Alright...For all of you language lovers, what language do you believe...?

Question

...is the hardest to learn? I've heard that Japanese or Arabic are difficult. What do you think?

Answer 1

Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic are rated as the hardest languages in the world for native speakers of English. How hard a language is depends on many factors including competency at learning foreign languages and especially the mother tongue of the person learning it. For example, English speakers can learn a language like Norwegian fairly easily because of how closely they are related, however a Chinese or Japanese person would struggle with it for much longer.

The US Government rates Japanese as harder than Chinese, and the hardest for native speakers of English, and being able to speak both I would agree. Japanese is subject-object-verb, has politeness levels which don't exist in English, and is an agglutinative language with many conjugations and inflections. Chinese on the other hand, is subject-verb-object like English, has no genders no conjugations no inflections no irregular verbs no politeness levels ,etc.

Chinese is only rated so difficult because of it's characters and tones, the latter is not as big of a deal as the former. Japanese has characters as well, and although there aren't as many as there in Chinese they are used in a more haphazard way. The readings for Chinese characters stay fairly constant, whereas in Japanese the reading for the character depends on how and where it's used in the sentence and can up to 6-8 different readings. Japanese also uses a combination of two scripts, hiragana and katakana, in addition to characters, whereas in Chinese it's just characters.

Korean is hard because it difficult grammar and things like politeness levels similar to Japanese, but with more complex pronunciation (but actually has an alphabet unlike Chinese and Japanese which have characters). I'm not so sure about what makes Arabic hard, I don't speak it.

Answer 2

I speak English and Arabic fluently, and I'm learning Spanish, French, and Japanese.

I believe the hardest language to learn in Japanese because you need to memorize around 2,000 symbols to become fluent in more recen writing. The older texts (such as the Tales of Genji, if it was not revised) would need someone who knew around 5,000 to 10,000 different kanji to read it without difficulty.

Chinese isn't much more difficult than Japanese because Chinese characters and Kanji are practically the same.

Arabic, I believe, is a pain to learn. First of all, speaking and formal writing are different. Some words are the same while others are completely different. Also, vowel sounds are usually made with about five to seven different kinds of accents and the same letter would be written differently depending on where it's placed in a words (beginning, middle, or end).

I've heard Russian is also difficult, but I can't really say anything about the language since I have never studied it.

Answer 3

Those two would certainly be high on the list; Russian is no picnic either. With its three symbologies, and varying degrees of politeness, Japanese is a challenge. Arabic plurals are a disaster -- you have to learn the plural (and dual) form of a noun along with the singular, and non-native speakers will go nuts trying to deal with the alphabet: there are two H's (distinguishable), two S's, two D's, two T's, and three TH's, all undistinguishable to a naive ear. Which makes trying to spell an Arabic word a real pain. And, of course, there is a sound -- sort of an A that might be said by someone being strangled -- which is virtually unpronounceable, and used by no other language in the world.

Answer 4

I didn't think that Arabic was that hard. Learning how to write it as well as speak it was a great help because you could differentiate the sounds by writing the word (e.g.; 3 different "k" sounds are easily differentiated when you write it because they are all different letters.)

What I did was to record my lessons and slow the tape down a bit to get the phonetics right.

IMO: Any language that has a lot of sounds that are not in your native language will probably be more difficult.

If the language has a different alphabet (Arabic, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, etc.) learn to write it as well as speak it!

I would say that a language such as Chinese that does not have a phonetic alphabet would probably be most difficult for me.
.

Answer 5

I have often replied to questions like yours to point out that there is no meaningful answer to your question, because it entirely depends on your own native language. If the language you want to learn is related to your mother tongue, then of course it will be easier to learn than a language which comes from a language family totally unrelated to yours.
Example: An Italian speaker will have no problems learning Portuguese, whereas a native speaker of Mandarin will have to work very hard at it. Conversely, a German will not find it easy to learn Thai, but for someone from Laos it is child's play, since Thai and Lao are related languages.

Answer 6

Both are hard because of their different alphabets.

I personally believe that Chinese is the hardest to learn, here is why. You have to memorize every single word. There are no letters, only separate symbols for each word.

I myself speak English and Arabic fluently, and some Spanish.

To answer "Johhney cee", English has 12 tenses, so the 15 of Finnish is no biggie.
Spanish has more than that.

Peace.

Answer 7

Hardest I've ever tackled is Quechua. But the question is flawed because how hard a language is depends entirely on who is trying to learn it.

For example, Turkish, whose structure and grammar are very different from that of Indo-European languages, is terrifically difficult for an Englishman or American to learn to speak fluently, but would be relatively easy for someone from Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, whose languages are similar to it. Chinese would be difficult for a Westerner, since meaning depends not only on the words you use but also on the tone of voice, but it would probably be easier for a Thai, whose language also has "tones". By the same token, English seems to be a harder language for Southern Europeans than for Dutch or Scandinavian people.

As it happens, I believe that, generally, English is one of the hardest languages to learn well; although its grammar is relatively simple compared to more inflected languages, such as Slavic languages, for example, the highly developed use of its idioms and its complex phonetic structure (especially British English) make it one of the hardest for learners to reach a standard where they sound like native speakers.

Answer 8

Japanese is rumored to have the hardestst grammar of all the languages, and is reputed the hardest language on this ground.

As for myself, I think all have roughly the same difficulty, except if one already knows a closely related language.

Answer 9

I am not being funny.. I think that the hardest language is reading the questions.on Yahoo/answers.

I can't believe how the people who ask questions on this site spell in english. Where did they learn to spell???????

Answer 10

I think Japanese