Top List of the hardest languages to learn
Oct 24th, 2008 | By Jonas | Category: EnglishUPDATE: We had so many interesting responses to this article that we decided to create a poll to see what people think the hardest languages to learn overall are. We also wanted to find out what people think the hardest language to learn to pronounce correctly and the hardest language to learn to write correctly are. The hundreds of votes have now been counted! Take a look at the results of the hardest languages to learn poll, to find out what languages people voted for.
1. Basque
2. Hungarian
3. Chinese
4. Polish
5. Japanese
6. Russian
7. German
8. Korean
9. English
10. Swahili
There are some controversial questions which to some extent may never be satisfactorily answered. For instance, why is the train always late when we are on time and on time when we arrive too late? One important question, which falls under this category, is the following: What is the hardest language to learn? When I went to school we had to choose between French and Latin. All the students who decided in favor of Latin were absolutely sure that there was no trickier language on earth to learn. However, the other group, which devoted itself to the French language, was of the opinion that when it came to difficulty no language could come close even to the difficulty rating and kudos of learning French. Is it at all possible to prove either one of them wrong?
As so often is the case, the answer to this question lies partly in the eye of the beholder. For somebody from Spain learning Portuguese doesn’t present too many difficulties and lots of learners from the Netherlands find it quite easy to master the English language. As a matter of fact, different language families as well as cultural issues lead to a different approach of learners towards different languages. Due to the similar or identical characters of Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese can easily understand written Chinese. Interestingly, grasping the Chinese pronunciation has turned out to be more of a challenge for Japanese learners. All this shows, that there are many different aspects that need to be taken into account in order to pass a reasonable judgment on the matter. As English is the nearest thing to a world language there are lots of tools and textbooks that facilitate acquisition of the language, by contrast, this is not true for minor languages spoken by a smaller group of people.
While the common consensus tends to describe Chinese and Russian to be among the most challenging languages, a survey conducted by the British government has shown that this is not necessarily true. According to their results, which are based on interviews with diplomatic staff around the world, they found that on the list of the most difficult languages Basque is the top dog, followed by Hungarian with dozens of word cases. Surprisingly, among the interviewees Chinese was not considered to be hard to learn.
*Top List based on forum discussions in 23 countries
Esperanto is certainly the easiest, because irregularities have been consciously removed. Even here there are challenges for the English-speaking learner.
Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
@Bill: Esperanto is an artificial language, which was “designed” to be easy to learn. But since Esperanto is based on Indo European languages, it won’t be that easy to learn for people whose native language is not from the Indo European family.
@Jonas: Is there a link to the survey with more information, e.g. where people come from and how many people took part in the survey?
I think English should be higher on the list. Like the 7th or 6th. Because it IS a hard language to learn. I don’t think Japanese is that hard of a language to learn. I’m trying to learn it myself, and once you get the word order and the tricks, it becomes pretty easy. All you need to know after that is the words and certain sentences and how/when to use them. But I do think it’s one of the hardest languages to write, since you have a variety to write in such as: Kanji, Hiragana, Romaji. It get’s a little confusing. But the same goes for Chinese.
[...] Last example: Basque, to be found in France mainly in Pyrénées-Atlantique. How lucky we are, French is still used, otherwise we would have a hard time to understand anything … http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/top-list-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn [...]
[...] Dernier exemple: le basque, présent en France essentiellement en Pyrénées-Atlantique. Heureusement qu’il y a encore la version française, sans quoi nous aurions beaucoup de mal… http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/top-list-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn [...]
if hungarian is on that list then why leave out finnish, given that it´s from the same language group?finnish should be hard to learn as well, because it has little affinities with the major language groups: germanic, latin, altaic etc.
and, from my experience, swedish is so easy to read if u know german & english, but utterly impossible to pronounce…this should give it a small boost on your list above:)
Great article, love it !
Waiting for more !
Melissa I have to differ and say that English is a very easy language because of simple grammar like no grammatical genders. A more or less fixed word order and analytical. It has some sounds can give foreign learners problems like the TH sound and the spelling is illogical and it has a large vocabulary. Of course hard and easy is an individual question and also based on what mother tongue you have but alla in all I don’t think English is one of the hardest languages.
JK,
These things are indeed subjective, and I don’t know what os your mother tongue; the TH sound exists in Spanish so is no problem for Spanish-speakers. English has (effectively) no genders, true, but it has phrasal verbs, which can be quite impenetrable. Word order can be tricky, in adverb positioning for example. And as for its simple grammar, I have two standard English grammar books on my shelf – and each of them has 2,000 pages!
Yeah Peter true. But I stil ldon’t think you can compare with Germanic languages that have preserved more of the Proto-Germanic or indo-european complex inflaction system such as Icelandic and German.
As I said it is very much based.. on what is your mother tounge is. My mother tounge is Swedish if you wonder.
The hardest part of English is it’s massive vocabulary because it has so many loanwords from so many langauges it has hade contact with trough the years and because of that have alot synonysm and the spelling makes seldom sense at all it does not fit the with the langauge phonetics all the time.
But as you say theese things are subjective.
All love
Spanish is one of the hardest languages to learn while English is one of the easiest. That list is wrong.
well i think this list should be reviewed i know english french german arabic and alil spanish
frankly anyone would be crazy if he tries to learn arabic. i havent seen any foreigner speaking arabic fluently even after living in an arabic country for many years. german is relatively hard because of the many grammer issues and different cases. french its only a matter of verb conjugation.
i think arabic is by far the hardest followed by german ,then french. english is the easiest i dont know how u have it on the top list
HUngarian is deffinitly a hard langauge to learn. i would know. i am currently and exchange student IN hungary so i need to learn the language. Hungarian has lots of strange sounds and conjugations.
I Speak english which is one of the easiest language to learn, but hungarian is way different and isnt related to any other language at all.
What about Arabic?
Isn’t it extremely hard to learn
especially since it has a different alphabet
and its written in a way while spoken in a different way?
Icelandic is FAR more complicated then German. The grammar is harder and there are almost no Latin based words in it.
Arabic is very hard to learn, I speak it and yet I dont get the professional way of speaking it. Theres more than 1 prononciation. More than 1 meaning. Words to say to a guy and a girl. For example, ‘i love you’ can be said to guys and girls in English. In Arabic, for a male: bahibak. female: bahibik. And some letters dont even exist in the English language that do in Arabic. Plus a totally diferent alphabet.
[...] Read on to find out where English is on the list… [...]
This list is arbitrary, and so are the responses to it.
Japanese learners find it easy to read and write Mandarin/Cantonese because they share a writing system. They struggle with pronunciation because Japanese is not a particularly tonal language.
It’s possible to make similar points about any “X is easy/difficult to learn” statements that you care to make. As the article states, family relationships between languages make a big difference to how difficult they are to learn.
What matters most when learning a language is motivation and quality of instruction.
Hi guys, this is a very interesting debate and let me share my views being a multi-language speaker myself. I am an Egyptian and have learned English since I was born side by side to Arabic so my English is almost perfectly fluent . I believe that English is very easy to learn especially if you start young but quite hard to master since the language is very deep. While Arabic is probably one of the hardest languages in the world having almost the biggest vocabulary as well as probably the hardest grammatical rules in any Language. Trust me as a native speaker I don’t know half of it and it gets more complicated as you go . I have never met a non-Arabic born person who is completely fluent in it even people who pretend to read and write it well.
However, this is not meant to discourage people from learning the language because it’s very beautiful indeed and very deep meanings for the words yet you have to be patient and expect that the actual language spoken in the Streets of Cairo for example is completely different if not totally different from what you will learn in college or through your Arabic courses. However, you will find similarities and eventually you will pick up the language. It would be hard for anyone to learn the language in an acceptable way in less than 4-5 years and yet don’t expect to speak it like the natives unless you plan to live a decade in Egypt or Syria for example. The colloquial Syrian is closer to the Classical Arabic yet it’s not the same.
Furthermore, I am also a speaker of both German and French, while I never liked the French language despite it being so romantic because of the too many verbs conjugations and exceptions , I actually liked the German language despite having the same features and probably much harder but I found in German a lot of similarities to English which helped me to grab the language much faster than French . But remains to be said that I also know a little of both Spanish and Italian and I believe they can be easier to learn than German or Arabic.
Finally , I still believe that Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin ) can be among the most complicated languages ever given the hard and long list of vocabulary that you have to learn in order to just begin to grab the language. Added to the list of really hard languages are Finnish , Korean , Hungarian and Hindi.
I think Dutch should be in there, mainly because Hollanders have far too many rules when it comes to both writing and speech and it’s very confusing for most who move in there, even those who have grown up in The Netherlands themselves have a lot of trouble with it. (as far as I know, that is.)
English is an easy language, that is the reason why it is used internationally.
