It is accepted by various U.S. DoS and DoD government agencies, such as the Foreign Service Institute, that Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Arabic (MSA) are the most challenging languages to quantifiably acquire fluency in for a native English speaker. These discussions are entirely based on the individual's experience and background, so "easy" or "difficult" is an arbitrary term. However, standardized language proficiency tests in reading, listening, speaking, and writing are one way to test these sorts of claims.

Well, I'm a bulgarian, can speak german and english and learned polish and would like to say some things about these statistics... I think it's impossible to define a particular language as the world's hardest! Everybody in this forum is discussing the problem with the cases. Wait a minute ... the cases are not the only thing in a particular language...*far from that*.. there are so many things that define it as easy or difficult.. I can tell you the following: Everything *depends on the mother tongue*! If your mother's tongue is a slavic language it would be easier for you to learn another slavic than any other.. *as simple as that*!

Moreover I've been observing some tendencies recently and I can tell you that we can understand russian and polish better that russians and poles - bulgarian. You tell me why! *moreover* ... they define it as *difficult* ! And I have heard that from many people.. I'm not figuring that out at the moment. And I can assure you that russian and polish are not so hard for us..by no means a piece of cake but not that hard at all. Russian and Polish have 6 respectively 7 cases. We have *only rests* of 4 cases. Despite that people from other slavic countries say it's difficult for them to comprehend it.. what remains for the rest of the world's population..you can't just say it's the third easiest language in the world... *by no means*! There are lots of russians that have been living in Bulgaria for more than 20 *years* and still confess it's still hard for them and experience difficulties while speaking.. *russians*!!! The same ones that have the same alphabet and perhaps far more than 50 % of the vocabulary ! And you tell me it's the *third easiest* language for the *whole* of the *world's population*. Hey.. excuse me guys but did you go nuts or something?! You are old enough to decide for yourself what I'm talking about.

I've been studying Japanese for several years now, and haven't found it that difficult yet, though I am starting to have to memorize more conjugations and such as I go on.

What is a "punctuation system"? I speak German and am learning Russian, and both have normal punctuation. Besides, a punctuation system can't really be hard. Armenian doesn't have the question mark; it marks the word in the sentence that the emphasis of the question is on. I doubt it is that hard to grasp, though.

Also, Korean ain't easy.

anon5582: The most difficult languages are Czech and Slovak. They both are almost one identical language.

A lot of people on this discussion board seem as eager as used-car salesmen to sell their native language as one of the most difficult in the world for non-native speakers to learn. (Perhaps this is because it gives them a smug-like satisfaction to be very good at something that other people find immensely difficult?)

Let's try to remember that *every* language has its difficult points... and its easier ones.

English is "easy" because of its relative lack of verb conjugation; its abundance of loan words usually present in the learner's mother tongue; its adjectives, adverbs and nouns that don't change due to verb tense or gender; the "cut and paste" aspect of its basic grammar structure. Not to mention the fact that (as mentioned at length in earlier posts) the language is everywhere, with plenty of learning materials available in just about every mother tongue imaginable. While that doesn't speak to the intrinsic difficulty of the language itself, it does factor into the relative "ease" of learning English.

English is "difficult" because of its extensive vocabulary and high number of synonyms (though I think the impact of the latter is overblown); its high number of irregular verbs (which can be mastered, though it seems few learners get all of them right, all of the time); its horrendously illogical spelling (which even native speakers mess up all the time); its prepositions that generally don't follow any tangible rules whatsoever; the surprisingly complex ways in which its articles are used (or not used); its wealth of counter-intuitive idioms (it was "a walk in the park"- or was that "a piece of cake"?) and phrasal verbs ("go off", "make up", etc.) with multiple meanings and usages that simply have to be lived rather than studied.

This last point is key. I can guarantee that every single non-native speaker on this site who claims English is "easy" has not been able to master the thousands of idiomatic constructs and expressions that make up everyday speech in English. Personally, as a former English teacher and resident of (hugely multicultural) Toronto, I have yet to meet a single one. (Though my Polish dentist comes close.)

But that's no fault of yours. Non-native speakers of *any* language, unless they're a linguistic genius or started learning at a young age, simply cannot completely master a second language. (You may think you can, but you can't. And native speakers will quietly snicker at your heavily-accented claims to the contrary.) But as long as you can communicate in a functional way, it's all good.

Meanwhile, I can also guarantee that any native English-speaker who claims English is bar none the "most difficult language in the world" has never studied a second language in any meaningful capacity. (Ha! Caught you!)

