The hardest languages to learn

[Comte Arnau]

As a native english speaker, Spanish is the easiest language I've learned at least some of. I've learned a bit of French, German, and Russian as well. Russian is hard. German and French are easy, but not as easy as Spanish, which is really easy.

The main difference that makes French look harder than Spanish is its phonology, gone so wild that nowadays the spelling seems crazy too, much as in English. But then, when it comes to real grammar, both are just as complex. If anything, Spanish uses subjunctive much more often than French, distinguishes two verbs for 'to be' while French doesn't, and has a complicated system of diminutives, rich in connotations, that's missing for the most part in French. So in practice, it all depends pretty much on which parts of a language one puts the emphasis on.

[Swearengen]

The main difference that makes French look harder than Spanish is its phonology, gone so wild that nowadays the spelling seems crazy too, much as in English. But then, when it comes to real grammar, both are just as complex. If anything, Spanish uses subjunctive much more often than French, distinguishes two verbs for 'to be' while French doesn't, and has a complicated system of diminutives, rich in connotations, that's missing for the most part in French. So in practice, it all depends pretty much on which parts of a language one puts the emphasis on.

French wording is just weird. Spelling and pronunciation aside, all of their contractions like j'aime, etc. It's just a very messy language. Spanish is very clean, methodical, and consistent. Once I learned some of it, I began to understand why the mexicans speak english the way they do; "I no speak english." The only annoying thing about Spanish is the genders, which pretty much every language aside from English has.

[VR6_]

For me it's Finnish language - sounds very good but is quite hard to learn it.

[Svipdag]

I agree that Sanskrit is a difficult language to learn. However, the Devanagari script is not "opaque", any more so than Cyrillic. It is different, but, except for the compound characters, mostly unambiguous. However, the lack of any division between words is very bewildering and sandhi is nightmarish. For those unfamiliar with sandhi, it is the change of final consonants depending on the sound of the initial character of the next word. E.g. "sat cit ananda" becomes "saccidananda". It is easy enough in writing Sanskrit to work out how sandhi will change the spelling of what you are writing, but to work backward from sandhi to the original spelling in reading or translating is maddeningly difficult.