The hardest language in the world?

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

Wikipedia, in Kalaallisut!

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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:

Originally Posted by Barry Farber

For two different reasons, Finnish and Korean. Finnish because of the complexity of the grammar – a lot of people bloody their noses against the six noun cases in Latin/Russian, seven in Serbo-Croatian, you have 15 noun cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. I like to joke that I was in my hotel room in Helsinki for five days trying to learn enough to get downstairs.

Korean has a different kind of difficulty. There are some languages – we should invent a catchy phrase for this; the repeat/rely index, that’ll work for now – if you learn a word in Italian and say it to an Italian person, the Italian will immediately understand. If you learn a word in Indonesian, the Indonesian will immediately understand. There’s good repeat/rely there. If you learn a word in Korean, the Korean’s eyes will glaze over; he’ll be hopelessly confused. Then you say the word again, and you say it louder, and he still won’t understand. Then you show him the word and he’ll say “ah!” and he’ll repeat to you exactly what you’ve been saying, at least to your ears. That happens a lot in Mandarin, and it happens all the time in Korean.

I love the languages that make you suspect the person you’re talking to has the same book at home.

How ya doing, buddy?