Can I offer one observation that we might be able to agree on? That, for non-native speakers, English is relatively easy to speak, write and comprehend at a basic level, but dare I say very difficult to speak, write and comprehend at a consistently high level. That's what I usually tell people who ask. (Not that you asked.)

But then again, can't the same be said about any language?

Have you ever heard about Tabasaran language? It belongs to Nakhsko-Dagestan group of languages. It is considered to have the 3rd most difficult grammar in the world, after Arabic and Japanese.

To anon29208: I would mention that while English is a globally common language, even those who speak it primarily rarely speak it precisely. And that is, after all, the beauty and finesse of the language. There are even grammatical errors in posts here. I don't intend to attack personally, but I grow tired of hearing this argument from people who, generally speaking, fumble with English syntax or punctuation while singing the relative ease of its facility.

I'm french, and russian appears to be according to me a really difficult language, even though I love to practice it. The endings in general and particularly of the adjectives are kinda tough.

on anon 29197, I don't readily agree that Bahasa Indonesian is the hardest just because of nouns having an affix in front of each on of them. I'm a native speaker and in my humble opinion, Bahasa Indonesian is the most flexible if not the easiest language because it uses alphabets (roman) giving an ease when learning language such as English, with and uses phonology similar to those of Italian or Spanish in terms of vowels and consonants pronunciation, as opposed to English phonology.

Indonesian grammar has no tense e.g past tense, for example, we say for English equivalent "we_eat_banana_today"(present) "we_ate_bananas_yesterday"(past)= "kita/we_makan/eat_pisang/banana_hari ini/this day/today"(present)"kita/we_makan/eat_pisang/banana_kemarin/yesterday"(past)[notice the indifferent verbs], no gender etc couldn't make better point than anon 10929. This is surprisingly very similar to Chinese grammar in many ways.

On the other hand, English is theoretically not the easiest. Most people would assume that English is the easiest, just because they hear it everywhere. Being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world does not necessarily mean being the easiest language.

English usage of vocabulary is precise, there is always a particular word for every definition as mentioned by annon 22623 (rightfully thank him/her) quoted "But then these words are very logical... e.g Umweltverschmutzung consists of the words Umwelt and Verschmutzung... in English it would be Environment and soiling, why doesn't the language allow to say Enviorenmentsoiling, instead we have to say pollution." Thus, instead of logically matching up words as in German, you have to actually know the specific word in English, and literally there are hundreds of such words.

Languages used in programs such as BBC is considered as English. English would seem more complex to even most native speakers, due to this wider vocabulary usage mentioned above. However, it is perhaps the most interesting and beautiful of all language as said "when one masters English all else seems out of necessity" thus answers why it is the most popular of them all.

I believe that the hardest languages are Japanese, Chinese and Lithuanian. I'm from Lithuania myself so it's not that hard for me, but learning it if you're from other country is very difficult. Grammar has *a lot* of rules and plus all the dialects... And the easiest language is clearly English, as people all over the world speak it. I myself learned it by watching TV and reading books.

Well I think Indonesia is the most difficult one, because it has an affix in front of nouns and in the end. e.g "Memasyarakatkan diri kita sendiri untuk memulai hidup bersih di lingkungan kita"

My mother's tongue is hungarian, so it isn't difficult for me :). But I am aware of it: Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages of the world. I can speak Hungarian easily, but it's grammar is really hard.

We have a lot of causes (I think 35).

Our language is an agglutinative language, so we use inflections (for (almost) everything) (I think the best example is the word "fiaiéi". It's forming the next way: first stop is fiú (boy), second stop is fia (his/her son; it's an irregular possessive case; the word "son" in hungarian is "fiúgyermek", but this word isn't very used), third stop is fiai (his/her sons; "-i" is the inflection of plural), forth stop is fiaié (his/her sons'), and the final stop is fiaiéi (his/her sons' (plural object))).

We also have extremely long words, such as "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" (it's forming the next way: "meg-" is verb prefix (in this case, it means "completed"), "szent" means holy (the word root), "-ség" is like English "-ness", as in "holiness", "-t(e)len" variant of "-tlen" (noun suffix expressing the lack of something, like English "-less", as in "useless"), "-ít" is a constitutes a transitive verb from an adjective, "-het" is expresses possibility (somewhat similar to the English auxiliaries "may" or "can"), "-(e)tlen" is another variant of "-tlen", "-ség" (it mean's see above), "-es" is constitutes an adjective from a noun (like English "-y" as in "witty"), "-ked" is attached to an adjective (e.g. "strong"; produces the verb "to pretend to be (strong)") "-és" is constitutes a noun from a verb (there are various ways this is done in English, e.g. "-ance" in "acceptance"), "-eitek" is plural possessive suffix (second person plural (e.g. "apple" -> "your apples", where "your" refers to multiple people)) and "-ért" is approximately translates to "because of" (or in this case simply "for"). So this extremely long word means: "for your [plural] repeated pretending to be undesecratable" (we also have long words, such as "töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek" (it means "you [plural] could constantly mention the lack [of a thing] that makes it impossible to make someone make something defragmenter-free") or "elkelkáposztásítottalanítottátok").

