I was under the impression that Arabic was one of the most difficult languages as well.

I am a Speech-Language Pathologist, and in my second year of University I had to take a Linguistics course in which we learned that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Not only do we have homophones and verb tenses, but there are so many double meanings in our language; not only with one word at a time, but with phrases as well. Just something to think about!

Basque is difficult because it isn't related to any other language or cultural group. Navajo seems to the be the most challenging language to learn - for anyone, regardless of native tongue. I believe that's why WWII code breakers were unable to crack the US Navajo code.

-kfm

Did they try to learn Czech? I have heard this is a very hard one as well, because of changing suffixes in nouns and verbs and irregular grammar.

Someone needs to add Danish to the list of difficult languages. The grammar is not extremely difficult, but spoken Danish is a nightmare! Within a country of 5 million people and 40,000 sq. km, people from one region have huge difficulties understanding people from another region. Whole words are swallowed and run together in a continuous stream. Few consonants are ever expressed in the middle or ends of words. While there are only about 68,000 words in the Danish language, most have at least four meanings and can act as a verb, noun, adjective and adverb. Due to the fact that the language sounds nothing like how it is written, Danish children regularly score low on tests designed to show the correlation between language and sound. Children of Danish parents who learn Danish abroad often spend years of study to learn to match the words they know with the spelling. For example, the Danish word for "much"

is "meget." It is pronounced similar to "mal" in one part of the country or "mite" in another region of Denmark.

I would also add Lithuanian. Try to learn all endings of all genders of nouns. Plus numerals have also fem. and masc. endings in all cases. It is a highly inflexional language in which you can easily express ideas almost without prepositions. If you talk about verb... One verb has 13 participial forms (only in masculine) and add feminine... Moreover, accentuation system is almost impossible to learn. Accents are shifting; thus, those speakers whose languages have constant accent find it very hard to stress words correctly without a dictionary. On the whole, Lithuanian is considered the oldest surviving Indo-European language that preserved many features that other languages have long modernized.

strange, I speak Russian as a second language and don't see it as a difficult language, but i guess that really depends on where you come from or how much you have heard it being child ....

they also say Lithuanian is rather complicated language, i cant comment on this because I am Lithuanian, but you can look it up.

I speak Russian as a second language and it was extremely difficult at first, but it gets easier after you get the basics down, and start to understand what each case is for and that sort of thing. English is my first language though, and this article says German is hard for the same reasons as Russian, but I also speak German and it is a lot easier than Russian for me. Spanish was also really easy as an English speaker.

What about Icelandic? The pronunciation is difficult for most words... unless you're a native Dane or Finn.

try to learn slovak:)

i agree , slovak is really difficult to learn - extremely complicated grammar

On September 27th a linguistic consortium in Paris has come up with following results:

the easiest languages to learn:

10. mongolese

09. aramaic

08. greek

07. norwegian

06. italian

05. romanian

04. croatian

03. bulgarian

02. english

01. the easiest language in the world spoken by more than 300 million people is spanish

the most difficult languages: (linguists examined complexity of grammar, syntax, historical development, pronunciation, orthography, letter styles, signs, etc.)

10. german

09. french

08. chinese

07. japanese

06. korean

05. persian

04. arabic

03. finnish

02. hungarian

01. the most difficult language is Slovak

The most difficult is grammar structure. Slovak language is the only one with seven grammar cases (nominativ, genitiv, dativ, accusativ, local, instrumental, vocativ), exquisite words, soft and hard "i", declension of adjectives and verbs, in other words almost each and every word in this language is being declinated. There are many other characteristics which are not found in other world languages. It is said, or estimated, that it takes about 12 years to learn it completely, but the linguists say, that there is no one on this earth who can speak this language perfectly knowing all the grammar rules.

no way French is the 10th most difficult! it's not t h a t hard. well, i am Hungarian and i can assure you that it is one of the hardest languages. i don't believe that one!

I realized that after learning any foreign language it won't be as difficult for you to learn another one ;) heh, and i speak slovak perfectly and know all the grammar rules :o)

I speak Czech and Slovak and it is not true that Slovak is the ONLY language with 7 cases for declination. Czech has also 7 cases in singular and 7 cases in plural of nouns (about 40 different model words for declension + words that swing between model words), 7+7 cases for adjectives and also for pronouns with enough of irregularities that you can imagine. Furthermore "Y" and "I" is more difficult in Czech than in Slovak. By the way, for the verbs in Czech (as difficult as in Slovak) and some other languages, is used "conjugation" and not "declension".

