Hardest Language?

Question

In your opinion what is the hardest language to learn???

Answer 1

It seems that the concept of the "hardest language" is based upon individuals and their previous language experience. I don't think there is any way to evaluate "linguistically" if a language is "hard" or not. The most difficult language to me would probably be Basque because each noun has over 400,000 hypothetical forms. But of languages I have actually studied, it's hard to say between Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Arabic. Arabic is hard because it is not related to English, it uses a completely different way of writing, and it uses a system of root consonants and formations based on those roots that are completely foreign to English or any other Indo-European language. Irish and Scottish Gaelic, on the other hand, for languages that exist in such close geographic proximity to English, they are extremely different. I can understand more of French, Spanish, and Italian because of the Latin root words which make up about 60% of our vocab. We don't share much vocab with the Celtic languages and the way they express themselves is different. For instance, they use initial consonant mutations in a way similar to the use of cases, but not. They also have conjugated prepositions like "dom" with me and "agat" at you.

Answer 2

I think this issue of the hardest language is sometimes kind of erroneous, the more different a language is from our mother tongue, the harder it will be to learn. For example, for a Spanish speaker to learn Portuguese or Italian would be a lot easier than for a Chinese speaker.
But anyway, far from being contradictory, I'll tell you in my case, I think the hardest for me would be Chinese or Japanese, you know with those strange characters of them, but as I said that's in our case because we use the Roman alphabet.
And Hungarian too, it's harder than it seems.
And of course it also depends on our own ability to learn, our natural aptitude for languages.

And please, those who are saying English...are you out of your minds??? English must be the most widely spoken language in the world!!! Conjugations?? Pleaaaase, you still dont know what a hard conjugation is, Spanish has a tricky conjugation (not for me 'cause it's my native language but many of my friends are having such a hard time learning it), and many others....but English??? Pleaaaase, some common sense guys, we're talking about the international language, the one that millions of people worldwide have at least as their second language.

Answer 3

English is the # 1 Hardest language to learn . But since i know it I would have to say Vietnamese is the second hardest for me lol .

Answer 4

A friend of mine had to learn Hungarian and many people in Europe told me and her that it was one of the most difficult languages to learn. A guy I met in Scotland who had a fascination with languages said Finnish was very difficult as well.
English is hard because a lot of our "rules" are easily broken - and there are different phrases and words for British English and American English. A friend of mine from Cuba learned English from a woman from Northern Ireland and when we met we had some problems communicating initially until she told me who taught her English.

Answer 5

Linguistically speaking, the most difficult of the 'major' languages to learn is English.

The reason is that English, unlike most other 'major' languages is a conglomeration of Norman French and English Saxon. As a result the rules, what there are of them, are varied, there are numerous cases of silent letters, spelling is inconsistent, there is at least one redundant letter (c).... etc.

The other major languages generally evolved reasonably logically and over a greater period of time, so have reasonable rule sets, pronunciations, etc (i.e. the Latin languages - Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian...)

-dh

Answer 6

dude , this question is not enough to answer it ,
it depends on ur native language , but i think generally chinese is
the hardest , but also you can say arabic , aslong as their alphabets
are different from english and most of the languages ,
also arabic pronouncation is so hard ,
that's m opinion

Answer 7

I heard that Arabic language is the hardest.

Answer 8

Not my opinion, but I am providing a links to several sites that answer your question. Some possibilities (from these sites, in case you don't have time to review them):

Hardest first: Hungarian, then Japanese, then Chinese.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

mindundermatter

Answer 9

Arabic ..... cuz there r many accents for each country .. that means about more than 10 ... also there r the Slang Arabic & the Classical Arabic ... Classical more difficult , even Arabs cant speak Classical Arabic fluently .... So , its the hardest language !

Answer 10

Dude heres a list
#1 Hindi
#2 Chinese
#3 Malay
#4 French
Must i go on? Anyway you gotta put into consideration the subbranches of the language for example chines is comprised of amoy, mandarin, and fokien. Hindi is one of the many languages for indians, in my opinion chinese and hindi are supha hard dude