We also have a lot of (used) synonyms (for example, we have 78 synonyms for verb "to move" (and all's meanings are a little bit other): halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál, andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál, bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér, botladozik, őgyeleg (old word, we usually don't use it), slattyog (old old word, we usually don't use it) bandukol (old word, we usually don't use it), lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng (old word, we usually don't use it), csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol, tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog, mozgolódik).

We have a lot of dialects in Hungary (and we usually understand all of it, but sometimes it is complicated). The understood difficulty is a result of hungarian word order in the hungarian sentences. As a matter of fact, in the hungarian language there really isn't any kind of attached word order (but every sentence's mean is a bit other). For a hungarian person (who's mother's tongue is hungarian) this doesn't constitute any kind of problem, but for an other person (who's mother's tongue isn't hungarian) it means incredible difficulties.

Our spelling is also complicated. We have many irregular causes (almost everywhere) and our accent is also very hard (for a not-hungarian), because we use many rules for a hungarian word's accent (and we have many-many irregular words from this grammatical category too). The word's irregularity is the hardest in inflections (for me too: it's very hard for me to learn it at school, when we learned irregular conjugations). Our phonetics is also difficult. And we also have slang.

I can keep on this assignment, but it would be a very long comment. So everyone, believe me: Hungarian is possibly not the most difficult language of the world, but it is very difficult (but not for me, because I'm hungarian :D).

I grew up speaking English and Polish and am fluent in both ... Studied French for years and years in school, never had a chance to use it day to day, and still find it difficult. German, on the other hand, which I don't know per se, seems inherently easier than French because of the logical way that words are built up. If you know the parts a long German word is made up of, you tend to be able to figure out the meaning therein. French on the other hand is quite a non-literal language; it's very idiomatic and if you have a literal mind, it can be very hard to know how to say things using standard idioms that you have never heard of previously.

Chinese "has no grammatical system per se"? That makes no sense. Every language has a grammatical system.

Well, after doing a little bit of research i found out that in Holland we not only speak 2 national languages but the main language (dutch) has over 5 million different words that could be used !

This is according to the Dutch Dictionary "De grote Van Dale".

its absolutely depends on your mother tongue. my mother tongue is persian and for me learning arabic is pretty easy(cuz its similar to arabic).. btw have u ever heard persian? its very beautiful..try it!

i'm learning english and french, and i think english with american accent *is the most beautiful* language.

I don't agree Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn. It might not be one of the easiest, but I am brazilian and I've been studying Arabic for 4 months and I did not find it very hard to memorize, but I have troubles in my fluency, y'know, i have to think a lot before speaking, checking if my sentence is correct.

English is, in my opinion, far the easiest language to learn. Thanks to its grammar.

I'm a native Arabic speaker and i speak English fluently; actually i once worked as an english teacher, recently i started to learn spanish and found it very easy to learn, it's true that it's more complicated than english when looking at the cases but hey! english is a piece of cake in the world of languages! i think germanic languages are a bit hard to learn - for me - but i think once you learned one you can easily catch up on the others (talking about germanic languages)

Arabic is a bit hard to learn...that's what my non-native speakers friends say...

i have some friends who learned Japanese and i was kind of amazed by how fast they learned it... after less than one year i was able to catch some japanese phrases only by watching some Anime series in Japanese translated in english! it's an easy language to learn but you'll find it a little bit hard to pronounce...

Any of the Caucasian Languages, specifically Chechen, Abkhaz, and Georgian, are by far the most difficult languages to learn.

Croatian ( Bosnian ) on the list of the easiest languages? That's ridiculous. Like Slovak, which is the first on the list of the most difficult ones, Bosnian has 7 cases ( 7 in sg and 7 in pl + several different declensions )and very complex grammar. Script is easy, but there are some challenging letters. It also has perfective and imperfective verbs and there are no rules for building one from another: Raditi(imperfective)-uraditi(perfective) but ukidati(imp.)-ukinuti(perf.) . Way to express some states is pretty strange and there are many ways to express smtn as in english. Word order is arbitrary , someone gave examples for russian, it's same in bosnian. Also, we have several verb conjugations and we don't have to use pronouns cause verb ending indicates what person and number is word about.

