Hardest language to learn

Hardest language to learn might not be what you think. Polish is the hardest language to learn. Why is this not common language uncommonly hard to learn? Read on.

Hardest language to learn in the world

What is the hardest language to learn?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Average: French – lots of tenses, but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
  7. Easy: Spanish and Italian – People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
  8. 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.
The most challenging language only for the strong and the brave is Polish. Most others are easy in comparison.
  • 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.
If you learn Polish your third language will be easy to learn. It is like training and conditioning for a sport.

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.

Ordinal ranking on how hard a student has it to for second language acquisition.

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.

Map of difficulty with green being a breeze and red being, well more arduous foreign languages.

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.

Author: Mark Biernat

I live in with family between two worlds, US and Europe where I create tools for language learning. If you found my site you probability share my passion to be a life long learner. Please explore my site and comment.

1,422 thoughts on “Hardest language to learn”

  1. As a native Italian speaker (fluent also in Spanish and Portuguese and with some French knowledge, apart from speaking English), I have to say that German should not be at the same level as French. I personally once learnt German and Japanese at the same time during university for a few months and can say theh Japanese is much easier to talk, pronounce and even to write than German. I now live in Berlin and it’s basically impossible even to undestand them for basic daily routine with a B2 level. I heard people declaring the same compared to Turkish and Arabic. That’s probably because the harsh sound and weird structure of words is just not sticking easy in mind. On the other hand, I found Korean a really easy and beautiful language to learn.

    Weel, yes, Polish is just pure nightmare, of course! 😀

    1. But you have to consider the fact that you are native Italian with fluency in further romance languages and this probably makes learning French easier than German since they all are romance languages with the same structure and logic. As a native Swedish you’d probably find German very easy compared to French. And I think if you weren’t native “romance” (nor “germanic”) you’d find them equally hard/easy. I would be a good control group since I am native Hungarian but I’ve started French at the age of 14 and German at the age of 25 so there are a lot more aspects to be considered while comparing the two processes. By the way I also heard from friends that Japanese is quite easy. I’m not interested in Asian languages though.

  2. It’s interesting to read this kind of “language ranking by difficulty” article, but I do detect something dark in the responses by Mr Biernat to posters on his blog

    For example
    – He repeatedly states that there’s a lot of rubbish on the internet, and accuses others who refer to another study or piece of evidence of believing such rubbish, lacking individual thought and lacking objectivity, while viewing himself as exempt from such “armchair linguist” bias (hmm…lack of self-reflection there maybe?)

    – He criticises others’ English while occasionally mangling the language himself (it’s OK to make mistakes in your own language, we all do it, but pot/kettle/black etc.)

    – Lack of acknowledgement of the anecdotal basis of his theory. E.g. the arguments about “Asian” languages (of which there appear to be only two worth considering) appear to be based on the anecdotal evidence of his teacher friend in NYC. Mr Biernat says in the original article that he is learning both Chinese (Mandarin?) and Polish, and finds Chinese easier. From his later comments in the discussion, he appears to have mastered Polish to the point of being able to recognise native Polish speakers’ grammatical errors. So can I deduce that Mr Biernat now has native-like fluency in Chinese?

    Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some of my own COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE opinions on the question:

    – Polish can be lexically opaque for non-Slavic-first-language learners, which can make it difficult to learn, certainly.

    – Polish people will not universally shut down when you mispronounce or even abuse their language, neither do they do insist on native-like pronunciation before they respond.

    – Polish people are not the best in the world at speaking and learning English. Some are good at it, some are bad at it – it’s a spectrum.

    – I think that some languages which are, on paper, easier to learn for English speakers may in fact not be so easy, e.g. Dutch and Danish (some posters in this discussion with first-hand experience of these languages have referred to this issue).

  3. Hello, a native Hungarian writing here. To be exact, Hungarian is Ugric but Finnish and Estonian belong to a different branch (Finno-Permic) of the Finno-Ugric languages (which in turn is a part of the Uralic languages. You also mention “countless cases” — well, we have some 30plus suffix types but from these “only” 18 refer actually to cases. Besides these, one of the biggest challenge in our language is to apply the correct word order within a sentence – put a word in a wrong place and the meaning of the whole sentence would change.

    Others often cite that our language reads and sounds nothing similar to other languages, and it is hard to catch even very common expressions like “police”. Reason for this is that Hungarian composes the expressions from stems, utilizing a wide range of suffixes. To show this, here is the example of “police”:

    Police is “rendőrség” in Hungarian. Let’s have a closer look:

    At the very stem you find the noun “rend” (=”order”).
    Next to it is another noun “őr” (=”guard”).
    Put them together, and you get “rendőr” (lit.” order-guard), guard of the order, ie. enforcer of the law = member of the police, police(wo)man.
    You have “rendőr” so now apply the “-ság/ség” suffix (roughly similar to “-ness” in English, like in “greatness”, “politeness”), and take care to choose the right one by vowel harmony: “rendőr” has E and Ő vowels, both considered as “front” vowels, so you are supposed to select “-ség”(which has another front É vowel).

