The hardest language in the world?
 

Just lately I've been studying japanese intensively and so far my progress is quite good. Even though it's quite painstaking, but I think japanese is probably not as hard as I thought. For a break, I browsed for articles about the hardest languages in the world. It seems Finnish and Hungarian deserve the title of being the hardest language in the world, while Indonesia/Malay is the easiest.

Well, what do you think about this? Do you study language a lot? What is the hardest language you ever learn?

I started learning Russian a few weeks ago, and the Cyrillic alphabet was pretty fucking hard to nail down at first.

I'm pretty good with it now, though. Apart from the hard and soft vowels and stresses.

While not necessarily the hardest, the languages that are most unrelated to any other language are: Hungarian and Basque.

There's a saying about a man who studied Basque and after nine years he knew seven words. Probably an exaggeration, but still.

I thought Hungarian was related to Finnish?

It is, but distantly. It's not like any of the other Indo-European languages that populate the rest of Europe.

I would perceive Cantonese/Mandarin very hard in both an oral and an aural context. Especially if your primary language does not make constant use of intonation. The structure does not seem too intimidating (eg. no need to mark articles), but for many people, you'd take quite a long time to be able to fluently process all the seemingly subtle rises and dips in intonation. Learning all the kanji isn't exactly a walk in the park either.

English probably is. English has so many words with the same pronunciation, but with different spellings. There, their, they're and words like then, than, etc.

For foreigners, people can move to the US and live here their whole lives and still not pick up the language. English has to be up there.

The ignorent are outlyers and should not be counted within the mean :)

I think Polish is probably up there as well, though I guess it's somewhat similar to Russian.

The pronounciation is pretty strict and difficult, and you have to conjugate everything. Verbs (obviously), nouns, adjectives, pretty much everything, including names! This is speaking from personal experience, but I'm sure there's something harder out there. But then again, what's hard for one person may not be for another.

English is generally regarded by non-English speakers as quite a difficult language, yes. I mean, every language has it's homonyms. But English just has so many fucking words.

I would say that Chinese (any of the dialects) and Thai are the most difficult languages to pull off, by account of their extreme tonality. Finnish is also quite challenging, I hear. Completely unrelated to the other Scandinavian languages.

Anybody have any idea if Maltese is hard to learn? Being a blend of Arabic and Latin, it seems like it should be at least slightly confusing.

due to the complexity in the grammar, somehow I'm glad Finnish is not a superpower.:tpg:

Yeah English was definately a bitch to learn. I managed to freaking learn it in about four years or so but boy was it tough. The worst part was that you have all these grammer, and spelling rules. And yet, every freaking rule seems to have like a billion exceptions that break it.

Trying to parse down a language into it's logic to me seems like an exercise into madness.

Which is why I would choose English and Chinese as the two hardest languages (and interestingly enough the two languages I always love to know more about). The former for being a stylistic chimera and the latter for its graceful difficulty in execution both in written and spoken forms.

How about some of the languages in Africa that use clicking in them? I think those would be pretty tough.

It'd probably be either Vulcan or Goa'uld.

Or some of these tribal African languages. I mean, I guess the ones that have been listed here are perceived to be the most difficult because they are the hardest ones spoken by a good number of educated people.

I remember a cource in language I took in college as a gen ed where the professor talked a bit about some of those click languages which just seems nuts. But it's almost like those are languages in the same way hyroglyphics are an alphabet...technically, yeah, but it's so radically different that it isn't even the same realm.

I studied spanish for 3 years and I still cant speak it despite how easy everyone says it is to learn.

I don't think there really is one particular language that's the hardest. It's all relative to what your native language is, really. For instance, I'm studying Japanese and I find it immensely difficult (very different grammatically from English, not to mention the different kanji readings), however Chinese and Koreans have a pretty easy time picking it up, Chinese because their familiarity with kanji, Koreans because their grammar is so similar. The same holds true for other languages. Like, say you know Italian--learning Spanish, French or other Latin-based languages will be much easier compared to others with no familiarity with that branch of language.