Honestly though, I thought Chinese was the hardest language…
how interesting…i am an engish teacher and there is NO easier language. period. i also speak fluent portuguese, spanish, russian, french, some italian, some norwegian, and recently decided to study polish. it is VERY hard. very, very hard.
Ok, where is Baltic languages?? Letland and Lithuanian languages?
Lithuanian language is one of oldest europe language, and very hard. We have really more hardest gramatic than english, nederland and another language. Our pronounciation is also very difficult .
For example:
šalna, šąla šiandien, ačiū už skanią vakarienę, pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis, ūkis, malūnas,
čežėti šiauduose.
I think lithuanian language is more difficult than russian and should be in that list.
Ok, where is Baltic languages?? Letland and Lithuanian languages?
Lithuanian language is one of oldest europe language, and very hard. We have really more hardest gramatic than english or Dutch and another language. Our pronounciation is also very difficult .
For example:
šalna, šąla šiandien, ačiū už skanią vakarienę, pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis, ūkis, malūnas,
čežėti šiauduose.
I think lithuanian language is more difficult than russian and should be in that list.
Ok, where is Baltic languages?? Letland and Lithuanian languages?
Lithuanian language is one of oldest europe language, and very hard. We have really more hardest gramatic than english or Dutch and another language. Our pronounciation is also very difficult .
I think lithuanian language is more difficult than russian and should be in that list.
If you don’t know Lithuania as a country, so you really didn’t like europe history
This debate is very interesting. In my personal opinion, Polish isn’t that hard of a language, but that may be because I’ve studied Czech and Slovak. Czech and Slovak are extremely similar and are mutually intelligible to a very high extent with little or no difficulty. The cases are easy to learn, and there are few irregular verbs, however, many nouns are irregular and you have to learn which are and aren’t and the difference between Feminine,Neuter and Masculine nouns. Adjectives are also the gender of which they describe.
English, on the other hand, can be completely frustrating and hard, or it can be extremely easy. It all depends on who’s learning it and if they’re talented at learning new tongues. If you compare Modern English to Old English, you wouldn’t be able to understand a word because Old English was basically another dialect of Old Germanic. Middle English would be slightly easier to learn, but it would still be extremely difficult. Over the years, English has been simplified greatly and I don’t think it could be any more simple than it already is, but hey, that’s just me.
As for Spanish;Spanish is probably one of the easiest languages in the world for an English speaker to learn, other than Frisian or Scots which are the two closest living relatives of English. I taught myself Spanish on the internet in about a year. Now I’m 2/4 to 3/4 fluent in Castillian Spanish. Spanish has immense similarities with English because many part of English were derived from Latin.
Example: Bus in English is Autobus in Spanish. Pronunciation is easy after a few weeks of study.
Another good example is You and Tu. Voz and Voice. the Z in Latin-American Spanish sounds like an “S” but in Castilian, C’s and Z’s omit a “TH” sound.
Spanish, is very easy. However, a language group that’s missing and that should be up there is the Uralic language family. Finnish,Estonian and Hungarian are all in the Uralic family. Finnish has 14 or 15 cases and the same goes for Hungarian and Estonian. This makes these languages extremely difficult to learn. Another thing is pronunciation which can be impossible at times. There are so many other languages that are harder but these are just the ones that I’ve studied so far.
Hasta Luego!
Spanish it´s one of hardest, I don´t know why it doesn´t appear in this list.
This list it´s WRONG….
hey all!
i think the list is pretty wrong.english is defenetly not hard to learn and i miss the arabic language as well.i think thats the correct list.
1.Slovakian
2.Hungarian
3.Finnish
4.Arab
5.Persian
6.korean
7.japanise
8.korean
9.French
10.German
The Slovak language is the world’s only 7 cases (Nominatív, Genitív, Dativ, Akuzatív, Locale, the Vokatív Instrumental), key words (s – y), adjectives and verbs in the paradigm. In fact, the Slovak language you have to inflection of all speech.
Lithuanian language is one of the most dificult in the world ;]]
Sveiki, as esu Lukas, man16 metu. Lietuva yra paciame Europos centre
I can see that you didn’t mention the arabic language.
arabic language is from right, to left, but we also have special thing on top of letters šįėęčąūųž
and very dificult grammar, pronouncing and writing ;]
JK: Your statement that English is very easy is absurd. As a native Swedish speaker English is clearly easier for you. Swedish is in the Germanic family and most Swedes get a very thorough education in English starting at a young age. The English language is def. one of the hardest languages in the world to achieve fluency in. The syntax is certainly not fixed as you claimed; there is a great deal of variation in sentence construction that is quite often very inflexible and must appear with specific associative words, lest the sentence come off as awkward or not make any sense. Two abiding characteristics make a language difficult: languages with many grammatical rules and languages that appear ‘lawless’, i.e., that have many exceptions or where grammatical structure lacks uniformity. Arabic is an excellent example of the former while English is an excellent example of the latter.
Moreover, general difficulty of language acquisition can be measured by a simple rubric: ALL language learning is relative. There is absolutely NO such thing as an absolutely ‘hardest’ language. Difficulty is determined by how close or distant the target language to be acquired is from the mother tongue of the learner. This can be further exacerbated by how much later in life the learner begins to attempt acquisition.
Finally, this list sucks! It is based on the British government, and it appears obvious that their research was certainly not thorough nor was it held to any standards. Seriously, how is Swahili, a language that is not considered very hard to learn for English speakers, harder than Arabic, which is arguably one of the hardest languages for English speakers to achieve fluency in?
In a few months i will be going to the Language school for the Army. In order to get my MOS (job) you have to take the DLAB (defense language aptitude battery). depending on your score, you get assigned a language that you are capable of learning. there are four categories: CAT 1 is spanish, Portuguese, french, italian, and other such languages. CAT 2 i believe is German. CAT 3 is hungarian, russian, czech, tagalog, and those languages. CAT 4 (which i scored for) has four languages, AKA the most difficult, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
so there you have it. i believe the best language school in the United States that trains the most capable linguists would know better than anyone
Sorry, but I haven’t met many Americans that knew more than their own language!
So I don’t think that you are experts on this matter.
And “so there you have it. i believe the best language school in the United States that trains the most capable linguists would know better than anyone” is a bit too patriotic for my taste. Relax, Sarah… It’s just a blog, not a competition.
Plus: Your figures are only applicable for natives of US English, so not very helpful for the rest of the world
(as so many other things from the US).
I recommend that you first master some foreign languages and then come again to comment here:)
Have fun at your excellent language school!
(I wonder why I see US soldiers only carrying weapons, why can’t I see any dictionaries???)
It would be so nice to be able to come to a website without reading attacks on my country. Carl, your understanding of America is obviously (like much of the rest of the world) based on Hollywood or the anti-American news media or government where you live. Here’s a newsflash for you: we, much like English speakers anywhere, don’t learn alot of foreign languages, because ENGLISH IS EVERYWHERE. I’m not saying that’s either good or bad, it’s simply the truth, whether you like it or not. I wish it were not the truth, because I love foreign languages. I speak French (albeit Acadian French from birth), Spanish, Swedish, and I’m attempting Russian.
As much as you love to believe that all Americans are stupid, let me assure you that all of us are not. Why some of us even managed to put on shoes and stumble our way into a university! If you can imagine such a thing. And whether you like it or not, the US Defense Department certainly does have its share of experts on language.
Now Sarah may have been a little vociferous in her touting of the US military’s language education program, but I think your mean spirited little rant was a little over the top as well.
You were right about one thing, Carl, it’s not a competition. No one but you, in your attack on the US, intimated that it was, so why don’t you spare us the anti-American lecture? We’ve heard it all before, ad nauseam from the likes of you.
Sorry, I overreacted. It won’t happen again…
Hi Kris, hey Carl, hey guys,
I’ve enjoyed this debate very much! It’s interesting how different people with different native languages and cultural backgrounds from many different countries exchange their views.
I spent three years studying and working in the US, and I met some nice, very open-minded US polyglots, and you seem to be one of them, Kris. (Although I still don’t watch Hollywood movies and keep a sure distance from overly opinionated news, I think the majority of Americans could use a bit more education on international matters (apart from the typical: “we owe China so much money” and, “the Middle East is the axis of evil,” and … (quotes from the US media, sorry, it’s true).
America is a great country and you’re a great people, that’s for very sure. And. It’s really hard for you guys to get around to learning some foreign languages, because in fact, the world knows too much of your native language. My advice for you is to study harder and just be better than the non-Americans, so that nobody dares to stutter any more English to you;) That’s really the best way to handle it…
Anway, though I didn’t like Sarah’s ending line either, the last comments of yours, Carlos, kind of crossed the line, so let’s go back to the original subject:
My question for you:
How should one raise a child bilingually? My wife (from Canada) is pregnant,
and I, always being a bit too hasty, am thinking of how to teach children two languages while they are growing up and without putting stress on them or confuse them.
in lreland, irish is a compulsory subject in school and yet students tend to gain a better standard of french or german. we learn irish for about 13 years, french or german for just 5. i have as much knowledge of french as i do irish but i have no idea why. it would seem that french and german are simply less difficult for an english-speaking person to learn than irish is.
