Comments on: Top List of the hardest languages to learn

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:32:04 +0000

What about Spanish, Spanish verbs are difficult to learn, they change a lot in the consonants and Spanish grammar aaarg it is even difficult for a native speaker, I love English grammar but I hate Spanish grammar. (Note: I have no problems in Spanish grammar in the present day, it just was pretty hard to learn it and the English one was pretty easy.)
In addition, If I am not wrong, the Spanish is the language having more verbal tenses, we have 17 verbal tenses in Spanish, tell me another language having more verbal tenses than Spanish because I still don’t know about any other.
I am Spanish, my father speaks English hence he is a native speaker and he also speaks Spanish as second learnt language and he doesn’t use correctly verbs in Spanish yet, he speaks Spanish for almost 30 years!! lol
English should not be in that list, it is the easiest language to learn!
I speak Spanish, French and English and I am currently studying German and let me tell you that this language is to be spoken only by Germans lol, I have to translate things on my mind, from Spanish to German and apart from the work of translating, I have to know if I have to use Dative or Akkusative in my sentence, it is pretty complicated and it has a lot of consonants example: kopfschmerzen (headache).
I forgot to inform you that numbers are read this way, example: “59″ is “neunundfünfzig” (”nine and fifty”) I feel frustrated because I think I will never be able to speak FLUENT German.
French or English doesn’t help me to learn or understand German hence they come from a completely different language family.
Lucky I speak Spanish and French, I perfectly understand people speaking Italian and Portuguish ! If there’s a verb in Italian that is not similar to Spanish, then it is similar to French and I can understand!

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:34:54 +0000

armenian is the most difficult one

By: baburam

baburam — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:00:51 +0000

i have read the comment regarding the hardest language all over the world. easy language?it depens where the learners was born.how many foreign language he can speak.i am learning danish language . i have found it must the haedest one to learn to write and to pronounce. because it is not written how ever it is prounced. prouncation ……..very hard…….i think it must be the hardest one…..it means scandivian language are the hardest ….

By: aeoeue

aeoeue — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:40:33 +0000

I am not sure if it would theoretically be possible to make an objective list of “the world’s hardest languages”, and this one surely is not. I would just like to draw the attention of those seriously interested to a number of points:

1. Most comments in this thread about English being such an easy language have several mistakes in them. Those are mistakes even I can see, and my English is certainly far from perfect. I would say it is relatively easy to achieve a level of English which allows you to communicate, but if you continue learning you realize that truely mastering pronunciation and vocabulary, phrasal verbs etc. is extremely difficult.

2. There are about 6000 languages in the world today, that’s without counting various dialects. No one could study the structures of all of these to make a reasonable judgment as to which one is the hardest. I am already conspicious of people who tell me they speak more than three languages fluently, most of them have a definition of fluency which I wouldn’t agree with. Many of the comments here seem to come from people who have learned two foreign languages and now want the one they find harder up in the list.

3. There are different types of learners, and they will consider different types of languages difficult. If you learn a language at an early age, it is much easier for you to pronounce it correctly, since from a certain age it becomes nearly impossible for you to distinguish between various sounds (e.g. most English do not hear the difference between German ’schwül’ and ’schwul’; many Germans do not hear the difference between English ‘bed’ and ‘bad’). On the other hand, it may be easier for adult learners to understand difficult grammatical structures (not sure about this though).

Polish has been quoted a few times as having a difficult pronunciation. I find this rather surprising since Polish pronunciation is completely phonetic, I would definitely consider English pronunciation more difficult. Personally, out of the eight languages I have studied at some point in my life (English, French, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian; being a native speaker of German), I still find Russian the most difficult one.

@ Cirex, No. 187: Posts like this are the reason why so many people consider native English speakers completely ignorant and incompetent when it comes to language learning…

By: Cirex

Cirex — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:01:36 +0000

I speak English and Spanish. I am surprised why Spanish is not in the list. Just “speaking” Spanish could be easy, but in grammar, Spanish have a lot of accents and variations.. Symbols you don’t use in English; ¿, á, ú,ñ,é, í, ..

By: Andrew Jakobsson

Andrew Jakobsson — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:31:47 +0000

I know that Japanese always claim to be able to read Chinese, but that’s not true at all. If you press them to explain the meaning of any Chinese text, they just can’t do it. What is true is that many of the nouns and some of the more complex verbs use the same character combinations, but mainland China’s characters are too simplified for Japanese to recognize them, and younger Japanese can no longer recognize a lot of Taiwanese (and Hong Kong) traditional characters.

Because Japanese is an SOV language, with all of the prepositions and adverbs in phonetic hiragana, Japanese don’t recognize any of those parts of speech in written Chinese, nor can they cope with the Chinese SVO pattern. It is rare for Japanese to recognize any of the adjectives, either.

Therefore, the only thing that can be said is that Japanese recognize the general subject matter in Chinese text, but they can’t actually read even the simplest single sentence. I read both languages and have lived for a couple of decades in Japan with a Chinese wife, so I can definitely state this based on my own observations.

By: matthew

matthew — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:09:59 +0000

dont forget irish… its one of the most hardest languages i had ever learned ( i still havent learned it yet after 8-9 years lol)

By: Sandra

Sandra — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:16:04 +0000

English is one of the most easiest language in the world. Hungarian isnt so hard as well. i spend few weeks with hungarians and after it i almost understood what they were talking about . Polish is very easy as well, russian too. My list woulb be:

1.Arabic
2.Lithuanian
3.Finnish
4.French

By: Where is the science of this

Where is the science of this — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:01:55 +0000

English is the hardest because it has the largest number of people who speak it badly, as counted by the number of students who don’t attain proficiency level.

(this discussion is bullshit, which are the indicators of hard languages? BTW Basque has only 5 vowels and a few consonants, and therefor a very simple phonology)

By: Viktor

Viktor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:35:50 +0000

I am Hungarian and i totally agree. I can speak English, however i thought the that the 1. Mandarin