What is the most difficult language to learn?

[Formiko]

From the ones I've tried to learn - French definitely!. Just because they write and read the same word in 100 different ways. When I watch French TV programme it all looks for me like a river of different strange sounds - pleasent though. And when I have a French text read - it just looks to me like a waste of letters since no matter how long the word is, it sounds like one syllabe.
Hebrew is hard as well, but mostly to read. The same sign is sometimes read in two different ways and there are almost no vowels.

Nah, I think Hebrew writing is simple, but Arabic on the other hand is hard. (Not Persian, which is fairly simple) I find Arabic grammar a pain in the chalf! Hebrew is similar but I find the moods rather confusing (Qal, etc).
Unless you had the luck of being born speaking English, speaking English properly is tough.
Most American Indian languages can make a grown man cry

[Eoghan]

Even though I strongly disagree, Scottish Gaelic is a pain in the ass according to all my Swedish friends, after one of my usual half-hour rants about how wonderful Gàidhlig is...

The grammar is rather complex, even though I love it, but it sure can drive you crazy...

As a friend of mine said some time ago;

"Mutations? Initial consonant mutations? You're kidding me - It's a language, innit? Not a bloody X-Men character!"

[ILuvEire]

Just saying, apparently they did some study and discovered the hardest language (of the ones studied) for an native English speaker was Hungarian. Hmm. Why is Hungarian harder than Finnish? Grammatically they are very similar.

[''']

EDIT: btw the study you're referring to, I think, is the British diplomatic corps who study, among others, Hungarian. I think they also do Japanese which is ranked first by the US navy. The Brit D.C. put Hungarian as the hardest language for them to learn.

Well, we do have more cases than them, and we are closer to Altaic languages than they are. So we can have 257 forms per noun (iirc) and our genitive attaches to the possession:


ember=man/person
ház=house
a(z)=the

az ember háza = the man's house
a házam = my house
a házad = your house

While Finnish does it the way I-E does it.

Though they have some 14 infinitives while we only have 7...grrrr.

I've never done any finnish but form what I have seen, I'd say they've assimilated more linguistically. Anyone care to comment?

[Levo]

Goodies! Our one is considered the hardest langauge for English-speakers

[''']

Cuz that's how we rollz

[ILuvEire]

Goodies! Our one is considered the hardest langauge for English-speakers

All that test did was make me want to learn Hungarian more. LOL.

[''']

Say goodbye to your brain. You shalln't be using it much longer.

EDIT: Yes I know it was poor grammar, it's on purpose.

[ILuvEire]

Say goodbye to your brain. You shalln't be using it much longer.

EDIT: Yes I know it was poor grammar, it's on purpose.

I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep it straight from Finnish. I try not to learn languages that are in the same language family. That's why I like isolates. XD

[''']

Ah no fear not, the vocab is totally different so the only thing which will get confusing is the grammar and they are rather similar so that's not as big a problem. Possibly the closest I've found is:

Mennä - menni (to go)

But if you look at the wiki comparing them:

fire tuli - tűz
fish kala - hal
nest pesä - fészek
hand/arm käsi - kéz/kar
eye silmä - szem
fathom syli - öl
vein / sinew suoni - ín
bone luu - csont
liver maksa - máj
urine kusi - húgy
to live elää - él-
to die kuolla - hal-

So while the similarities are usually visible, as long as you knwo that ä is purley finnish and áéíóőúüű are purley magyar, and that we don't double our vowels, you shoudl have no doubts as to the origins of the word.

And we do have a lot of notable differences in our grammar, think finnish+turkish=magyar.

[CoBB]

I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep it straight from Finnish. I try not to learn languages that are in the same language family. That's why I like isolates. XD

Why, would you confuse Russian and German? Hungarian and Finnish are similarly far from each other.

Miért, összetévesztenéd az oroszt és a németet? A magyar és a finn hasonlóan messze van egymástól.

[neoni]

I started with Finnish a couple weeks ago, and it doesn't look that bad at all. The cases seem pretty easy, I guess I'll at some point get used to vowel harmony and consonant gradation to the point where I don't need to think about it, and words will just feel better one way. No freebies in the vocabulary, but that just means more words to learn, not that they are harder. Far fewer irregularities, which probably makes up for having to learn more words. The tenses aren't that hard at all (haven't looked at the potential yet, which I've heard is very difficult, but the wikipedia summary of it doesn't look too daunting). No genders, which I like a lot. One of the easier number systems I've come across.

