English. So many spellings of the same words and yet they mean different things to confuse those that wish to learn it. However, I will also put forward one language that is not native to me and I have had trouble learning; Cantonese. Been told that I can manage the "sing-song" dialect well but I find it difficult to remember all the different tones.

French from English
 

Simply 'cause une vache is feminine, hence you use the feminine article la as opposed to the masculine article le.

amman2003

Swahili has eight. :)

The hardest? Chinese!
But try translate this:
"Macie wyjebiste forum i naprawde kurewsko milo jest znalesc tyle zdrowo, pozytywnie pojebanych ludzi"
This is polish - really hard to understand langue :)

Yar, I think Polish is difficult. German seems rather difficult too? I don't know, you combine words together to get a very long word!

Yup! Like swedish. German it's really simple. But polish...fuck..i hate this langue :-/

I agree with you. English is my native language, and I think it has to be one of the more difficult languages around.

I was taught that "English likes to be succinct." So, can someone tell me why a language that's supposed to be succinct have so many words for the same concept?

Since I speak English, I can really never understand how hard it is to learn. All I know is people have difficulty with it.

for me however, I find Mandarin very hard.... With all the pronounciations and how the tongue works and all that stuff.... I have to practice a lot to get the right articulation. I find the reason its hard for me is because when I speak English, I am very articulate with t's and s's etc., but in mandarin, everything seems to slur a little more.

I know much more Korean, partly because I have a better and easier time pronouncing and understanding.

Mandarine[sp?] (Chinese something)

My god, if you breath differently a different word comes out !

Mandarin, lol. And it's actually really easy because they have pinyin. Much easier than other dialects which don't have pinyin at least.

I would say English, French, and Japanese. These are the 3 official languages of the Winter Olympics for a reason.

I'm going to be different and just say the hardest language in the world is Mathematics. It's just difficult for me to master completely and I know for a fact that I never will.

Japanese is real easy compared to others; pronunciation ain't a real factor. I agree with French and Cantonese being hard to learn (note I'm not talking about those who picked them up at the prime years of pre-teen!) But for me I find anyone who can fluently speak Tamil with only having picked it up late, is truly a legend.

I was told Japanese was the hardest language. Of course, it was a Japanese and his English speaking gf who told me. Go figure.


I never thought of Hungarian being one of the hardest - my dad was born in Hungary. Too bad I don't know a lick of the language.

Seriously, English is a breeze. It's very easy to learn, much less complex than any other language I know, but more concise than German for example. At times it's not very coherent when it comes to pronunciation (verdict / indictment; awful / awry; etc.), but neither is German, so... *shrug* Many years ago I tried to get a grasp of Irish Gaelic. Beautiful, beautiful language, but hard as hell to learn. Needless to say, I gave up pretty soon.

Correct. Our longest (and best-known) word would be Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajüt entürschlossschlüssel :D

Zorro

They all are hard to learn to me since I know none but my g/f is well versed in Spanish and Polish, she is Polish but was born in America and decided she wanted to learn it...she knows bits and pieces of other languages as well.

They also said to me that hungarian is the hardest language... and maybe because hungarian language has something like 15 declinations of nouns!! At the moment I'm studying russian... even this language is not hard as I thought. Next language I'd like to learn is Japanese... any suggestion? Maybe I will study at first with Pimsleur language course, it helped me a lot aquiring the sound of the language when I was learning Russian at the beginning... and by the way, maybe I have to improve my English:)

What about creating a forum for languages??

Did anyone think about Italian? Since it's my native language, ok, it's pretty easy for me... but I think that for foreing people would be difficult, for example, learn all the verbs coniugations, and been able to relate them well to each other. I mean: even speakers on tv do a lot of mistake, for example, in using a verbal form that is "congiuntivo"... let's think about...:)

I agree, Hungarian is one of the hardest language. A friend of mine explaining hungarian grammar once, and it's seemingly beyond my comperhension.
Japanese is much easier than our thought. I have studied it for one year and my progress is quite well, especially when you learn the kanji first before advance any further.
I agree, I made a lot of language-related threads in general discussion forum. I think we should have our own language forum

Yeah, let's get a language folder in here.
And give the food folder a decent name, too.

I haven't tried to learn it, but Hebrew I heard, was pretty hard to leaarn.

I've understood that learning a language that isn't somehow related to your native language is what gets to be difficult. Though this would make it seem like anything that descends from Indo-European means that a French speaking person should be able to pick up Sanskrit a lot easier than someone native to Japan.

Anyway, I think learning something like Old English would be rather hard for someone. As English today has many influences from German, Welsh, Gaelic, Latin, French, and Greek, which has turned it into this very strange broth of words that we speak today. Not stopping me from wanting to take up on it, but I can't study it here in Wyoming. Same with Norwegian. Guess I'll have to go with German, since English is a Germanic language, and I'd be able to make connections with both.

I've only tried to learn one language, so basically I'm going to say French. Damn reflexive bloody verbs >.< Then again, I'm no linguistical genius, so I find any other language other than my mother tongue to be quite a challenge...

So sue me, I'm lazy :(

Ok, but then, how to request a forum dedicated to languages?? It would be nice: we could share opinions, suggestions, and even tools that can be useful learning a language...

I can see how English would be a hard language for someone of whom it's not ingrained into since birth. :P

There are indeed a LOT of words in the english language that are spelled nearly the same or even have something just as simple as single vowel digits yet mean entirely different things. Another thing I've noticed that is always a constant bone of contention is "it's" and "its". Its a simple easy to make error that a lot of people make - one being a contraction that means "it is" the other being something to denote a thing.

Hell - I know people who've spoken english for years and STILL can't (or won't) get it right. ;)