I’ve been taking German lessons for about 1.5 years now and I have to say that it is really hard. Other than the umlaut pronunciations (excluding the ä), which are somewhat hard, the grammar definitely takes the cake. It’s just that the sentence structure and word placement are really different from English, like when you place a modal in a sentence. Ex: Ich möchte mein Auto fahren. It literally translates into “I would like to my car drive.”
Plus the noun infliction into the four cases and the masculine, feminine, and neuter. I’m starting to pick up Italian now and it is way easier. It’s a little less predictable and rolling r’s are, in my opinion, pretty difficult, but the the grammar is easier to comprehend.
I didn’t see Danish? And English come on thats easy
im a swahili speaker and now im living in poland learning polish,its exetremly hard i dont think its a good idea to place it in 4th position,and also i don think swahili should be in this list its extremely easy ,
i have been learning polish for 3 years now but i still cant speak it well at all,i think its trhe most difficult language to learn
arabe is the third language
English should not be on that list!!!! English is the easiest language to learn! And what about Tamil and Icelandic???
id say that one of the hardest languages to learn is polish. ive been speaking polish for 13 years and i still CANNOT prounonunce alot of words or even say some. im a native polak and its hard. imagine a american trying to learn it. Chinese is nothing compared to the polish language.if anything polish should be 3 or second not chinese.
all 40 hungarian so called “cases” arent cases !
Korean should be higher than japanese, because i feel that hangul(korean letters) are more difficult to write and it is much harder to speak their language. If you want to learn both languages, I suggest you learn korean first before learning japanese.
I must agree with gen about korean, although Japanese is hard, Hangul is harder. Although I do not see the the gain in learning korean first unless you’re talking about honing your asian language learning techniques. Because Japanese and Korean is not connected in any way. Japanese is actually not connected to any language except that they took kanji from the chinese, other than that for lack of a better word the language is completely independant. Korean I agree however is the harder language to learn.
I’m from Poland and I don’t know whether it’s the matter of fact that I’ve been learning English for seven years now but I find it quite easy. Except for tenses which sometimes are confusing for polish-speaking person.
Funny, because on the other hand I find Slovak really hard to learn. I’ve been taking one lesson per 1-2 weeks in the last two school years and I don’t feel I can speak Slovak. I can easily read books in this language but that’s probably because of my native language.
And German… well what I love about german is the simplicity of its grammar. Yeah nouns are hard to learn but the rest? No…:) It’s a little bit hard to speak fluently german because of thinking about all the rules but writing is easy
And when it comes to Japanese…Well I love sounds in this language! They’re so easy to hear compared to English or Norwegian! But all this characters…I’m thrilled when I think about them…
Hey guys,
http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/COURSES/verbs/HABLAR.HTM
Firstly, there is no such thing as the ‘worlds hardest language’!. We are only limited by the words of others and by stupid articles like this. It’s just typical of government organisations to bring out lists of ‘HARD LANGUAGES’ it’s a joke really.
I started learning Indonesian last year and of course people know it as ‘the easy language’. It is true, there are no tenses, no gender, a great lack of grammar but!!! To speak it like a native is a whole other ballgame. I started learning spanish 8 months ago too and i can understand everything said on the news yet when i watch indonesian news i find it very different and sometimes ‘hard’ to understand. Could it be that this lack of grammar makes it quite hard after all for the English speaker? I think we should stop reinforcing this stereotypical idea of there being a worlds hardest language. Like i said, people seem to enjoy limiting the capabilities of others because when you put your mind to something, you can always achieve it.
I remember when i first started learning spanish and i found a website that showed me a complete verb chart. It scared the crap of me to be honest, but after a few weeks of reinforcement and repitition, the forms are now stuck in my head, and whenever i hear an english verb in a certain tense i can picture the spanish form too. here’s the page i looked at if anyone’s interested
So anyway, here’s some tips:
1. don’t listen to what others have to say, unless they want to teach you their native language
2. try to avoid articles like this that enforce shocking!!! stereotypes about language learning
3. listen to lots of music in the language
4. translate as much of the language as you can to find patterns etc
5. get on the internet and find some language learning buddies (livemocha is a good one)
6. when the going gets tough, the tough get going!!
So have fun learning, LANGUAGES ARE GOOD FOR YOU!! LEARN!! BELAJAR!! APRENDE!! TANULJAD!!
1. don’t listen to what others have to say, unless they want to teach you their native language
- what a great way to have a conversation, don’t listen to people unless you feel you have something to gain!
2. try to avoid articles like this that enforce shocking!!! stereotypes about language learning
- yes let’s not write interesting articles so that we can discuss the reasons and or validity of what is written. let’s all just stick our heads in the sand.
english is so ****** easy!!! I speak 5 languages and english is by far the easiest, it doesnt have all time conjugation, its like a cheap mix of other languages, I would say its hard to read because there are no gramatical permanent rules as other languages like the romances ones.
arabian should be in the top ten, not **** like english easy language
I disagree that English should be higher. Actually, I don’t even understand why it is there at all. French is my first language. I have learned English + some Spanish and some German. English has been the easiest to learn. The grammar is extremely simple (only the 3rd person is different), so as the time conjugation. There are no genders, and the pronounciation doesn’t have to be perfect for you to be understood. I know English speakers keep saying that English is one of the hardest languages in the world. But really it is not! It is probably of the easiest, if not THE easiest.
I don’t agree with German and English, I find them pretty easy…
English is in my opinion pretty easy to learn,
and German fairly easy too..
and Chinese, i don’t know.. I’ve been living in china for half a year now, and ok i haven’t learned that much, but i haven’t taken lessons. and i believe it’s fairly easy, at least the grammar is. the writing and pronunciation seem pretty hard, though..
oh and you some of you guys are talking about Icelandic… idk about that, but i do think that Finnish should be on the list.. it’s not similar to anything (except Estonian..)
I’m hungarian and it’s definitely a hard language! We have many rules, suffix etc. There are many words what are hard. For example : megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. It’s not a popular word.. But we use these : pillangó, szeretlek, gyönyörű, köszönöm, szép etc. I think hungarian is one of the most beautiful languages.
1-japanese
2-lithuanian
3-french
4-arabic
5-spanish
the list is arbitrary indeed! and so are most of the comments here
im native Arabic speaker, learnt English German and French ,,, I believe how hard and easy learning a language actually is depends totally on the person, his native language and his talent !
in Germany where i lived for some years i realized that English for Germans and Dutch is a piece of cake, while here in France as well as for Italians it might be the hardest language to learn. thats not only my openion but the official sensus of the EU shows that both Italian and French pupils come always last in performance in English tests, while the pupils from Holland come almost always first.
learning Arabic for a Farsi or Hebrew native speaker isnt at all as hard as it is for a German native speaker due to the similarities since Arabic shares the same roots with Hebrew and has influenced Farsi thoroughly.
but hay! a language with over 20 thousand character to learn like chinese and its dialects or a language with a huge vocabulary and very complicated grammer like Arabic are too hard even for natives to master!
english shouldn’t even be on there…… it should be on the most easiest….. i came to US and didn’t know how to speak it, or write it…. and i learned it like in 6 months, THE WHOLE LANGUAGE…. they should put like Lithuanian, Greek, and others like that…….
Sorry, Greta, but from what you’ve written here… Did you really learn the “WHOLE LANGUAGE”? Or just things like “like”. No offense, but I think English, like really proper, elevated English is pretty difficult – even natives say that! I think it should be on that list all the same!
Hey Omar, I partly agree with you but there are more than 50,000 Chinese characters! Yet, you just need to know a few thousand…
As a proffessor of langauges,and having the knowledge of 14 languages fluently,we have a chart in our department,of the hardest languages to read,write and understand as well as speak like a native, and this is th elist as follows..
1. Chinese
2. Greek
3. Slavakian languages( Polish, Russian etc)
4. Hungarian – finnish- Japanese- Korean
5. Arabic- Turkish
the top 5 hardest in the world rated by all the universities of language around the world,and tested for more than 100 years. As for the English langauge,for a non native speaker, it could be difficult,because there is a large vocabulary and to pronounce the words may be difficult. However It is as hard as any language.. But the top 3 of the hardest in the world
I speak seven language almost fluently…And from my practice of so many dialects, Bushman is by far the hardest, then tongues, speaking in the spirit. Also, kenny from southpark show, speaks a very difficult language to be considered as well. Just my opinion.
Anthony, after just reading this whole page of very serious comments, that cracked me up! Thanks for lightening this up, people need to chill.