In essence, it's all relative.

Exactly, thats why English is up there. It isnt a logical language. The grammar rules and the way certain words are spelled go against some of the rules its supposed to have. But their just exceptions, so many of them though.

I would think Attikamekw would be the hardest, it is the language of the Inuit, and other languages of the Canadian first Nations. But I think Attikamekw is their primary language. Reading it probably harder!

It blows my mind that people are naming English. Not only is it very easy on its own (for instance, there are no declensions), but it's also so widely used in the Western world that even people who aren't interested in learning any languages will still understand the basics of English.

Really, the only two arguments I see here are that there exist exceptions to rules in English (that happens in virtually every language), and that there are, uh... many words (which is irrelevant, as you don't need to know a certain percentage of all words in a language to be fluent).

I was looking up Kalaallisut, the inuit language of native Greenlanders, and it looks like someone's having a laugh.

Wikipedia, in Kalaallisut!

I agree. English was a breeze to learn and, although I still confuse some verbs and conjugations from time to time, I believe my level is pretty good. Yet, I know shit about grammar rules (I've never been good with those), so probably if I knew about them I'd have a different opinion. It is true, though, that English has one of the most large vocabulary out there. But I bet you that most of those words are not used or known by english speakers.

Spanish, on the other hand (which is my native language), seems very hard. With all the ortographic rules (which I don't even know perfectly) and the pronunciation I've heard from foreigners, it seems like a though one.

Also, japanese and chinese. Writing those must be quite an adventure.

i'm think german is, apart from having rules about using x and y for gender and intonations and trying to sound as though you aren't angry... um yeah

chinese/japanese is relatively easy for me because it's a picture language, kanji that is. it's easier to learn chinese first then understand how each character is different and unique then apply it with japanese.

Neat words there, pretty long but I guess they are not too hard to pronounce.. unless they don't use finnish pronunciation, that is.

And that's the point also, there's probably no single most difficult language. Unless there is some language that is so hard to use that it has a negative effect over the development of its culture. ;P

But then again those languages would be extinct by now.

I would believe that the hardest languages to learn are the ones that have silent consonants. I remember studying psycology, and seeing a case study of nature vs. nuture that involved speaking languages that use silent consonants. When a child is young enough, their hearing is sensitive to all noise, and they don't know how to disregard certain forms of "white noise". Being so, they can develop an understanding of silent consonants because they know how to differentiate them from other forms of sound. If the differentiation is not made at an early age, the person will never be able to differentiate the sound from all forms of white noise.

Imagine parts of a language you can't even hear to begin with.

I don`t have the slightest fucking clue after reading this thread. I always heard Mandarin would be tops, though. Who knows.
I wonder why you`re promoting Puerto Rican`s! Anyhow, my sister spent three years in the United States in the late 80`s and still has better, much better, English than my mother who has lived there 22 years. I don`t necessarily think English is an easy language to learn, but all your example and my example says to me is that some people are just far more adept at learning new languages.

What about French ??

To properly speak in french from english seems to be hard for a lot of people.

"Le vache" NO IT'S "LA VACHE". WHY? ...WHO KNOWS ??

Wow. No. That is completely false. The funny thing is, people from other countries that came here can distinguish between than/then, there/their/they're, and avoid many other common errors that people that were born here commonly make.

French is very difficult to get good at unless you grew up speaking it. There are so many grammar rules and even more exceptions to those rules.

Japanese is probably one of the tougher, especially if you don't know any other Asian languages. The grammar is ridiculous from what I hear. Seriously, look at all of the Japanese kids that take extra lessons after school so that they can learn how to write well. Crazy.

Also, Mandarin, Cantonese and any other language that has a bunch of intonations is a bitch to learn unless you grew up speaking it. I hear Mandarin grammar is pretty simple, but memorizing all those symbols and learning intonations is friggin' hard.

Haha. Interesting viewpoint. Speaking chinese/mandarin is actually quite easy, to me, since I did grow up learning it.