Amazing how so many people think Arabic is a difficult language. It most certainly is not. In fact, my mother learned Arabic in two years in a special school. I have some little brothers and sitters (one baby bro, one lil sis), so my mom only went to school for like half an hour a day. She now speaks like a native.

By the way, I'm from Kashmir, and I'm sure none of you have heard of or would ever try to learn Kashmiri. The accent is so weird. Search it up.

I know five languages. And I'm fourteen. (English, Arabic, Urdu, Kashmiri, Indonesian-my best friend teaches me this, I learned Indonesian in a month)

have any of you heard about the Maltese language? It is very similar to arabic in the case of grammer even though we use the roman alphabet. we also use a different word according to the pronouns. the most difficult in maltese is the spelling because we have two letters .. 'gh' and 'h' and sometimes they have a sound, and sometimes do not.. apart from this, they may change position in a word according to gender or if it is singular or plural. I do not think it is the most difficult language, but definitely it is not easy.

All the languages that have their own alphabets, such as Russian, are difficult, so please, don't tell me that those languages that belong to latinate language group are harder that Chinese, Russian or Greek.

I've seen a list of the most difficult languages in the world and those were:

1.Chinese

2.Japanese

3.Russian

4.Arabic

My mother language is Russian, second language-Latvian, third-English and fourth-French and in my opinion, English is the easiest out of four and Russian is the most difficult one. Probably because of exceptions. For example, you can either say "I love you", "You love I", "Love you I", "I you love", "Love I you" and "You I love" in Russian while in English every single sentence is like a template-you just have to match words for them.

I absolutely agree with anon3612. It's a surprise that no-one has commented on Danish, I've even seen people on other webpages say, that Danish is an easy language to learn. As written, Danish is an extremely hard language to learn if you are not native (which I am).

However, even the written language is a nightmare for most people, too. We have a grammatical order that is basically upside-down for many people.

Instead of 'the' in front of nouns we have 'den' and 'det', and instead of 'a' and 'an', which are easy to figure out, we have 'en' and 'et'. It depends on the word and doesn't really make any sense.

For example, the Danish word for dog is "hund". It's an en-word, en hund, a dog. But the word for pet is 'kæledyr' and that's a et-word. Whether it's an et- or en-word also decides the endings. A horse - en hest. The horse - hesten.

And that's just the beginning. To mention some more, we have the hv and d-words; the hv-words are words like "hvordan" (how), "hvorfor" (why) and "hvad" (what). The H is not pronounced and many people become confused with that. Even worse are the d-words where the d is silent. In the word hund, as mentioned above, we do not pronounce the d. There are many words like that in the Danish language.

And not to mention our famous æ, ø and å, the Danes being the only ones in the world to have the å. These three letters are pretty much impossible to pronounce if you're not from Denmark.

Even native speakers often have trouble spelling things correctly. How sad is that?

And then comes the talking. Denmark is a land where about 50% is made up of islands, only Jutland being the only part not an island. Therefore the Danish language has been pretty much mangled up because we live so separated. There is not one part of Denmark that doesn't have it's 'own language', where the dialect simply has become the language of the island. The only non-dialect 'language' in Denmark is what we call Rigsdansk, pretty much Government-Danish. But no-one really talks like that.

We have eight main dialects in Denmark and many, many accents to come under that. Many Danes understand what other Danes say, no matter where they're from, but to a foreigner hearing a Jutlandish person and a Zealandish person talking together would be like hearing an English person and a French one talk to each other and understand everything.

I myself speak four languages. Danish, English, Swedish, German, and I've been learning a variety of different languages that I don't speak fluently, though.

English is actually a very easy language to learn, I think, if you want to learn it. German is not that hard either, contrary to most beliefs.

But (BUT!) which languages you think are easy depends totally on yourself. Just because I find English easy it doesn't mean that everybody does, and that's what most people are misunderstanding.

I have good friends who think that Japanese is the easiest language to learn on the entire planet, while I perchance understand some words now and then but doesn't really get anything at all. I have a friend who hates English because he thinks it's hard as hell but speaks fluent Polish. His sister doesn't understand Polish at ALL but finds Norwegian very easy and natural.

It's all a matter of what person you are. You can't really just point out a language and say, "That's the hardest language in the WORLD!" because there's always someone who'll think that it's easy. It's all a matter of opinion and personality.-Cecilie

(By the way, I'm sorry if this giant ramble is harshly incorrect grammarvise - my keyboard is acting kind of stupid right now; I think it needs new batteries.)

I am English and learning Turkish which is difficult. Lots of suffix use which can give one word that reads as a sentence in English.

