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.
In my idea persian(farsi) and arabic is hardest language because havent rules specially persian(farsi)don’t have any rule. this language is very hard to learn
writing is very hard.
In my idea the hardest language in the whole world is persian(farsi) that use in I.R.IRAN
What about Czech? Is it really hard? I am trying.
It has 3 tenses (that’s not much really) but then come the perfective and imperfective verbs and the 7 cases. I think that its prepositions are the ones that turn it into a difficult language to learn!
It is very similar to Polish in terms of difficulty, however, Polish has a little bit harder pronunciation. In fact Poles and Czechs make fun of each other in a friendly way, because they each think the other’s language sounds funny almost like their own language, however, full of diminutives, almost like speaking to a child or a child would speak.
Polish? well then might as well mention Lithuanian along side it, seeing as how we have just as many cases. And the grammar is insanely complex.
I know that Polish is a difficult language. For those who learn the Polish language from birth, it is not all that difficult, but even some Poles have a problem with it. Always the worst problem I had when arranging sentences. A teacher from the Polish always said, “This sentence is written as if he wrote a foreigner who is just learning the language.” She was very demanding.
Other people also have a problem with that, but most of the problem is with spelling. You must know by heart every principle of spelling words to write properly. The literature is also a lot of style.
aforyzm
anakolut
animalizacja
antonim
aliteracja
alegoria
aluzja literacka
anafora
animizacja
antropomorfizacja
antyteza
apostrofa
apozycja (retoryka)
archaizm
asyndeton
dialektyzacja
echolalia
elipsa
enumeracja
epifora
epitet
epitet barokowy
epitet metaforyczny
epitet stały
epitet tautologiczny
eufemizm
eufonia
glosolalia
gradacja
groteska
homonimy
hiperbola
Instrumentacja głoskowa
inwersja
inwokacja
ironia
kolokwializm
kontrast
lipogram
metafora (inaczej przenośnia)
metonimia
neologizm
oksymoron
onomatopeja (wyrazy dźwiękonaśladowcze)
ożywienie, zobacz animizacja
paradoks
parafraza
paralelizm składniowy
parenteza
paronomazja
personifikacja
peryfraza
pleonazm
polisyndeton
porównanie
porównanie homeryckie
powtórzenie
przenośnia, zobacz metafora
przerzutnia
pytanie retoryczne
retrospekcja
rym
rytm
synonim
synekdocha
synestezja
symbol
tropy
uosobienie
wulgaryzm
wykrzyknienie
zdrobnienie
zgrubienie
złożenie
związek frazeologiczny
It is difficult to learn the importance of these compounds style.
I do not know if I wrote well, because the English language at school brought me difficulty. Receiving a 3 and 2 of the tests [in Poland, rating system is 1 – niedostateczny (lowest level), 2 – dopuszczający 3 – dostateczny, 4 – dobry, 5 – bardzo dobry, 6 – celujący (highest degree, the least used, mainly from the knowledge secondary)].
I think the translation of this text into Polish.
Ja wiem że język polski to trudny język. Dla tych którzy języka Polskiego uczą się od urodzenia, on nie jest wcale taki trudny, ale nawet niektórzy Polacy mają z nim problem. Zawsze najgorszy problem miałam kiedy układałam zdania. Nauczycielka od polskiego zawsze mówiła “To zdanie jest napisane jakby pisał to obcokrajowiec który dopiero uczy się języka”. Była bardzo wymagająca.