    So you get RENDŐRSÉG, lit “order-guard-ness”, for “police”. Look for this word if you are in trouble. But do not fret – Hungarian policepersons have it written bilingually on their shirts:

    Cheers 🙂

  4. I’d have to concur regarding Navaho/Navajo!

    No surprise then that it was chosen to the one “uncrackable code language during WWII (..and damned near was too!!):-)

    My forays into at least between a dozen and upwards of FIFTY languages over the last few years have suggested that Navajo’s chief difficulty seems to lie in its relative lack of codification, i.e. it’s lack of a uniform or coherent writing system, plus the fact that its word stock cannot be catalogued within the paramaters of a dictionary, as can umpteen other languages. This relative inscrutability therefore has made Navaho a language of mystery to all but a paultry few outsides, e.g. linguists, code experts etc..

    Sure be interested in some feedback on this one! Socio-linguistic discussions such as this one’s the stuff of conferences and acts as my caffeine jolt:-)

  5. I didn’t read all the comments, so I am probably repeating so many people and comments. I apologize ahead of time for being a language snob.

    That being said. This list and equation for difficulty leave out so many elements that contribute to language complexity. I speak English, French, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Dutch, and decent Kyrgyz. I have worked as a linguist (mainly in phonetics and phonology, but I did my thesis in Slavic morphology) for 6 years and have studied several other languages.

    This list did not even touch on polysynthetic languages, ergative languages, eveidentiality, counters, other determiner systems, and the diversity of declination systems within “case systems” in languages around the world.

    What about Fula, Yupik, Navajo, Sami, Maya, Salish? So many non-mainstream languages are more complex. And from the perspective of an English speaker learning a new language, there a more difficult languages than Polish.

    1. While I fully agree with you, the author addressed this – he was ranking mainstream languages. There are some far more complex languages than these, but not that are mainstream.

      That said, I, personally, disagree with the ranking. I’m a native English speaker, and I also speak Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, a small amount of Portuguese, and a little American Sign Language. Japanese was harder to learn than Arabic (including speaking, not just writing), and Russian was relatively easy (despite having forgotten most of it by now). But I’ve never studied Polish, so…

  6. About 98% Poles I know don’t speak polish correctly. Moreover, my friend from Italy told me he had read an article on la-repubblica website about languages. They think polish is the most incomprehensive and ambiguous language and when people talking, more of us don’t understand what the second perso’s talking about because each word has several completely different meanings.

    Next situation. I said to my foreign friend: I wish I had had more time to learng foreign languages. He answered: you speak polish. It’s equivalent to ten other languages.

    Two weeks ago I met a Turkish man who lives in Poland. He speaks polish a little so I asked him: is turkish harder than polish? He said: Nooo, no, no, all the languages are much easier than polish.

    Do you want to kill yourself? Start learning polish.

    1. I am really sorry to say that, but 98% of people I do know speak Polish fluently and do not make major gramatical/lexical mistakes. For sure not more then average Germans, Russians or Italians in their languages.

      And you mix up two things: learning a native language (as a child) and learning a foreign language.

  7. Hi!

    I totally agree than polish is the hardest language to learn. I’m native speaker of a latin language. I was learning chinese and after 6 months i could speak. I moved to Poland last year and i’m trying to learn polish but i feel like i cannot make any progress. Even if you try to learn that 7 cases, there are so many exceptions that it makes you more confused. Simply the most difficult language.

  8. I’m fluent in Polish, French and English, and I’m above all a linguist. I cannot understand how you’ve achieved seven genders in the Polish language, as it is a misconception, because there are only three (masculine, feminine and neutral), the variations are only for the correct use of meaning, but you already have an excellent explanation for it done by Michał Ryszard Balicki.

    I don’t really understand how you came to the conclusion that Poles fluently speak their language only at age 16 – this is extremely misconceiving, especially when you compare them to 16 year old North American English speakers who make basic grammatical mistakes speaking casually in their first language (English). It can probably be explained by very poor emphasis on grammar in North American schools, never the less this comparison should be made. Comparing to North Americans, young Poles as well as French native speakers in Europe speak their languages much more correctly.

    Also, comparing Polish, French and English languages, reading and writing would be the most difficult in English from a trilingual child perspective, whose first languages are English and Polish, and French comes only as third. In Polish the reading is straight forward, you’re basically reading every single sound that is written, with no exceptions, and if you’ve learned the correct pronunciation, you would be able to write mostly correctly too.

    As to the pronunciation, of course every language different from English makes a great challenge for a native English speaker – Polish, is definitely difficult to pronounce.
    However, have you ever heard ESL speakers (English as a second language), most of these people, who started to learn English past the age of +/- 12, even after many years, still have a strong accent. Wouldn’t that proof that English has a rather difficult pronunciation too?
    All that to say, for every person a language is more or less difficult depending on their perspective, and their first learned language. I believe the biggest mistake of this article is to look at languages from the English language perspective.