I personally believe that the hardest language for a person, is the language where's it's grammatical rules are totally unfamiliar.

What I'm saying is, most language has certain similar rules, and learning new languages that is in someways similar, would be easier, than learning the whole grammar rule from ground up.

What more in the later stages of your life where the pace of your learning slows down...

Japanese is simple because it uses phonetics. That makes it even easier than English even though Japanese has a weird counting system, verb tenses and uses kanji along with hiragana and katakana. Same goes with Hangul. Chinese is harder because it uses characters only and combines two characters with seperate meanings to form a new word. Everything sounds weird if you're not brought up with it cause you'll be like "what? large window mountain has train seeing up face you?"

I'd say one of the hardest languages is Tamil. Or one of the hundreds of Indian dialects.

Duh. A cow is obviously more feminine than masculine. No, wait, actually that works since a cow, in french anyway, only applies to the female animal. A better example would have been "La table". Why is a table more feminine than masculine? Who knows... There are even words which no one seems to remember the gender of, even native french speakers. For example "apostrophe". Yeah, that has a gender. But half of the time you'll ask someone and they'll have no idea which gender it is. So yeah, I can easily imagine how fun it must be to learn french for people who haven't grown up speaking it. In my opinion, english is orders of magnitude easier. I'm not even sure you can find an exception or some weird rule in the english language that doesn't have an equivalent in french, or something even more bizarre.

Since french and english are the only two languages I know, it's sorta difficult to say what the hardest language to learn/speak/write is. From my point of view, anything using a different alphabet than what I'm used to would probably be fairly difficult at first. So I'm gonna go with a safe bet and say ancient egyptian. With hieroglyphs and shit.

From my (limited) experience Chinese and Japanese are quite hard to learn, especially reading and writing. In Chinese there are so many different "words", but instead of letters there are strokes and can combine into so many ridiculous combinations because they aren't as restricted as letters in how they can be put together.

Well then it seems it depends on the person. Because spanish was more of a breeze for me, and for most ppl who I know learned it didnt have too much trouble with it.

It's more or less, fairly easy to become sufficient with English. However, learning to speak it like a native was pretty challanging. Sure, I managed to do it with in 3 to 4 years but it wasn't a cake walk. I know Armenian, and Arabic, and I dabbeled in some japanese. I have to say out all of those so far, English still was the toughest to master. (Not that I've mastered Japanese unlike the other three languages listed above but, so far, it's not nearly as frustrating to get the hang of)

The Cambodian language (Khmer- pronounced Ka-mai) is pretty damn hard.
Though i was born in the US, i've been speaking it with my family
every day for the past 23 years and still can't master it's pronounciation
and vocabulary. ^_^''''

An interesting discussion. It is of course not possible to say just which language is the most complex, and therefore the hardest to learn, since one's perception is inevitably distorted by the distance of one's own mother-tongue from the language of study.

Nevertheless, specialists in the field of Comparative Linguistics would identify a number of areas of the world where spectacular language density occurs. That is, the number of languages in a relatively small area is high, the number of speakers of each language is low and the mutual intelligibility between geographically close languages is much lower than logically might be expected.

The highest language densities occur in:
1. Papua New Guinea - the mountainous island to the north of Australia.
2. The Caucasus - the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas, between Europe and Asia, where the huge number of consonants and consonant clusters cause especial problems for non-native speakers.
And to this can be added
3. Australia - where the huge number of Aboriginal Languages have so far mostly defied classification.

Those wishing to explore further can look at Wikipedia, where sensible overviews and links to more in-depth references are given:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papuan_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral...ginal_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_families

Rob

I'm Maltese, so I'll probably ramble on this one. ^^;

Maltese was the first language I learnt, so I can't say whether it was difficult or not... the first language is always "easy", being acquired when our Language Acquisition Device is still functioning at its best. There are some people here, however, who are not native speakers of Maltese even though they're Maltese (and born to Maltese parents) - a certain part of the population believes in speaking to newborns in English, and sometimes even continues to speak mostly English for the rest of its life. Such people usually find it difficult to learn Maltese, though part of it might be their attitude towards the language - they usually believe that Maltese is somehow a lesser language to English. So they might study it at school and have ample opportunity to practise it, but they still have somewhat stilted Maltese. This happens even with people who start learning Maltese as a second language from a relatively young age, say around 12 years of age.