Inni ludzie też mają z tym problem, ale najwięcej problemu jest z ortografią. Trzeba znać na pamięć każdą zasadę pisowni żeby wyrazy pisać poprawnie. W literaturze dużo jest też środków stylistycznych.
aforyzm
anakolut
animalizacja
antonim
aliteracja
alegoria
aluzja literacka
anafora
animizacja
antropomorfizacja
antyteza
apostrofa
apozycja (retoryka)
archaizm
asyndeton
dialektyzacja
echolalia
elipsa
enumeracja
epifora
epitet
epitet barokowy
epitet metaforyczny
epitet stały
epitet tautologiczny
eufemizm
eufonia
glosolalia
gradacja
groteska
homonimy
hiperbola
Instrumentacja głoskowa
inwersja
inwokacja
ironia
kolokwializm
kontrast
lipogram
metafora (inaczej przenośnia)
metonimia
neologizm
oksymoron
onomatopeja (wyrazy dźwiękonaśladowcze)
ożywienie, zobacz animizacja
paradoks
parafraza
paralelizm składniowy
parenteza
paronomazja
personifikacja
peryfraza
pleonazm
polisyndeton
porównanie
porównanie homeryckie
powtórzenie
przenośnia, zobacz metafora
przerzutnia
pytanie retoryczne
retrospekcja
rym
rytm
synonim
synekdocha
synestezja
symbol
tropy
uosobienie
wulgaryzm
wykrzyknienie
zdrobnienie
zgrubienie
złożenie
związek frazeologiczny
Trudno jest się nauczyć znaczenia tych związków stylistycznych.
Nie wiem czy napisałam dobrze, ponieważ język angielski w szkole sprawiał mi trudność. Dostawałam 3 i 2 ze sprawdzianów [w Polsce system oceniania to 1 – niedostateczny (najniższy stopień), 2 – dopuszczający, 3 – dostateczny, 4 – dobry, 5 – bardzo dobry, 6 – celujący (najwyższy stopień, najmniej stosowany, głównie z wiedzy ponadpodstawowej).
Polish really is difficult. If you don’t believe it – check this out. This is word “to read” along with its possible forms:
There are 120 forms.
Your right! I had to remove all the forms you wrote for technical reasons. 🙂 But I might make it a post as is is amazing that there aso many forms in the language. No question Polish is the hardest language to learn.
Honestly, I have seen the Icelandic language and that looks the hardest to me besides Asian and Arabic languages.
I am a native English speaker [15, from the US] and I am taking French right now in high school [I am a sophomore] and it seems pretty simple to me. I am in French 3 out of 4 [French 4 is the college level and if you pass the exam you can get the college credit while in high school] and the only thing that I still cant get is which way the accents go lol!
I’m from Poland. I know, it’s really hard language. For me Polish is easy (of course). I was born here. My English is weak, but I don’t care. I am only 13 years… and I learn German in school. I prefer German. xd
Jestem z Polski. Wiem, to naprawdę trudny język. Dla mnie polski jest łatwy (oczywiście) – urodziłam się tu. Mój angielski jest słaby, ale się nie przejmuję. Mam tylko 13 lat… i uczę się niemieckiego w szkole. Wolę niemiecki. xd
Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzeszynie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie – spectacular sentence (popisowe zdanie xD)
I am – Ja jestem.
You are – Ty jesteś.
He/She/It is – On/Ona/Ono jest.
We are – My jesteśmy.
You are – Wy jesteście.
They are – Oni/One są.
I know, Polish is beautiful.
wiem, polski jest piękny.
/nie rzucim ziemi skąd nasz ród,
nie damy pogrześć mowy… (Maria Konopnicka)/
;dd
I’m trying to understand why Polish is difficult?
Próbuję zrozumieć dlaczego Polski jest trudny?
I’m Polish, so it’s easy…
Jestem Polką, więc to łatwe…
Everything is difficult.
Wszystko jest trudne.
Maybe beyond words “yes” or “no”. xD
Może poza słowami “tak” i “nie”. xD
It’s only a joke.
To tylko żart.
We have yet: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż.
My mamy jeszcze: (tutaj są moje ukochane polskie znaki, których nikt inny nie ma xD).
Widziałam kiedyś film na youtube, gdzie ucyzli słowa “j*bany”, pisząc “yeahbunny”. Poniżające.
