What's the most difficult language in the world?

Question

I read an article when I studied at Penn. It said that Pasque (or Basque) is a language that Satan doesn't speak. I guess it means that Pasque is the most diffcult language in the world. I'd like to ask linguists out there if it's true, and who speaks this langauge? Thanks.

Answer 1

the language of love

Answer 2

You are bang on target.....Basque or Euskara as it is called by the native speakers is considered to be the most dificult language because it is totally unconnected to any other existing language in the world. It's grammar does not have any similarity with any other language on the world.

Most of the people get moonstruck by the complexity of Chinese characters and end up thinking that it's the touhest language of all.But apart from characters nothing is bizzare about chinese.

Sentences in a langugae are formed by the subject (S), object (O), verb (V).

Now if I say

"Reading gives you more".....This sentence structure is SVO that is subject-verb-object

Now if I say

"Pora tomake day aaro".......This is perhaps not understandable by you. It's written in bengali. But it means "Reading gives you more"......Now if you compare the two sentences you can at least guess that which word corresponds to which.

But if I say

"Irakurtzea aberasgarri"........This is in basque and this also means the same. But you can hardly gues which word corresponds to what. The basque language does not follow the general rule like all the languages, that is the SVO, VSO, SOV, OSV, VOS or OVS pattern of sentence structure. It's a genre of it's own. And thus it is unrelated to any other langugae and it's grammar is also bizzare.

Answer 3

Basque only Basques speak but it has some similarities with Breton (spoken in a part of France) and Gaelic spoken in Great Britain. They belong to a part of old old languages that were conserved no matter that every where else the languages became indo European. The Pays Basque stay isolated and so only Basques know how to speak this language, that has nothing to do with Spanish, not even the village names, for instance the same city in Basque: "donostia" and in Spanish "S. Sebastian".

But my friends English the most difficult one ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Give me a break I speak 7 languages (none of them very well but) and apart from my mother language (for me evidently) English is the easiest one is the simplest, have you had Spanish grammar or French grammar or worst French pronunciation, or even seen the huge difference between spoken French a written one. English verbs are the easiest ones if one compares it to Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish (or any other language spoken in Spain), German, Russian. It’s true that verbs aren't everything Chinese do not conjugate them, but imagine try to talk a pass or a future (not even an "I, you, he...") you have to get there otherwise, it's hard to imagine. Then see how Chinese that never had to conjugate learn other languages, they do not had the concept of conjugation so for them it should be really difficult.

In truth the most difficult language is the one that is more different then your mother language. You obviously can constitute based on the language level richness of words verbs complications, variety of characters in the alphabet... a scale but English would be almost the easiest one, the alphabet is simple, there aren't any accentuations (speak with someone that is Latin or German you will ear how difficult is to know how to put accentuation in words, in Latin languages is impossible), conjugations relatively easy although they do exist, no declinations …
I believe that it should be one language like Basque, Greek or Chinese that would get the first place, German, Portuguese is also very likely to stay in the first places, not that is difficult to get the first steeps but for instance Portuguese vocabulary richness is such that some words simply don’t have direct translation to English, not in a single word never the less.

Answer 4

I have to agree with PBmaostg......I posted a similar question because I was tired of hearing and reading that English was the most difficult language to learn. Even if you are not European, it is one of the easiest language to learn. No gender problem, verbs are not complicated neither is grammar compared to other languages. English might have lots more words than other languages ..but who uses them ??
People will argue there are exceptions everywhere.....but it is so in so many other languages.
I teach English (yep) to non-anglophones (from China, Iran and whatever) and be sure they acquire the English language very fast ! But would you learn theirs as fast ?? NO WAY !!

So that is a complete myth which should be relegated to Snopes.

I am a francophone so the "harder and most difficult" texts are for anglophones are so easy for me : it is all French !!

Give Best Answer to PB.......he deserves it. I am just putting my two cents here. Or two Euros..or two Francs when they still existed :-)

Edit : and it is BASQUE. both in France and in Spain...until I read PB 's answer, I thought nobody knew where that language came from. A mystery.

Answer 5

English

Answer 6

I am a linguist. Basque is NOT the most difficult language in the world. There is no such thing. It all depends on what languages you already know how difficult a language is. Basque (or Euskara) is spoken by the Basques on the border of France and Spain.

Answer 7

In my opinion, I think that Chinese is the most difficult language I've ever learnt. The reason why I tell you this is that Chinese is the symbolic language or logogram which means its characters are used to represent creatures, things, places, etc. The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is nearly 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. In China, literacy for the working citizen is defined as knowledge of 2000 characters.

Our languages, most of them, are phonetic languages or phonograms which means the characters represent sounds.

So, Chinese is the most difficult language I know now.

Answer 8

Everyone says English, but its not! I learned most of English in less than half a year!
I say Russian is pretty hard to learn if your native language is English because each word can have lots of different endings depending on gender, tense (past, present, future) and a lot more! I tried teaching some people simple russian phrases, but for some reason, to most americans Russian is a real tongue twister. Especially our "R"s. :)

Answer 9

My linguistics professor says that Arabic is the hardest language in the world to learn, and especially to write. I think it's probably going to depend on if you mean written language or spoken. I do agree that English is one of the hardest to learn because of all the grammatical rules, etc.

Answer 10

Well I'd say it depends. Which languages do u already speak ? I mean, someone could say English is the most difficult to learn, but then how would u know how hard it is to learn if u've never had to ? what if it's ur mother tongue ?? To you, maybe Chinese is the most difficult, or Japanese, or Arabic. Everything is relative.

Answer 11

Spanish is the richest language of them all.
A lot of people ''think'' they speak Spanish in the US, but all they do is to mix Spanish words with both Spanish and English grammatical.
There is no other language in the word that has more idiomatic turns and times of verbs.
Just that a lot of people in the US and parts of Latin America speak it doesn't mean they do it as they should, like for example in the center of Spain (Castilla).
That's where the ''Castellano'' (the other name for Spanish language) comes from.