I will say though Spanish is definately not one of the hardest languages.
In response to Proff Maria, how would your department rank Sanskrit. I know for myself it has been by far the hardest language I have every tried to learn. I took 3 weeks of a class and new if I didn’t drop it I would fail. As far as some of the debate I’ve read on english being a difficult language that is my native language and I do believe it should be on the list possibly in a higer ranking than it is listed as. The reason I say this, and no offense to those who don’t speak English as their primary language, but there is much more to the language than what I see many non-native speakers associate with it. For one it is in some ways a phonetic language because the way you say something in English can really cause people who speak the language to interpret something totally different than what is actually said. Also, the language has a lot of influence from both Germanic and Romance languages, not to mention significant ties to Latin and Greek. So I do think for individuals who speak a Romantic or Germanic language that the actual vocabulary and sentence structure can be picked up on fairly easily, I find that people I know that do not natively speak a language that can be classified as Romanctic or Germantic find English to be fairly difficult.
LOL this list is so not true! english isnt hard to learn. atleast it shouldnt be on the top 10. neither should german
Hey? Whats the problem?
Maybe You have heard about LATVIAN language too….it`s a bit similar with LITHUANINAN but very difficult too…I guess, one off. I could tell You…6th difficultest!
Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu.
Cheers!
Response for Tibor: Slovak is the hardest language to learn? Are you serious? Definitely not, on the contrary its one of the easier slavic language. From slavic languages the hardest to learn is Polish soo far. The list looks correct but i think Japanese is one of the easier languages for a beginner to learn. It has a simple pronunciation scheme and with few exceptions a straight forward set of grammatical rules. Limitations on sentence structure are also quite minimal. The most difficult aspect of learning Japanese is the mastery of the reading and writing of kanji.
English?????????
comeon..it’s not that hard..
wow 61.Proff Maria D u speak 14?? sooo coooooool
1. Chinese
2. Greek
3. Slavakian languages( Polish, Russian etc)
4. Hungarian – finnish- Japanese- Korean
5. Arabic- Turkish
i agree..but korean is not that hard realy..it’s somth..
i speak English and Arabic..and learning korean..and i’m only 18..
I think Non English speakers are saying that English is a easy language to learn without taking into account media and cultural influences. English is so widespread and far reaching in film, tv, literature and social conscience that for a non native speaker it seems very familar and not as hard as something like Finnish of Chinese would seem and would seem alien to a native English speaker. I am English and currently living in Paris and learning French,(which I would say is the best and easiest way to learn another language.) I would like to say to all these people who claim english is an easy language to learn or understand sit through a production of Shakespeare by the RSC in Strafford or any RSC and claim that English was easy.
i have english as a second language and though i’m competent in talking and writting in english. i still don’t consider myself fluent in the language. i find learning english hard if the english that’s being discussed is everyday english. everyday english is made up of tons of phrasal verbs that are easy to get mixed up with.
englisH ??? strange!
I think
chinese
arabic
hungarian
japanese
turkish !!!!
According to the things I learned and read about languages, I don’t agree with the list. If you want to line up the languages which are known by a person from European civilization, this isn’t a correct list. Latvian, Albanian, Celtic languages are also Europeans (not to mention Georgian and Armenian) and are much harder than German, Russian, even the Polish. And enlisting the English to the 10 most hard languages must be a joke. Maybe to learn it perfectly(?) is hard, but getting to an intermediate or advanced level (even with a Hungarian mother tongue) is quite easy. But try to do this with Irish or Lithuanian…you will se the difference.
na it thing 1o should be english. I learned it in 2 years without an acsent now. I definitly think Japanese,German,and Arabian should be the top hardest. Im german we have so many wierd things. like we have 3 diffrent ( THE ) words. der,die,das. and you can only use certain ones for certain objects or things. Now Arabian I think would be hard cause they write backwards. they pronaunce words very diffrent. And they dont only have the ABCs they have like diffrent letters. And I think Japanese might be the first. cause people in japan learn a new symbol everyday cause they have over 5000 letters and new ones added all the time.
Vincent is obviously a troll
Vincent, if you judge by the writings of the languages, Chinese might be the hardest one, but there are Latin alphabet for most of these languages, and if you use these, they are a lot easier. And the difficulty of a language does not depend only on its writing…
Hy Everybody,
I want disagree, with English language. It’s not so difficult at all. We are all learning that at school, from low grades and everybody can speak, very well, i think.
However, I am from Lithuania and I think, our language should be at least in TOP 10 hardest language in the wrold. Latvian too. Our language is really more difficult, thant Dutch, English, German, etc.
We have Really Lot of grammar rules, and punctuation rules.
Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už dėmesį ;]
Lukas, may I correct your English? The brackets [ ] are for missing words and spelling errors, the asterixes * signify punctuation errors.
[Hi] everybody,
I want [to] disagree with [the] English language. It’s not so difficult at all. We are all learning that at school, from [the] lower grades,* and everyone can speak* [it] very well* I think. (commas not necessary)
However, I am from Lithuania and I think* our language should be at least in [the] TOP 10 hardest languages* in the [world]. Latvian too. Our language really is more difficult* [than] Dutch, English, German etc.
We *really have [a] *lot of grammar rules (no capitals), and punctuation [as well].
Maybe our grammar and punctuation are not as simple as you’d like to think, although very good effort!
i don’t understand why english is in the list. There are much harder languages that are not in the list, like Greek, Arabic and Turkish.
I stand corrected.
I did an update this week at Harvard Uni. However it is fact that…
1. Chinese
2. Greek- Finish- Hungarian
3. Russian-Latvian- Lithuanian etc
are officially the hardest amongst all the languages in our living Earth. Chinese Mandarin being the most difficult of all, Followed not too far behind being Greek,Finish,Hungarian are on the same level almost and so on..
as i said before, some languages are easy to learn for some, you either have an ear for languages, or don’t, but someone may find it harder to learn one language and another might find it as easy as their native tongue. Each to their ow.. But hundreds of years of testing have proved these to be amongst the hardest in all fields, this discussion should be at its end about now. If you are all saying German and English etc are difficult that is to your own. It may be easy to some. And just to inform you, German is one of the easiest languages to learn.English is said to be harder.
Again,i don’t make up the statistics, studies of the world do. I am indeed a prof of languages.
I have friends that at the age of 31 do not speak English and find it extremely hard but they speakGerman and japanese. So as i said each to their own.
statistically these are the ratings. you can’t argue this fact.
The ratings of the above languages are 87% harder than other languages.
take care everyone, educate your minds
I think one point that many observers seem to have overlooked is that reading, writing, speaking, and understanding a language are all slightly different skill sets. For example, speaking Chinese, after you pick up the tones is reasonable, but writing on anything resembling a professional level will take a native English speaker many many years. As an American whose approached Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese –in that order– I’ve found that intuitively I can say things in Spanish that simply don’t fall into place in Chinese, despite having studied it twice as long. The one thing I can say about the process of learning a language as an adult is that the languages with alphabets are more accessible; if you forget a character, there’s no sounding it out, there’s simply a pure, almost Zen emptiness as you look helplessly at the lines on the pages… Alphabets are far easier to learn and study, even if the grammar gets a little awkward-
I think people are over looking english a little. Yes it’s no where near as hard to learn as arabic for example, but to be able to express all one’s opinions fluently and to be able to understand all the slang etc, is more difficult that you might think. You need to remember that being fluent in a language means understanding all the colloquial terms aswell!
There are voer 7,000 languages in the world, how can you simply take 10 well known ones and plonk them in a list?
I don’t think you can ;]
*that
**over
Here I am debating about languages and I can’t even get the spellings right! =P
Suomalainen, Finnish is said to be on of the hardest languages that uses the latin alphabet (for English speakers)
i think that the only thing that makes english hard is the vocab, and to #11 i think that spanish is one of the easiest languages
@”Wrong” #11
Spanish id definitely one of the easiest languages to learn, at least from an english standpoint, because the sentence structure is so much like that of english. That being said, english is one of I believe the 3 hardest, because although you don’t have to conjugate, that takes all of 30 minutes to learn, and english has so many rules, and then so many exceptions to those rules which don’t make sense. If you don’t care about grammar, then english is probably not that hard, but if you want to learn english completely correctly, then it’s definitely not even remotely easy. I am lucky that I grew up with it and can learn other languages using english as a basis, instead of the other way around. Although even so german could be a tricky language at times
Spanish *is
[...] is said to be one of the most difficult languages and after explaining all the complexities of the so simple name issues I could agree. One must also [...]