I don’t know but for example, Czech people say Czech is harder than Polish, but it is not in the list. And I see French is consider harder than Spanish, how? Spanish vocabulary is wider, French grammar is a simplier version of the Spanish and there are more exceptions in Spanish.
Hi, well, in my opinion the serbian language is one of the most difficult language to learn. Id like to hear what do other people who have tried to learn it, say their opinion.
A while back I had some Serbians trying to make the case that Serbian was the hardest language, it is hard and even similar to Polish but there is now way it comes close to the tongue twisters Polish has with every day words.
Hi! I trying understand what is the most problem of Polish language to learn. What is most difficult to understand you? I can believe that my language is so difficult, but do not worry because sometimes Polish people can not truly speak and write correctly.
What about Slovak language? How will you rank their language? because I found it hard to learn as well.
English is very easy..
Hello
I`m Polish for me Polish is easy XD
I live in the UK and I am finding English accent very difficult for me. I am teaching my friend to speak Polish and when he speaks I wanna just laugh XD
Not too long time ago I started to learn Spanish in School we had a choice Spanish or French
Now I am finding learning of Spanish very very easy and logical to me. I started to learn Italian and Latin online words in Spanish and Italian and Latin are very pretty much similar-E.G To give is Dar in spanish and dare in Italian/Latin.
In fact in Polish Dar means gift
Dear author,
It would be quite fair to say that the answer to the question is rather subjective. Do you personally speak those languages mentioned, or at least are you aquanted with them on paper? It would be rather unwise to claim Polish to be the hardest if you haven’t tried the others.
I would certainly agree that there are more complex language system regarding pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar than the others. Though I might argue the point that a certain language is the hardest and the other is the easiest. If you know/study a language, then the others belonging to the same linguistic family seem very close and much easier to learn, more distant families have less common features.
Polish is not hard for people speaking Ukranian, Russian, Belarussian and other Slavic languages. For the rest it surely represents more complexity but it is not something extraterrestrial. “Polish-… Seven cases and Seven Genders” – sounds really threatening )) Just in case, French has 8 genders and 8 verb cases
Is Polish difficult for the Poles? =)
Best regards
Maria, there is a degree of relativeness in this. That is if you speak Russian where 50% of the vocabulary is similar and with a case system like in the Russian language it is easier. However, for an English speaker Poles is the hardest language to learn by far.
Have a look
Wiki for the hardest language to learn.
In Europe, Basque is known to be among the top five hardest
with Hungarian (17 declinations/6 in Russian/4 in German)
Finnish,Greek,Icelandic.
In North Africa Kabyle (a dialect of Berber) is considered much more difficult than Arabic.
In Asia, Chinese, Armenian or Thai are specially hard task to master!
Maria, the Internet is the biggest barrel of recycled information in the world. I do not put much credence when some (usually egghead academic) says this or that. I teach and learn languages has my hobby and Polish is the hardest language to learn. I like to hear people’s personal experiences and opinions as I think they are more valid recycled secondary source on languages.
Polish is same as Croatian/Serbian…
grammar is exactly the same … Spelling (pisownia/pravopis) also …literature also…
Just words are different…
Similar but harder pronunciation, the Polish language has crazy long strings of incongruent continents running together. But your right all the Slavic languages and people are related 🙂
I speak several languages on an advanced level and if i were to put them all in difficulty order, they would go as follows:
french (being the most difficult), english, polish, russian, slovak (the easiest one – my mother tongue).
The reason why I think french language is more difficult than, say polish, is because of more difficult pronunciation, more difficult ortograph, more tenses, more homophones and also the fact that you can never precisely write down, based on the orally transmitted form, the names of towns, villages or human names.
