The world's most difficult language // Your opinion

[linguaholic]

What's the world's most difficult language?

I know that there is no definite answer to this but I still think it is interesting to talk about it. In my opinion, Japanese is pretty tough. I was really struggling with Japanese Grammar, honorific forms and different registers and the different pronunciations of words.

German would also make my top 3, however it is pretty hard to tell for me as German is my native language. One of my "polyglot friends" would probably vote for Russian. He speaks about ten languages and in his opinion, Russian is the most difficult language that he came across until now.

Please share your opinion on this and also tell us why you think that language X is the most difficult language.

[Czarownica]

Well, from a linguistic point of view there is no such thing as the most difficult language. It's because people find different languages difficult, depending on what their own native language is. For example, Korean people don't find Japanese as difficult as people from other countries do, since Korean grammar has many similarities to Japanese grammar.

I don't think Japanese is anywhere near the most difficult languages anyway - it has no cases, and cases are my worst nightmare in language learning I also have no problems with pronunciation, since Japanese vowels are pronunced the same as Polish vowels - and the majority of consonants is identical, too.

I think that my native language, Polish, is very difficult - we have nine cases! Obviously, it's not difficult for native speakers, but I can't even imagine trying to learn Polish if I weren't a native speaker.

I don't think it's the most difficult language though... I think I'd have problems picking one. Arabic and Finnish look very hard to me, but I don't really know enough about them to make a definite judgement.

[linguaholic]

Well, from a linguistic point of view there is no such thing as the most difficult language. It's because people find different languages difficult, depending on what their own native language is. For example, Korean people don't find Japanese as difficult as people from other countries do, since Korean grammar has many similarities to Japanese grammar.

I really do agree with this. It is still very interesting to hear what people have to say about this question. Cases are something pretty difficult in language learning, I do agree as well. I guess this is why you say that Finnish is hard to learn, because it has a lot of different cases. I have been in Finland six times and I also think that it is a pretty tough language to learn. Finish just sounds so random to me and the composition of different letters making up words just looks so at...for me, it just looks like someone randomly put together some letters :=)))

[BWL]

The most difficult languages for me would be some of the Native languages of North America. Granted, they're not as well-known or as commonly spoken but believe me they are so complex they make German, Russian, Polish and Arabic seem like baby talk!

A lot of them are agglutinative to a degree that would shock a German! They frequently combine several morphemes into one single word that would be equivalent to one sentence in a European language! They often use unique idiomatic expressions that only make sense if you know the tribal history and culture.

For example, in Chippewa or Ojibwe, a language spoken in the Great Lakes region in the US and Canada, "They are Chinese" is only one word! "Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag".

You can break the word like this:

Aniib (elm tree)

Aniibiish (elm tree + iish, which is a pejorative suffix = leaf; literally, no good elm or lousy elm - yes, this the word for "leaf"!)

Aniibiishaaboo (leaf + liquid = tea)

Aniibiishaabooke (tea + make = to make tea or to make leaf water)

Aniiibiishaabookewinini (tea + make + man = Chinese; literally, man who makes tea. The Chinese were the ones who first introduced tea to North America so the Ojibwes called them "Tea-Making Men")

Aniiibiishaabookewininiwi (The suffix "wi" when added to a noun makes it an equational sentence "to be a Chinese" or "to be a tea-making man")

Finally we get the whole word, which is equivalent to one sentence in most other languages:

Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag (this is Aniiibiishaabookewininiwi + wag). Whereby "wag" is the plural third person suffix meaning "they are".

Hence "Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag" meaning "they are tea-making men" or "they are Chinese".

Are you impressed by how complex this language is?

[Czarownica]

Ah, yes, agglutinative languages. I think Finnish is agglutinative too. They look quite nightmarish, but I think that if you try to treat every word as a separate sentence rather than a word, then it might look a bit easier. It has a lot of rules, after all.