Many words have dual meanings and the sentence structure is alien to me as well. I thought it might have featured as a difficult language but as it doesn't, perhaps I am better off than I thought.

My mother tongue is English but I grew up in Germany, hence I speak both languages fluently! I learnt French at school and I am learning Spanish at the moment. Here in Germany it is said that French is very difficult and English very easy.

Considering the fact that you cannot really compare every single language because every language has its individual difficulty. Some languages have an easy pronunciation, some easy dialects to understand.

For instance Russian has hardly got any dialects so the language types don't vary among the population. On the one hand English is easy to use for small talk. That's got to do with the culture and usage of the language. We mostly don't use that many words whenever we explain something or tell a story. Sometimes we describe words within a conversation or story. That makes it very easy for foreigners to grasp and learn the language.

Another example is German. It is not difficult to use the tenses in German. All you have to use is two (mostly just one) tenses for the past, one for the present and one for the future (occasionally you need a second one even though that is seldom).

I think there are two main reasons why people think English is the easiest... there are hardly any conjugations and the words all seem to be quite small. Whereas I look at German or even Spanish... there are tremendous words in German and you can connect many words to each other. But then these words are very logical... e.g Umweltverschmutzung consists of the words Umwelt and Verschmutzung... in English it would be Environment and soiling, why doesn't the language allow to say Enviorenmentsoiling, instead we have to say pollution.

I hear various languages in my daily life and I love looking at facts of other languages even though I don't speak nor understand them.

I think German is one of the most difficult languages across the world, surely not the most difficult because I think Hungarian, Finnish and Japanese are on a different level.

Even many foreigners who were born here in Germany have a very slight accent. There is also nobody who came here as an adult who was able to comprehend and learn the language like a native speaker. The best example is the German "R", ever tried to pronounce it properly? Most languages roll it , some have a stronger sense of rolling, (Russian is strong, same with Spanish, every slavic language rolls it, turks roll it a bit differently but they do roll it, I think even japanese roll it) The only language I have ever heard which has the same is French.

Not being able to roll an "R" doesn't mean that the language is difficult.

I'm just trying to tell you that it is absurd to say that somebody is able to learn a language from books and at school and speak it perfectly or nealy-native and understand the language of the streets or adolescent language if the person has never left their own country. And that also applies to English, even though everybody can sing the songs when they watch MTV or listen to the radio.

Ever listened to a Chinese or Japanese speaking in English. No harm to them, I'm not able to speak a word of these languages and I guess I never will, but there English is very often a catastrophe. Same applies to French and Spanish speakers!

I think the fact that English has millions of words and that nearly every word in every sentence can be replaced by a synonym is just incredible. That's what makes English very difficult, and obviously the spelling must be one of the hardest. I told a German friend this and he answered I don't think so, it is very easy. I asked him to spell easy words like receive or perseverance.

Like in every other language there are some words with different meanings... admire, estimate, appreciate, value, regard, prize, reckon, guess, treasure, cherish, esteem, appraise etc.: all these words are being translated into one word in German: schaetzen. And same vice versa.

Another point is the heritage of your language. I wouldn't say it easy for me to learn Danish, Swedish or French, but it ought to be easier than learning Japanese or a Slavic language due to the similarities which do exist.

German has one big disadvantage. You need a large vocabulary to even do small talk. Very often there are special words needed to communicate. I once read that it is proven that German has the fourth largest vocabulary among all languages.

I suppose English belongs to the easiest languages in terms of providing people with small talk. But when it comes to difficult topics and discussions the language gets very hard to understand and use. Switch on BBC parliament (which isn't too hard to understand but it will give you foreigners some trouble understanding it). There are also no rules for pronunciation, which are very easy to understand in Romance and Slavic languages.

So it depends where you come from, which languages you speak and if you are that kind of person who grabs up a language easily and quickly. Thus we should appreciate every language and look at the special things and difficulties or even simplicities of them.

But still I think Navajo, Finish, Hungarian and Chinese considering that it is a tonal language. Thank you for reading my text ;)

What about Dravadian languages, tamil, malayalam. Unbelievably hard to pronounce with very complex scripts. A real tongue twister. The plus side is the phonetic alphabet.

I don't really understand what level of competence is assumed to say that you "learnt" a language. Getting basic English or Italian might be easy if all you want to do is book a hotel, but Italian for example is a very formal language - no way a foreigner would have an easy life with it. In fact, I have never seen even a small article written in Italian by a foreigner with no mistakes in it.

I'm not trying to push Italian among the most difficult languages to learn but how could a language that has 6 different forms for each of the 8 indicative tenses, 4 subjunctive tenses, 2 conditionals tenses and 1 imperative be easy to learn?