Sorry, but it really sounds like the publisher of this blog has not studied languages before. I say this especially for asian languages, because the assessment of Japanese was downright ridiculous. Japanese has 8 different classes of particles each with numerour particles with varying uses. In addition to that, it has tenses, and a honorific conjugation system. And instead of some “difficult gender system” Japanese has a classifier system for nouns. Verbs have different ways they can be conjugated-stative, continual, punctual, movement, non-volitional. Oh yeah, and for those 5 different patterns you need to know this many conjugations.
1 Present and future
# 2 Past tense
# 3 Negative
# 4 i form
# 5 Te form
# 6 Potential
# 7 Causative
# 8 Causative passive
# 9 Conditional eba form (provisional)
# 10 Conditional ra form
# 11 Imperative
# 12 Passive
# 13 Volitional
Alot of foreigners speak Japanese bad, but they wont hassle you about it, or correct you. I know, I am a foreinger.
Oh yeah, and Korean is like a harder version of this. Burmese has particles, classifiers, and get this tones. To add to that it has nasal sounds and plosives. People just dont understand how hard it is to speak a tonal languages, Im guessing you dont know one. I wont even break down Navajo, youll crap you pants. Also, I dont see any Caucasian languages, I dont see Arabic, and as a matter of fact, I dont see any African languages mentioned. I also dont see Lithuanian mentioned. The explanations of the finno-urgic languages is horrible. You have no knowledge of any of these languages, including the romance ones. Popular languages usaully get the mark of being easy, because they are so widespread. But I know plenty of people coming from all over who speak bad Spanish, and especially bad English. We just hear it so much that we understand it and dont correct them. Another on that gets a rep of being easy to speak is French.
When it comes to spoken language for speakers of non-tonal languages (all European languages), Thai is actually one of the most difficult ones to master. It can be quiet easy to learn conversational Thai, but there is an extremely steep learning curve when it comes to more advanced Thai language.
Thai has 9 (!) different tones, not just 5 as commonly assumed, and consonants have much finer differentiation than what many of our ears can distinguish without training. There are several consonants between d & t for example, in very fine graduation, and picking the wrong one can alter the meaning of a word drastically and make it incomprehensible, just like a wrong tone.
Many different words are used when talking with people depending on their social status (not just pronouns, but also verbs and noins), just like in Japan, which goes back to the system of “sakdina”, which gave each person an exactly defined rank in the social hierarchy, and depending upon which social status addresses which, different words must be used.
I think Spanish, Finnish, Estonian and for example Japanese are quite easy in the sense of pronunciation. They all are pretty much the “pronounce how it is written”-type compared to English and let’s say French. Though, it’s easy for me to say because im Finnish myself 🙂
I would like to say as English is hard to speak like a native, so is Dutch. You can see foreigners speaking it with perfect grammar, just when a native starts speaking it sounds sooo different.
Otherwise I saw that someone said Czech and Polish sound funny to one another.Well if you are a native Bulgarian you can laugh yourout every time you hear Polish, Serbian, Macedonian etc. Its ‘couse long long ago these languages were similar and at present Bulgarian has excluded all the hard things like cases and has changed the pronounsiation. However old people from the villages still, as they speak they use old pronounsiation and when I hear a Slavic language it automatically sounds like Redneck language to me 😀
Nice word though:
Непротивоконституционствувателствувайте.
Neprotivokonstitutzionstvuvatelstvuvajte.
Hi :). I’m from Poland and I’m very very proud of our language. It’s very beautiful and a little bit ‘susurrous’. I hope You’ll understand what I mean – we have a lot of “sz”, “cz”, “dż”, “ć” “rz”/”ż”, [similar to English “sh”, “ch”, “j”, soft “ch”. French “j”, etc…]. And Polish has got a lot of funny or cute idioms – e.x. “pocałować klamkę” [translation: to kiss door handle] means that You went to somebody’s home, but he wasn’t home – so You had to ‘kiss the door handle’ :D.
Gramatics is very hard, some Polish adult people sometimes don’t know how to write correctly.
And, what really makes me sad – a lot of Polish teenagers don’t like Polish lessons. They don’t learn and they speak wrongly.