[pcgamer]

I honestly can't talk about the language that are still alien to me. So, I will only talk about those I have learned or am still learning. The most difficult language to learn for me is French. I still haven't gotten the hang off it.

[BWL]

Ah, yes, agglutinative languages. I think Finnish is agglutinative too. They look quite nightmarish, but I think that if you try to treat every word as a separate sentence rather than a word, then it might look a bit easier. It has a lot of rules, after all.

Yes, I completely agree, the wonderful thing is that agglutinative languages have so many parts to a single word that they really have no more energy left to make irregular words like in Polish, French, German, English and other European languages. Once you learn all the complex rules, you can create your own impromptu long words and be perfectly understood.

[A0130]

My native language is English. That being said, I feel that Mandarin, Japanese and various Indian languages are among the hardest. All those characters, all those sounds, it's just too much for me. I tried a class on Japanese in high school and dropped out in 3 weeks, I was so lost. I'd like to try again however.

[Jellyfish]

They say German is pretty hard. And I guess every language that has a completely different structure (f.e. Latin alphabet - Asian sign) is hard to get into.

[LauraM]

My native language is English. That being said, I feel that Mandarin, Japanese and various Indian languages are among the hardest. All those characters, all those sounds, it's just too much for me. I tried a class on Japanese in high school and dropped out in 3 weeks, I was so lost. I'd like to try again however.

Yes, I can relate to this.  I am also a native speaker of English.  Thus far I have only learned Spanish and, to a lesser degree, German. 

But having to learn not just a new alphabet, but indeed  a completely different system of writing -- as Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and other languages of China, etc. would require -- would be difficult for me.  I admit I find it quite intimidating.  I've never tried it and so I commend you for making the attempt.

So I think "difficult" is relative to what we are used to, whatever language system we have been brought up with and how different and challenging the demands of a new language would be in comparison. 

[linguaholic]

The most difficult languages for me would be some of the Native languages of North America. Granted, they're not as well-known or as commonly spoken but believe me they are so complex they make German, Russian, Polish and Arabic seem like baby talk!

A lot of them are agglutinative to a degree that would shock a German! They frequently combine several morphemes into one single word that would be equivalent to one sentence in a European language! They often use unique idiomatic expressions that only make sense if you know the tribal history and culture.

For example, in Chippewa or Ojibwe, a language spoken in the Great Lakes region in the US and Canada, "They are Chinese" is only one word! "Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag".

You can break the word like this:

Aniib (elm tree)

Aniibiish (elm tree + iish, which is a pejorative suffix = leaf; literally, no good elm or lousy elm - yes, this the word for "leaf"!)

Aniibiishaaboo (leaf + liquid = tea)

Aniibiishaabooke (tea + make = to make tea or to make leaf water)

Aniiibiishaabookewinini (tea + make + man = Chinese; literally, man who makes tea. The Chinese were the ones who first introduced tea to North America so the Ojibwes called them "Tea-Making Men")

Aniiibiishaabookewininiwi (The suffix "wi" when added to a noun makes it an equational sentence "to be a Chinese" or "to be a tea-making man")

Finally we get the whole word, which is equivalent to one sentence in most other languages:

Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag (this is Aniiibiishaabookewininiwi + wag). Whereby "wag" is the plural third person suffix meaning "they are".

Hence "Aniibiishaabookewininiwiwag" meaning "they are tea-making men" or "they are Chinese".

Are you impressed by how complex this language is?

Thank you for that amazing post. It was really amusing to read through this and see how the "final version" of "They are Chinese" looks like. The breakdown is very useful and enabled me to get some more insight into this fascinating language. So, the word for "They are Chinese" that you just provided is actually Chippewa or Ojibwe? Or is this even one language with two different names? This might sound like a stupid question but I have not yet heard about this (these) language (languages).

