The hardest languages to learn

[Catrau]

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the unusual vowels such as nasal diphthongs and the strange palatal lateral ʎ, which many English speakers will mistake for an l.

Portuguese gets a 1 rating, easiest of all.

Very nice post, thanks. Very comprehensive.
About Portuguese, Spanish and French. I can speak and write the 3 and I do not agree with you on the ratings you gave for Portuguese.

Until some years ago, in Portugal, at school you would have as typical options: English, French and German. No Spanish for the simple reason that everybody felt they didn't need to learn Spanish because it was a language that we could speak easily, in fact Portuguese and Spanish tend to speak a mix of both known as Portuñol... after the opening of the borders and the understanding of a local Iberian "market" for work, the need to speak properly Spanish arose and nowadays Spanish is the 2nd language more learned at secondary school level, it supplanted the French that almost disappeared. If when I was in secondary school there would be typically 15 classes learning French, 3 learning English and maybe 1 learning German, nowadays we have less kids and 6 classes for English, 5 for Spanish and 1 for French and 1 for German.
The fall of French and the rise of Spanish has 2 reasons. The first one, as I told before, was the assumption that speaking and writing correctly Spanish was paramount and the second one was the discovery of the easiness to learn Spanish, kids like that. Until here we are in accordance and, yes, Spanish is easiest than French, kids know that.
Where I don't agree with you is when you place Portuguese at the same level of difficulty than Spanish. Portuguese is much more like French at the grammar level, it is tortuous with many irregular verbs and a phrase building very similar. My teachers in Spain had some difficulty in correcting my work because, in their opinion, I had a different way to build my phrases, a French way as they said... whatever that means. Portuguese kids have lots of trouble in learning Portuguese, their own language. In fact, it is one of the hardest disciplines at secondary level and the one that gets lower marks in national exams.
I know there are people that do not agree with me, but even if I’m not a linguistic expert, I can compare things as I’m speaker of those languages and facts corroborate my opinion.

[Insuperable]

I see the thread is mainly about Indo-European languages, but Hungarian would be the most hardest European language to learn.

[Mans not hot]

It's not realistic to generalise. For example, a Korean would find it relatively easy to learn Japanese; a Vietnamese would find it not too hard to learn one of the Chinese languages. For English-speaking people, the easier languages are those that belong to the Indo-European family; however, the further you go from your native language, the more difficult it is. If you are Spanish, then Portuguese is fairly easy (at least, when written). Also, Italian is pretty close, as is Catalan. A Spaniard would find Russian very difficult because of the phonology of that language compared with his own - the consonant clusters would freak (spelling?) him out! "How on earth can you have a word "Kreml'?" - you must put some vowels in between the consonants!

In summary - it depends on your starting point.

[wvwvw]

Could not see Finnish on that list, its said to be one of the hardest, though i might just have missed it..

Probably because Finnish and Hungarian do not belong in the Indo-European family of languages.

Finnish belongs to a different family of languages often called "Uralic" along with Estonian, Livonian (Western Latvia), Lappish (Northern Scandinavia) Karelian, Permian and Veps (Northern Russia) and even, more distantly, Hungarian.

However, all of these languages are full of loan words from Indo-European languages , primarily Germanic and Slavic. Germanic has even influenced the structure of Estonian to some extent while Slavic has influenced the syntax of Hungarian, especially in the use of words like 'meg' and 'volna'.

Some linguists think that the Uralic languages may be distantly related to Indo-European on one side and to the Tungus, Eskimo, Korean and Japanese languages on the other. They even think that Proto-Indo-European may have started out as a dialect of Finnish.

Certainly, a few words are similar between Uralic and Indo-European. For example the Finnish and Estonian words for name "nemi" and the Hungarian word for name, "név" are similar to the root word for name *nama / nome- in Indo European languages. However, this is still just speculation. More evidence is needed.

[Amun]

Hungarian & Chinese
You have to take into consideration the native tongue of the person. e.g. if somebody is from Azerbaijan, he/she would have no trouble learning Turkish, since it belongs to the lingual family.


I would have no problem learning Hebrew, since it is a Semitic language as Arabic.

this guy can speak more than 20 languages

[Szegedist]

Hungarian has 15 cases (8 more than Polish).

It has more than that.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Append...s#Case_endings

[Styggnacke]

It's not realistic to generalise. For example, a Korean would find it relatively easy to learn Japanese; a Vietnamese would find it not too hard to learn one of the Chinese languages. For English-speaking people, the easier languages are those that belong to the Indo-European family; however, the further you go from your native language, the more difficult it is. If you are Spanish, then Portuguese is fairly easy (at least, when written). Also, Italian is pretty close, as is Catalan. A Spaniard would find Russian very difficult because of the phonology of that language compared with his own - the consonant clusters would freak (spelling?) him out! "How on earth can you have a word "Kreml'?" - you must put some vowels in between the consonants!

In summary - it depends on your starting point.

Why don't you write your own posts? (scroll down a bit)

[Talvi]

Ive learnt English, German, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese and Korean.

Th hardest was German by far, and if I couldnt speak Estonian id die learning Finnish, too. Often I was like WTF??!! and then I realised it actually the same in Estonian.

Japanese and English are the easiest.

[Minde]

half time i dont understander what pepol talk in this forum

[Geni]

i think : chinese.. ho tou tu chi chun cha hai to bau mu ta ?