    Regards,
    Magda

    1. Magda ja naliczyłam conajmniej 5: męski, żeński, nijaki, męskoosobowy i niemęskoosobowy. Z tego co udało mi się też znależć męski rodzaj dzieli się na 3:
      rodzaj męski osobowy (np. uczeń)
      rodzaj męski żywotny nieosobowy (np. pies)
      rodzaj męski nieżywotny (np. kapelusz), czyli mamy już 7 rodzajów, nie chce mi się szukać głębej, ale napewno by się jeszcze coś znalazło 🙂

    2. This is a rather well-rounded reply, Magda. I lived in Poland for three years and learned the language nearly to the point of fluency. I could tell jokes, argue, and dream in Polish, so maybe I was fluent. I can’t speak about other languages, but I think there are others out there at least as challenging to learn, i.e. Hungarian.
      Incidentally, I discovered that those who struggled most with learning Polish were Asians. I was in a Polish class with a Japanese guy who had a terrible time of it and I taught English to a Polish teacher who said the same thing. For an English speaker, probably the toughest parts of learning Polish are verb conjugations, cases, and pronunciation. However, I know some people with horrible pronunciation and they get around fine. Poles are happy when foreigners try to learn their language and are very eager to help them speak it.
      One thing the author of this article should clarify and that any commenters should recognize is that this is written from the perspective of an English speaker. He is not attempting to write from a purely objective standpoint. That said, he should also correct his hideous grammar errors and typos.
      All in all, it was a fascinating read. I have always loved communicating in Polish and to watch my abilities in it diminish as I have less contact with it is very sad.

      Pozdrawiam,
      Matt

    3. Magda: I agree with you on this how is that people find seven gender things. There really is only 3, Masculine, feminine and neutral. I speak English(Canadian), I speak Croatian, I know some Italian and know American Sign Language(Deaf). If someone gave me something to read in Croatian I could read it with understand probably 50% of it, I can carry on simple conversations in Croatian, but I need practise in my Italian and ASL. I don’t really know any Polish people so I can’t say for sure that it would be a hard language to learn. When I look at a word that isn’t English I actually don’t have a hard time prouncing the word. Example: I was at a Spanish friends house and they had a Spanish prayer hanging on the wall. I read it out loud and for the most part her dad said I did pretty good.

      That being said I think any can master a language if they practise it. You have to speak the language every day if you want to get better at conversations if your needing to write in the language then you need to practise writing it. In the article I believe I read that the average language has 26 letters, well let me tell you what I remember English has 26 letters yes, Italian 21 and Croatian 30.

  9. Hi,
    I am Polish native speaker and I’m proud to say that I’ve reached fluency in Polish before I was 16. I speak also few other languages like English, German and Spanish… And i have to say that i find German easier that English but I know that lots of people won’t agree with me… Not so sure about Polish being on top as the hardest language to learn. Although it strangely gives me satisfaction that many people find my native language extremely hard I think that Hungarian should be the hardest one . That language is not similar to any other languages in Europe not sure if you can find comparison in any other country in the world. In fact i don’t know people that would say “No it’s easy” and i don’t think that any seller would try to convince you that you can speak even communicatively in 3 hours 😀 Hahaha if you do sellers like that please let them call me of course trying to tell that to me with their fluent Polish 😀 😉

  10. Polish is so difficult becouse it has more exceptions than regular words (in cunjugation, declination etc.). So I don’t think learning it will give you any advantage in learning other languages, since it does not train you in aplying rules. You just need to have that gut feeling to speak correct Polish, which non-native speaker will never fully get.
    And attributing the low language skills of Polish youngsters to the difficulty of the language from a foreigner;s perspective is nonsense. Just see some Polish internet media, if you can – those texts haven’t been written by teenagers. Imho, it has rather to do with poor performace of Polish schools and people not reading.
    There’re no links between lerning a language by foreigner and learning it by a native speaker in their childhood, it’s totally different processes.
    Well and maybe good to mention, I’m a Polish native speaker 🙂

    1. Speaking difficult languages can of course help you learning others easier. When you look at Polish as first language for you, German for me, we both know our native languaueg perfectly well and don’t really think about what we say, we just have that feeling for the language! And this feeling is the most important thing when it comes to learning different ones.

      Just a small example besides this, in Polish you have polite forms (correct me if I’m mistaking), so do we in German. Englishmen, when learning a language with those polite forms really struggle not to personally call someone “you” when he should need the polite form.. the other way around, for us it’s really easy to apply the “you” (“du”, “ty”) on all cases. Personally i speak German, English (8 years) , French (7 years) and Luxembourgish (2 years) and in general, all languages I learned were ways much easier than German.

  11. Hi, I am Polish so I might not be objective but I have never heard about 7 genders in Polish (unless there is another meaning of this English word than to describe whether the noun is male, female or neutral). I also cannot agree at all with your statement that Poles cannot fluently speak Polish before the age of 16. At the age of 14 – 15 we take a big exam terminating a secondary school, which at my times (the rules have been changed since than) required writing a dozen or so pages of text about literature etc. You must speak fluent language to do so. I have a 5 year old son now and he speaks very good language, he may have still not too rich vocabulary but the genders and cases he can use pretty well (sure, not perfect but even adults make mistakes, I guess in most languages).
    But all in all, I do agree that the Polish language is very difficult, both because of the grammar and the pronunciation.

  12. Spanish at the same level of English? wtf??? I am a Spanish teacher, of course I cannot compare it with Polish or Finish because I cannot speak these languages, but I can Speak English, Italian and French. I can say as a Spanish teacher that it is not an easy language, it has a lot of irregular congugations and we use more tenses than French and Italian. If your mother tongue is a romance language you might learn it fast, but with a lot of errors, if your mother tongue is English or German you will find it hard, and I think it can be harder than Italian and French.

  13. This seems to be more an opinion article than a scientific article to me, since it lacks linguistic insight. There are no hard or easy languages per se.

