard that language before.
On the other hand, I have always been unable to learn any German, which according to you have an “average” difficulty.
So the degree of difficulty of a language depends overall of the language(s) you already master, which is not necessarily English.
The other thing is that every time I heard an English speaker saying that he could “speak” French, in fact he was barely familiar with the greetings and could maybe order a pizza in a restaurant, but he was totally lost at the second I started to speak normally, and was certainly unable to follow a conversation !
So it really makes me laugh a lot to read that the French tenses are not used, and that the French grammar is “moderate” !!! This is totally wrong : we use more tenses than English in normal conversation (not even talking about written formal French, which must be a lot more correct).
And the French grammar is a real nightmare, believe me, even most of the native French people can’t use it properly !
Same thing for the Italian language, that I also speak pretty well (I live in Italy) : it is extremely close to French, so it only took me about 3 months to be able to speak well enough for work needs. But even now after years of practice I certainly won’t have the arrogance to say that I have mastered that language.
The Italian grammar is as difficult as the French one, and there also are many exceptions and traps where a non native speaker will fall easily.
Well all I want to show there is that the difficulty of a language depends totally from where you come, and that there is a huge gap between saying a few words or sentences, and speaking fluently.
The only thing you, English speakers, should really remember, is that the whole world DOESN’T speak English, and that you need to keep a certain degree of humility when travel abroad.
For example NEVER start speaking in English as if everybody was supposed to understand it : we are not ! Please at least start to ask your interlocutor (if possible using the local language) if they speak English.
This is called being well educated, and a lot of English speakers forget it.