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What is generally accepted as the hardest language to learn on planet earth?

Everyone says Spanish is easy, and I'm not suggesting it's the hardest language in the world but I find it really difficult to understand spoken Spanish. They seem to speak at the speed of light which doesn't help!

Reply 41

KerryCarmen

yeah i heard english was the hardest in the world too !
i also do french and mandarin!
Mandarins good because there is like nooo tenses!!
but trouble is remembering the characters

Reply 42

Meg_Lili

9

Masucha

Greenlandic 10x harder than icelanic

I would go with Greenlandic (or Kalaallisut) too, anything that looks like this:

"SIISSISOQ angalaaqqinnissaminut piareersarpoq!

Pilersaarutinuttaaq ilaapput koncerteqattaarnissat! Suli ullui aaliagerneqanngillat, ornitassalli siunnerfiit oqaatigineqarsinnaapput"

Can't be an easy language to learn! Though I would love to try one day.

C-

Reply 43

llys

17

What about Bengali? (I don't know anything about it.) Is it difficult?

Reply 44

quintsy

17

Basque. It has absolutely no clear links with any other language, yet is still very much "living".

Reply 45

Irrelevance

16

Marsha2112

Chinese?

Which dialect? Cantonese, Mandarin or old school Hak Ga?

Arabic i would think is pretty tough

Reply 46

rapha

2

Portuguese is quite hard too (not the hardest though :p:

). Although the basics are easy, there are SO MANY stupid grammatical rules that even native speakers (brazilians at least) make a lot mistakes speacially when conjugating some verbs and although english is my second language, I find it easier to spell most words in english.

Reply 47

xJessx

18

I think Euskadi (I think that's the name for Basque) would be very hard or Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese. It depends though on what your native language is, as people have already pointed out.

Reply 48

Chrrye

17

Dont know why this has 3 pages of replies. Just wait till someone comes along who knows 'all the languages' and answers.
:P

Reply 49

Drewski

19

Klingon...

Nah, depends on the person. Most of the oriental ones are considered hard for people of european origin. Can't imagine many of the central african languages as being much fun, either.

Though, has to be said, English is no piece of cake. How can you explain to a foreigner that 'refuse' [turn down] is a different word to 'refuse' [rubbish]?

Reply 50

pendragon

13

I think you should differentiate between spoken and written. Mandarin is really not that hard to speak; Japanese would be tougher I imagine.

Arabic?

sanskrit

When I went for my final assessment at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I had to do a 'Modern Languages Aptitude Test' which lasted 1 hour.

The information I was given before the MLAT stated that it was designed to discover how long it would take you to reach a certain proficiency level in a foreign language.

They included the FCO Language Training scale which shows the difficulty of each language (Class 1 being the hardest and Class 5 the simplest) for native English speakers.

Reply 54

jonnythemoose

15

Frankly, there's no concensus on what the 'hardest' language is. For English people, Chinese and Arabic are no doubt the first to come to mind, because they have different scripts. In the same way, a Chinese person may find learning French impossible, and yet be strong speakers of other east asian languages.

English is considered hard for its pronunciation, which lacks consistency. One of the greatest examples of this is the 'ough' sound, which can be pronounced in about eight different ways (through, though, bough, cough, enough etc), something that certainly isn't so much of a problem with some other languages, which have more consistent patterns.

Reply 55

ash_moo

8

Malayalam. Just try it. It's mental.

Nearly 17 years on, and I still have no clue. Even people who have been speaking it their whole lives complain about the sounds, verbs, tenses and what not.

OK, so I might be exaggerating a little... :biggrin:

Reply 56

*Corinna*

16

I think it depends on what your mother tongue is but in my opinion ( actually in the opinion of everyone I know ) it's certainly not English. Sometimes you may have trouble with phrasal verbs and prepositions but this is a small prize to pay since English has no declination and basically its Grammar is quite easy. I would never claim of course that I am perfect with it ( I think only a native speaker or someone who has lived in a country for many years can be very good with a language-not only english ) but I find English relatively easy.

Reply 57

ClivePounds

9

However different it is to your mother tongue the harder it is to learn as a second language

Reply 58

Gourdman

gt94sss2

When I went for my final assessment at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I had to do a 'Modern Languages Aptitude Test' which lasted 1 hour.

The information I was given before the MLAT stated that it was designed to discover how long it would take you to reach a certain proficiency level in a foreign language.

They included the FCO Language Training scale which shows the difficulty of each language (Class 1 being the hardest and Class 5 the simplest) for native English speakers.

I'm stunned by Japanese up there. I'm guessing thats because of the lettering? Learning to speak japanese I would assume is fairly easy (i've done the basics) because the language is so logical and structured, and it doesn't have the mangled letters that Russian and the like have.

Reply 59

username42053

7

Does depend on mother tongue.

Though you have Basque which apparently extremely hard, and the African language which is clicking or whistling. Vietnamese is hard too.

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rthompso/hardlanguages.html < found this ages ago. For people with English as their mother tongue.

AND found this with it too - a thread that was closed after 18 pages discussing what people thought were the hardest languages: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=10550

What is generally accepted as the hardest language to learn on planet earth?

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