Many English words substitute Polish just like “super” substituted our “świetny”, “cudny”, “niesamowity”, “piękny”, etc.
But I hope that there are people which take care of our language… And I want to invite people to learn our language :).
I’m learning English, German and a little bit Russian. Every language is beautiful and in my opinion, English is very easy. And Russian is easy for every Slav. 🙂
Greetings from Poland, have a nice day 🙂
Bisia
WOW! I have no clue what most of you are talking about. No wonder I cannot learn a second language! “Tenses, Times, Cases, Classifiers, Mnemonics, Tone, etc…..I do not know what any of this means. 🙁
To learn a second language you do not need to know these terms, you just need a lot of exposure to it and a willingness to sit down and study.
Here’s my background: I’m Fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, French, and Japanese. I’ve learned them all to literacy since birth and need to converse with my family in them constantly.
Taking it from the English as a base perspective, I’d say learning French as a European language is the easiest.
Note: Japanese DOES require a fair amount of conjugation. There is NO conjugation for Chinese. I’d seriously classify Japanese to be exponentially harder than Chinese. Chinese, as a language, is actually very simple. The only difficulties I can see are just pronunciation and writing. Sometimes I go to Barnes and Nobles and meet a language textbook for Japanese and just sigh and say, “wow this is one ridiculously hard language”.
This is of course all opinion. My Chinese and French became comfortable waaay faster than Japanese.
hey guys! my names’s Wiktoria and i live in Poland, Wrocław. well i know that polish is the hardest language and someone from another country probably will never know polish as well as some Pole. im only 13 but i learn languages very fast, i know polish orthograpgic so well, i do not any mistakes, same with english. i also learnt russian ALONE cuz i love this language and Russia so much. if someone of us would want know polish, i can help you. it would be very nice thing, really:) if you’ve any questions or something like this write me
kisses :*
Greenlandic is an extremely difficult language. More than 20 words for “snow” for example.
It’s kinda funny when some english-speaker is talking about difficult pronunciation in Polish. Yes, it has some different sounds than english, but it has a high level of consistency between writing and corresponding sounds (at least one way).
In polish, if you have a certain letter or group of letters, they are always (there are very, very rare exceptions) read the same way. In english? Try to guess. The most notable example is “ea”. Quoting wikipedia – “‹ea› is used in many languages. In English orthography, ‹ea› usually represents the monophthong /i/ as in meat; due to a sound change that happened in Middle English, it also often represents the vowel /ɛ/ as in sweat. Rare pronunciations occur, like /eɪ/ in just break, great, steak, and yea, and /æ/ in the archaic ealdorman. When followed by r, it can represent the standard outcomes of the previously mentioned three vowels in this environment: /ɪər/ as in beard, /ɜr/ as in heard, and /ɛər/ as in bear, respectively; as another exception, /ɑr/ occurs in the words hearken, heart and hearth. It often represents two independent vowels, like /eɪ.ɑː/ (seance), /i.æ/ (reality), /i.eɪ/ (create), and /i.ɨ/ (lineage). Unstressed, it may represent /jə/ (ocean) or /ɨ/ (Eleanor).”
Polski jest zajebiscie łatwy hahah:D
Finnish (Suomi)
This lang sthe hardest in the world well second to be in fact!!
Why?
Finnish ang you dont have same meaning for 1 word, you must constantly chane the words around to talk.
Like this:
Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?
In Finnish you must change every word, you cant keep same form, meaning you must learn like a child to get it right, if you look Polish and other langs, you can cach words and remeber them, as for Finnish you cant, unless you have brains like a Sponge
well, polish is hard even too hard for some Poles cause when i read some comments in internet my eyes are like o.O
russian is not hard but lithuanian that is pretty difficult ! I shall say very difficult. My husband is from lithuanian it took for me ‘some’ time to learn his language but for our daughter is very simple, she can speak polish, english and lithuanian.
