Most difficult language ?

[プチクレア]

What is the most difficult language you have studied in your life (not counting dead languages) ? To make things easy, I'll just add in the poll the languages presently taught in the pod101 sites (excluding Survival Phrases), but the answers shouldn't be limited to those !

And for those of all using several pod101.com, what about the most difficult language you learnt from scratch, and the most difficult one to study even though you've had previous contact with it before coming to the site ?

I'll start :

Before coming to the sites, I had studied :

- English (7 years)
- German (5 years)
- Japanese (3 years)
- Chinese (2 years, I forgot most of it...)
- Russian (on my own, on and off)
- Italian (same thing)
- Finnish (same thing, ok, not a language presently taught here, but very interesting !)

The most difficult language I've studied from scratch (and am still trying to come to grasp with) :

- definitely Korean !!!! and even with a good background in Japanese...

The most difficult language to study on the sites, even though I studied it before :

- Japanese

What about you ?

[dat5h]

So here's what I've studied:

-English (native, though it has really stupid rules)
-Japanese (8 years)
-Spanish (5 years)
-German (1 year)

Frankly, I never could get a good grasp of the romance languages, but when I tried to figure out German (not a romance language) ... I just couldn't get it. Everything was a 12 part compound word and grammar was ridiculous. I found that despite a sentence being grammatically correct, it would "sound funny" and was therefore "WRONG." I just never understood it.

Fun poll I like it.

[Psy]

The only foreign language I have some degree of competency in is Japanese, however I have played around with many others at some point:

Mandarin
Spanish
Russian
Hebrew
French
Italian
Korean
Thai

Without question the hardest language of those has been Thai. From the alphabet with its complicated rules to its oodles of difficult-for-English-speakers phonetic distinctions... the simple grammar just fails to make up for it. Mandarin has never seemed so friendly.

Personally, I believe the "hardest language in the world" is the one that has the least in common with your native language.

[nelsonman90]

i agree Korean is so freaking hard.......but i love the way it sounds.

[プチクレア]

Without question the hardest language of those has been Thai. From the alphabet with its complicated rules to its oodles of difficult-for-English-speakers phonetic distinctions... the simple grammar just fails to make up for it. Mandarin has never seemed so friendly.

Personally, I believe the "hardest language in the world" is the one that has the least in common with your native language.

How true !

It's funny to see how syntaxically difficult languages (ie Japanese or Finnish) have on the whole easy pronunciation rules (Japanese and Finnish are written phonetically), and languages that are difficult to pronounce (or at least where pronunciation is important, ie tonal languages like Mandarin) have rather simple grammars ...

[untmdsprt]

So here's what I've studied:

-English (native, though it has really stupid rules)
-Japanese (8 years)
-Spanish (5 years)
-German (1 year)

Frankly, I never could get a good grasp of the romance languages, but when I tried to figure out German (not a romance language) ... I just couldn't get it. Everything was a 12 part compound word and grammar was ridiculous. I found that despite a sentence being grammatically correct, it would "sound funny" and was therefore "WRONG." I just never understood it.

Fun poll I like it.

hahahaha, stupid rules are right!!! You wonder how anyone speaks English! Good to know about German. I may attempt Chinese or Korean after learning Japanese.

In all fairness though, I feel the hardest language is one you just don't want to learn. I don't find Japanese all that difficult, just time consuming.

BTW, here's something for you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_ ... _furiously

While the sentence is correct grammatically it's completely wrong.

[kaitagsd]

Though my native language is Cantonese, I have to say Cantonese is one of the hardest languages to master if you're from an European background. Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese has a ton of slang, 6 tones instead of 4, and things like n and m endings to the sounds. And of course, to the literary side of it, which is the same as Mandarin (standard Chinese), recognizing all that kanji isn't an easy thing at all.

I've only begun dabbling in Japanese a few weeks ago, and though I can remotely guess what a sentence is trying to say due to my high kanji reading abilities, the grammar and verb conjugations are killing me.

[Ulver_684]

I only know English, Spanish and some Japanese! The last the most difficult one for me because I still can't pass the newbie and beginner seasons.

[Javizy]

I did French and German in school for a number of years, but I use the word 'did' rather than 'study' because I don't remember actually learning anything.

I studied Italian for about a month by myself and found that quite easy to get to grips with. The spelling is probably one of the easiest of any language, there are lots of similar words to English, word order is similar, and the grammar wasn't too difficult. Not sure why I lost interest.

As has been said, the most difficult language is going to be the one that has least in common with your mother tongue. Japanese has little in common with ANY language, let alone English, so I find that I really have to get into a very different "mindset" to even begin to express myself naturally. Then you have the fact that learning the ridiculously complicated writing system takes away hundreds of hours of study time that could be spent practising speaking, learning new vocabulary, etc, and generally progressing faster.

