Comments on: Results of the Hardest Languages to Learn Poll!

By: Joan

Joan — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:03:39 +0000

Irish should definitely be up there somewhere. Really hard to pronounce

By: Aiswarya

Aiswarya — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 01:30:29 +0000

Well my mother tongue is malayalam,a language that it spoken in kerala,an indian state. I wish you would include my language in list of top 10 toughest language. My language is difficult and i can prove. The malayalam script is as difficult as mandarin/ cantonese

By: Brused Forsyth

Brused Forsyth — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:50:34 +0000

Im going for Estonian with its 14 case endings and no relationship to Indo European languages hardly at all only occasional loan words, I would say its as hard as Finnish and Hungarian but add that its only spoken by just over a million and they dont have any experience listening to foreign accents when trying to learn it, Ive lived here in Estonia for 6 years and I dont know any foreigners that have learnt it properly in adulthood, though there are legends my Estonian friends say only language perverts can be bothered with the struggle.

By: Today Translations

Today Translations — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:15:59 +0000

I would make an argument for English being a difficult language to write properly.

English orthography is extremely complicated and the letters of the alphabet can have so many different phonemes attached to them that reading and writing English is definitely difficult. How many times have you wondered about the spelling of a word and how many spelling mistakes do you still make even as a literate, native English speaker? Also, I tend to feel that English pronunciation of the alphabet letters does not always correlate well with more general usages. My favourite example is ‘i’, which in British English is not pronounced the same as /i/ as in most other languages.

I’d also like to echo sentiments that Korean, whilst perhaps initially confusing for people is definitely an easy alphabet system to make. From a linguistic point of view, it is arguable the most perfect alphabet system to date – encoding a lot of linguistic information intrinsinically.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:30:48 +0000

I don’t think that Polish is relatively hard language to learn to write. Just the opposite, it is quite easy to write, comparing to English. However it is very complex in terms of gamma and clean, proper pronunciation. Everybody finds orthography, the hardest part of learning

By: Brest

Brest — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:19:30 +0000

If Mandarin is #1 on your list, then you should know that it is one of the easiest Chinese dialects to learn, for several important reasons: it only has four tones (compared to 6-9 for some other dialects), the spoken and written language are quite similar or even identical (although mastering written Chinese is extremely difficult, you have to use lots of literary expressions from classical Chinese to write well), and because Mandarin has a much reduced vocabulary compared to many dialects.

By: Colin Raphead

Colin Raphead — Mon, 24 May 2010 04:33:07 +0000

As somebody who has lived 25 years in the Basque Country, I have to agree that it is a devilishly hard language to learn. Almost as hard as English, it seems?! Maybe that’s because there are about 20 ways to say “took”, 50 ways to say “this” and 100 ways to “that” in Basque. Imagine how long it takes me to translate, “Is that the boy who broke this chair?”

An interesting survey, anyway, though it would be good to know a little about total number of participants, voters’ nationalities, backgrounds, etc.

By: Leon

Leon — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:18:59 +0000

IMO, Cantonese is much harder to pronounce correctly than Mandarin as there are no suitable pinyins, IMO.

By: Colin

Colin — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:21:16 +0000

As the results do not appear to state the native language of the participants in the poll, they are of doubtful value IMHO. However, I am truly amazed that Russian does not appear on any of the lists. For an English speaker, the different alphabet, the case system, the complexities of the orthography, the flexibility of the word order, the often unfamiliar vocabulary, the sheer volume of rule exceptions, all add up to a learning experience which is much more demanding of the student than many other (even Indo-European) languages. Very interesting results!

By: Oscar

Oscar — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 09:44:50 +0000

Hey I m in Taiwan, at the begining i though Mandarin is the hardest lenguage but i can tell you that list is because a lot of guys on the sample for sure they don t know about lenguages around Asia or in the middle of Africa, Vietnamesse is really hard to pronunce, and some countries like Burkina Fasso really hard to write, for sure as my point of view is not the mandarin because grammatically is not so hard, the oral expressions are quite simple forms.