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!