Well hungarian is or now i have to say was (american scientists proved it recently although not every country- even hungary- accepted yet) in the finn-ugric language group but its completly different from them. The finn language and the hungarian actually cannot be compared finn people cant understand hungarian and hungarians cannot understand finn. Although there are some similarities between the 2 languages but these are quiet negligible, in real language one cannot realise these even the native speakers (for instance world similarities like pot- in finn: pata in hungarian: fazék were used to justify the relative relationship between the languages. (especially these 2 words- although i dont really see the similarity.) Hungarian is more likely to be unidentified in terms of origin (40% of the hungarian vocabulary cannot be connected to any existing or even dead languages) I think it is one of the most hardest languages in the world and deserves the second place on the list.
oh excuse me pata is in vosztják (another “close language” to hungarian) pot in finn is potista though it is still not fazék
Georgian ქართულია ერთ ერთი რთული ენა
can you read this? 
))
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Iraide and Transket, Transket. Transket said: Die schwierigste Sprachen http://bit.ly/4a9KWp [...]
Bitxia benetan. Euskara zailena omen da ikasteko, zerrenda honen arabera. Hori esateko, ordea, ez dut inungo arrazoi zehatzik ikusi. Gainerako hizkuntzekin zerikustekorik ez duela…Bai. Zailagoa dela ikasteko…Ez. Hori ez da egia inundik ere. Desberdina da. Kitto.
Good article,
from the Basque Country,
Best,
Igor Calzada.
Basque is quite an EASY language. It’s absolutely logical and has just a few irregular verbs. It’ has no sense being on the top of the list.
Strange that people say they haven’t met many Americans fluent in another language. I’m 19 and American and live in New York state (NOT city). I’m in college and almost every other kid here knows a second language. Even in Junior High and High School many of my peers knew a second language because their parents had them privately tutored at a young age just so they’d have the advantage and not have to take a language in school in order to leave space open for other academics. Lots of these kids ended up liking learning a new language and continued on in it. My cousin is fluent in 3 languages besides English.
Also, I think Korean relatively easy, but that’s just me!
This list is arbitrary, there are dozens of far more complicate languages.
I don’t know if we’re just considering languages one usually learn… leaving aside then Caucasian, Australian or Amerindian languages, most of them quite hard to be learnt by Westerners.
And, anyway, this is a matter of the point of departure and the point of arrival… it depends entirely on your mother tongue and the languages you know.
Hara hor estadistikak eta zerrendak! Kultur aniztasuna dugu gure herri honetan eta harro sentitzen gara euskaldunak garenok. Nahiz eta askotan politikariek kultura eta politika nahastu gizarteak eta mundu osoak argi eduki behar du bi gauza oso ezberdin direla eta hizkuntza hau gal ez dadin gobernuek ere lagundu behar dutela.
Don´t mix Basque Culture with politic please, we are pleased to meet you in our-yours Basque Country !!
I know a Pole (from Poland) who learnt basque in three months
Bai, egia da, euskera ondo hitz eta idatzi egitea ez de erresa, ni euskalduna naiz eta alan eta guztiz, es dakit oso ondo.
To make such a list someone from other planet should learn all languages from our planet and after write which one was the hardest one…
Esan beharrekoa da milaka zerrenda egin ditzakegula, bakoitzak bere ikuspuntutik. Baina hizkuntzarik gatzena jakitea ez da gauza makala
ouch, really basque it’s harder than chinese or japanese, I don’t think so.
With chinese & japanese you have to learn their “alphabet”.
Anyway, all languages are beautiful, they’re culture.
PS. a girl who knows and speaks basque
Zailena edo ez, gurea da ta kitto!!
I must say that as Basque speaker my language would be one of the most difficult ones if you are not a native speaker orif you don’t learn it since you are a child. Everyone could tell you that if you learn Basque when you are older like 30 or 40 i’0m sure that you will speak it or even learn its structure and grammar but it’s quite unlike that you will speak as fluent as a native does.
Bye,
Maybe a better approach would be to present languages in tables and point the degree of difficulty of grammar, vocabulary, the language actually spoken, easy at the beginning but difficult at a later stage, etc. and so on.
English is extremely difficult from the point of view of being a language almost without rules. However, the vocabulary used in the UK is extremely low (maybe 2-3000 words) compared to the one used by an average Spanish or French speaker (probably double that and with far more expressions). The richness of everyday talk is far higher in the continent, than it is in the UK or USA.
Euskalduna naiz eta harro nago!
Gora gu!!!
epa, ni re euskal herritarra naiz. ni eguzkin iritzikoa naiz.
egia esan ondoren datorrenak hau letzeko bakarrik idazten det kar, kar. aber suerte pixkatekin inglesez dakin ta letu dezaken hemen jartzeuna… jeje
*****ahuntzak eztul egitean sorbaldako hezurra bere lekutik irtetzen zait eta benetan kezkatzen nau honek. zer egin dezaket? nora jo dezaket?*****– ok. if the next person writting in this blog realizes about what i’m saying right now, please could he/she try to write the sentence between “obeliscos” (*) the way she/he would pronounce it? it’s just to see how would people pronounce such complicated things as: “ntz” and others. just curiosity.
sorry about my english, i’m basque, and i also think that our language is difficult, but at least it ain’t got tones or you write it from left to right!!
bueno, gabon ta hurren arte mundu osoko jendeai!!!
All of the people who comment that Spanish is an easy language to learn are completely wrong! Nowadays Spanish is not a language, it is a mix of weird sounds that you can use like you want. You don’t need to learn grammar, vocabulary or practising pronunciation, you only have to go to Spain, get drunk in the beach, and bark loudly to the people. And, magically, all of the people understand you.
Ooooooh… That’s pretty cool!
Seriously, I invite to study Spanish to all of the people who comment that it is really easy to learn, and much more to that guy who said that he can watch and understand Spanish TV programs with a few months of training (because I have sometimes problems to understand South American TV programs, and my native language is Spanish of the center of Spain).
And, where is Hindi language?
I think that, if English is an international language, it is because is easy to learn. (And don’t tell me that there are cultural differences and differents regions, because all of the languages have it). Other languages that are not there, like French, Arabic or Thai, as an example, are more difficoult to learn than the English language.
(And thanks to the anglophone troll who is going to correct or reply this comment).
[...] dio “Leiophiles blog ospetsuan” zabaldu dela berria. Eta ez dago Leiophiles izeneko blogik; Lexiophiles da. Ospetsua omen. Ba, ez da oso ezaguna izango, prestigioa aitortu nahi diotenek izena gaizki [...]
I don’t think English is a difficult language to learn, my list will very different. Except for the first one, the Basque. I perfectly understand it, I can write in Basque, but speaking it is really hard… Until I started University, I studied in Basque at school and today I’m not even close to speak in Basque like I speak Spanish (the other co-oficial language in th Basque country). But I’m really proud to know the hardest language in the world! I feel better now about my german classes!!
El euskera, el mas atiguo deveria estar protegido, y no manipulado tan politicamente.
That’s a nosense;
I think the hardest langueage to learn will be, that langueage which is more far from your’s, alphabetically, grammaticaly, phonetically…
Hi!
I think basque country is in fact a quite difficult language tu study, but I agree with the author of the article, when it says that the difficulty of a language depends on who studies it.
Basque is one of the eldest langauges on the earth, and it should be more protected, as a minority one. Unfortunately, Spanish government don’t think so and they think it puts on risk Spanish language!
Help basque language!
and the navajo?????
I think that is harder to learn than euskera (basque)
Respecto a la lengua, se debería de tratar de ofrecerla y no de imponerla. Y mas, en zonas y lugares, en que se expresan mayoritariamente en una sola… y esta es común al resto de la nación y compartida por otros muchos millones. Si encima se le añade el echo de la dificultad de aprendizaje, en una nación que cuenta con una gran fracaso escolar, se le imponer por la fuerza y la sin razón el aprendizaje de una idioma, que debería ser una opción optativa y ofrecida, y no impuesta a quines ya de por si encuentran dificultad para el aprendizaje de su propia lengua materna y son condenados a arrastran su fracaso escolar y ser arrinconados y sin posibilidades de aprender y desenvolverse apropiadamente en su habitual desenvolvimiento, sin crearles trauma y perdida de tiempo en algo, que solo obedece al sentimiento nacionalista, por sentirse diferentes y asilados del resto. Llevándoles a una sin razón y empecinamiento, siendo España quine ostenta el ultimo puesto del escalafón de países subdesarrollados europeos en enseñanza. Y donde ni el propio presidente ni su familia ni miembros del gobierno e instituciones, ni siquiera hablan otro idioma que el materno, condenan a quienes al igual que ellos se encuentran en estas regiones con sentimientos corporativos y endogámicos. Que hacen que la mayoría llamados despectivamente por el nacionalismo como “maketos”, se dobleguen por su falta de organización y asunción de complejos de inferioridad ante la burguesía nacionalista, que ha sabido trasmitir al resto de la izquierda la asunción de su exclusión y aislamiento nacionalista. Imponiendo la obligación de expresarse en euskera. Cuando en la zona francesa, el único idioma oficial y que se ensaña es el francés. Esta bien que se potencie y se trate de preservarlo, pero sin ninguna connotación de querer ser utilizado por obligación y menos para separar y aislar endogamia y sectariamente a la sociedad. Aislándola u negarle el poder relacionarse, desarrollarse y entenderse con el resto de vecinos, mas ahora que se trata de globalizarnos a través de las grandes corrientes idiomática y sobre todo del ingles. Mas valiese dar prioridad al aprendizaje de una idioma difícil también pero que abre muchas puertas y posibilidades, que aprender una idioma solo para uso burocrático y muy limitado.
