Which language is most difficult language for people to learn?

As far as I know nobody mentioned Hungarian. Well, try it....it is not similar to anything (closest relative is Finnish, but they separated so long ago, that they are not mutually understandable). It is agglutinative, meaning there are conjugations at the end of words, and you have to pronounce these endings (and write) according to the vowels in the word. Plus, there can be extra vowels before the endings to make the pronounciation easier.

a house: egy ház.

my house: (az én) házam (but the word házam contains the az én part)

in my house : a házamban.

in my houses:  a házaimban.

your house: a házad

in your houses: a házaidban

a child: gyerek

my child: a gyerekem

to my child: a gyerekemnek

to a child: a gyereknek

Then, the word order is free, but if you put the different words into different order, the meaning is different too. the stress.

and there are two forms of each word, transitive and intransitive. eg. John sees an apple. John lát egy almát.

John sees the apple: John látja az almát.

an apple: alma...

to wash: mos 

but there are several prefixes, and the meaning will be totally different depending on which you use. kimos, megmos, felmos, bemos, átmos, elmos..

CalifJim wrote:

I read somewhere that Mario Pei, the linguist, tried to learn a different language every year.  He supposedly claimed that Vietnamese was the most difficult. CJ

I disagree with the linguist Mario Pei not because I am a Vietnamese. It is because I have seen, in my country, a couple of TV hosts and many shop owners speak our language fluently and write better than most of our people do. Amazingly, all of them have lived in Vietnam for only a few years. For instance, Joe Ruelle, who has been in Vietnam for only 3 years or so, has his own blog written in perfect Vietnamese and speaks the language without a foreign trace. People say that Joe is a Vietnamese who had plastic surgery in order to look like a Canadian!

For me, after years of learning French, English, Japanese, and Korean in that order - I find that:

1. Korean is the easiest to learn. After learning its unique phonetic vowels and consonants, one can arrange them together to form / spell various monosyllabic words; and string the words together, using a few grammar rules, to make sensible sentences. After two years learning the language, I now can comfortably watch KBS TV- programs.

2. French is second. Its grammar is structural and without exceptions. Spelling the words is as they sound. The hardest part is to memorize the gender of its vocabulary (i.e., masculine vs. feminine).

3. English is next. This multi-syllable language has the richest dictionary in the world with all of the borrowed words from a score or more foreign languages, including Latin / French / German / Japanese / Vietnamese, etc…you name it. It also has too many exceptions in both grammar and pronunciation, along with its homophones and all of its nym's (homonym, capitonym, etc…) that give Spelling-Bee contestants nightmares.

4. Finally, Japanese is the hardest with its two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana, plus about 8000 kanji's. This multi-syllable ideographic language is too culturally, hierarchically, and gender sensitive. I was told, one needs to know about 2000 kanji's to reach college-level proficiency and 2000 more or so to be considered as a scholar. In number, those are not huge compared to hundred-thousands in English but they take a decade or more to learn! Thus, the language is VERY difficult.

After 2 years learning the language, I can only manage to limitedly engage in daily, social conversation and no more. Now my Japanese friends rather use their broken English to talk to me! I owe them a lot since they have to deal with the language, to them, is the most difficult one in the world.

Having said that, I must say all languages are equally difficult for foreigners, who are not familiar with the cultures in which they are used, to learn. Absorbing literal meanings might be manageable, but understanding the deep connotation is often impossible.

CIAO,

Hoa Thai

Hey! You gotta try Spanish, it is my first language and I find it more difficult than English!!!

Anonymous

English is one of the easiest languages to learn now because it has become such an international language.

In one sense you are right. English is not intrinsically easier to learn than any other language, but if you live in a community where you are constantly exposed to it it has to help. Also, necessity is the mother of language competence.

Anonymous

Polish is supposed to be the most difficult western European language to learn. If you already speak a slavic language, such as croatian, it is not as difficult, but in general, it's almost impossible to learn and speak like a native speaker. So by that same token, it is also quite difficult for an english speaker to learn croatian.

I think Polish simply has the reputation of being difficult because of the way it looks on the page; it appears to have some fearsome consonant clusters. Even then, whilst it does have consonant clusters that English lacks, appearances are a bit deceptive; the combination szcz looks like four sounds, but is in fact two.

Anonymous

Japanese is supposed to be the most difficult language for English speakers to learn, but I know people who have done it with relative ease. I would think that some African languages would be equally as challenging.

Again, Japanese has the reputation of being difficult because it has the most complex writing system of any language. The language itself is just as easy/difficult as any other language.

Whether a language is easy or difficult depends where you start from. All non-Indo-European languages present a challenge to speakers of Indo-European languages. Whether a given Indo-European language is difficult to the speaker of another Indo-European language depends on how similar it is to one the speaker knows.