    The degree of difficulty when learning a language lies in the L1 and L2(s) of the learner and the linguistic kinship between them and the language to be learnt. This means the more linguistic relatedness between the language to be learnt and your mother tongue, second languages you have acquired and/or other foreign languages you have learnt, the “easier” it would be for you to learn it.

    When learning a new language its foundations are built upon the existing linguistic background of the subject. Thus, lexical and morphosyntactic similarities, as well as a shared writing system and cultural background accelerates and strengthens the process of learning.

  14. 1) “Further the written language is in the process of a strange de-evolution with rise of texting messages and ADD.” (Writing isn’t language, but I’ll get to that later.) In linguistics, there is no such thing as “de-evolution,” only evolution. Inherent to languages, is the idea that once a language gets too complex, humans organically change the rules. This means that no language will have all the most complicated aspects of each possible part of language. That’s great news, because it means, in sum, all languages are at a similar difficulty to the human brain, although their difficulty to the individual may vary greatly.

    Consider the following: In a highly analytic language, there are less word-forms (inflections), i.e., little to no cases, perhaps no tenses or aspect marking. However, this means that other words, like prepositions have to do the work to communicate the ideas. My favorite example is the word “knock” in English. How to explain to the student the differences between “knock over/on/off/up/out/in” etc.? One means to kill someone, another to impregnate, another to punch someone unconscious, another to use the hand to hit an object so as to make a sound. How can one word change the meaning so substantially? And how can one ever learn such meanings? Some languages also change parts of their language over time, without affecting the rest. For example French and German go from highly synthetic ways of explaining the past tense (simple past or preterite), to now favoring an analytic construction, i.e., the compound past or perfect; so now we need a helping verb and a past participle instead of one special, conjugated verb. Additionally, while we’re using more words to say the same thing, we’ve also eliminated a difference between perfect and imperfect aspect. That’s really frustrating to the English speaker! German is also using phrasal constructions to eliminate the genitive gradually. It is the elimination of one difficulty in favor of another difficulty.

    2) Defining syntax and grammar. You erroneously state that “No grammar to speak of, no cases, not complex plurals, short words.” Please, please stop passing on your Euro-centric ideas as facts. You are the Aristotle you speak of. That is not an objective look at these languages, which you seem to have no extensive experience learning or learning about. If you peruse the Chinese Grammar Wikipedia article, I am sure you will find a number of topics that you have never considered before, as they do not exist in IE languages. One problem I have always detested with Chinese is the idea of Topic Prominence. I, personally, do not like it. I also dislike their lack of “it”; even though there is a pronoun for it, they don’t ever really use it the way English-speakers would. These are my personal hangups, and I know many other English speakers do not have such issues.

    You say there are no verb tenses, while true, you completely avoid the topic of aspect, which is a HUGE problem for IE speakers who are used to dealing with both tense and aspect, and rarely learn the difference. Don’t even get me started on the character “le” (了). You don’t bring up complements, or words that act in place of cases, such as “gei” (给) to denote indirect objects, or (把) to denote instrumental case. You don’t bring up classifiers, i.e, “measure words,” which can also be a big problem for some learners. Also, Mandarin is not as standardized as some people think. Southern Chinese will use “ge” (个) excessively, and Northern Chinese tend to be more exact in their use of classifiers. We haven’t even gotten to Japanese and Korean etiquette and politeness. What about word order? Is that not important?

    3) Officially to linguists, the written word is not a language. Only spoken language is actually a language. Also, there is really no classification of dialects and languages, as they are often political boundaries more than anything. Look into the differences between Serbian and Croatian vs. Mandarin and Cantonese. Languages behaving like dialects and languages treated as dialects. The only true distinctions of language are pidgin-type communication vs. language-type communication. This assumes an innate grammar and official signifiers of meaning to classify as a language. For this reason sign-languages are languages, but saying to someone “Bathroom, where?” while making goofy gestures is not language. It is communication, but it lacks the sophistication of language. This is important as governments the world over try to define people as lacking the sophistication of language (hence the issue I take with your use of the word “patois.”) Prominent examples of linguistic oppressors include the French, Chinese, and the elite status attributed to Latin and Sanskrit, just to name a few.

    It is a HUGE no-no to attribute that any language has any superiority or deficiency at all. I think most linguists would suffice to discuss inefficiencies. For example, English writing is terribly inefficient (consider the pronunciation of “gh” in laughter, daughter, through, ghost, and thought; apparently the vowels can’t even be consistent.) Germanic languages are also inefficient in terms of counting (the poor, poor Danes!), whereas Chinese is highly regular and can be acquired by children very easily. In this way, English speakers are being outperformed in reading and math because of structural issues with the language. This is a topic that is becoming increasingly interesting to the public as there is increased competition between countries in terms of education.

  15. Regarding English… The main reason for it becoming so complex (and illogical, in places, such as with conditional tenses) is that England was invaded several times, so the the official and written language was that of the occupying nation, whilst spoken English by the ordinary people carried on developing, and thus developed in a myriad different forms, with no overall rules. (Also, some invaders only occupied part of the country – for example, the Danes.)