Since modern Slovak has a common dialect ancestor with Czech I can find Czech hard but to say whether it is harder than Slovak?

Speaking also quite good French, German and Russian I would say, as not being a professional, one can judge just from the small amount of languages he can speak and it is hard to imagine the other languages just from what someone is saying about them or what he/she heard speaking during some short-term visit.

a native speaker of any romance language will find any other romance language more easy to learn than a non-romance language, at least in terms of grammar and general pronunciation. the same applies to the anglo-saxon language family, or the slavic language family. i speak two romance languages and english. what i find really interesting is that learning a new language, even if it belongs in the same family as your first language (mother tongue), it will change the way you think and the way you express your thoughts, sometimes in a better way but not always.

Slovak language is the only one with seven grammar cases

Czech has also 7 cases in singular and 7 cases in plural of nouns

I'd add Polish as well(spoken by more people than Czech and Slovakian combined)

no way French is the 10th most difficult! it's not t h a t hard. well, i am Hungarian and i can assure you that it is one of the hardest languages. i don't believe that one!

note what city was that linguistic consortium from :)))

german is not difficult to learn and english is not easy to learn. for foreigners all the rules and exceptions in english can be very difficult. it depends on what language you are fluent in. german and english are very similar so it is easy for a german or american to learn the opposite language. i have found czech to be especially difficult. some of their words have no vowels and their vowels have so many cases

I am Hungarian. I learn English for about 15 years live in England for 3 and still struggle with English in many cases so who is to say which language is harder?

I'm Bask, and I have to say, it is really difficult. We have 24 cases, so the 7 that has Slovak is nothing comparing with this. Also the verbs are very very complicated.

I'm from Vietnam, my first foreign language is czech. It took almost 3 years to learn and speak like a native speaker. It wasn't that difficult, maybe it's because I learned it almost every day. My second language is english, quite difficult in the beginning. I started also with korean, chinese, french, spanish. Every language has a distinct difficulty. It's not true, that for example a person who can speak chinese can easily learn korean or vietnamese. Many chinese words were being adopted by other asian nations, but the pronunciation is different and sometimes are used in a different way with a different meaning. For example when i told my chinese friends a word that is very unusual in vietnamese originaly chinese, but no chinese could understand it, because this word was adopted 3 centuries ago, so it is not used in modern chinese. If u want to know, which language is the most difficult, then try vietnamese...

One of the regional languages in India - “Malayalam” - has been titled as the hardest language in the world by the WLRF (World Language Research Foundation).

Slovak is definitely NOT the ONLY language with cases. I'm from Finland and we have them 15. Compare 7 to 15...

I'm an English teacher, and I live in Russia. I've learned to speak Russian in two years, but I still make a number of mistakes with the cases. Nonetheless, few Russians speak their own language flawlessly. I can categorically state that even native English speakers (and teachers) make mistakes constantly.

I'll also add that English has far more words than any other language (the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 definitions), 12 verb tenses which are very hard for foreigners to grasp, and a lot of articles and prepositions that often don't follow any rules whatsoever. I haven't met a single Russian who hadn't traveled abroad who can speak English like a native speaker.

English is the most bastardized language on the planet and it's quite easy for native speakers to understand foreigners' mistakes because we're so used to hearing them.

Hi, I have noticed that people who comes to Spain learn to speak spanish in one month (excepting David Beckham and english native speakers in general). I am not joking I have noticed it in football or basketball players who came to play to Spain and in a Lithuanian and finland friend as well.

How on earth could croatian be 4 on the EASIEST list, when it, like the supposedly most difficult language (slovak) has 7 cases singular, and 7 plural..(nominativ, genitiv, etc)

Also... there is the hard and soft ch sound, the hard and soft "j" sound (dz and dj)..the difficult letter lj... words without vowels (krv, krst, etc)...

I do find english to be among the easier of languages... I picked it up fluently within 6 months of moving to canada...within a couple of years, it was safe to say I knew english better than croatian, my native tongue.

Also, for the Russian person who said s/he'd never met a person who could speak English like a native but hadn't lived/travelled abroad... well, here in Bosnia i know of a few such cases... eg. my cousin - you would think he is from england natively, yet he's never set foot outside of bosnia and croatia. and maybe some professors, but i can't vouch that they never visited/stayed abroad.

English was much easier for me to learn than German, and my native tongue is even more similar to German than to English.. Spanish was quite simple too, although I didn't stay at it long enough, so I've pretty much lost what I had...