[...] asteko eztabaida antzu eta lerdoa, desproposito bat den zerrenda batek ekarri du. Zerrenda horrek euskara jartzen du munduko hizkuntza zailenen top 1-ean. Ene. Zerrenda [...]
My niece, who is now 1 year and 8 months, is now learning speaking (so gorgeous!), in basque. It doesn’t seem to me that she’s having more troubles than other children in their first steps in oral communication. Her grandma (my mother) says always that she’s very intelligent, probably a HIGHLY-GIFTED CHILD. Now, I know it’s true!
Well. I must say I don´t agree at all.
We could say basque (euskara or euskera) is hard to learn because is a minority language not very spread along the world and spoken only by 800.000 people or so.
That´s the difficulty. If we add all the problems we, basques, find to promote it and normalize it´s daily use in society in the hole of Euskal Herria (basque country:)… well, then, yes. It is difficult to learn.
I´m a citicen from Navarre (Nafarroa) and I am an euskaldun- berri (new basque speaker). . I think it´s a very logical language. It isn´t easy eiher! But anyone could learn enugh to move arroud within two ar three years. From there onwards it´s a matter of improving.
I invite you all to learn more about our small, but beautiful, language. You are all invited to come over to the basque country to proove our lingustic reality and discover a bit about our ancestral language.
Gero arte! (see you later!)
Actually, we should not include all the chinese languages into a category as “chinese”.
In fact, there is a big difference between Mandarin and Cantonese (South China such Canton province and Hong Kong). Mandarin has 4 tone and is written in simplified characters. On the other hand, Cantonese has 9 tones and is written in traditional characters.
Which one is harder? Without any doubt Cantonese.
ESPERANTO estas la lingvo plej facila el cxiuj de mi konitaj. Mi parolas euxskan (basque), hispanan, francan, iomete da germana kaj angla. Antauxe ankaux multe studis latinan kaj grekan.——– Hala eta guztiz ere, honi buruzko iritziak, erabat subjetiboak dira. Beti amaren hizkuntza polita, garbia eta borobilena da. GUREKIN GORPUTZA EGITEN DUELAKO. Horrexegatik, gomendagarria da hizkuntz batzuek ikastea, hain parziala ez izateko eta ikuspunto zabalagoa edukitzeko.
The Basque is not DIFFICULT. The Basque is DIFFERENT.
14years learning basque and i hardly speak it…. REALLY hard
[...] de 23 países del mundo han colocado el euskera en el primer puesto de las lenguas más complicadas del planeta. Le siguen el húngaro, el chino o el [...]
I don´t think basque is a very difficult language to master, if you live here. Here, in the Basque Country, many people, thousands, have learnt it as a second tongue. I learnt and use it everyday, and I don´t think I´m very a gifty bloke. At first it seems difficult, but when you get the basic rules it´s very regular. Besides, English is easy at first, but phonetic is tricky. In my opinion, Basque is a bit easier to learn than English.
RICARDO: tu español escrito es lamentable. Ocupate de aprenderlo correctamente en lugar de ir contra otros idiomas repitiendo la basura que has ido oyendo de otros. Y un poco de respeto, que este foro no es en español.
This list is just… way off. Japanese? What about Icelandic and Czech? Most of the languages on this list are simple. I dont understand the logic behind this list.
Let me start off by saying I (and every single poster on this topic) am completely 100% biased. It is impossible to be unbiased in the realm of languages because each person has their own life experiences to shape and mold their thinking. That being said, as a native English speaker living in the United States, I think many are seriously misjudging the difficulty of the English language. I am earning my English major at a relatively prestigious American university. Other than students in my department, many college students decimate the English language on a daily basis. Is it their/there/they’re? Whom or who? Should the subject go before the verb or vice versa? Semicolon or comma? Believe it or not “could of” is not grammatically correct. These are just a few of the ways many English speakers incorrectly use the language in both oral and written speech.
I can’t accurately speak to actually learning English because, as said before, it’s my native tongue. However, I think many may find it “the easiest language EVA!” because of its prevalence in media and business. Unlike Russian for example (my current language of study) where I must actively seek out opportunities to hear and speak Russian, English is literally everywhere.
I intended to write more on the subject but I must leave for work so I will leave the issue as is. The moral of my little story is to not underestimate the difficulty of English.
[...] This limit level of vocabulary convergence is different for every language, but it doesn’t so much depend on the language family or geographical origin, rather it depends on the size and the development of the community of speakers. That is the reason why even non indo-European languages like Basque are extremely easy above the intermediate level: the community is not big enough to support complex terms, and all higher Data is adopted from International words. Most people tend to misunderstand and attach too much importance to the concept of language families, and they come up with absurd lists like this one. [...]
HUNGARIAN has to be the most difficult language in my opinion. Such a twisted pronunciation, and writing is ever more challenging. I had a lot easier time to learn quick sentences in Egyptian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish or German than Hungarian, ever while I lived there for 2 weeks
So Dana, Hungarian is the most difficult language from all the Finnish Languages – Its hard – what can I say.
[...] year we posted an article with the Top List of the hardest Languages to learn. The article attracted a great deal of attention with people voicing their opinions about what they [...]
Language serbo-croatian doesn’t eaxsest. Thet is croatian
hello.
I’m basque (euskaldun) and I think that the difficulty of this languaje is because is the oldest in europe. It’s a very beautifull lenguaje. We must conserve it always.
Euskera dagoenik hizkuntzarik politenetarikoa da. Mantendu dezagun euskadi eta bere hizkuntza.
I always thought that Georgian is the hardest language to learn.
It’s funny, that Russian was voted as easier to learn than Polish: pronunciation the same (Polish has nasal vowel but Russian movable accent impacting pronunciation of vowels). Russian on the other hand has completely different alphabet (maybe easier for Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbians and maybe Greek). Grammar practically the same. This funny poll give us an answer on how often you meet people you don’t understand. Polish language for example has greater share of its native speakers abroad than Russian. In this situation far more residents of the world can hear this swishing sounds. So stereotype of difficulty is well founded.
Serbo-Croatian does exist. It’s used as an umbrella term for all the dialects spoken in what is nowadays Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_language
I agree with whoever mentioned the many exceptions to a language. That is what makes a language difficult. I don’t care if the language has very little similarity to my native language if I can simply memorize a set list of rules that can be applied to every case in its grammar, without exception. Then, I would want a list of beginner vocabulary (800 words or so) that is used commonly amongst native speakers of that language. From there, achieving fluency (being able to read a daily newspaper in that language and have a conversation based on it with a native speaker) wouldn’t seem that daunting. (Such is the case with constructed languages.) So Chinese, Japanese, and Korean aren’t really that hard. (I don’t know the case for Arabic, though, but I am scared away by the number of different ways to say “boy” and “girl.”)
@48 (Viktoria): I would say that Korean is harder than Japanese if you’re talking about pronunciation and sounds. However, I don’t know where you got the idea that hangul, the Korean script, is harder than the Japanese kana and kanji combined. To me, the easiest part about Korean was always the hangul–I absolutely love it because of how logical it is. If you have ever studied it and how each part is connected, you wouldn’t argue that hangul is harder than kanji (and kana). Hangul is phonetic, kanji isn’t–and there are over 2,000 kanji characters that you’ll have to memorize to read a regular newspaper. In hangul, each part has a sound, and then to create a new sound, you add together two other different sounds . . . really cool.
@133 (marqoz): Haha, yeah, that’s what I thought when I saw such a high count of Polish being a difficult language. I simply thought, “Oh, there are more Polish people around the world in countries/places with internet.” Also, Russian and Polish never seemed really different to me, either, except for the fact that Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet while Polish uses the familiar Latin alphabet. (However, I doubt that learning the Cyrillic alphabet will be very difficult, especially after learning the Greek alphabet and having experiences with some of the more complicated writing systems of the East Asian languages. This might not be accurate, though, because I was “forced” into those languages at a young age by my parents and teachers, so they weren’t as difficult to me to learn as it might be for an adult.)
[...] previously posted an article on the top list of the hardest languages to learn which attracted a lot of feedback from our readers. As a result of this, we decided to [...]