It might be easy to order a pizza not to talk business.

Greetings from a brazilian guy trying to write in a poor English!

You should try one of these:

Ubykh, !Xóõ (Taa), Nuxálk or Hmong (White Meo language)

Despite being extremely complex (for 99% of the humanity), you probably will not find tutorials, nor manuals, nor didatic materials, nor native people to talk...

Hungarian, Mandarin, Basque or Slovak are piece of cake in comparison with any one of those.

Granted that there is a thing such as 'The most difficult language in the world', it could be one of the four oddities I listed, or else some other obscure language with many complexities, very few speakers and/or written, recorded materials.

I read that english is one of the easiest language.

My mother tongue is Spanish, I know English and French. Personally, I think that the most difficult language is chinese.

Spanish is my mother tongue, and I also know, more or less well, Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Asturian or Bable, Aragaonese and Aranese, all, but English, Romance languages. And, connected as they are, all those languages present difficulties and are a challenge to learn! In my opinion, there is not an "easy" language! I speak Catalan every day, with my wife, our sons and the rest of the family, as well as with the people around us, and, although I speak it "almost" as a native, I don't speak it as well as spanish.

I'm learning Arabic now, to be honest, I think it's definitely up there in the difficult languages to learn, but it's by no means the most difficult. English is probably more difficult than Arabic.

I have read most of this site and can see many of the points. My comment would be that difficulty should/could be measured to two ways...(1) complexity of the grammar, spelling, etc. and (2) ease of pronunciation and being understood.

I live in Vietnam...am native English speaker and I know that English is extremely difficult to read and understand so many of the irregularities...so it would fit under complexity of grammar, spelling, etc.

*However* I swear that Vietnamese must be one of the most, if not the most difficult to speak because of the closeness of tones, even more than Mandarin (I have studied Mandarin somewhat while living in Taiwan for two years), but no matter how hard I try, I seem to not be able to make myself understood whenever I try to speak Vietnamese! Drives me crazy. I know the "word" I'm trying to say, but somehow that *exact* tone has eluded me, therefore the meaning eludes the listener! It is truly crazy-making! However, Vietnamese is not so difficult grammatically and it's quite easy to read once you get a handle on the tone marks which are very clear on every (monosyllabic) word. It's a fun language, and interesting to listen to as it has many accents depending where in the country you come from. But it's a nightmare (for me and according to *many* other foreigners I've talked to!) to speak...and be understood!

Is Slovak the only language with 7 cases? I don't think so. Let's also take Polish, Czech, probably Croatian, and some other languages belonging to the Slavic group. It's hard for me to pick the hardest one from the family, but they are presumably on a similar level of complexity, though they can differ in some respects (South-Slavic languages- a lot of "no-vowels" clusters, while e.g. in Polish, there is a "normalized" amount of vowels in a syllable, while the consonantal system itself is more complicated). Such lists are a bit funny-it's obvious that the more a given lg differs from your mother tongue, the more difficult it seems; but let's not make the matter oversimplified. As far as I'm concerned (and I'm talking about _my_ opinion on that) the Romance languages (+Norwegian) are among the easiest to learn for a person like me (Polish and Italian grammar have a lot in common, just like the reflexive pronouns system, or the accent falling on the same syllable, no vowel-shortening in unaccented syllables, and so on) while I have more problems with learning...Russian, which resembles Polish to some extent (too many false-friends as for me to remember). Personally I find Gaelic and Hungarian/Finnish the most difficult, but I don't know much about the Basque (hey, my blood type is Rh- A, so maybe I even have some roots in there).

I've studied many languages and speak 3. Try Navajo. You'll wanna kill yourself.

Chinese would be hard to learn for English speakers at first because of the lack of alphabets, which means thousands of characters to remember, as well as distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated consonants and consonants which do not exist in English. Another issue for English speakers might be tones. However, once you get pass the initial difficulties, the grammar is much simpler than English so that wouldn't be a problem. In any case, Mandarin would be considered one of the easiest "dialects" to learn. Minnan and Cantonese would be more complicated due to pronunciation issues.

For Japanese, English speakers would get the pronunciation fairly quickly, but the grammar can be rather complex. And as someone mentioned earlier, the Japanese you learn in lessons is drastically different from the Japanese on the streets, as you are usually taught only the formal grammar in classes.

I'd just like to point out that English is not nearly as easy as some of you seem to think...

