What are the hardest languages to learn?

Question

I've heard that English, Portuguese, and Icelandic are considered some of the most difficult languages to learn. What other ones?

Answer 1

Depends on what language you know already.

Remember that children everywhere acquire their first language at approximately the same rate, regardless of what language it is. Americans regularly adopt babies from foreign countries and teach them English, which they are able to learn just like any other children.

Once you've learned a language and have hit double digits in age, though, the issue changes. Then the ease/difficulty is based on how similar the language is to the one you already know.

French is easy for English speakers because many of the rules that you learned as a small child regarding English apply to French - same alphabet, similar sound stock, similar word order, even some common vocabulary. With Chinese, however, you have to learn to listen for tone, learn a completely new writing system, different sound system, and essentially non-existant common vocabulary.

For a speaker of Japanese, who already uses Chinese characters and readings in a limited way in his own language, the reverse is true; French is difficult because it is different, Chinese is relatively easy because some of the rules learned about Japanese apply to Chinese.

Answer 2

Any language with loads of irregular junk. That would mean English. Especially when it comes to spelling. I mean, who in their right mind would make the word "light" have a "g" in it!? It makes no sense! I would've died if I had to learn English as a second language!

What I do know is that Japanese isn't hard, no matter what others say. It's really straight forward, unlike OTHER languages I know...

When it comes to reading, Chinese would be another. All those characters could be hard to learn.

Answer 3

English was almost impossible, here it is, 7 years of living in America, and I still get stuck getting my point across...
French was very easy, once you get over the pronounciation.

Russian so far has been easy, though it is harder to read and write, I just have to memorize the sounds.

Latin is one of the easiest languages to learn personally...

Answer 4

okay english is one of the easiest languages to learn because their is not a real set of rules. Sometimes you pronounce a letter in a word and sometimes you don't. I would have to say russian is fairly difficult to learn and vietnamese.

Answer 5

Wow well I'm glad i know English then! I'm in the process of learning Spanish. I can carry a conversation but with limits. I'd say Spanish is pretty hard lol. But there's always nice ppl up here to help out with the translations so its all good. =P

Answer 6

French for sure is probably the most difficult language to learn. Sure, people think Japanese or Arabic would be harder since their characters are different, but French is more difficult.

Answer 7

Well out of the ones I'm trying to learn: German, Japanese, and Spanish. German is hard grammar-wise when it comes to the "der, die, das's" and the prepositions, and it's confusing. Japanese is really easy grammar wise. There is no "the" or "a." And the prepositions (actually postpositions in Japanese) are pretty constant with what they mean and are easy. And speaking backwards isn't that hard, for me anyway. Spanish grammar is a lot more complicated than Japanese's grammar too.

But Japanese is very hard to listen to, but very easy to speak. German is a lot harder to speak than Japanese, but it is easier to understand listening wise. German and Spanish of course are very easy to read compared to Japanese lol.

Overall, I think Japanese is the easiest for me out of the 3. And German is the hardest...learning wise. I've been picking up on Japanese way faster than I have German. German words I have to say a billion times for them to stick in my head, but Japanese words I only have to say a couple times and I remember them, because German words are really long, and Japanese words are fairly short.

Answer 8

Malyalam, one of Indian local language.

Answer 9

I would say German language.

Answer 10

i think Hebrew and French