I'm from Bulgaria... I can speak perfectly russian, also english and german. I had no problem learning russian and english, but german... :(

However... I can tell you that my native language is not so easy to learn it is very difficult...my mother is from russia and she lived in Bulgaria for 20 years and still can't speak well... 20 years!

I work with many tourists and they say that they can't even pronounce some words and even some letters... so it is imposible that bulgarian is the 3rd easiest language to learn !!! Think about it !!

I think some of you guys don't even know there are more than 2600 language in this world, and the most difficult language in this world is Sanskrit and Hindi.

I speak 23 languages. Although I am not a translator, I have use for most of the 23 languages in my work. My work is very technical. I speak, read and write most of them well enough to be able to function in each of them as I would in one of my mother tongues. Every language has its own complexities, regardless of what one has as a native tongue. Different does not mean difficult. Writing a language is always more complex than speaking a language. Writing well is difficult in every language, even in one's own. Also, not every one knows their own language well.

I think that Romance languages are probably the most easy language group, French included. Scandinavian languages are also quite easy, apart pronunciation. Scandinavian languages use limited vocabularies. Japanese is also not that difficult for various reasons. It just seems exotic to people who are not from East Asia. Like in northern European countries, there is a lot of communication in Japanese that is not expressed through words. That is difficult for people who cannot understand communicating in that way.

Korean is very difficult. Thankfully the Korean alphabet is easy. Mandarin is not that difficult. Cantonese is more difficult than Mandarin, writing included.

Polish, Greek and Turkish definitely not easy. Although I do not speak Slovak, Slovak is quite similar to Polish. Both are rather mutually intelligible. Slovak does not seem to be an extremely difficult language.

Although not very difficult, English is also not that simple, due to the large choice one has in terms of vocabulary, syntax and style.

I would say that German is difficult, especially due to how its sentences are structured in formal communication.

Although I don't speak Basque, Vietnamese or Hungarian, I think that Finnish is the most difficult language that I know. It never becomes simple through extended use. One always has to be aware of how to use different possible grammatical structures when putting together a sentence. Just try translating a text, especially a technical one, into different languages and then into Finnish in order to understand what I mean.

I'm sorry but you gotta take a look at mother languages, 'cause I saw that thing that said that Spanish is the easiest, but, for whom? then it should be Italian and Portuguese and french as well, as they're quite similar, then you most take a look at who speaks and which language, as someone said here, it depends on where you are located. The easiest language to speak should, according to me, the easiest language to speak. That's a stupid statement though, as far as I'm a spanish native speaker, it's obvious that it's easy for me. Then first let's take a look at native languages. I speak Russian as well, and it has nothing complicated!

Hi Guys, I speak 43 languages but still i can't tell you which are the most difficult languages to learn for me i still find english quite difficult...all i can say that i found chinese very complicated.

No way! French is easy, for some people Portuguese is hard, have you ever tried to talk Portuguese? there are so many verbs! I have Portuguese friends with 15 years speaking over than 5 languages, as French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian! And I have always studied languages and I can only speak English, Germany and Russian (my mother language).

Languages can only be so complex - our brains are wired from birth for certain universal characteristics of language, so a language can't deviate too far from those, or have so many idiosyncrasies that a child couldn't learn it. So probably the best measure of "easy to learn" is similarity to English - unfortunately, English has gone through a lot of changes, so that it has some uniqueness to it, but grammatically it's related to Germanic languages, and a lot of its vocabulary comes from Romance languages. The other Indo-European languages come next, including ones like Russian. Then comes everything else. The writing systems are a separate concern, really, but do make something like Chinese really hard to learn (Hebrew and Russian, though, are phonetic, so you can pick them up pretty quickly).

I speak Hungarian, English, Russian, Slovak, Czech, and German, and Hungarian by far is the most difficult to speak properly. This is mostly because of all the nuanced different endings for the same word used in different circumstances. Yes, Slovak has 7 grammar cases as someone earlier stated, but many other languages have this many. But Hungarian has many special forms for a single word. This complex way of modifying a word, allows you to express very precisely what you want to say. In fact, of the six languages I know, I'd say Slovak is the easiest because there is generally one word for one thing, whereas in these other languages you have many ways to say big, for example.

@anon5582:

all slavic languages have seven grammar languages and many suffixes.

My mother tongues are Croatian and German and I speak English of course, French and a bit of Arabic, Russian and Chinese.

I have heard that the Coptic language is very difficult.

italian is 100% the hardest grammar in the world.

There are thousands of rule and exception just to make plurals, hundreds of combinations to make articles and prepositions and thousands of irregular verbs with all different irregularities.