No to pozdrowienia i uczcie się języków obcych !
My native language is Russian. I don’t know Polish at all, but when I was in Poland, I talked in Russian, but they in Polish and we understood each other, not perfectly, but just some ideas 😀 😀 also I can read and understand something in Polish, as basically it is similar to Russian, but with English (Latin) letters.
“Eyjafajallajokull” vulcano. Go on, try and say it quickly!!!
Probably bit your tongue off, didn’t you???
I’d say Icelandic and Finnish.
I’m Irish and Swedish. Try Gaelic and old Scotish But nothing beats American English
for idioms (unique to regional areas.)
So personally, I think it is a challenging battle. I would say that the hardest in my opinion are Icelandic and Finnish, for different reasons. I love languages, I even make them up. So here are my reasons. (I am a native english speaker)
Icelandic: Yeah, I can pronounce and spell Eyjafjallajokull correctly (except for the accent, which i know is there too. But the phonology changes all the time, and the words just boggle my mind sometimes. Well, now Finnish…Finnish is wonderful because it uses this wonderful completely phonetic Latin alphabet. But…the grammar! Yeah, endless noun cases…and not to mention consonant gradation (which is a phonetic thing, yet the consonants are changed with the sound)! It is ridiculous, and lots of memorizing these different types of nouns is ridiculous. My main problem with noun cases: the partitive case…too many uses
I’m learning russian and finnish. God there both so hard. But I’m young 13 so i hope I have a chance at this =( There grammar is hard. I’ve been studying it for some while now and I get what makes something in a russian case but not what ending to use. Oh or why some words don’t exsist. After you learn the cases you still have the other stuff like the words they use in between to handle cause cases don’t explain that.
There is NO WHERE to learn finnish cases. Like why there in that case (I mean in depth). They have way to many cases it just makes me angry!
My native language is Polish, but I also speak in Ukrainian because of family who are Ukrainians. Now im trying to speak fluently in English, but I am only one year in England, so I will be a better in converstaion after 2 more years. Will see. I think Polish is well hard to learn, when I speak with my Polish friends, English pople always look at us and says that we speak so fast and when they are listen us, they have impression of noise in our mouth. Haha, its interesting how Polish language sounds for English friends 🙂 Can I learn spanish on my own? Or better not?
Yes Spanish will be easy to learn for you as Polish is a complex and rich language, if you move to something like Spanish it will be no problem.
Hey ! I’m for Polish and… Polski jest łatwy dla Polaka a wy się nigdy nie nauczycie mówic bardzo dobrze .. trudno 🙁 Gramtyka POLSKA jes bardzo łatwa
odmiania czasownika SPRZĄTAĆ – CLEAN
1.I- sprzątam
2.you – sprzątasz
3.hi, she,it – sprząta
haha a to tylko l.poj.
Ni nauczycie sie nigdy !!
Polska jest zajebista nie dość, że wygrała woje i miała papieża polaka to jeszcze ma najtrudniejszy język któego sie nigdy nie nauczycie
Polish the hardest language to learn? That is like saying that playing the violin is harder than playing the piano. Which is nonsense, of course: even a three-years-old can’t play out of tune on a piano, but when it comes to real playing, a pianist has a lot more notes to take care of than a violinist. Both instruments are simply different.
Before drawing this kind of conclusions one should first answer questions like:
– what makes a language difficult?
– difficult for whom?
– learning to what level? (basic, advanced, perfect, etc.)
– do you mean the spoken language, the written language, or both?
It’s often taken for granted that a language with cases is harder than a language without cases. I’d say, cases CAN make a language difficult for a person who is not used to them. Same goes for grammatical gender: Polish has three genders (not seven, I’ve no idea where the author got that information), the same as in Latin, Greek and all other Slavic languages. From that point of view, Polish might indeed be hard for someone who is monolingual in English, however, if you already know f.ex. Latin, then the Polish case system is peanuts. I should add that the Polish case system is practically identical to those in Russian, Czech and Serbian; you can’t say that one is harder than the others, and if you know one, you basically know them all.