Maybe I've just not gotten far enough in?

[maeng]

Just saying, apparently they did some study and discovered the hardest language (of the ones studied) for an native English speaker was Hungarian. Hmm. Why is Hungarian harder than Finnish? Grammatically they are very similar. I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep it straight from Finnish. I try not to learn languages that are in the same language family. That's why I like isolates.

Why, would you confuse Russian and German? Hungarian and Finnish are similarly far from each other.

I gotta say that I’m with CoBB on this one, confusing Finnish and Hungarian is like confusing Russian with German (Actually gap between them is even greater. But as there isn’t any sufficient criteria for such analogies they are primarily way off).

When ever there’s one of these never-ending (and pointless if I may add) discussions going on about which language is the hardest at some point Finnish and/or Hungarian are likely to pop out. And I think there are 2 basic reasons for this: 1. they are not I-E 2. they are spoken in Europe and thus pretty well known. Tbh I dislike seeing Finnish mentioned in these discussions and I dislike people promoting it as some kind of a mysterious language with cases, like having cases for some reason makes languages hard, or more over like not being I-E makes languages hard. It doesn’t. I know countless foreigners who speak Finnish fluently by anyone’s standards and it didn’t take them a life time to learn it, just some motivation and the will to see through differences and getting past the illusion that this language is incredibly hard.

az ember háza = the man's house
a házam = my house
a házad = your house

While Finnish does it the way I-E does it. Well, we do have more cases than them, and we are closer to Altaic languages than they are. Though they have some 14 infinitives while we only have 7...grrrr.

What exactly is this I-E way? You’re right about the first structure hu. az ember háza ~ fin. ihmisen talo, no suffix there unlike in hu. But about the other two: hu. a házam, házad ~ fi. taloni, talosi (apart from the fact that Finnish obviously lacks articles) these structures are formed in a similar way, that is by adding a possessive suffix at the end of the noun. Btw having articles looks pretty I-E to me ;D What do you mean here by infinitives? According to my knowledge there are 3 infinitives in Finnish (this might be due to terminology employed, like it is with Hungarian cases).

So while the similarities are usually visible, as long as you knwo that ä is purley finnish and áéíóőúüű are purley magyar, and that we don't double our vowels, you shoudl have no doubts as to the origins of the word.

What do you mean exactly?

And we do have a lot of notable differences in our grammar, think finnish+turkish=magyar.

Finnish and Hungarian indeed have notable differences in their grammar. Saying that by mixing Finnish and Turkish you get Hungarian just isn’t true and is not very accurate, since consonant gradation is very typical and very central in Finnish morphology and both Turkish and Hungarian lack it.

[''']

Well, the UK study didn't say magyar was hard just that it was the most challenging/difficult/took the longest to learn of all the languages they looked at. Finnish presumably would be similar. There is a lot in common between English and other Germanic languages, and between French and even the other romance languages. To the best of my knowledge, Slavic langauges are not as heavily inflected as Uralic and my parents said that they found Russian to be simple and straight forward with few irregularities. Of course, their grammar is also I-E. From the English point of veiw, among the Languages in Europe, Fn, Ee, Hu are the ones with the least amount of common ground (possibly except for Maltese, Gaelic languages, and isolates like Basque).
So it's not so much that we're inherently harder, but that English speakers have less of a head start when begining with an Uralic language. If their understanding of Uralic grammar were as good as their inherent understanding of Germanic grammar I'm sure they'd have no problem, but the gap must be bridged.

az ember háza = the man's house
a házam = my house
a házad = your house

While Finnish does it the way I-E does it. Well, we do have more cases than them, and we are closer to Altaic languages than they are. Though they have some 14 infinitives while we only have 7...grrrr.

What exactly is this I-E way? You’re right about the first structure hu. az ember háza ~ fin. ihmisen talo, no suffix there unlike in hu. But about the other two: hu. a házam, házad ~ fi. taloni, talosi (apart from the fact that Finnish obviously lacks articles) these structures are formed in a similar way, that is by adding a possessive suffix at the end of the noun. Btw having articles looks pretty I-E to me ;D What do you mean here by infinitives? According to my knowledge there are 3 infinitives in Finnish (this might be due to terminology employed, like it is with Hungarian cases).

then what is the meaning of 'talon'? I thought this was the genitive and that you didn't use our style of genitives. If i'm wrong, sorry abotu that.

