Koroleva

ok...here i go

1. basque (euskara) - the most difficult for everyone
2. caucasian languages (can anybody learn about 80 cases?)
3. african languages (with clicking sounds) - easy to pronounce isnt it?

its very strange that people tend to think that chinese is difficult, no grammar at all, or turkish - its much easier to learn turkish cases then slavic ones for example

dada

do you want the opinion of a very old woman ,who tried to learn 8 "foreign languages " (her mother language is french )
What can I say about "difficult or not difficult "?None of all these languages are difficult IF YOU HAVE A GOOD REASON TO LEARN "....If the reason falls down, you forget what you have learned .I did so for Finnish ,Romanian ,and Russian .
The most difficult is not to LEARN ,it is to practice enough not to forget !!!!To read is not the best mean ...but can help .I think you well learn and "keep " a language if you have an opportunity to communicate with someone in this language ....it's my reason to come on this Forum ...not to forget my poor english ,my not so good turkish.For German ....my daughter works and lives in Germany ...it gives me the oppotunity for "refreshing " my "leanred at school half a century ago German ", for italian ,I have friends who speak it ....and my neighbour speaks occitan ....that I understand but cannot speak....

Jonne

^true. I learnt spanish and turkish 8 years ago.. I spoke them pretty fine.. now I haven't used them and I've forgotten a lot!

@dmin

I agree with Dada as well..Practice is the best thing to do when you are learning a new language, especially whith native speakers!

And as I might have mentionned before, no language is hard to learn..

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Jonne

yeah.. and it's all about the languages you've already learnt... like estonian is really easy language to me, because my first language is finnish and they belong to the same language group... but it'd very tricky to someone whose first language is english.

a big problem to me is remembering all the words :/ I used to make some flashcards with difficult words.

ewomack

I can only speak to the languages I've actually tried to learn. And of those, Japanese, 日本語, was by far the most difficult. Japanese presents an interesting case, because the language itself isn't really that difficult - not a lot of irregularities, few verb tenses, and nearly no plurals - it's the writing that makes Japanese difficult. So learning to speak Japanese is no where as difficult as learning to read and write Japanese.

The other languages I've tried include Español, Arabic, Français, and Nederlands. Español and Arabic have the tricky rolling "rrrrr" - for those who have never rolled r's, prepare for a revelation (it took me a few months to learn, now it's second nature); Arabic, as has been said, includes sounds specific to it (but the writing is so beautiful any difficulties are worth it); Français has very tricky prounounciation, and, to a non-French speaker, it's difficult to interpret prounounciations from the words. Nederlands includes some amazing gutterals that leave English speakers dizzy. It's a lot of fun, though.

So here's my list:

1. Japanese
2. Nederlands
3. Arabic
4. Français
5. Español

What I've heard from non-English speakers is that English is tremendoudly difficult due to all its irregularities. It is a "mutt" language after all - being a combination of numerous other languages. Does anyone agree/disagree with this? Does English belong in the list of most difficult langauges to learn?

Lastly (sorry I've probably typed too much) where do some of the ancient languages belong? Such as Old English, Old French, Sanskrit, etc? These can't be easy to learn either.

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xpsal

Ewomacks, That's impressive that you speak all these languages, especially japanese, i never tried to learn it but since you said it's easy to speak it , i may give it a try.
Yeah english is difficult, easy verb conjugation but hard pronouciation, especially since half of what is written is omitted when talking, weird isn't it

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