My experience is that every language has its own difficulties, and every language can still be learned. Being Dutch myself, I have learned several other languages, including Polish and Russian. All I can say is that Polish was easier for me than Russian, and both were easier for me than… German! Polish has a rich phonology, and of course, it does have its genders and its cases well, but several other elements are particularly easy to handle. Please consider the following:
– Polish has many consonants, and many of them don’t exist in English; however, the system is pretty straightforward, and all that’s needed is some practice.
– Vowels, on the other hand, are very few and very simple. Compare that to English, where virtually every simple vowel is subject to diphthongisation, vowel length, etc.
– Word order is fairly free in Polish.
– Stress falls on the penultime syllable almost by definition. If you know how to pronounce Polish, you can read any text aloud without any mistakes, without knowing even a single word in it. You never have to learn pronunciation and orthography separately.
– Polish has a very limited number of tenses and moods.
– There are a lot of rules, but there’s little irregularity.
– In comparison to Polish and English, many other languages are truly alien. That can be said of Japanese, for instance.
Besides, language learning is an individual process. Some people prefer learning auditively, others visually. Some people love tables, others hate them. And let’s face it: some people have a talent for learning foreign languages, others don’t. What is good for one person is bad for another, and there is no universal method of language learning that is good for everybody. People are different and languages are different, and how difficult a particular language really is for a particular person is pretty much a matter of finding the right teacher.
Sorry but I have to disagree.
“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.” I’ve been learning Japanese and most of that is simply not true. Japanese essentially has only two tenses, perfective and imperfective but there are countless verb forms (I think what you mean is that it’s not conjugated differently for each subject). Also, words are NOT all short. (Hazimemasite? Hidaridonari? Irassyaranakatta?!)And if the grammar was as easy as you say, people wouldn’t write entire books explaining the countless uses of wa and ga (for example). I’m not here to say that Japanese is in fact the hardest language, but if you’re going to argue that Japanese is not then you need to at least have the facts right.
The United States Defense Institute divides languages into 4 categories based on the number of hours needed to achieve fluency:
Category 3 (2nd Most Difficult) includes Polish, Russian, Greek, Hebrew etc.
Category 4 (Most Difficult) includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
There’s no absolute for language difficulty though so in the end it’s all opinion.
The hardest language i think is lithuanian. It is much harder then polish.
My native language is English and I found that after coming back from a stay in the Czech Republic that Czech is the hardest language to learn. They have so many tenses that if you think yo know how to say a word, you probably don’t because that word can be writen six other ways. Czech is also hard to read for English speakers because the letters are so different. The accents they have on their words are also hard to say; one person had lived in Czech Rep. for 4 years and still cannot say one of the letters right.
French is easy for English speakers I believe because the words are so similar but the grammar is the hard part- they have imparfait, future simple, passe compose, etc. They also have a lot of irregular verbs. I’ve been learning French for 8 years and I’m not close to being fluent in it.
English is the hardest language of all. It’s the be all and end all, because it’s the dominant language here in the world today. As for Polish, it would make more sense if it used the Russian alphabet as opposed to the Latin one, it just does not suit the Latin alphabet, like all Slavic languages – they should not use the Latin alphabet because that best suits Romance and Germanic languages only.
My native language is German and I’ve been told by foreigners that they find it the hardest (Western) language they know.
First our words; EIGHT SEPARATE noun plurals. Some have none Zimmer/Zimmer, Gebaeude/Gebaeude usw.. plus four cases, three friendshipes.
My friend from Australia says our sentences make her dizzy LOL
to Jan van Steenbergen,
apparently you haven’t learnt Polish not Russian if you say such things.
“Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?”
And in Poland? What do you think?
Hi how are you doing?
Hej, jak się masz?
Hi what are you doing?