  16. In English:
    1. two

    In Polish:
    1. dwa
    2. dwie
    3. dwoje
    4. dwóch (or dwu)
    5. dwaj
    6. dwiema
    7. dwom (or dwóm)
    8. dwoma
    9. dwojga
    10. dwojgu
    11. dwojgiem
    12. dwójka
    13. dwójki
    14. dwójkę
    15. dwójką
    16. dwójce
    17. dwójko

    1. Yes and this is just one number and not considering other aspects like cardinal vs ordinal etc. If you think about all the ways you have to know how to use every word and case the complexity expands out ad infinitum.

    2. John, you forgot this one or perhaps these “two”
      dwójeczka, dwójeczeczka.

    3. If you bring up counter words as an example, then Japanese beats even Polish, I’m sure! They have different counter words for flat object, round objects, rabbits, birds, other animals, people, chopsticks, and who knows what else. It drives me crazy!

  17. what about Herdemenegilda Obsztylifikulifikiewiczowna name and surname

    1. What about what?
      Name “Hermenegilda” (not “Herde[…]”) has got nothing to do with Polish language. It is a female form of a name with Germanic provenance (Gothic “ermen gild”) and never in history was it even noticeably popular in Poland. And your funny surname doesn’t exist.

      One could find some difficult or bizarre things in Polish, but word combining just isn’t one of them.

      1. In German it is B-) And learners go crazy when it comes to this!

        “Rindfleischetikettierungs-überwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz” is a German law and was or will be removed (I’m not very sure).

        1. Well, you can build such words in German, but even Germans divide them into more understandable sentences. A couple of weeks ago I had a good chat over a beer with my German friend, and I said I know something like this: (sorry, no Umlauts here):
          (die) Reiseruecktritsskostenversicherungsbedingungen.

          In a couple of seconds we added a couple of “word’puzzles” to make it even longer, what you, theoretically, can do. But no one would do that for sure. So what about…

          (die) Reiseruecktritsskostenversicherungsbedingungenuebersetzungsvorschlagsvorbereitungen?

          Does it make sense? Well, questionalbe 🙂 Does it make German the most difficult language in the world? Not really. It’s very logical, and I personally can find a lot of “matematischer Verstand” here 😉

  18. Seven genders? could you please tell me what you consider a gender? I am a Polish native speaker and we have three genders which are in plural simplified to two genders. What about languages which have 14 cases or more? In Polish everyting is pronunced as it is written (there are few rules of pronunciation). Even children are fluent Polish speaker. I have a friend from India who learned Polish in less than one year and spoke it very fluently. Polish is very hard in some aspect while other languages are hard in another, but it is defenetly not the hardest language in the world.

  19. The authors seems a bit euro-centric given that no african languages have been taken into account. Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda and Burundi) is commonly cited as in the top five most difficult languages to learn, 16 verb and noun classes, tonal like chinese, and believ it or not THIRD most spoken language in Africa. Swahili on the other hand is a breeze in comparison. Please take more of a world view 😉

  20. I’m Hungarian, and indeed Hungarian is very hard but it looks laughable in comparison to Chinese. I just started learning basic mandarin recently.

    You say about Chinese and Japanese: “No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar”

    That’s nonsense.

    First, Chinese is a TONAL LANGUAGE. Tones change the meanings of words! The same word with the 4 different tones has 4 completely different meaning.

    For example, “ma” can mean “mother”, “hemp”, scold” or “horse” depending on the tone.

    You can try to say “Your horse eats my grass” and end up saying “Your mother is a ” just by making some mistakes in tones.

    No offense meant, but you clearly had no clue about Chinese when you set this order up.

    1. Írhatnám a kommentet magyarul is, de hogy a többiek is értsék: You can’t compare first language acquisition and second language learning. What you did with Hungarian is you picked it up and it is a completely different mental process than learning consciously another language. What seems very difficult in Chinese (the tonal nature of it) is in fact as easy and natural for a native Chinese as for us putting ridiculous amounts of suffixes in and after a stem (tettenérhetetlen). Ask a Chinese person learning Hungarian whether Hungarian is easier 😀 Or ask a native English/German/anyone who learns both languages which is easier.
      p.s.: I liked your example sentence 😀

      1. Oups… my reply ended up as a new comment. Sorry about that. 🙁

  21. This is the answer to the post by Magda. In fact, there are exeptions when it comes to reading written language in Polish. For example “jabłko” (an apple) is read in a different way than it is written. If you listened how polish people pronounce this word, you would spelled it: “japko”.

    1. JAPKO such pronounce is common but not correct – many polish people had wrong pronaunciation especially now have jurnalists – it’ make me angry 🙂

  22. I am native from Romania. I speak 7 languages, and I know that greek language was more hard to learn than russian and ukrainian. Why the authors didn’t write nothing about greek language?

  23. Dear all, My native tongue is Dutch (Flemish) and I speak English and French. When living in Finland I learned a basic of Finnish rather easily (because to me the language is very logical) and when traveling in Poland and the Philippines, I picked up some basic Polish and Tagalog. However, now I live in Bulgaria for over 2 years and I still don’t speak the language decently. I wouldn’t consider Polish the hardest language, because there are rules for pronunciation, though I admit, they can be a bit confusing for a not-slavic person.
    One criterium to define a hard to learn language, is definitely your own mothertongue. For me it is infinitely more easy to learn a germanic language and since I m from Belgium I get around with Romanic languages as well. The Slavic grammar is even understandable (I m now refering to Bulgarian, since that’s the Slavic language I am most familiar with) but the words don’t make any sense to my brain. While in Polish the vocabulary is a bit easier with more Latin influences.