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[...] away on the subject for some time, but after a while, things start getting repetitive. This post is very good. They did a survey, and this is what they came up with. This post is also very [...]
This list is far from acurate.
toh there 7.000+ languages i doubt its realy possible to make one compleetly acurate caus one languages is easier or harder depeding on wich language you allready speak.
But i read of a few about Dutch, Like:
“mainly because Hollanders have far too many rules when it comes to both writing and speech and it’s very confusing for most who move in there, even those who have grown up in The Netherlands themselves have a lot of trouble with it. (as far as I know, that is.)”
Speech when born here general isnt a to big issu, writeing how ever i honostly dont know anyone who can write dutch with out makeing any errors, some make just a little toh but most pepole i know make quite alot of mistakes spelling or grammar wise.
hello everybody ^_^
I am a native arabic speaker and i can tell you that arabic is the MOST difficult language ever , yes chinese is hard and its writing script makes it classified as hard , but actually the hardest to speak is arabic ..
we have almost infinite grammar ..
i will tell you the easiest most basic words ..
as for the word YOU .. in arabic it depends
anta >> if you are talking to a single male
anti >> if you are talking to a single female
antoma >> if you are talking to 2 persons !
antom >> if you are talking to male ploral
antonna >> if you are talking to female ploral
for example , we don’t have the word YOUR in arabic ..
it’s conjucted to the object directly making it a one word ..and surely depends on whom you are referring to .. wether it is a single male or a single female or ploral male or ploral female or to two persons .. !!
your book ( as for a single male for example ) = ketabuk
your book ( as for ploral females ) = ketabukonna
your book ( as for two persons ) = katabukuma
another example of the VERY BASIC structure in arabic ..
word THE , is pronounced depending on the word that follows it , we have 28 letters in arabic alphabet .. some are classified as moon-letter and some are classified as sun-letter ..
if the subject or object starts with a moon-letter THE is pronounced as al , if it starts with a sun-letter it is pronounced as a+streching the first letter …
for an example , walad means boy , M is a moon-letter in arabic alphabet .. so the boy = al walad
sama mean sky , S is a sun-letter in arabic alphabet , so the sky = assama
emmm , there’s also .. the comparative rule ..
in english you just say nicer , hotter , more beautiful …
jameel ( beautiful ) , put an A in the beginning , eliminate the vowul aftar the constant letter and add another A before the last letter in the word , and here we go AJMAL means more beautiful in arabic .. that’s just in case the word ends with a constant letter .. !!!!!!!! I KNOW
ktaba = the original word of write.. if you want to say writting , written , wrote .. then take the verb and do some work with it .. it’s all about adding vowls before and after constants and in every time it gives a new function of the original word .. !!
who wants to speak arabic should understand these ULTIMATELY BASIC things very well , because usually it takes you to think for few moments to before you spell a very simple word .. I , you , she , he , they .. or even me , her , them ..
always sticked to the word making it a one word ..
I love you =
ahebek .. it’s a one word now lol ..
i loved you ,
habetek !!
told u , it’s about re-ordering the vowls and consistants .. and that should be very basic .. we are not into the real arabic grammar YET !!
complex enough ? =)
and yeah , about the arabic script , it’s written from right to left , and we use dots in letters alot , dropping a dot or a adding a dot or changing the dot’s place may change the whole word thus the whole meaning ..
plus , this may be shocking but seriously we don’t write down vowls unless they are extended in pronounciation !!!!! the reader must figure ‘em out by himself ..
PEACE , salam =)
i had few chinese lessons , and i can tell you arabic is way harder ..
i seriously think that no1 can speak arabic correctly 100% no matter for how long they’ve been learning it unless he/she is a native arab .. << this sentence should be upgraded from a just an opinion to a statement !!!!!
at last each language has it's own distinguish feature ..
to me
english is sooo cool fun and outgoing
romantic languages are just so elegant and chic
far east asian languages are SMART
Arabs used to send there children to teachers just to learn there language.
i bet you mean the classical arabic language and the very accurate grammar of it ..
^^
but in casual arabic we can go easy on ourselves and skip the very drastic grammar rules that is found in classic arabic , even some native arabs may fail the grammar advanced lessons !
Each and every language is difficult to learn & write, But I consider the children below 10 can learn any toughest language much easier than the age group above 10, Also I can list the south Indian language “TAMIL or Thamiz” is also difficult to write also to learn.
where is Latin?…you are telling me that learning English is harder than learning Latin…..your list need to be updated…no one here has ever studied it or you don;t know what you are saying. Greek should be placed in the list.
I am Basque and I think this is nonsense! How many British diplomats have tried to learn Basque? The difficultness or ease is in this survey based on one’s own knowledge, wich leads to the wrong simplification that the most difficult is the farthest fron ones own, which is not scientifical, nor objective.
In fact, Basque is a very easy lenguage. It is agglutinant, with a very consistent paradigms for verbs, has a very simple 5 vowel sistem (aeiou), sounds always as you read it without irregularity and so on. Nowadays, almost all Basques speak also Spanish or French, but those languages were very hard to learn for ancient Basques. Difficultness is a very subjective concept.
Ah, and Basque is not my mother tongue, I learnt it very naturally.
Spanish is a hard language to master, even Spanish natives get it wrong. It’s a myth that Spanish is easy, therefore one of the reasons ‘Spanglish’ exists.
Now, Dutch is certainly one of the most difficult languages to learn and to master.
Hi Guys I’m a hungarian boy.I say a hungary sentence. Sziasztok,Szécsi Krisztián vagyok.Kiskunhalason születtem ami a dél-alföldi régióban található.
I forgott it.The hungarian language is the 2. difficult language
I’ve studies both Chinese and Korean for more than ten years, and have studied Japanese for a year each, so know a little about them. I would say that Korean is by far the hardest, for an English speaker at least. Its pronunciation, grammar and honorifics are much more complicated than Chinese and Japanese (though not tonal of course). It actually takes quite a lot of fluency to say even the simplest things without sounding extremely rude. Though of course lovely people, Koreans will almost never correct you, and are probably the most reserved of all the East Asians, making practice quite difficult. Many older people simply do not wish to talk to foreigners. True, hangeul is a remarkably simply script, but if you want to progress beyond the elementary stages, you will need to know Chinese characters. Newspapers use them, and there are so many words that sound the same in Korean, that you’ll be wishing they used them more.
Chinese on the other hand requires a great deal of memorisation of characters, which is difficult in itself, but once you’ve learnt them, and if your tones and pronunciation are good, it is much easier to develop fluency. The grammar is minimal.
I don’t have much experience with Japanese, though the pronunciation is probably the easiest in the world, and having learnt Chinese, I am very grateful for their frequent use of Chinese characters, whereas written Korean still leaves me baffled a lot of the time. Only its word order is similar to Korean, not much else.
Wow, English isn’t a difficult language to learn AT ALL (as have said all foreigners I know who have learned it… being A LOT). Idioms aren’t “exceptions” (they’re in every language), absolute minimum conjugation, and pronunciation doesn’t come out of left field (and can be taught by teachers or the dictionary, where it’s almost always shown). Those who say otherwise either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are English speakers themselves.
Oh, and lol @ the people who said dutch/swedish were impossible. Absolutely not, they’re almost equally as easy as English to learn (albeit slightly more difficult).
arabic by far. It is written from right to left and it looks very diferent too. There is also a lot of dots in arabic. By the way im arab.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?Polish is pretty easy!And I think English is quite easy as well..Have you ever tried to learn czech?I am from th Czech Republic and even for czechs it is very difficult not to make mistakes,learn every rule and remember all exceptions.Sorry for my English…I am not good at it,but still I found it easy in reference of many other languages..
[...] Fuente: Lexophiles [...]
Interesting article that tries to answer this question of what the hardest language.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609
Well, I study linguistics and I’m really interested in languages. I have been studying French, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian and Finnish. Russian and Swedish are by far the easiest of these, French is also easy. I think that English also belong to this gategory. On the contrast Hungarian is really difficult, but Finnish is even more difficult. I think that for Indoeuropean speaker Finno-Ugric languages are difficult, and as far I know, also Japanese and other languages with different systems are also causing problems.
Polish >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-vMd_pBks&NR=1 just tray :]
Hard for polish people to
w Sczebrzeszynie rewolwerowiec strzelił do rozregulowanego kaloryfera stijącego naprzeciw stołu z powyłamywanymi nogami
English should be taken away from the list. And tamil tough is very hard to learn, like me struggling to learn but it is easy to speak it.
The hardest language to learn is: Polish-Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation. Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language not until age 16.
Im hungarian myself. I think english is the easiest language out of all shouldnt be on the list at all. I learnt french which i find a little bit harder. and though i only now words in arabic i can understand a lot of moroccan dialect. So again depends on the person i suppose.
1 hungarian word……i bet know one would find anything harder to pronounce or longer to write lol
Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért
I have more ….