[captormoonlu]

English -- Native
I was actually forced to learn this because everyone spoke English and I was in an English speaking country. I learned pretty fast. Compared to the Asian languages, I think it's easier in the sense of word composition by alphabets. Then again, I know a lot of Asians who have trouble learning English. In terms of grammar, I agree that it's pretty weird.

Mandarin -- Somewhat native, forgot a lot but it is supposed to be my mother tongue. I'd like to believe that I can "catch up" any time.
I think Mandarin is really hard from a Western perspective. All that memorizing and it's a you either know it or you don't situation. And really accurate pronunciation is hard in my opinion. Grammar is rather easy.


French -- Somewhat intermediate. I still can't watch junior shows or read books with 60%+ comprehension without subs/dictionary.
I'm a little ashamed that after 3 high school courses I'm still, not that great. I say that because a lot of my classmates seem to be really fluent already. Meh. I don't really find that learning English helps learning French THAT much easier. The most annoying thing that I find is verb conjugation. Argh! So much memorizing. That and some saying some words makes me want to puke due to rolling of the tongue. Yeah, my pronunciation is pretty bad... I have little motivation to learn French though.

Korean -- Only some basic most used words learned from watching dramas.
The many English/Mandarin like words makes it somewhat easier. I'm not planning to read or write but I think that will be pretty hard since I have to start from scratch.

Japanese -- Attempting to learn so I can watch dramas/play video games.
Well, kanji is really easy with my Mandarin background. Hira/Kata are easy to memorize as well, though I haven't exactly became fluent in those. For the time being, I'm just focused on reading. I will probably learn more intermediate grammar and vocab through Mandarin and not English because the culture gap sometimes makes it a bit confusing, and some words just have closer understandings in Mandarin. Yeah. Most of my motivations aren't that academic or work related.

[hairlet]

As a native English speaker I would have to say that...

Japanese is not a particularly hard language because pronounciation isn't 'foreign' to me. Whereas there are so many other languages where many of the sounds are completely absent in English.
Examples - Arabic and Mandarin have loads of sounds which my English ear isn't accustomed to hearing.

[dat5h]

I would also like to add that I find the grammar in Japanese to be almost mathematical. Maybe because I'm an engineer ... But as I go along learning, I find the grammar fits into place and "phrases" that I learned make sense despite questionable direct-translation. But that's my take on it. The only sound in Japanese that took a bit of time to pull out is the "R" sound, but once you got, you got it.

[プチクレア]

dath5さん,

I agree that after some time you can make sense of the sentence despite the direct translation, but don't you think using the same grammar fluently is way more difficult (I'm speaking about Japanese more than other languages) ?

[dat5h]

Unfortunately, you bring to light an interesting point that there is a steep learning curve to being able to speak. I agree that while this did take some time, I, personally, didn't see it as a "difficulty" but more of a goal. I suppose, in my mind, all languages have their pros/cons, and it's all about your mindset when stating "the most difficult language."

In addition, I just read a book called How to Learn Any Language, by Barry Farber. It's a really interesting and fun book. It starts off with an short autobiography of the author (he knows 25 languages well). He then gives his thoughts on language learning and gives pointers to students of all languages that he has studied. I would suggest it to anybody as it gives some really good ideas and is a fantastic motivational book. WHY DID I SAY THAT?! Well, he actually says that Finnish is the hardest language he's ever studied. From the description ... I see what he means. there are 15 cases in Finnish but 16 in the plural form. Having never studied it, I can only speak on hearsay, but I believe it.

[halpin]

English (Native)
Irish (12 years)
French (5 years)
German (3 years)
Japanese (1 year - My Japanese, which is basic, is better that the rest!)
Thai (2 months)

I feel one's attitude to how they were taught languages at school reflects their passion to learn new ones later in life.

Being brought up in Ireland, Irish is drilled into kids in a format that hasn't changed in decades, having to memorise old poetry and stories that no child or even a PHD student has interest in reading. Nobody speaks it outside of school, except for very small communities in the west of Ireland. I do wish I was better at it though.

French and German are a similar story, resulting in me having a very limited knowledge of either.

Then when I lived in Thailand, I made a horrible mistake. I signed up for classes that taught using a model which is so fundamentally flawed for adults. Their theory is that the human brain needs to hear hundreds of hours (Which it does, but speaking, reading is also important), before even trying to speak, just like how every infant learns their native tongue. The problem is that this only works from 0 to about four years of age. Adults need to know how the grammar works, memorise and practice. I made the mistake of sitting through roughly sixty hours and have a vocabulary that can now be counted on one hand.

Education is wasted on the youth. It wasn't until I invested interest and time in some evening classes in Japanese, followed by discovering JapanesePod101, that I became interested in learning a new language. As Javizy said, I simply was present in class for the other languages, this is the first one I've studied.

So for me, Japanese is a challenge but definitely not the hardest language I've studied.