  24. So we win at making life complicated for ourselves. Go us.

  25. Well,
    Basic English is easy to learn, but advanced English not so much. Somebody said Spanish is much harder to learn than English…hahaha…So that is why all Spanish people can talk English? With no accent at all… 😛 I speak both and I am not native in any, and I learned Spanish much faster than English.

    There might be Slovenian language that is harder to learn than Polish, because with 6 cases (we lost 7th) and 3 genders, we have 3 to even more “numbers” So plural, singular and dual. Sometimes it is different for plural up to 5, and plural with 5 or more than 5.
    Let’s say PIVO (BEER)

    1 pivo
    2 pivi
    3 pive
    4 pive
    5 piv
    6 piv
    .
    .
    .
    The best word there is, do try and pronounce it: ČMRLJ (Č=ch in spanish) – So this shows on “weird” writing… But over all there are many exceptions…

    But most definitely, the hardest language that I know (in Indo-European languages) is Hungarian!

    1. In Polish is the same. Though dualis doesn’t officialy exist anymore we have something to do with it in modern Polish.

      1 piwo
      2 piwa
      3 piwa
      4 piwa
      5 piw
      6 piw
      22 piwa
      100 piw
      101 piw
      102 piwa

  26. I am native in Spanish / Portuguese, and fluent in English. The easiest language in my opinion, given your criteria of speaking, is definitely Swedish (and the other Scandinavian languages as well).

    The reason is simple: few verb tenses, no gerund, no verb conjugation, noun cases are separated only in definite and indefinite, and small grammar.

  27. if you were not born in poland it is impossible for you to learn correct polish. Some immigrants are living here for 20-25 years. They have nice polish but still FAAAR from even 8-year old level when it comes to gramma. Our gramma is impossible to learn by other way than just learning that language from a very early age. We should develop some technology in the future to allow to teach children multiple languages when they are best suited to (very young age). I bet there are tons of languages that have similar issues as polish language.

  28. Well, Chinese who live here in Hungary seem to be able to meet some usable Hungarian in time periods that I don’t think an average Hungarian would be able to meet some usable Chinese.

    Also, if you make some mistakes in Hungarian postfixes, it likely can still be understood, and is very likely to not change significantly in meaning like a mistake in the tones would in Chinese.

    Chinese also have several words that sound completely the same (usually written with a different character) so it requires a good understanding of context to know which one they meant even when the tone is right.

    Another factor is that Hungarian is pretty straightforward regarding the phrasing of your message, while Chinese speak a lot in allegories, symbols, poetic images and so on. For example if they want to say that something is “so-so”, somewhat OK but could be better, they will say “tiger-tiger-dragon-dragon”.

    Now if you want to write a letter in Chinese, that is completely different from speaking or general writing because writing a letter has its own set of rules about how and what kind of allegories, symbols and pictures to use, and thus even harder. Not sure tho if in the age of email this still is used widely.

    So even if you understand/pronounce it correctly, tones are right, and the correct meaning that is paired with given sounded word is OK… you still won’t understand much without a background in Chinese culture, philosophy, poetry, symbols etc. OK, OK, this might not be a feature of the linguistic system itself, but the way it is being applied, but in the end it changes everything.

    Funnily enough, for me personally, the easiest part of Chinese seems to be the writing! 😀 Once you learn to recognize some characters, then they can already tell a lot, and once you get the feel of how characters are written, and the stroke orders (generally and usually left to right and top to bottom within the character) you can reasonably write any character you remember. I can already write more words than what I can pronounce.

  29. Polish is not so hard. I speak Slovak, English, Czech and learning Romanian. When I had first contact with Polish people and grammar I was lost. Didn’t understand anything. But i wanted to learn as they couldnt spk English. I went to Youtube and listen polish music with lyrics. Now I have not problem to speak, write and read.

  30. I’ve lived in Poland for a year now and meet a lot of people. I keep hearing of these foreigners who have learnt fluent Polish in one year. But I always hear this secondhand from Poles and have never met these elusive linguists. I spent a lot of time in Polish language schools and didn’t see people progress to fluency in Polish in 1 year even after intensive courses. They were lucky to get to a real B2 level after a lot of time and effort. The equivalent time i.e. 6 months of intensive classes learning French or Spanish would yield a higher level of language proficiency. I also like the author’s ‘o’ classification. Most Poles say they like people learning the language but are confused when they need to hear bad pronunciation. They give a quizzical look after a few sentences and ask if I want to switch to English. Why would I want to switch to English when I’m in Poland and have evidently learnt enough vocabulary and grammar to make myself understood? I passed a B2 exam. People in France or Spain don’t speak to me in English when I’m there and speak my basic knowledge of their language, even when they evidently speak English quite well. Perhaps the intention is to be helpful. But the result is not helpful as it would help to be able to practise the language. When I insist on speaking Polish, many Poles make little effort to speak slowly or clearly.