Many Maltese, including myself actually, are put off (to different extents) by the perceived difficulty of Maltese ortography. The grammar is relatively easy - no declensions, very few tenses, no tones, etc. Most people have appalling ortography however... I think the culprit is a low amount of reading in our language, since there isn't much actually. Apart from some newspapers and magazines (themselves usually filled with appalling syntax and vocabulary choices) there are few books worth reading.

On to vocabulary. The influx of new words from English and Italian (I suppose this is the Latin influence you mentioned?) means that apart from really basic or everyday words, Arabic is becoming less and less represented in the language. This is because people when speaking tend to mangle English or Italian words instead of thinking of the Maltese equivalent... we're becoming too lazy to speak Maltese.

Foreigners who live in Malta for some time and do make the effort of learning the language usually learn it quickly enough, however.

I'm completely amazed to see people listing English as one of the hardest languages to learn. My native language is Croatian, and I found English too damned simplistic. I picked it up in a single summer and I barely did any formal studying while doing so. Just sat down in front of the TV and read books. Eventually I just sort of absorbed it.

Probably the hardest change to adjust to was the fact that I couldn't write down words as I spoke them. In Serbian and Croatian, the letters are made of sounds - not a bunch of letters like in English. I'm not sure what the technical term is so here's an example. Say we're talking about the letter 'j'.
In English, you write down j and pronounce it as jay.
In Serbian, you would write it down as j and pronounce it as j - the y sound in yard.

It's really an awesome system because spelling is not necessary. When someone tells you a word, you can spell it because you just write down the sounds that you hear.

I have good spelling in English because of this non-phonetic writing style. Whenever I speak a word in English, I visualize it in my head. When I say things out loud, it's as if I'm reading them - I'm aware of their proper spelling and I use the letter formation as a guide for pronounciation.

Also, out of the blue - I find English to be damned choppy. It isn't as musical as other languages like Italian and French. It seems to be switching directions with each word and ... it just doesn't flow. Anyone else get this feeling?

Neus, Serbian and Croatian, from what you've explained, have a phonetic ortography. English was never standardised before the mid 16th century, I think, so everybody basically wrote as he felt it was best. English already had absorbed many words from a variety of languages, and their ortography was not based on English but rather on the language of origin (French, for example). So when it was standardised they probably chose the form which was most common, not which made the most ortographically sense.

I don't notice it, but everybody says that's true. Also, it's difficult to hear a song in Italian (and probably French, but I don't know it) and not understand most of the song. I tend to not understand certain verses of songs in English, even after a lot of listens (and I mean a lot).

I'm also amazed why is english mentioned in this thread. You guys don't use acute accents, which makes english very easy for those who actually use them.

Take these spanish words for example:
Como - I eat
Cómo - How?
Como - Like (comparative)

Solo - Alone
Sólo - Only

Por qué - Why?
Porque - Because

Man, I could go for hours.

its suprising how many languages depend on changes in tone of voice and so forth..it goes a bit haywire when it comes to pronouciation

I think it may be due to the fact English, for native speakers, is first learned phonetically in early childhood while people from abroad learn it when they're already capable to actually understand the difference. Just a thought. =/

And I'm still surprised so many native English speakers mention English. I was also sure French would be cursed a lot more for it's use of genders and pronounciation.

I could never get my mind around french...genders for chairs?

like really..wtf

I don't think there is any "hardest". It just depends on whatever you're already familiar with.

After reading what everybody has said, I have created a hypothesis. It is harder to learn a non-latin based language than it is to learn a latin-based language. I'd love for someone to come up with solid proof that I'm wrong.