1. Irregular verbs- more than 200 of them. 2. Extremely irregular spelling- silent letters, many different ways (combinations of vowels and consonants) to make the same sounds (up to 26 in the case of one vowel sound). 3. More than a hundred different accents (that's just in London). 4. (Most important?) You just have to know which preposition goes with which verbs and phrases- there are even combinations of two or more together! 5. Multiple meanings and pronunciations for the same words and phrases- 'get down' means what it sounds like, but it also means to go wild on the dance floor; read and read (simple present and simple past) are spelled the same, but sound different. 6. Over a million words- more than twice the next highest number in any language in the world (though they say most of us only really only use about 5,000 and only really understand about 50,000 of them). 7. Verb tenses- we have five infinitives!! (to take, to be taken, to be taking, to have taken, to have been taken) We have more than 40 tenses (twice as much, if you think there are multiple ways to make passive tenses [be taken, get taken, have taken {to have someone else take something}], also 'will future' is not the only way to make future tenses [going to, for example]). And that's just what I've been able to find names for. What do you call this- 'having taken'? I can't even find a name for that... some kind of double participle tense. I'm an English teacher and writer, so I believe I'm correct in stating that English is not as easy as you think. [Most of you on this page have made multiple mistakes, even after 'having professed' (I still don't know what to make of this tense) your profound fluency in the language.] And true, writing well is quite difficult in one's own language. If it weren't (Check out that subjunctive- bet you thought it didn't exist in English. Ooh, and check out that zero subject before the word 'bet'.), anyone could do it... You only think you speak English. Take my word for it. At least we don't have 126 cases, as in Tsez (it's a language).

I completely agree with Lithienne. Like most middle-class Germans I have grown up only with my dialect until I came in contact with books for the first time. It's a really HUGE difference! Apart from many words and phrases that can only be roughly translated even into regular German, my mother tongue has got a lot of special mutations, simplifications and variations even if only regular expressions are applied by the speaker ("Eich sinn em Faader sei Bou" "Ich bin der Sohn des Vaters" "I'm the father's son").

I can understand many of what people above have stated. For example, learning Swedish was very simple for me, on the one hand because the vocabulary and the grammar can be (this may be a bit arrogant) regarded as a mere simplification of the german equivalent, and on the other hand because of the very similar cultural background that defines what can be expressed. Contrarily, Bulgarian which is listed as very simple in one of the first posts, is a real difficulty for me (if I want to be confident in formal situations). There are so many grammatical moods with which you can express that you talk about something historical, that you doubt what you are telling, that you doubt the facts that you are telling historically (...). And this is a really unique linguistic phenomenon!

We have only spoken about modern languages until now. I have been engaged in the Vedics for fun, and believe me that there is no language that can be as complex as Sanskrit (if we like to define complexity as the main criterium for difficulty). Complexity can be created by the language structure on the one hand by the structure of the thoughts that you can express. Basically, Latin may be a simple language if we only look at the funny grammar and stuff. Perhaps it WAS very simple until Horatius, Cicero and friends came and messed it all up.

Kafka, the german writer, said that German is so much influenced by the works of Goethe that you can hardly overcome this influence!

Sanskrit scholars have early developed a meta-language to deal only with grammatical issues! Computer scientists have stated that both Sanskrit and Russian would be most predestinated among all natural languages as computer languages because of their regularity.

A befriended literature professor (latinoamerican) also told me (as a joke?!) that he doesn't believe that any lyrical poetry can be possible in Russian because of the missing ambiguities.

Ok, there goes my train, have to shut up :D

Slovak is not the only language that has 7 cases. In fact, Slovak almost lacks vocative case - it's extremely rare and found in nouns only. Two nouns that have it come to mind: pán (sir, gentleman, mister) and šéf (boss). While Slovak language definitely IS one of the hardest in the world, there sure are other languages that are even more difficult.

Western Slavic languages are harder than German because German doesn't take much inflexion and the inflexion itself is quite regular (speaking as a speaker thereof), whilst Slovak, Sorbian, Czech and Polish are much more complicated and heavily inflected. Czech also has a phoneme not to be found anywhere else - an alveolar fricative trill sound - 'ř', quite difficult to pronounce even if you're Slovak (my case).

Slovak and Czech is also difficult for the y-i distinction, which in fact, has no effect on pronunciation (of the vowel), but still there are rules and the use affects the preceding consonants (t,d,n...and in Slovak also 'l'...'i' makes them palatalised, but the pronunciation shift/change of them is not general and there are exceptions).

Well, there are exception to everything in Slovak, and there are exception to exceptions. Still, I wouldn't dare to challenge Navajo.

I think that much of the difficulties about language learning (and thus stating which one is the hardest) are basically up to one's mother tongue first and personal (could I say brain?) skills?

