hardest language?

Question

i was wondering what is the hardest language to learn in the world. some people say bulgarian but i dont know

Answer 1

No language is easy or difficult. The one u know is always easy and the one u don know is always difficult

Answer 2

This is one of my favorite questions. And, I didn't get to answer it early on because I went to a movie. Everyone seems to learn their own language pretty well and then something happens that makes the second language harder than the first. My theory on this is that it is something like mother's milk or mother's cooking, that is, what is easy seems to be what one is used to. Let us say that one get a taste for English as one's own mother tounge and then it is the fallacy of comparison what is familiar to what is strange. The foreign language being like the new wife's cooking -- it's not mom's way! Maybe we don't say this but something like this must happen in our brain or "language learning center." In theory it appears like that mechanism that once a sperm has entered an egg the action shuts the process down to further impregnation. It seems as well that two languages learned in tandem are not so difficult. OK so there you have my theory that there is some biology behind it. Then I have noticed that some other answers have suggested my second point and that is that many languages grew up together and then parted. Japanese, Korean and Finnish all belong to the same group interestly. And Chinese is not like Japanese although they are Asian tounges. Nevertheless Japanese takes from Chinese a model of grammar and a scheme of writing. So, in considering which is easy and which difficult and this has been suggested already we must consider in what ways are the languages alike. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that to someone who speak a tounge that has a close relative that the closest relative would be the easier to learn. Perhaps in the Romance languages of Europe Spanish and Portugese or French and Italian... I have heard from many sources that Americans cannot learn languages. I mention this because I believe that it is a consideration of who is learning what. I have heard that a Russian has a better chance of learning Italian than an American. So maybe what language is easy also depends on what skills are brought to bear on the effort. Another interesting point that has been brought to my attention is that someone who is biologically close to the people who speak the language should have a better chance to learn it.
OK let us say that the people of country A have much in common with the people of country B in the eyes of the people of country C. Therefore the person learning the language of country B if he is an A should stand a better chance than a person from country C whoes facial structure is obviously different and who has fairer skin and lighter hair coloring and so on. Because someone has in fact stated this argument for consideration.
Anyhow, myself I don't know the answer. Or I should say seriously I don't know the answer to this question.

Answer 3

It depends on which languages you currently speak, or particularly, your langue maternelle (first language). A lot of people say that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn, but for someone who already speaks an Asian language, like Japanese or Korean... Chinese would be much easier than English or French. There are groups of languages... for instance, English, Dutch, Frisian, German, Scots... etc, belong to the Germanic language group, while French, Spanish, Italian and Portugese belong to the Romance language group. It is much easier for speakers of these languages to learn a language in the same group as their first language. So it's really highly subjective.

However, to make a long story short... assuming that English is your first language, or any other Indo-European language for that matter, Cantonese Chinese would probably be one of, if not the most difficult. In the end it basically comes down to whatever language is most different from the ones you already speak.

Answer 4

I think it is Finnish. I don't know about Bulgarian, but I would guess it has around 7 or 9 declensions. Finnish has 21, I believe. Hungarian has 14, if I remember correctly. Czech has 7, I know, and Greek has only 4, but really only 3.

Mandarin is the most difficult when you take into account the written language, but the grammar is actually not that difficult.

Answer 5

I read somewhere the hardest language to learn outside of that country is actually English. We have many homophones such as hoarse/horse and also many words can have multiple meanings such as bar, hard, say. fox, doctor (it can be either the medical title or a description of the practice of creatively editing and changing something) spin. Many of our past tense verbs, mostly the everyday ones would be deemed as irregular, including
dreamt, sat, beaten, ran, dead and sang for example.
Another problem is that we have a lot of idioms, such as being driven up the wall, and being like chalk and cheese. Often we use them but cannot explain their meaning very well to a foreigner.
We also have many slang words which we would use as normal but would be meaningless outside of our own area, region and county. For example i live in the North East of England where 'ganning or gannin' is used instead of going.
This is the reason I prefer to speak French- it's a lot easier and much better structured and patterned, with less irregular verbs. Je suis si desolee!

Answer 6

As to the reading and writing system, the Japanese language is the most difficult language (extant--meaning in current usage) in the world.

