[pgrmdave]

Remember too that what is hard for me may not be hard for you. I have quite a bit of difficulty learning any language, but I'm quite fluent in English. Does that mean that English is an easy language? Because I know English, I'm going to be biased against languages that are very different, and find them more difficult. German makes more sense to me than Mandarin, but how could I know whether that means that Mandarin is harder or simply more foreign to me? I've heard (I'll start looking for studies now) that the average english speaker knows more words than those of most other languages (partially because English has more words than many other languages), does that point to the possibility that learning English is more difficult, because you need to learn more words to become 'average'?

[Ganoderma]

I haven't learned mush Japanese but i find it harder than Chinese due to the different written styles. But i think Thai has both beat in that they have more tones. the 4 tones in chinese aren't really that hard...being a native English speaker there are only 2 chinese "letters" i have a hard time pronouncing. but Chinese grammar is actually quite a bit easier and in many ways more logical than English. i would say aside from the written aspect chinese is actually a fairly easy one to learn. and in my opinion traditional is easier as 1 character doesnt often mean as many things...although i still have a hard time knowing what a character means as there is often a few.

my 2 cents.

[TheBigDog]

The hardest language I can think of is the one spoken by Ludo. (This is my required obscure pop culture referance for the month. Rep to the first person to correctly identify Ludo's language.)

Bill

[Mercedes Benzene]

I've often heard that Icelandic is the hardest language to learn. I really never heard someone speak Icelandic until this girl moved from there this year. It turns out she's now in my AP English class and she learned English as a little girl as well as Icelandic.
Well, sometimes I ask her to speak in her native tongue because I find different languages fascinating, but I must say Icelandic seems incredibly complex.

Currently I'm trying to teach myself German, and I've dabbled in Spanish and Irish Gaelic in the past.

[Mercedes Benzene]

The hardest language I can think of is the one spoken by Ludo

Ludo? As in Labyrinth's Ludo?
I have no clue what language that is... but I'll try to find out.

EDIT: Is it called like rock-speak or rock-talk or something along those lines?

[TheBigDog]

Originally Posted by Mercedes Benzene

Ludo? As in Labyrinth's Ludo?
I have no clue what language that is... but I'll try to find out.

EDIT: Is it called like rock-speak or rock-talk or something along those lines?

YES! And what harder language can there be than Rock?

Bill

[alexander]

The language categories were selected carefully so that some people will appeal to at least one (except for one laguage)

Most of us here spealk at least one Indo-European language, and it is easier to judge most of the languages presented because a good 1/4 of them are Indo-European, and if you can read this, you spealk one!

Fewer spealk a Finno-Urgic language, but there are a few here, i dunno if tormod spealks Finnish, but there has got to be someone who spealks hungarian or something like that, i hope... Tormod?

Fewer yet spealk a Slavic language, although it technically is an Indo-European, but so is Finnish, i will categorize Slavic as a separate language family here, because it is different from most other Indo-European languages (namely: spanish, german, norwayan (bokmal and nynorsk), french, italian, icelandic and english (also reminding that french, icelandic and norwayan/norwegian are all germanic languages))

That leaves us with Sino-Tibetan family, to which, and not to offend anyone as i wont argue your point, i will put Chinese (Yes I mean Mandarin, its spoken by the overwhelming majority of at least 800 million, followed closely.... err not... by Wu (90 million) and Cantonese (80 million)) and Japanese (that uses lots of chinese characters known as kanji, as well as 2 alphabetical, written languages: hirigana and katakana). We used to have a few people that spoke a Sino-Tibetan language, dunno if there is many people now...

I'm sure there has to be people that spealk an Afro-Asiatic language here, so would someone give us some insight into Arabic?

That leaves Hebrew and Numee... Anyone Jewish or a Theologian here learn Hebrew? And Numee is just a brain teaser to make those who care do some research. Its a language with a lot of french influence, as New Caledonia was a colony of Frances for a while, but i was hoping that would push most people to do some research, and that brings me to the rant part of my post:

Ok, I understand that some of you may not even heard of a language or two i posted, and that was fully to be expected of, so i gave yall a clue:

Before you vote, you may want to look into the languages you dont know or never heard of before...

What surprises me is that there are still people that go "Well i never heard this language spoken, how can i vote?" Have you not heard of Google? Its like, ok, you dont want to do any minor research here to increase your IQ, then why do you waste time by posting that you dont want to do reseach and can not take a guess in a simple matter? If i posted a poll on what car maker produces the best cars and the list went like this: Mercedes, Bentley, Auston Martin, Lotus, Ferrari, Pagandi Zonda, Koenigsegg, McLaren, Alpha Romeo, Vantage, Citroen, Porsche, Ford or Noble, would you still come back with "Well i dunno i havent driven all of them" well yeah, the combined cost of top of the line mobiles in this category is well over 15 million dollars, i dont blame you, but can you google each manufacturer and come up with a definitive answer at least for yourself?

If you dont understand that this poll is merely to, perhaps try to get some people to learn something they didn't know before, something that they may have been interested in so this will provide them with an opportunity to do so; or to let you do minor research as a fun activity, the main lesson of school; I specifically do not want you to vote!

[Racoon]

Well, I shall use this sites references to back my claim of Chinese being the hardest, if not one of, the hardest languages to write and read. (*not speak)

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

[C1ay]

Missing the na-dene language family still

[alexander]

which one do you want me to add out of it?
athabascan, eyak or tlingit?