The Student Room Group

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Reply 1
I heard it was Romanian, but of course it varies depending on what your native language is.
Chinese? Russian's pretty hard too.
Reply 3
Greenlandic 10x harder than icelanic
Reply 4
English... apparently.
Reply 5
English imo. It's bloody stupid a lot of the time.

In reality I doubt there's a single language that has any sort of consensus as to being the hardest.
Reply 6
I was just reading about sigur ros there and the language they make up in some of their lyrics and made me realise how bloody hard icelandic looks.
Reply 7
Well English is harder to a Chinese man than a French man.

Some of the hardest languages would probably be for a Westerner either the east asian ones, Russian or indigenous south african ones. Even German is pretty hard.
Reply 8
Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian, Polish.
Reply 9
English by miles...being born here i dont see it but when i learnt it as a language for A-Level i realised how much twisting there is..Things like Jam and Traffic Jam LMAO what the hell
I personally find Dutch. Pronounciation.... yeah.

English a close second.
Reply 11
Danish, Danish children learn speak later that any other children, due to the language being made up of grunts and glottals.
Personally I don't think Mandarin is that hard...

I've once read welsh, finnish and hungarian are the hardest ones...
Reply 13
Nah, Icelandic is easy - you can learn it in a week
I think it's got to be something pretty obscure that there isn't much information about available. It's obviously not English, although I'm not saying it's necessarily easy. I think languages with more than one alphabet, like Japanese, have to be much harder, surely?
Reply 15
There is no really a hardest language, because depending on where you come from you will easily learn it, or not.
I found French really easy, because I live in Spain and speak Spanish and Catalan, which are directly related to French, whereas I couldn't cope with Russian. However, someone from Ukraine would learn Russian more easily than French! Same goes for any Asian language - surely for someone from Korea Chinese is not that difficult.

You mention English - that is because EFL teaching is not good outside Universities, and anyway to be fluent in English you need to go to England, which is something not everyone can afford.
Elvish. Because no one speaks it - how are you going to learn it?! :tongue:
Reply 17
Yeh I heard it was English as well because of all the different ways we use and spell language.
Learning how to speak like a Chimpanzee.
Reply 19
Finnish? ~ 15 cases and about 4 different infinitives and word order is totally skewed (almost everything is suffixed and some things are prefixed). lol I don't understand how anyone can speak it naturally as a second language!

Chinese only pronunciation is difficult (for atonal language speakers), grammar is easy.

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