There is not grammar in the world which can be compared to italian grammar. Italian grammar encompasses books of hundreds of pages.

Writing rules are virtually impossible to follow at 100%.

But Italian has very easy sound, that makes it easy to pick up the basics, but almost nobody can speak it thoroughly perfect, even Italians themselves speaks dialects and speak and write Italian with tons of mistakes.

the oldest languages are the hardest to learn because their history goes back many centuries. and as a result their techniques are not as refined. the history of some languages like slovak goes back just over a hundred years and therefore the number of words are much lower and their structure comparatively simple.

I totally agree with this article, I am a Hungarian, and I have to confess that even if Hungarian is our mother language, we have a lot of difficulties with the grammar as well...it is extremely complicated and complex, I admire people who takes the challenge and try to learn it...I would not do it by myself if I were from an another country...

And I have to add, that I totally agree with the writer who wrote that Danish is complicated...but it is not that hard to learn it...I am studying Danish now, and after 4 months I can understand daily conversations, and I can talk by myself...but yeah...it is a weird language...

Lithuanian is the hardest language I know.

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I have passed the most difficult examinations in Arabic language, and I can assure you that it might be the most difficult language ever, however, not enough research by foreign researchers are taking place which possibly makes it the reason why it's not classified as the most difficult language.

I'm learning Italian and I find it hard to deal with numerous irregular verbs in Italian. How can I remember all of those? I'm from Vietnam. Vietnamese is a lovely language. Chao moi nguoi!

I agree with some of the previous comments saying that a language is easier to pick up by speakers of languages of the same family. I think this is specially true for romance languages speakers. It's pretty obvious, since basically, romance languages are dialects of the same original language: Latin. The exception is French, which is the most "bastardized" romance language.

On the other hand, there are some language combinations that usually "don't mix well".

I'd also like to point out that it's always easier to go from "more to less". For instance, if your mother tongue has cases (nominative, etc.) it's easier to learn a language without cases --or at least that part of the language--. If your mother tongue has lots of verb tenses and modes, it's easier to learn a language with only 3 verb tenses. If your mother tongue has 10 vowels, it's easier to learn a language with only 5 vowels. And so forth and so on.

As for writing and reading, I'd say that any language using ideograms/logograms is difficult to write and read even for its native speakers.

I've noticed that speakers of Polish, Russian and Czech, among others, are able to learn and master languages like Spanish, English, French or Italian in an amazingly short time.

guys this is not an attempt to figure out the most difficult language in the world but rather to say that i just read a text of finnish and although belonging to the roman letters' family, it's almost funny to read it!!!!

Every letter is repeated twice over in every word, so it looks like a design more than anything else!! I have been reading finnish text alongside english in my work in national accounts and laughing my head off at the idea of ever having to speak it :))

if one squinted one's eyes and saw the page with finnish in it, one could see k's, t's and n's interspersed with little dots all over!!!!

Just to start off, the languages I spoke while growing up are Indonesian and English. Then, I studied German and Italian intensively. Now, I'm beginning to study Icelandic and Thai.

I disagree with the results from these language studies, because I don't think they've studied the 2650 languages of the world. And it also seems like they only include languages that are socially, politically or economically powerful. European languages+ East Asian languages (economically strong Taiwan, Japan, China, Korea, Singapore)+Arabic (official language of 25 countries and highly regarded in the Islamic world)+the native language of Jesus. The list doesn't include African languages, Native American languages, Native Australian and Papuan languages, languages spoken by very few speakers/communities, etc.

IMO, the Indonesian/Malaysian (practically the same language) is one of the easiest language in the world. It has no tense whatsoever. I eat today, I eat yesterday, I eat tomorrow, etc. We use the 26 latin alphabet that English uses, no accent marks or anything. It's read exactly the way it's written. No tones. Very few prepositions (in, into, onto, upon, at, off, etc are all classified as towards, from and at, like Italian and not like English, believing IN, thinking OF, depending ON, looking AT, IN 2007, ON monday, ON the 27th of May, IN May, waiting FOR, ON strike, BY accident, AT risk, etc, sorry got off topic, hehe) No gender (he=she=it), just repeat the word twice for the plural, add di- in the beginning of the verb for passive, pe- for actor of a verb, -an for the patient of a verb. So makan (eat/to eat/eating) becomes dimakan (eaten/to be eaten/being eaten/etc), pemakan (eater), makanan (food). Although, the difficulty may be that in colloquial version has diverged from the formal version.

Hi all, In advance, sorry for my english skill:)

Well, here I would like to say that it seems in principle there is no sense for us to decide which language is the most difficult. Actually it is impossible. Surely some languages have really complicated grammars than others. But in general, this "difficulty" highly depends on subjective view of people.