  31. Hi, I am a Polish native speaker learning French, Spanish, I had at school German and Russian also. There is one the most important thing for me in learning a language – as you try to speak you need self satisfaction to be encouraged to learning. From the Polish native perspective FRENCH is extremely hard, as well as it seems to be with Chinese it is because the fonetics is so different than your mother tongue. In Polish you pronounce every single letter and the language has no melody, it is “hard” language in speaking, like german for example or harder, rather compared to hungurian. I heard once Elton John saying that he sings in American English that it is much harder to sing in British English. It is veeery hard to sing in Polish and in French only speaking is like singing. So Polish and Hungarian people in the majoroty would have a strong accent when speaking Eglish or French, not so smooth and melodic. Different understanding, attitude is needed when Polish try to speak French, they first struggle with trying to HEAR what has just been said and very often are not able to repeat properly because there are some UNKNOWN, NEVER HEARD BEFORE S O U N D S. So for me the difficulty in learning a language is measured mostly by SOUND! The rest you are able to understand (as we had to understand a lot of rules in Polish, rules and grammar structures are not soo difficult). The most difficult for a Polish who got used to heard speaking using front parts of the mouth – strong pressing on teeth for example when speaking- is that in French we need to involve different speech organs. When Spanish or German are clear and you are able to remember words and repeat them exactly as they sound or see different words in a sentence, in French becuase it is so melodic it is difficult to catch words and understand them and the whole sense beacuse for a Polish native it is not as easily RECOGNIZABLE as in the other laguages. The same would be with Chinese where you can hear all those words using mostly the throat which is difficult for a Polish to repeat. It is so unnatural in our language to use THROAT sounds. And Maybe the same is with English/French/Chinese speakers trying to learn Polish or Hungarian – fonetics is so difficult for them that learning and trying to remember each word or sentence is a nightmare. For me it is a nightmare to remember anything in French and to use it although each words are easy to repeat whole sentences seem to be unrecognizable as if it was a language of a different species. I never had that feeling when learning Russian, German or Spanish.

  32. As I read it, I should feel proud to be a fluent polish speaker 😉
    The pyramid should look different for everyone. I can say that if you know Polish then it’s much easier for you to learn e.g. Russian. It depends on amount of vowels and flexibility of your tongue in such language. Maybe Polish is hard but you’ll use this knowledge during learning other languages 🙂

  33. Well it is fine.But where the hell is Turkic languages ? Are you going to refuse it like the land once called Türkistan ?

  34. Floating accent in Russian together with its vowels pronounced differently when stressed and unstressed makes that language most difficult.

    1. Alexey,

      Very, very true! This accent makes Russian language so beautifull! The melody of the language is one ot its art. But, I still wouldn’t consider any Slavonic language “the most difficult to learn”

  35. I think that something like “language ranking by difficulty” doesn’t make sense because for me for example, as a Polish native speaker, Russian or Ukrainian is easier than French or even English and we should not cow each other into something like that.

    A Polski wcale nie jest takim koszmarem 😉 Znam wielu ludzi, którzy uczą się polskiego i nie narzekają jak osoby, które nawet nigdy nie spróbowali 🙂

    1. *spróbowały 🙂

      That shows how even a Polish native speaker makes mistakes.

      1. I would be even more cruel 🙂

        “A Polski wcale nie jest takim koszmarem 😉 Znam wielu ludzi, którzy uczą się polskiego i nie narzekają TAK jak osoby, które nawet nigdy nie spróbowaŁY :)”

        Now it’s better, however I think a Polish language teacher would correct this and add “[…] nigdy TEGO nie spróbowały” to make it more logical.

  36. I wonder if they consider Slovak to be at lest somewhere near by the Polish.
    Polish, Slovak and even Czech is quite close, even in Grammar, there is many exceptions in both languages. Very delicate thing is polish do not use v, only w, and Slovaks don’t use w, only v.
    I do not really agree with this chart.
    There is too many criteria the language can be judge by.

  37. I’m native Polish, and I’m surprised, because I know that you all find Polish difficult, but not SO difficult. Of course Polish is hard, but don’t tell that it is impossible to learn! Look at David Snopek, for example. And in Polish there are only 5 genders, not 7. And three genders in singular and two genders in plural, but you only need to learn those in singular, in plural there’s simply, logical rule 🙂 About pronunciation: some sounds are hard, but once you learn them, you’ll find it easy to pronounce all the words. And Poles are not fluenty at the age of 16! They’re fluent since childhood, but at the age of 16 teenagers should know all the rules present in the language, but they use them before that, of course. And yet about difficulty: I had been learning Japanese for some time, and I found it much easier than French, for example. Everything’s logical, and there’s not so many conjugations. I would give the first place, as regards difficulty to Finnish, and other Ugro-Finnish languages. Not because of the cases, but because of being other type of language, where everything depends not on declinations and conjugations, but on suffixes and prefixes, as it’s an aglutinative language, not like Indo-European ones.

  38. It seems to me that the author is discredited from the moment that he refers simply to “Chinese” without considering the significant difference in complexity between Mandarin and Cantonese.