It's all relative based on your innate lingual abilities and how similar the languge you're learning is to your first, as people have already said. There can be no solid proof of anything - for or against your "hypothesis".

I surrender :beer:

Is really does depend on your linguistic skills, developed at an early age, Latin based or not. So I guess the question becomes, which language has the most complexity to it?

...Meh. I think I am done answering questions with questions.

For people like you and me, it might actually be impossible. I recall reading somewhere that if you don't grow up learning a language that involves manipulating clicks and other sounds (such as many African languages and their dialects), by the time you're past eight or so, it registers in a different hemisphere of your brain as sound and noise, not as a language. Someone correct me if you know I'm wrong.

Every language I've studied aside from English aren't too hard. I mean, I'm not a language expert, but studying languages such as French and Spanish is like studying any other subject you would have in school. I wish I knew how hard English would be without growing up with it. I don't think it'd be up for most difficult language, but it would definitely be on the more difficult side.

As far as I know this extends beyond clicks... basically when we're young we cannot discriminate, and therefore our ears pick up all the phonemes we hear in a language. Those phonemes which are not part of the mother tongue however are ignored until the listener can't actually hear them as phonemes or else does not differentiate between that phoneme and a similar one in his native language. That is why speakers of Chinese and Japanese can't hear any difference between the 'r' and 'l' sounds, I was told... basically their phoneme is somewhere in the middle of those two sounds, and since there isn't a pure 'l' or 'r' in the original languages they tend not to pronounce them when speaking a foreign language.

I'm not speaking from experience there, since I've never asked a Japanese whether this is true, but I do know that I can't hear the difference between the open and closed vowels in Italian (there are 7, not 5, vowels) because in my native language there isn't this distinction.

For me Spanish is easy, since I'm Spanish. :biggrin:
However, when I listen something said in English I just get some random words and...a headache. It may be the %#@! accent that obfuscates the words.

The hardest language in the world is Linear A. It's so difficult that no one has ever successfully learned it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

In linguistics, there is no such thing as the "hardest" language. If a language has a complex morphology, it probably has a simpler syntax or phonology. Each language is difficult, just in different ways. Russian is very difficult morphologically, but syntax is very free. On the other hand, Chinese has almost no morphology, but the syntax is very strict and complex. The phonology is no piece of cake either. English tends to tend towards Chinese on this scale. Yes, it is an Indo-European language, but it has diverged a lot, losing most morphological endings.

And Linear A isn't a language. It's a script. And it's like that only because no one has deciphered it yet. Who knows, it could have been used to write English for all we know. The reason it's deciphered is that the language that it probably was used to write is lost to us now, and it's not related to any other script we know of.

I agree with what Oric said, but I remembered what I had heard about Georgian and checked with Wikipedia (ok, not the most authoritative reference, but whatever... the article seems professional enough). Georgian has

It also has a complicated (I suppose) morphological system:

I could never learn German because I never understood the dative and accusative cases, so I shudder to think what I would have done with Georgian ^_____^.

Even the number system is bloody strange:

Ok, this is not necessarily difficult, but it is a little weird.

yeah, in france, in games like who wants to be a millionaire, an impossible question pops up "which of these words is masculine?", usually people fail at these questions


by the way, i stumbled upon this video about counting stuff in japanese :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY8YsB14ABI

that's some scary crazy stuff, but has a hot chick in the video so...

I think Chinese is really hard. The four intonation thing just messes me up, and also knowing all those characters and how to write them. You have to memorize quite a bit to get just the basics.

True, but a lot of the discussion in this thread has revolved around scripts, especially ones radically different than the Latin script. And let's not forget that sounds are typically associated with ancient scripts (like hieroglyphs) once they're deciphered, making it possible to speak the language. It will almost certainly be different than it was when it was spoken natively, but the fact remains.

Hence my mention of it. If the language were simpler, deciphering it would be easier, especially given the tentative links with other languages as described in the article.