Being an italian native speaker, I get to have romance sounds in my ears, so it has always been easier to grasp meanings out of other romance languages. Since I also had latin and ancient greek courses at high school, I developed a sharp "translation skill" which right now, at 25, allows me to read almost flawlessly spanish, french, portuguese, romanian, latin, ancient greek, english (which I took up at 11), german and russian.

Same doesn't apply to talking, since I speak them from a near-mother language degree (english) to mid-level (french and spanish) down to complete zero (e.g. romanian and ancient greek).

Why have I bored you with all of this? Just to add that, I swear it, NOTHING even distantly compared to the troubles I had in dealing with the magyar language which, after almost 4 years of efforts, I still cannot master to an average degree. For the sake of clarity, it took me 4 months to take up spanish to the same degree I got after 4 years of hungarian...

Therefore, I absolutely rate hungarian as the hardest language.

Hi, I would like to know, if ANYONE who isn't from Finland, can speak finnish? I mean someone who haven't ever lived in Finland? Just lived in own home country and learned from internet or books or ya know, just learned? Cause I cannot understand what is so difficult to speak finnish.. All you need is a wordbook and some kind of book where is word endings.. "-sta, -in, -n, -lle, -lla/ä" -types of endings you learn, and you could live here. But of course here is all kinds of slangs, but everyone can understand that "real" finnish in Finland. Heres one example of finnish slangs.. "Moro, mitäs kuuluu? Sä oot varmaha käyny jo biitsillä." and heres "real" finnish "Moi, mitä kuuluu? Olet varmaan käynyt jo rannalla." and here is for english "Hello, whats up? I quess you have been at beach allready."

no way, guys... The most extremely difficult language in the whole world is Bakjalukasha. It is located in the Shore of Elephant Bone or also known as Cote D'Ivore. I am European and lived there for a year on Help Africa program. I offer you to try this one to experience real difficulties. =)P

I am from the U.S. but my mom is from sverige (sweden). I learned to speak svenska along with english at a young age. Both were easy for me. Later I also learned danish and norwegian. Norwegian was easy but danish was really hard difficult to pick up. The hardest foreign language I learned was Finish however. Downright not fun!!!

Hello

Having the most difficult language does not make any country more superior than others and we should always be proud of our native language. talk about the beauty of a language and stop wasting time on the difficulty of it. i know 4 languages and i have to say that Russian and French sound beautiful. keep listening and keep learning everyone!

Hi,

I speak English natively and I think that it really would not be that difficult to learn. Definitely the hardest thing to learn about English is the spelling because it is quite unpredictable unless you have a very good command of the language. I speak quite good Spanish, as I am 16 and have just spent 6 months in Spain on an exchange program after studying it for 1.5 years. I have looked into German and Malay and from what I can see and my own experience, Spanish is not too difficult, even if the grammar is a little difficult to grasp.

I definitely have to say that I was living in the north of Spain in Basque country and it is extremely difficult!! Unless you have grown up in the Basque country its an extremely difficult language to grasp. People dont even know where its from - they are guessing it originated in Africa!

i think slovenian language is the most difficult language on the earth, not just to speak but also to write it:)

it is not slovak but it is slovenian language! :)

The difficulty when one person is learning languages depends on several factors, I think. The first one is whether or not the mother tongue is related with the one that is being studied. For example, people who speak Portuguese do not need to take a course in Spanish to understand it, and Spanish-speakers feel the same with Portuguese. The reason is that those languages have its origin from Latin and the same situation is presented with other romance languages; like French, Italian or Catalan. Although French pronunciation is very difficult to imitate and catch, if you pay a very close attention, you will be able to do it.

The other one is that every language has its own particularities. English pronunciation could be a challenge for everyone, because some sounds are very related to others and could be difficult to distinguish them. Spanish has many verb sentences and that is a very true headache when using irregular verbs with all the different pronouns. German declinations are in many cases very confused and it is necessary to learn too many exceptions to the "rules". Plus the fact that they have very long words.

Another factor that could help is the facility with which we learn to listen. Japanese pronunciation is very close to Spanish, but in grammar there's nothing in common.

My mother language is Spanish and I think it is not that easy (although I am a native speaker) compared to others western idioms. For example, when I was studying English, which is my second language, I learned it very fast. English native speakers tend to learn Spanish within more time than a Spanish native speaker learning English.

Right now I am studying German and with this one I am making a real effort, although German and English are related.

Whichever may be the real difficulty, I think that the only wall is in our mind...

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..

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.

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:)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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!!!!

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 :))

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.

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'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.

Lithuanian is the hardest language I know.

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...

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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!

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 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'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 !!

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...

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.

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.

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

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).

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...

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 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?

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

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 :)))

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)

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.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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

try to learn slovak:)

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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