  39. Seven genders in Polish ? Here You are:
    1 male
    2 female
    3 neutrum
    4 MP Grodzka (trans from 1 to 2). There are of course cases of trans from 2 to 1
    5 MP Biedroń (gay)
    6. Doda (bi)
    7. Adamik (les)

  40. “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie” Try to poronounce it 🙂 All the best from Poland 🙂

    1. the same difficulty as “poczet sztandarowy wystąp” 🙂 and Wałbrzych 🙂 and an easy word “przeżyjesz” 🙂

    2. Try the extended version:

      “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie, a w tych chaszczach gdzieś przy Pszczynie skrzydła strząsa z dżdżu…”

      🙂

  41. I am a native English speaker but grew up in Japan and currently live in Spain. Just a comment about Japanese… basic Japanese to communicate is a lot easier than Chinese. There is little emphasis on intonation and a basic phonetic written alphabet so you can actually write/read Japanese easily before learning the Chinese Kanji characters which are mixed in. However, it is a very political language therefore the difficulty is with mastering the correct social/political addresses and terminology.
    I did not learn French at school so my difficulty with learning Spanish (at 30!) was with the verbs. However it is very logical so once you unravel the formula in your mind, it is a very fun language to learn.
    I think I have a good ear but Poland was one country which I visited and left unable to even say hello.

  42. Hi , Im Ryan

    The one thing i would like to Challenge is your Rating of Japanese.
    Especially The bit about Verb changes. Now I do believe that your correct in saying that it is not the hardest language. But i also know that it is a very different language than Chinese or Korean. I think one of the Things that makes Japanese More difficult than what you suppose , is that there are many similar sounding things in there language , and you can very easily say something you did not intend to .

    either way i think its great that you take time to do research yourself. I hope you continue in this 🙂 Good Luck !

  43. Firstly, I would like to note that a number of noun cases alone is not quite related to overall complexity of the language. I remember my learning Russian, and what caused most problems for me was not learning the cases themselves (I am Polish and Russian cases and their usage is quite similar to Polish), but declination variants which are significantly different. Actually, I don’t know, what is simpler: learning 18 cases with relatively simple suffix system, or 7 cases with 4-15 different suffixes for each case, depending on grammatical gender-category, number, two types of roots (hard and soft) and often changes within roots themselves. Example: plural of “pies” (a dog) is “psy”, while a very similar word with a soft suffix, “piesi” is actually a plural of “pieszy” (a pedestrian); on the other hand, there exist also a very similar albeit rather outdated and rarely used word, “bies” (a devil), which has a plural “biesy”. In Genitive there are “psa”, “pieszego”, “biesa”, and plural “psów”, “pieszych”, “biesów”. I’ll save you from quoting other forms.

    Please also note that the same word can be deflected in different ways depending on its exact meaning, for example plural of “agent” meaning a human (a spy, an insurance agent, representative etc) is “agenci”, while when meaning a type of a computer program it is “agenty”.

    In fact, I doubt if anyone can compare learning difficulty in an objective way, and even if it was possible, it would be fairly useless for any practical reason.

    Secondly, although grammars of some Asian languages are simple, I wouldn’t be so keen to ignore complexity of scripts. In fact, some specialists distinguish as many as five (!) distinct language competences in the modern world, which are only loosely connected: understanding a spoken language, speaking, understanding a written language, writing, and translating.

    Thirdly, considering that a vast number of people in media as well as people with degrees are virtually unable to use the language properly, I wonder if we are facing a process of simplification of the language, or the flood of ignorance.

    Anyway, I can only congratulate people who learned, not even mentioning mastering, Polish while living abroad.

    Best regards.

  44. 1 piwo
    2 piwa
    3 piwa
    4 piwa
    5 piw
    6 piw
    7 piw…
    :)))

  45. PS. I’m ‘only” speaking Polish, German, French and a little bit English…

  46. I’m Polish and I speak English and Russian, basic German and now I’m learning Korean (because I thought it would be much easier than Japanese or Chinese). I have to say that in comparison Korean is so much more difficult for me than for example Russian. I guess that it is because Polish (excluding the writing system) has a lot in common with Russian. We have a lot of words with Russian origin and if you realize that, it is often easy to remember them. Korean on the other hand I find really difficult – just because vocabulary and grammar, as easy as it might seem to you, are so unrelatable for me. I think the one thing that is not considered in these kind of rankings is the mind set of the person who starts learning a new language. It is easier for me to learn English, German or Russian because we share a similar culture (kind of), we have similar phonemes, almost the same metaphores and sometimes we have some intuition about the gramar rules.
    Also I woudn’t call English easy – especially for people whose mother tong is written exactly as you verbalize it. English has a lot of words which are spelled diffrently from what you would assume when hearing them. It’s because English language is evolving but at the same time is trying to keep it’s history in the way the words are spelled (best example would be sign and signature). Because of that I myself have great difficulty writing in English but I feel quite comfortable speaking it (I don’t have that problem with German but I just don’t like that language ). So yeah – cut me some slack if I made some horrible mistake.

  47. Keep in mind that Poland and Czech Republic have the most beautiful women in the world, so it’s definitely worth to learn their languages.

  48. A lot of people here says “I’m polish and we do not have any problems with our language”. It is false. I am polish-language geek and I have to say that I probably met less than 10 persons in my life who were really speaking polish absolutly correct. Of course most of educated adults use polish GENERALLY correct but they still make hundreds of small mistakes. Everyday polish is quite simple (if you speak it for ten years) but even professors often struggle with some phrases. For a foreigner the most diffucult part are probably cases and verbs – polish people find it intuitive and many of us thinks that if someone knows how to change the adjective for cases he knows how to speak polish. Well, I would call it communicative level but there is still a lot to learn…

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