In fact, being undeciphered and spoken by no one, you might argue that Linear A is impossible to learn, and therefore the hardest language by default (a distinction it would share with all undeciphered and/or lost languages.

You know, people never mention it, but I just realized at least Spanish and Italian do the same exact thing, aka giving genders to objects and animals.

Dunno why French gets picked on about it when everyone agrees Spanish is apparently so easy to learn. =/

la casa / el castillo = la maison / le chateau = the house / the castle
el gato / la vaca = le chat / la vache = the cat / the cow

etc ...

I think it has to do with the fact that masculine nouns typically end with -o, and feminine nouns usually end in -a. French, while having some indicators, is a lot less concrete in that sense =s

That's probably one of my biggest problems when writing in French.

Aaaah very true. It does make things a lot easier. Although I couldnt even explain it, there is some sort of phonetical coherency with noun genders in French though. Any French person can tell you if a word *sounds* feminine or masculine, with a certain error rate, of course. But yeah, nothing as obvious as what Spanish has.

Hi guys. A while ago I made a thread asking how many languages a person could theoretically learn and retain. Well...

POLYGLOTS!

There's some people who speak 60+ languages there

Anyway, there's an interview with one guy who knows over 25 languages. Here's what he has to say in reply to being asked what that hardest language was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

Another undeciphered language. There are many of them -- for a long time, Egyptian was until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. If that had been destroyed or hadn't existed, it would probably remain an undeciphered language to this day.

As Spanish spoken as i am, i really envy all you North Americans because you dont need to use one of the worst things ever made: Accents.

Burp, it only takes lots of practice and intention to defeat the accent. I didn´t start learning English until about three years after starting Spanish, since I was raised in Guatemala first. But I pretty much defeated my accent before getting deported. I wonder if speaking so much Spanish now is going to make it return?
Never really thought about those things you pointed out, but very true. It´s so easy when it comes naturally and you never have to give a second thought to what you´re saying.

Thats one of the reasons why I had so much trouble learning spanish. I could never get the accents down and every time I tried speaking it I sounded like a country bumpkin trying to speak in tongues. :P

Of the languages i looked at/studied with a (more or less) latin alphabet, German is the hardest. they have THREE genders, and in comparison to french/spanish, there doesn't seem to be much "logic" into them. PLus, ordering the words is a total pain

English! English can be quite complicated and downright intimidating to anyone who does not speak it as a first language! Sure, most of us take it for granted because we have been speaking it for so long, but look at it in another light; all the grammer ruls and punctuation makes it a nightmare!

To write well as in diction, or penmanship?

Anyway, I personally believe that languages that place emphasis on vocal tones (Vietnamese is a language that comes to mind) are harder for some people to learn. I don't think there is a 'hardest' language; since technically any language that is classified as such can be learned, right?

You might want to break things while trying certain ones, though. :tpg:

in my opinion, the most difficult language to learn is the sanskrit...

In my opinion, Latin has to be one of the hardest languages I've tried to study. So many case and tenses it annoys me...not only that, you also have to make the genders agree....etcetcetc. Very challenging, but was fun none the less. =)

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. ;)

Jesus, just because some people are learning impaired or just don't care about spelling doesn't mean the language is hard. Really, those who have problems with "it's" and "its", "they're" and "their", "would have" and "would of" (my favorite) would have problems with any language whatsoever.

Zorro

it's japanese for sure! I tried to learn but it's very complicated language, especially the handwritting, kanji and etc.

I am always studying languages, but then I lose interest right away. However, I have to agree that Japanese is not that difficult to learn, if you are a dedicated person and really try your best to learn it. I learned all hiragana and katakana within 2 months or less.
But, anywayth...I have to say that Vietnamese seems hard. I used to have a friend that was vietnamese and she would teach me, I kept on trying and trying to master the pronunciation, and I did, but I always forget.
Plus, there are a lot of accents that I think is so confusing. And, it's not pronounced as it is written, like Spanish or Italian. The word Chao is pronounced like Gaoh. I must say that it was a challenge for me. ^_^