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Which is the hardest language you've ever tried to learn?


kilat

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Of the languages you have studied, which one did you find the most difficult? I know Swedish is often considered hard to master, but I'm fortunate enough to have learnt it as a small child. Are the Slavic languages especially difficult, in your opinion? I would love to learn to speak Russian one day. I know there are lots of cases to keep track of!

What about languages that use non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic, Thai or Chinese - do you find it harder to learn them because you have to learn to read and write in a whole new way? When I studied Japanese I found the language itself (vocabulary and grammatical structure) quite manageable, and I was fine with the kana, but I did have problems learning all the Chinese characters I needed to use.

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Dear Kilat

I allowed myself to implement a poll that goes along with your question. If there are other languages you would like to add to the poll, please let me know and I will insert them as soon as possible!

regards

lingua

(PS: For me, the hardest language I've tried to learn so far is Japanese).

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I tried to learn other languages when I was younger, but I'd not consider them right now because it's been a long time since that.  Some of the hardest languages I tried to learn were Finnish and old Norse, I was 16 yeas old at the time, so I really didn't think a lot about being practical or ever using those languages, specially old Norse :P  I wasn't really serious about learning those languages, not as serious as I'm about learning Dutch.

So right now I'd say the hardest language I've tried to learn (recently) is Dutch. I have also tried to learn colloquial Hebrew, but Dutch has been harder to learn.  The harder part of learning dutch so far is the pronunciation and the spelling.

It's so hard to predict the spelling of a word in dutch... because in most cases those two rarely match, like for example ''mevrouw''!  WTF!?  LOL, it sounds like the German ''frau'', but looks nothing like it!

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I'm currently casually studying German and Spanish, but I think that any language that is not in the form of a standard alphabet when you write it is hard to learn, like Chinese, Arabic, Russian, etc. Not only are you studying a language, but also a whole new slew of images and what they stand for!

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I am currently living in Taiwan. Learning Chinese is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I am not a very visual learner at all. The amount of detail that goes into each character is mind-blowing at times.

There is also another fascinating aspect of learning Chinese that I don't quite understand. Foreigners can talk to the locals in perfect Chinese sometimes. But, the locals think that they are speaking to them in Chinese. This is because they are so shocked that any of us can speak any Chinese. It is bizarre, frustrating, and fascinating, all in one. ha ha

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I find german pretty hard to learn. I've been trying to learn on my own without much success. I've made progress with my french on my own, but german seems pretty hard to me. It's probably the hardest one I've tried to learn, until now.

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It would be French for me. Funnily, I think Japanese may actually be harder, the only difference is that I hated learning French (in school) compared to actually enjoying leaning Japanese.

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