[Topcho]

Wow, BWL after your post I don't dare to say anything!  Well for me, languages like Finish, German, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic look difficult, but I must say I've never learnt any of them (watching anime doesn't count). I don't think Russian was that hard, but the 10 years of not using it ruined my grammar knowledge.

I have to say I am pretty curious if my native language seems diffiucult for foreigners but there is no one to ask.

[Ariel]

I think Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn if you aren't native because it's very different from most languages.

Speaking: You have to train your ear to listen to the different pitches, because a word may be pronounced the same but its meaning is changed with the pitch.

Writing: There are tens of thousands different characters and unlike Japanese, there is no furigana to help you sound out the word.

The easy part is probably the grammar. There aren't any exceptions to conjugating verbs. (In English, to change a verb from present to past, we usually just add -ed to the end. But there are so many exceptions to this rule. Run -> ran, draw -> drew, read -> read, fly -> flew, etc.)

[NatureSun]

To be honest in my opinion there is no language that is easy to learn. All languages require hard work and patience and only then can you learn it. But that's my opinion.

Though I have a friend who is learning German. He knows around 6 languages in total. With being proficient in 3 of them including German and says German was the hardest language he had to learn.

[linguaholic]

I added a poll regarding the question: "What is the most difficult language?"

You will find the poll on top of this thread. Please vote!

[SpiralArchitect]

Among the languages I've tried learning, Japanese seemed the most difficult to me because it has little in common with languages I have some command in. The fact that even the script is completely different sure makes it a difficult nut to crack. Likewise, I think a lot of people studying it may find Russian quite difficult.

[atomiczagnut]

I have to say that I agree with BWL about Native American languages.  I lived near the Navajo reservation for a while and learned enough Navajo to say "hello", but that's about it.  It's got a lot of glottal stops and other sounds us native English speakers aren't really used to.  I can see why America used it as a code during WWII.

I've also heard that English can be very difficult to learn for a non-native speaker.  Though it's my native tongue, I can sort of see why.  There's so many exceptions to the rules and it's not clear how certain words should be pronounced.  Look at the letter combination "ough", and how it's pronounced in words like "though", "through", "thought", and "rough".  What's the rule for that?

[Baburra]

I picked arabic, just because the characters they use look like they would be hard to learn. At least when it comes to Chinese characters, there are some indications on how they came about because most of them originated from pictographs. When it comes to Arabic, though, I think I'd be completely lost.

[linguaholic]

At least when it comes to Chinese characters, there are some indications on how they came about because most of them originated from pictographs.

That is actually not the case. Just a rather small percentage of all chinese characters are of pictographic origin. Most of the characters are phono-semantical characters (one phonetic constituent and one semantic constituent). It's pretty complex, but basically there are six different character classes in Chinese. I'm going to elaborate more on this in a new thread soon.

[linguaholic]

For instance, the character 马 (simplified Chinese) is a pictographic character. In traditional script, the character is 馬。The picture shows how the character evolved over time.

From left to right, it shows the character in Oracle Bone Script, then in Seal Script, after that in Clerical Script, followed by Cursive Script and then in traditional script and finally in simplified script

[ollie]

I've heard Japanese is extremely hard, but I've never tried to pick it up myself. It's on my bucket list, I'd like to visit Japan one day, and it'd be nice to learn a little bit before then. But I don't see myself being fluent anytime soon.

[mareebaybay]

I think the world's most difficult language to learn is Japanese. Japanese looks so difficult because of all the characters you have to learn and how different it seems to be from what I am accustomed to.

[sidney]

I think that any language that has characters for letters would be hard to learn, like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Russian, because learning how to speak it is one thing, but learning how to write it is another thing! It's like you're trying to learn the alphabet all over again!

[Zandra]

all of the above mentioned languages are difficult to learn but I would say hindi would be the most difficult of all.

[Firelily99]

I think some of the native languages of North America are extremely difficult as are many of the Asian ones.  I'm not all that familiar with languages from Iceland, Finland, or Denmark but they too strike me as being difficult.