Which is the hardest language to learn?

Which is the hardest language to learn?

I've heard it's English with all our tenses and same word having different meaning based on how it is used. What do you think?

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

love ;)

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

Any one of the tonal languages (Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, etc.) are harder for English speakers I think; mainly because we aren't used to tone being so important that it can completely change what word is being said. 

The hardest to learn if you include writing it has to be Japanese. There are 3 separate alphabets:  hiragana, katakana and kanji. All three are used in sentence structure. There are some 50,000 kanji symbols, tho only 2,000 are commonly used 

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic seem to be some of the more difficult languages, but "most" depends on the learner.

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

Languages are only hard to learn in comparison to the language learner's first language. For English speakers, highly synthetic languages like Russian and Polish present some difficulties as do languages with tones. 

For a Spanish-speaker, Italian is quite easy to learn. For a Chinese speaker, Italian is going to be very hard with its complex inflexional system.  

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

It is hard to say which language is the most difficult to learn. It depends on the learners' skills, motivation and means (dictionaries, etc.), it depends on the teacher, and it depends on the language to be learned, and if it is quite a different family and writing, it will be all the more a challenge.

In Europe, they say that Russian (language group including Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc.), German and Latin are the most difficult in Grammar (and for the Russian group, the cyrillic alphabet is an additional challenge), but various other languages and groups are very complicated too, if thinking of the Ugro-Finnish group, Polish, Czech, Greek, Basque, Gaelic (whether Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Brittonic, etc.), or Albanian, etc.

In Asia, Chinese has various language groups and writings, India and Sri Lanka are a melting pot of varied cultures and languages, Japan has also several main languages and writings, and South East Asia has a similar variation of languages and cultures.

And on the American side, Native languages and their groups might be a complicated "puzzle" - filled with poetry ...

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

I had to write everything again after crashing, forgot a part of the initial text, and a correction did not function; here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Asia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

Swedish

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

It has to be Chinese. They themselves, often, cannot master it.

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

Re: Which is the hardest language to learn?

English must be very hard as well!

Link: Ricky Struggles With English

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

    F. Scott Fitzgerald