Hej, co robisz?
And for example… Maybe word woman – kobieta.
Kobieta, kobiety, kobiecie, kobietę, kobietą, kobieto, kobiet, kobietom, kobietami, kobietach, kobieca, kobiecy, kobiecymi, kobiecą… And more.
farsi (persian) is the sweetest and easiest language in the world .
It is the language of poem.its soft and persian when they talk it is pleasing your ears and you want to listen to them,as if they are singing…….
oh so smooth language .you should try once and see if im right
I’m currently making an attempt to learn Polish with a complete grammatical approach to the language, meaning I learn as many of these mentioned regularities in the grammar I can possibly learn, before focusing on the lexical aspects. Jan van Steenbergen might not be that far off the track as some of you think. Polish is extremely regular, which I enjoy. Compared to Polish, German, which is often referred to as structured and regular, is way out of league. German is grammatically quite structured, but with a whole lot of exceptions, for example in the gender singular-plural declension as mentioned above.
But the question is if a language will be perceived as “hard” if it uses very complex rules that maintain little to irregularity – like Polish does – or if a “hard” language is hard, mainly because of the parts outside the grammatical borders. The English language is a better example than German here. English grammar is very limited – leaving a lot of work to irregular structures in order to make the language come together.
I believe there are two main types of talent in learning languages. Either you are better at learning the abstract grammatical structures, with less focus on the actual words. Or you are governed by the words of the language; that is, you have an easier time learning hundreds of phrases and words without thinking too much about the heritage of them.
Whikis said
“Hi how are you doing?
Moi-mitä-sinä-menne?
Now lets try another way using same words!!
Hi what are you doing?
Moi-Mitään- sinäan-teehä?”
In polish is like that
Hi how are you doing?
Cześć, jak się masz? or Cześć, co u ciebie?
Hi what are you doing?
Cześć, co robisz?
See? Polish is hard. But i think that an asian languages are harder.
I think polish is the hardest language to learn. Let’s see, Poland was wiped off a map for 123 years. There was no time for the Polish language to experience reforms. Therefore, the language is difficult. I learn languages super fast and I finally been getting it. Polish is a beautiful language, especially when spoken in the northern region such as Gdańsk, Sopot, and Gdynia. Do you want to know an even harder language than Polish? Try Kashubian. More sounds, more exceptions, and the inclusion of a schwa in their alphabet! GAHH! But for you who say the polish is not as hard as finnish, try saying this: STÓŁ Z POWYŁAMYWANYMY NOGAMI!! It is hard. I have used Rosetta Stone, and even lived in Poland for a month and I still have so much trouble with declension (grammatical noun position). There are so many exceptions to noun declension but has anybody who hasn’t tried declension ever think that there are three different genders in Polish. For declension, there are 7 different cases and three different ways to decline them depending if they follow an animate, inanimate, or proper inanimate.
Now, I know finnish is hard mostly because it doesn’t have a family of languages. It is in itself, a smaller language family. Anyways, lithuanian is hard too. Mostly because lithuanian wasn’t a geographic language on a map like german or russian. So it never went through reforms.
Lastly, Croatian and Serbian are a lot harder than people realize because there is a certain intonation along with stress. There are rising sounds and falling sounds, along with the monotone sound.
Okay, enough ranting.
Do widzenia. 🙂
Gdańsk, moje miasto.
Nie ma lepszego kraja niż Polska!!!!
Marsz, Marsz Dąbrowski!!!
@Astunstana
I am just going to say this to you! Polish uses the latin alphabet because they are catholic. It’s called not being like Russia. Russia has done nothing but ruin Poland. Have you ever heard of the Katyń. The Russian slaughter of polish officers. April 10, 1940. Learn your history, 966 AD Mieszko the First was baptized and so was Poland. Get it straight. Let’s see…all western Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet. Why? Because they are Central Europe, not Eastern Europe.
Ale jaja!! hahaha