I realize people tend to think their mother tongue is quite hard to be learned. Probably since they have huge lexicon and keen sense on their mother languages, understanding very subtle nuances of words or expressions. To the contrary they tend to think some other language which have studied (but not achieved to very fluent level) is easier than theirs. Another reason sometimes is maybe a kind of patriotic propaganda by governmental education system.

Also we must underline that the difficulty of languages depends on the distance between the learner's mother tongue and the target language. It is natural for Spanish people Portuguese is easier to learn than English.

Anyway as a Japanese native, reading a comment of an English teacher above, I would say that practically Russian is much more difficult than English - at least on everyday's usage level - He wrote English has so many tenses and richness of words, but how it can be harder than Russian in which you cannot say some elemental sentences without mistakes even after 1 or 2 years study (of course because of the terrible declination..also genders may.) It is a matter to use your brain even when you order something to drink in a pub.

On this meaning I suppose English is easier than most of European languages because of lack of these grammatical aspects. Surely it is hard to be able to speak, read and understand English like natives, as the teacher said. But it is same in every language, I think.

sorry....but have you ever tried to speak spanish??

i know you are explaining that spanish is the easiest; no way is one of the hardest languages in the world, in spite of the pronunciation is quite easy, is easy for someone who your mother's language is "latin." but for english-, german-, hungarian-, russian-speakers, etc., it is difficult because the pronunciation is very different. spanish is also difficult because there are more tenses than english german, hungarian, etc.

besides, in spanish exists the gender and number, and in english not. also, accented letters like ÑáéíóúÜ exist and that complicates things for german-, english-, dutch-, russian- and hungarian-speakers. the easiest language of the world is the english because all the verbs for each person has the same conjugation. the english-speaker says "my friend" for a boy or for a girl but in spanish it is different.

in the spanish there are 3 forms to say you : vos, tu, and usted. and for each one the conjugation is different. for example, if you learn spanish from spain and later you go to argentina, it's gonna be very difficult to understand. in spain you use tu and in argentina and honduras you use vos.

conclusion: spanish one of the hardest languages to learn.

Every language has its complexity. Trying to figure out what language is the hardest is pretty much impossible. We all have biased opinions, and I seriously don't think that someone's "mother" language is more difficult than any second, third,.. language that you know. It really all depends on how much effort you put into it. I studied French for 5 years, and all I can remember is "boulangerie". Why? Because I didn't like it at all. Tried German too, and yes, it is way more complex.

For example, Spanish (mother language) verb conjugations are somewhat complex, irregular, they vary from person, (sg/pl). Every noun has a gender, and each country has its unique words. My point is, I can't say my mother language is hard b/c it really isn't. We are exposed to our mother language, therefore, all the information just "flows" in. Try asking me to explain to you Spanish grammar, or why such rules exist. I probably won't be able to give you a good definition, but the meaning is there, in my conscience.

Right now I am learning Japanese and it's really not that difficult (although I still haven't learned the honorific form of speech). Japanese lacks gender, particles, and pronunciation is not that hard. Although my teachers do tell me that my "r"'s are too strong :)

I still don't think Spanish should be considered the easiest language in the world though, try reading novels in Spanish, I bet you'll be spending more time looking up the words in the dictionary than enjoying the novel.

What's the hardest language in the world? Who knows...

Hi anon11422,

I agree with you that you feel Japanese is not that difficult. I am a Japanese native and I know lots of people in Japan consider it is impossibly hard for foreigners but I suppose actually it is not so extremely. I think one of the problems on learning the Japanese is that there is a huge difference between the language which you learn by grammar book in school and colloquial version spoken in Japan. All of you may say every language has there 2 aspects, but as I have heard from people who study my language and as I compare it to other languages I know - as if this difference is much bigger in Japanese. Anyway we understand of course the textbook version of Japanese when you speak it. Although I accept those simpleness in Japanese grammar, being without genders, cases and etc. But still I don't think it is so easy one. Why? Try to read a novel written in Japanese, then you will see:)

Hi all, I think "Sinhala" is one of the hardest languages to learn. I speak 5 languages Sinhala, English, Maylay, French and now learning Dutch. Try learning Sinhala, you will be surprised how hard it is.

I agree with the initial comment on hungarian -not just because of the 35 nouns but because they have even changed the names of the countries and nationalities such as Italy to olazorszag , germany to nemetzorsag etc. also the word and preposition are joined as one-making it look even more difficult..