The Hardest Language

[alexander]

What do you think is the hardest language to learn, spealk (fluently), understand, pronounce and all that fun stuff

[alexander]

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

[maikeru]

Chinese or Japanese, but I might be biased. Latin isn't easy, either. Let me outline my reasons:

Chinese

--Thousands of characters must be memorized (and must pick one of two kinds: traditional or simplified, both of which are still used depending on the country or place). I'm somewhat familiar with traditional. Not at all with simplified, even if simplified is more common now, with mainland China using it.
--Tonal language, has 4 (or 5, if including unstressed) tones. Each tone imparts a different meaning on the same basic sound. Quite a bit different from the use of tones in English. It's easy to mistake or miss the differences in tones, if one doesn't listen carefully. Both my father and my brother have a lot of trouble. I can hear them clearly, because I used to speak fluently at one point.
--Thankfully, grammar isn't too hard, but syntax matters, like in English.
--Can speak and understand some, but no longer fluent. I spoke it when I was young.

Japanese

--Thousands of characters must be memorized, and in addition, must learn two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), and writing consists of a mixture of all three systems.
--Kind of atonal, so it makes it easier than Chinese in that respect...
--But grammar is harder, because verbs, differing forms of respect and address (for humility, politeness, close or distal relationships), etc. require more learning and mastering.
--My Japanese is poor at this point, but I hope it will get better with more study.

Latin

--Alphabet helps out a lot.
--Learning how to decline and modify things is a challenge, but also provides tremendous flexibility in expression and meaning. I've only learned a little about this, but it reminds me of French and Russian a lot, which I studied when I was younger.
--Dead language.

I'm not a linguist. Just like to learn languages when I have spare time.

[alexander]

vote please, all of those languages are hard all in their own ways:

Chinese, loads of syllables, but syllables dont make the language, knowing those, you can read exactly how and what is written. There are no word endings and its not that hard to pronounce chinese.

Japanese, hirigana and katakana are mirrors of each other, they spell out the same sounds, but yes chinese is used alot, but once again there are very few word engings and it is easy to read if you know the systems

Latin is a dead language hence it is not inclided

lets see

English is there to not discriminate against the US

French and German actually came out of the same language, however german is hard to pronounce and is virtualy unsingable, french is a technical language where words pronounced very sinilarly may mean the difference between food and death

arabic, written backwards, also hard alphabet, easy to miswrite something

russian is a hard language with all the endings for different tenses, sexes of objects and how they are being addressed, vast vocabulary is used, same words can mean a lot of different things in different contents. And there are too many gramatical rules too. and it is very rare that you see a non russian spealking with no accent at all.

Icelandic is virtualy unpronounsable, because a lot of sounds are exhale-type, i was going to throw in finnish, but ran out of options, finnish grammar is so weird you can make words thousands of syllables long

Hebrew is also weird and old

and Kwenyi.... just go and research, it looks real hard too

[alexander]

aha, got it finnish is in too

and kwenyi people actually spealk numee, which is weird too, so its still on there

[C1ay]

How about Navajo? I've heard that even Navajo children have a hard time learning it.....

[eric l]

This is not a serious question, and I have not voted.

• How can one judge about a language one is not familiar with ? From hearsay ?
• Some languages are so closely related, that if you know A, then B is easy to learn.
• A language may be quite easy for you to speak, but not to write - which should you count in ?

I hear a lot of language around here, and I judge some of them as very difficult, but I never really tried to learn them yet, so what is the value of my judgement (or is it simply prejudice) ?

[ronthepon]

Yeah, that's true.

But the hardest language I've even come across (out of english, hindi, kannada, arabic, sanskrit and bengali) is definitely sanskrit. When done in advanced magnitudes, it becomes more like hard maths.

[InfiniteNow]

By Chinese, do you mean Mandarin or Cantonese?

[Racoon]

From what I know Finnish and Icelandic probably the most difficult to learn to speak.

Chinese has got to be the hardest to learn to read and write.

Japanese is tricky because there is a variety of different words you would use for the same meaning depending on your social stature and gender...