Well I’ve just spent two years of intensive study of the French language although not having lived there. Speaking a language is one thing, understanding it is another, and the French vocabulary is huge, French isn’t easy, I’ve got a definitive French dictionary and it’s real thick, and the French use all the words in it. Now I’m going to learn Arabic, I can already write it, and actually writing from right to left is more natural I think, and the dictionary doesn’t seem to have so many words in it so here goes. I will never give up, and that is the most important attitude to take in learning a language. It is like doing a 20.000 piece jigsaw puzzle.
I think German is very hard to learn :S
Because of its irregular verbs it seems to be a very unlogical language but it isnt.
It is a very beautiful language, you can express all you want in different cases. Thats nice cause of its high variability
Haha
A very long German Word:
Donaudampfschiffsfahrtseemannsassistentenzweitausbildungsversuchsstätte
haha
Italian seems easy if you do not have any greater ambitions than shopping in Italian stores. It is however extremely intricate on a slightly more advanced level, actually much like basque regarding predicate structure, when you combine the main verbs with auxiliaries and enclitic elements..
Finnish is fairly easy.
Two italian brain-crusher as examples (I hope i got it right):
gliel’avevo fatto rimandare. = I made him send it back
me l’avrebbe dato = He should have given it to me
These constructions are from from trivial.
.
ahaha english s the one of the hardest languages and français is not in the list? this list is completly useless english should be listed in the easiest languages list
I’m a native spanish speaker with three and a half infant years of experience in a north american school. I was 9, i’m currently 26. I have to say that I agree with the opinions saying that english is a very easy language to learn. What me and my brother learnt in 3 months or so can hardly ever be forgotten. Even the ones in my country who say that they do not understand english at all can read and hear it, understanding at least the principal idea of a sentence or guess the meaning of a word. It may be true that it has many words, but spanish also has many words that I may say, no one ever trully memorizes a dictionary. I also state that I consider my accent to be very good. In my short years of experience with both I may say spanish has a lot more things in grammar and a lot more pronunciation. I know a friend studying at Russia, and friends from France and Brazil who would easily agree with what I’m saying. What I do notice is that everywhere in the world they speak english, but hardly any english speaker in that country actually speaks and dominates that native language. ¿So how can anyone say, even a German, that the english language is the hardest one to learn?
I think that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. I mean people may get the basics of it, but I know a lot of people who make grammatical mistakes, can’t spell things correctly, and can’t pronounce certain words even when it’s their first language. I have a lot of friends who speak English as a second language (I live in Taiwan) and they all say that “English is the easiest language to learn” but the people who say that are also the ones who make the most mistakes, or were in ESL longer than the other students.
I live in the basque country and I speak basque though my mother tongue is spanish. Basque is hard but because it has nothing to do with absolutely any other language, but once you get the hang of it you see it is perfectly logic in its grammar and structure.
About spanish I would say it’s very easy, the problem it has is its verbs, its prepositions and that you can say one phrase many different ways.
Saludos
Ondo izan lagunok
Basically what I see and what I think, is that a language is either easy or hard depending on the person’s means, language, practice, use and context. You can’t make a comparison between someone who has a romanized language, with that of an asiatic language, or an african or native american (north or south), or a germanized or russian or austrian or whatever. You can’t compare the academic formations of someone who studies languages, literature, philosophy, history to those who don’t. I feel like an idiot when discussing with my literature friends in any language, even my own. I don’t think you can measure a language’s complexity by making dumb statistics on how many people spell it or write it or speak it right- let me say it- IN THE WORLD. I think OTHER factors come to play related specifically to the language and cultural studies. A german woman that studied languages told me once that to her it was the spanish a very hard language to learn. On a discussion regarding the russian and the spanish with an embassador it was concluded that while the russian was a more straight forward language to say things, the spanish like my friend up here said, has many different interpretations in terms of words and sentence compositing, hence making laws very complex. Native African Americans in San Andres Island, Colombia speak the english and the spanish language and with both over time, have made a new one also with their original african speaking toungue. And you can’t say which is harder or more complex. An official translator, of french, english, japanese and spanish as well as indian languages in my country- said that the indian language of many cultures here have great similarities with the japanese. The japanese writting being a modification of the chinese to their lexic.
Every language has it’s own history and it’s own complexity, so to me, you can’t compare. One thing that has been said to me is that some of the finest literature has been written in english. And I have among my favourite writers many english man among them Shakespeare, (Can you imagine that what he wrote was slang in terms of today?). I also love some of the very first pieces written in spain, and many russian and japanese writers as well that I’ve only had the sad chance of reading them in translations because I don’t know russian or japanese. There are also many fine pieces coming from oral cultures native in my country that I hope won’t be forgotten.
I never said a grammatical structure or spelling could be simple when you’re confronted for the first time, and if you’re already older than say 20. But with practice even what seems the hardest can become simple, in a ‘natural’ way, like the programming, the mathematical problem solving, the translating, or the making of an art work. Repetition. Many also say that programming, animating or 3d modelling is “easy”. Or that drawing, painting or thinking a design idea is -easy-. Or that web page design or publicity are -easy-. Or that administration or constructing are easy. LOL. In Dostoyevsky’s time it was common for everyone to speak more than five languages including the latin and the greek. The Sumerians had a very complex sexagesimal numerical system to make say, most or all calculations.
Perhaps one of the best things the english language has is it’s many variations in the past. Like the oldest piece known and it’s complex translating – Beowulf. (I’m no writer nor a translator, this is just something I read when I bought the book.) Another advantage to english, is that all the colonized countries use it; also many cultures have in turn made many other variations such as words and uses of the english within their own native language- vocabulary and grammatical structuring mostly. This has happened to most languages in the world I would say. Another advantage over any other language is that any mass media, film, book, magazine article, academic article, music have been translated and converted to, or are originally made in english. Like a Universal Language totem today, also used for technical and scientific sub- languages being developed today. A teacher of german once told me that the english language was the one that contained most words, because it contained in it’s own range most other languages today.To me that doesn’t make it harder or easier. But many words of other languages are continually being added and transformed to the english and vice versa.
We can discuss all this in terms of world politics and economy. It makes perfect sense being the united states and the uk the principal world leaders in terms of cultural, technological, and global “domination” since the 17th century and the colonizing of Asia, Africa, and America. (America being a term coming from the Helenistic- Roman- Christian culture of the renaissance in Europe. And Europe being also an invention of the chrintianized roman-greek world. Not that any of this has anything to do with it of course.)
So to me that is one of the most beautiful assets of our beloved discussion here today. My rising question of,- Why is the english language considered one the hardest or the easiest? – could be turned into- Why is english not in the 1st place of the top ten?
This whole blog is in english, and all of us posting comments here are in some way english speakers. How else could we communicate in so many different countries and languages? It’s -easier- that way without necessarily implying that the english is the easiest or just “simpler” than any other. The sad part of this whole asset of the english as most dominant or widespread is that many other cultures and languages are just tossed away to the trash and are over time forgotten. Like what Mao did with the chinese language by romanizing it, and eliminating those of the Tibet. And since most pieces regarding the past are either in europe or the united states, and over time many toss away books in their homes because everything is becoming -digital- (ecologically “friendly” all these computers), many words could be changed conveniently over time when all archives are digital. Conveniently modified or even eliminated. Or not even posted or with acces to “everyone” on the web. Like the 1984 novel of G. Orwell, we become robots speaking a universally “simple” language tossing away all other information that is not necessary. Some have money and possibilities to get a good english education since kids, because it’s essential today, as the most widespread language used today by everyone. A native or indian language of a minority is considered still like something that doesn’t pass to be more than just a historical curiosity or an attractiveness for tourists. Higher classes here in my country have a spanish with a slight american english accent. Puerto Rico, Panama or Cubans also carry a slight variation of english with spanish because of the american colonies. Let’s not say the chicano community in the united states and the fact that the spanish is the second most spoken language in that country. So, how could a north american not say also that the spanish is a very easy language to learn? But I must say still that not everyone, even in latin america or the spanish speakers in the US have a good spanish as well.
So to give an “ending” for now and hoping to here some comments about it, i would like to conclude with some questions that I don’t know the answer to, and have a curiosity- What qualities and quantities should you have in mind when making a list of the hardest language in the world or the top ten?- And why should the english be included over any others that are not contained within that list?
Also – Should the economical, historical and cultural factors be included?
And despite my written mistakes and all the blabbery i just wrote up there, I still think that english shouldn’t be among the hardest languages in the world. And the US army is making a very big mistake putting their language among the hardest…
That list is a joke. Why isn’t Ukrainian up there on that list? It is without question more difficult than half the languages on that list. It is also an older language that is not so obscure (50 million speakers worldwide). As for english being up there, I believe its difficult because of all the inconsistencies in pronunciation.