I'll check the verb infinitives for you (I asked a finnish guy a while ago and he had no clue either, and I didn't know magyar had "conjugated infinitive")

I Infinitive
Base form - mennä

II Infinitive
Active inessive - mennessä
Active instructive - mennen
Passive inessive - mentäessä


III Infinitive
Inessive - menemässä
Elative - menemästä
Illative - menemään
Adessive - menemällä
Abessive - menemättä
Active instructive - menemän
Passive instructive - mentämän


IV Infinitive
Nominative - meneminen
Partitive - menemistä

V Infinitive
menemäisilläni

So while the similarities are usually visible, as long as you knwo that ä is purley finnish and áéíóőúüű are purley magyar, and that we don't double our vowels, you shoudl have no doubts as to the origins of the word.

What do you mean exactly?

When learning two languages, (like when I mixed german dutch and afrikaans) a lot of the problems come from (to me) rememebring a word but forgetting where that word comes from, i.e. what language it is from. Because of our special characters, a lot of words could NOT be confused for the other language since we only share Ő. This should help with keeping them straight.

And we do have a lot of notable differences in our grammar, think finnish+turkish=magyar.

Finnish and Hungarian indeed have notable differences in their grammar. Saying that by mixing Finnish and Turkish you get Hungarian just isn’t true and is not very accurate, since consonant gradation is very typical and very central in Finnish morphology and both Turkish and Hungarian lack it.

I meant that magyar is far closer to turkish than finnish, so that if you think of a continuum with finnish on one end and magyar on the other it would be between the two. Alas, Fn Ee and Hu are the only Ural languages in major usage and Turkish was the only thing I could find to compare to.
Note that the lack of consonant gradation is as you say lacked in both magyar and turkish helps underine the point that were're closer, or rather that finnish is further away form turkish than we are.

[maeng]

So it's not so much that we're inherently harder, but that English speakers have less of a head start when begining with an Uralic language. If their understanding of Uralic grammar were as good as their inherent understanding of Germanic grammar I'm sure they'd have no problem, but the gap must be bridged.

Yea, my point exactly.

then what is the meaning of 'talon'? I thought this was the genitive and that you didn't use our style of genitives. If i'm wrong, sorry abotu that.

'talon' is genitive but I was agreeing with you on that one, I actually meant those a házam and a házad which are, apart from the articles, like similar structure in Finnish.

I'll check the verb infinitives for you (I asked a finnish guy a while ago and he had no clue either, and I didn't know magyar had "conjugated infinitive")

I Infinitive
Base form - mennä

II Infinitive
Active inessive - mennessä
Active instructive - mennen
Passive inessive - mentäessä


III Infinitive
Inessive - menemässä
Elative - menemästä
Illative - menemään
Adessive - menemällä
Abessive - menemättä
Active instructive - menemän
Passive instructive - mentämän


IV Infinitive
Nominative - meneminen
Partitive - menemistä

V Infinitive
menemäisilläni

I don't actually have Iso suomen kielioppi (which is the latest grammar written) with me, but I think the so-called IV and V infinitives aren't considered as infinitives by this grammar. Also I infinitive is called A-infinitive, II is called E-infinitive and III is called MA-infinitive. So basically 3 infinitives which are then conjugated further in a number of cases.

I meant that magyar is far closer to turkish than finnish, so that if you think of a continuum with finnish on one end and magyar on the other it would be between the two. Alas, Fn Ee and Hu are the only Ural languages in major usage and Turkish was the only thing I could find to compare to.
Note that the lack of consonant gradation is as you say lacked in both magyar and turkish helps underine the point that were're closer, or rather that finnish is further away form turkish than we are.

I haven't found any striking similarities yet between Hungarian and Turkish (apart from the obvious fact that they are both agglutinating), but then again I haven't studied enough Turkish to actually form an opinion.

[''']

Same here, but the more I spoke with turks, the more similarities I saw. The way they express subject-complements, the vowel harmony, conjugation, even a a shared word or two. (iirc)

[yabba]

reading this could make me so tired of languages!
im so happy that all the stuff you write compares by no means to the actual fun you get from learning any language!

[''']

you've lost me...

[polishboy]

Cantonese.
It has 7 tones, and many Characters.

[ILuvEire]

Cantonese.
It has 7 tones, and many Characters.

But beyond that, how hard is it really? As far as I have observed, the grammar is quite simple.