Which language is most difficult and which language is most easy to speak?

Question

If ur English speaker

Answer 1

Yes, it needs to be from the perspective of your native language. For example, Portugese is much easier for a Spanish speaker to learn than it is for and English or Chinese speaker to learn.

Japanese is often pointed to as the most difficult language for English speakers to learn. This is because it differs from English on several significant scales:

- Family Relationship: There's a "family tree" (and also a wave diagram) of the Indo-European languages, based on what languages developed from others and somwhat on where they came in contact and had significant exchanges. It's generally assumed that you'll have an easier time learning a language that's near your branch on the family tree. Japanese is not even ON this tree.

- Vocabulary: Languages that share similar vocabulary are often considered easier to learn. Japanese contains many loanwords from English, but this is not the same thing as having authentically similar vocabulary related to the languages being, um, related. The vast majority of Japanese vocabulary sounds nothing at all like any words you already know. This makes memorization of vocabulary much harder.

- Writing system. Japanese has a very simple phonetic (speech sound) system and a very straightforward way to "spell" words that makes it almost impossible to misspell or mispronounce a word. HOWEVER, they ALSO have over 2,000 "kanji" that one must know to be literate, and no text for adults is written in the easy simple phonetic alphabets, it's written with the super complicated kanji. Each kanji is a "pictogram" that is an extremely abstract picture of a concept. Each kanji has multiple pronunciations and meanings, which you must guess from the context or the other kanji it appears with in combination words. It takes Japanese students all of compulsory education (through highschool) to learn all of these kanji, and THEY already know the meanings of the spoken words in Japanese. YOU must learn the meaning and pronunciation in addition to the crazy complicated lines.

- Syntax, for at least three reasons:
1. Word order. This is true for many languages, not just Japanese, but I'll mention it because it's just one more difficulty. English is an "SVO" language- we say "The boy eats the cake." Japanese, however, is an "SOV" or "verb-final" language: in their word order, one would say "The cake eats the boy." You run into different structures when constructing more complicated sentences, too.

2. Particles. There are little grammatical speech helpers in Japanese that don't conceptually translate well to English. I guess other languages have this too, but it's just one more complication to the extremely foreign syntactical structure.

3. English and Japanese are on opposite ends of the Low Context ------- High Context continuum. English is Low Context. This means that it is IN MY SPEECH that I tell you who is doing what when where why how with definite articles and other relevant grammatical markers, and you'd better not leave anything out! Japanese, however, is extremely High Context. This means that the Japanese sentence for "I killed him" is exactly identical to the sentence that means "they killed her," "you killed me," "his brother killed my aunt," "that dog killed the president," and "Aaron Burr killed President Lincoln." Knowing which of these sentences is dependent entirely on context: have you just mentioned your aunt, or are you viewing a news report, in essence what are you talking about? However, I personally think this makes Japanese a comfortably ambiguous, gentle, and forgiving language, and actually makes it EASIER to communicate in.

This said, I have taken three years of Japanese, and it was incredibly interesting, and not too terribly hard. All humans have the same kinds of brains, so we are naturally equipped to pick up foreign languages. Even though it's theoretically the hardest language for an English speaker to learn, I don't think it's that bad at all. The biggest obstacle for me is vocab, although many people do not take to the unusual grammar as readily as I did.

However, I have heard that a language called "Basque" is the hardest language to learn, and that the Devil tried to learn Basque seven times and failed every time.


The easiest language for an English speaker to learn is Esperanto. There are other constructed languages that may be easier than Esperanto, but Esperanto is the best established. It was created by a man about 150 years ago. He specifically designed it to be logical, regular, and easy to learn. By its nature, it is several times easier to learn than any natural language. Again, the same can be said of any other well-designed constructed language. This is because natural languages grow and warp like an infected tumor, and develop all sorts of weird illogical irregularities. When someone designs a new language, they have the opportunity to eliminate many of the downfalls of natural languages and choose structures and syntax that seem most effective. Furthermore, Esperanto itself follows English syntax very closely, and has a lot of vocabulary that is similar to words in English. Plus, http://www.lernu.net is the best language learning resource I've ever seen, partly because of its built-in dictionary and mostly because it acknowledges that different learning approaches work better for different people, and so offers them all.

Answer 2

I speak two languages well and two others just enough to get by. Everyone I talk to about this same question always thinks his language is the most difficult. From among the more than 3,000 languages in the world, do you know anyone who can definitely say with authority that he or she knows the only one which just has to be the most difficult to speak? Besides, this is totally relative to which language is your native language. The language one speaks affects in a major way the difficulty of learning all other languages. So, really, there is no answer to your question, and it is not a well thought-out question.

Answer 3

For an English speaker, you've already conquered one of the more difficult languages.

Spanish is rather easy for English speakers because a good bit of the vocabulary is similar to that of English. Hardest? Probably Mandarin Chinese. One little inflection in the wrong vowel, and the whole sentence is screwed up.

Answer 4

This depends how well you expect to speak a language. Some languages are easier to speak at survival level but when you want to really master it it gets harder, some others are harder at the beginning but it is easier to improve when you have a foundation. Some languages have harder grammar some others are harder to pronounce. However, since English is a Germanic language German should be relatively easier. If you are good at Mathematics you can learn Turkish very easily because 99% of the time it goes with the rules, there are almost no irregularities or exceptions.

Answer 5

It depends on your native tongue. Do you mean, if you're an english speaker?
*Edit: On simple pronunciation I'd say the most difficult would be Cantonese. I'd venture to guess that the easiest would be Spanish, since the pronunciation is more similar than other languages (and so is the lettering).

Answer 6

If you are an english speaker, all languages are difficult because people in the USA have no interest in learning languages, and without interest, it is very difficult

Answer 7

The easiest is probably that of the Spanish language.. The mosst difficult.. Well, that is difficult to answer.. YOu have the Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Thai/Hindu/Arabic languages which are all very difficult and in order to really learn them, it would have been better to have GROWN up with the languages

Answer 8

For English speaking people Spanish is easiest and Hebrew is difficult. For Asian people Telugu is most easy and Persian is difficult.

Answer 9

Greek is said to be most difficult. There is a Phrase 'Maths is Greek to him. Easiest for an Englishman Certainly English

Answer 10

I don't think anyone will qualify to answer the first part of this Q.
The first language(the mother tongue) which one learns is the easiest.