What is the most difficult language?

[SOLAR]

I've been told english is extremely difficult. Why are the exact same spellings used to make different sounds? (Been, keen) Why are there so many words that have totally unrelated meanings? (Run - To move quickly or Run - Many of something in a row) Why don't trough, though, and through rhyme? Why does C make an S sound? Why does X even eksist? Wtf does Q exist for? Why does... Nm I'll stop there. English just doesn't make sense if you look at it objectively.

 

[Vegard]

You guys scare me when saying Enligsh is the most difficult language =S

But I think Franch is more difficult to learn. The grammar is a lot more to work with, the English grammar is simple compared to the French.

 

[REØ]

pokelanguage it's somewhat challenging, i mean can you go your whole life just saying your name in like 50 different tones and stuff

 

[Nihonjin]

Dutch is by far the hardest most messed up language on the earth (And its my first language)..
Its like german, but worse....much much worse.

I dont understand people who say Japanese is hard though :/ (To read and write...**** yeah its hard, to speak...they have no weird pronounciations so its not that hard >_<)

 

[SOLAR]

Japanese relatively simple. I love how vowels consistantly sound the same; for example I is pronounced eee and u is pronounced ooooh.

 

[NinjaFoxX]

english and japenese ftw.....

 

[Kragen]

English has too many exceptions.

Dutch is just...retarted. We just got a new spelling, and it's just totally ****ed up.

We have a little book with the official spelling: it's says on the site that it has 900 spelling differences with the one from 1995. And in 2015...there will be a new official spelling >_>

French is relatively easy, because it's almost totally made out of one system. It comes from Latin and is very systematically. If you know the system, you can make (almost) every verb in all the times (past tense, present tense etc.)

 

[G.Fizzle]

Well I've been learning Japanese of this site and I have to say its been going pretty good I can form sentences and even write a few things so my first post is kinda null at this point but I recomend Japanese as a thrid language its fun to pic up.

 

[RainOfDarkness]

japanese and chinese are the hardest

 

[DarkRenji]

Chinese would be the hardest...
Dutch is pretty hard too.

(I'm Dutch and English was really easy for me to learn...)

 

[Vinnie275]

Yeah chinese is hard, a non-phonetic language with hundreds of thousands of letters with new letters added every day and ancient ones harder and harder to comprehend.

 

[Crimson King]

From non-English speakers, English was really easy. This girl at work who knows I think 5 languages, 3 of which variations of Indian/Pakistani, German she learned from living there her whole life. I asked if English was as hard as people say it is too learn, and she laughed and said it was quite simple.

 

[Vinnie275]

From non-English speakers, English was really easy. This girl at work who knows I think 5 languages, 3 of which variations of Indian/Pakistani, German she learned from living there her whole life. I asked if English was as hard as people say it is too learn, and she laughed and said it was quite simple.

Your brain memorizes grammar patterns and consonant/vowel structures, the more languages you learn the easier it becomes.

Established linguists with over 12+ languages can become fluent in less than a month.



On a different coin, the easiest language is Esperanto. It borrows the good qualities from english, french, russian, japanese, spanish, and a VAST amount of others. Unlike french or english each phonetic syllable has only one sound. It's rules are simple and conversing in Esperanto is a very enjoyable experience.

It is also one of the unique languages formed not out of neccesity to communicate (like most root dialects that evolve into languages), but to communicate easier.

 

[DarkRenji]

From non-English speakers, English was really easy. This girl at work who knows I think 5 languages, 3 of which variations of Indian/Pakistani, German she learned from living there her whole life. I asked if English was as hard as people say it is too learn, and she laughed and said it was quite simple.

Yes, as I said, I am Dutch and English is so easy to learn. It might be because I started playing video games when I was six and that I learned stuff from that. (Which is probably true since I'm learning things from Japanese games now. ) Some people in Holland have difficulties with English, but most of them learn it without much problems.

 

[TheFifthMan]

Native English speaker, so I can't say anything about it.

But Chinese is surprisingly easy to speak, at least for the year I've been studying it. Memorizing the characters takes a lot of work tho, I'm expected to know 200 characters right now, and you need like 3000-4000 characters to read a newspaper...

 

[omfgomfg]

Chinese.

I'm Chinese myself, and I grew up speaking Chinese, and the first language i spoke was chinese and my parents and relatives speak to me in Chinese and i've taken 8 or so years of Chinese school and yet my English is far far superior to my chinese. my French is far superior to my Chinese. And heck, i understand japanese grammar better than i understand chinese grammar, and what i know of japanese i got from reading a "Japanese for Dummies" book for a couple hours.

I gave up on Chinese. :\

Exact same as me, but I don't know any Japanese.
Chinese school is never effective because it does not adequately motivate you, and the teachers rarely speak English because they are immigrants from China. These schools are often taught at churches as well. I took about 8 years as well. Can speak perfectly, little to no reading and writing.

 

[graves]

I don't know... I'm learning japenese right now so that seems hard right now...

 

[Vinnie275]

I don't know... I'm learning japenese right now so that seems hard right now...

after you have the letters solid you should enjoy it more.

 

[Jam Stunna]

English by far. Seriously, "there", "they're" and "their"?

Plus every single rule in the language has at least ten exceptions. For example, i before e except after c does not explain the word weird.

 

[cyberdemon]

From non-English speakers, English was really easy. This girl at work who knows I think 5 languages, 3 of which variations of Indian/Pakistani, German she learned from living there her whole life. I asked if English was as hard as people say it is too learn, and she laughed and said it was quite simple.

This is true. My first language is spanish, and I picked up the basics of english by studying it in high school, and after that, I just kept on watching movies and TV shows on cable, so I could get all the slang and other words you won't find in dictionaries.
So I could say I ended up learning english for fun, without taking classes for anything (other than basic grammar).

Right now I can understand most of the english language IMHO (unless they use some weird accent).

Seriously, I don't really know why people keep on saying that english is the hardest (and it's even harder to believe for the people whose first language is english ).

Those exceptions you talk about can be learned trough memorization, like any other language.

 

[veil222]

I think people who'se first language is not a romance based language english is the hardest, for people who'se first language is a rmonace language or derivative, chinese seems to be hardest. Japanese is pretty easy, I'm in a 102 class for it in college, got an a in 101, and I have an a in 102 so far and we've already started kanji, convorsation, tense, and are requiered to write in hiragana and katakana almost every day.

 

[bballstar23]

I remember something about Icelandic being the most difficult language to pick up, but I could be wrong.

 

[MeGaBiTe]

The Bask language is the hardest language to learn on the planet.

It's spoken in a small part of Spain.

It also has no known relations to any other languages known on our planet. It's quite the enigma for language scientists.

And if you learn it, it's more or less useless!

 

[bored]

I don't really think it's the language thats difficult to learn, but by how much effort you put into learning it. I had a horrible time with Spanish (I wasn't really interested in learning it), and I barely learned anything in 3 years of taking it, but when I took French I understood a lot more than I ever learned in Spanish and in just 1 year.