There are some reasons for this.
The vocabulary comes from Chinese Characters and is called "Kanji" in Japanese. Each kaji has two basic readings--the Chinese one and the Japanese one. A Kanji can have (depending on how it combined with other kanji) as many as 28 different readings. The Chinese worked well for the Chinese because their grammatical system is not inflected. But although the kanji worked well for vocabulary there was a problem with grammar. Initially a phonetical alphabet (katakana was invented for this), but it was replaced by another phonetical alphabet called (hiragana). Nowadays katakana is mainly used for foreign words and a few other odds and ends.

So you have a reading and writing system in which most of the vocabulary is carried by Chinese characters, but some of it is carried by katakana. All the grammar is carried by the hiragana. You need to know 1800 kanji to be able to read a Japanese newspaper and it takes 12 years of schooling to learn all those characters.

As for learning to speak basic standard Japanese some things about it are difficult and some easy. The sound system is the easiest thing about Japanese. Pronunciations are very regular and each vowel has only one sound.

The grammar is much more regular than English and so is easier to learn.

What makes it difficult is first of all polite language (called keigo). This makes it difficult to learn as you go. For instance the verb "to go" is "iku". If I want to be formal I use "ikimasu".
If I am in a social situation where I want to exalt someone I say "irrashaimasu", and if I want to humble myself I say 'mairu' or
mairimasu'. There are further variations, but you get the idea. Someone says "Would you like to go?" "Irrashaimasyooka?"
and I can't answer with that word because you never exalt yourself. I humble myself and say "Hai, mairimashyoo."

In English we'd use the verb go for both the question and answer.

Another confusing aspect in speaking is that some words are used only by males and others only by females.

The Japanese speak 100 to 200 syllables per minute faster than we do in English so that makes learning to hear properly a problem.

But as the modern world gels further the language is simplifying and it's not that hard for a young person with a decent language aptitude to learn to speak and hear Japanese.

On the other hand, if you are from Finland or Turkey learning Japanese is easier, as if you are from Korea or China. And oddly enough it is easier for Italians to learn Japanese than for anyone of the other Romance languages.

So difficulty in language learning has a lot to do with how similar or dissimilar the language is from your own.

But objectively no one has the Japanese writing system beat for complexity (of languages still being used in daily life).

Answer 7

the hardest languages are the ones which have vowel harmony, which are agglutinative and have an abundance of suffixes, but no native prefixes.One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words or to indicate the grammatical function of a word.Verbs belong to that kind of languages exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.They also have the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns. From that point of view the most hardest language would be Turkish I think. In addition to these, nouns in Turkish language can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences. The following example might be a good example to explain you how hard Turkish language is:
ev -house
evler -the houses
evin -your house
eviniz -your house
evim -my house
evimde -at my house
evinde -at your house
...
note:those endings change from word to word

Answer 8

The hardest language for English speakers to learn is supposed to be Hungarian, with Japanese coming second. Hungarian is so difficult because it has 35 cases (forms of a nouns accoring to whether it is subject, object, genetive, etc), and English has much less than that (I'm not sure how many). Finnish is also supposed to be very difficult.

*edit* English is NOT the hardest language to learn, it's easy to get the basics of because it has very few verb forms, but it's probably one of the hardest to master, as it has such strange spelling and hundreds of irregular verbs.

Answer 9

i think arabic and french im nt sure about the english
but i learn french and it jst wont stick 2 my head i take it since 9years and i 4get it easky ther is 2 much in it and jst the way u say the word m ight change the hoooooooooooooole meanning some words they write it the same but it have maby 3 or 4 other meanings with every singl pronaws its trky and arabic if u get into the reall arabic not the spoken 1 its hard i can talk arabic freely but when it get 2 grammer i suck ...
and english i can speak very good but when i wirte WOW i really suck in it as u all can c :D i cant hide it
but in the end ther is nothing hard if u putted ur mind into it and found the right spport right?
tc

Answer 10

Some IDIOT said there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English. What a JOKE!! English has a couple dozen irregular verbs ONLY. All other verbs are entirely predictable.

The hardest language depends on what languages you already know and what is easy or hard for you.

Answer 11

Just to make some corrections which have been posted:
1. Unlike Russian, Bulgarian does not have a declension system.
2. Although Hungarian and Finnish have many "cases", many of these "cases" are really examples of post-positions. Like saying in English: "the house in" instead of "in the house". Compare that with Russian which would use preposition + case: "v dom-e", where v = in, dom = house and -e = the locative case.