Easiest language to learn? Hardest?

[bombermouse]

depends on what is hard to you, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation.

English is easy, but the pronunciation is very difficult to me. Japanese is not difficult per se but the vocabulary is difficult for me.

I'm biased, but I'd recommend spanish. It's a beautiful language and phonetic.

 

[RaySpencer]

This thread is getting me back into trying to learn French. Duolingo is where I will go for now, but it sucks its just France French. I want to learn Canadian French :(

 

[ScoobsJoestar]

English was the easiest for me just because of how many resources there are. Like yeah it makes no fucking sense but I could watch movies with it very casually and pick up on the thousands of exceptions.

 

[Tiktaalik]

Perhaps it's a bit 'cheating' but for hardest you have to imagine that one of the many endangered North American indigenous languages would be the hardest to learn purely from a lack of resources and lack of speakers to practice with.

Wikipedia says Haida only has 24 native speakers, though I do know there is a Haida Language school and lots of revitalization efforts. Wikipedia also says that it's a language isolate, meaning it's not similar to any other language so that's another thing that's gotta make it more tough.

 

[Hikarilie]

Russian looks really hard with how many cases it has.

 

[iapetus]

The hardest language surely has to be the one with the most conjugations and cases.

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I'd suggest it's more likely to be the one with the most irregularities and rules that are further from your native language. Conjugations and cases can be learned, even if there are a lot of them. Obscure special cases that make no sense are the killer for me.

 

[Swig]

I work with Ukrainians and for a minute I thought that maybe I should learn some Ukrainian, aside from basic stuff like hello and thank you. That did not last long, very difficult to learn, especially with the Cyrillic alphabet.

 

[skycamefalling]

Worst that I have any familiarity with has got to be Polish. All the different s, c and z sounds, words change depending on gender, too many consonants following each other.

Of the little Turkish I learned, that language kinda came somewhat intuitively to me.

 

[Skulldead]

For me this is Mandarin, it's totally different then the language i know (french, english and spanish). This was my option class 2 time at school, and I seriously don't know how the hell I was able to pass each course..... i remember absolutely nothing

 

[dingobingo]

Arabic is fking hard trust me it earns its spot lol

 

[Deleted member 41520]

After studying linguistics the general vibe was that Hungarian was hardest. Much harder than Polish, Russian or Finnish. Chinese very difficult due to the tonal thing.

Easiest is a YMMV situation. English is meant to be pretty easy grammatically but has so many arbitrary spellings and pronunciation. Spanish slightly harder grammar but easier in every other way. Japanese surprisingly easy to speak but obviously next-level hard to write.

 

[Syder]

Anything where you have to learn a new alphabet really, I suppose.

I learned French to a conversational degree relatively easily, German was fine too. I gave up on Japanese very quickly, however.

 

[Deleted member 33515]

If being able to read or write a language is what counts and not just speaking it then most humans in human history knew zero languages

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we can agree there might be different degrees in knowing a language and that being illiterate in that language is pretty low on that scale. also, there's a hell of a difference between not being able to read and write and not being able to read and write a second language. you're fishing for a logical fallacy and you know it.

 

[smileyforall220]

English is actually quite tough for non Native speakers, lots of rules and then broken rules that don't make sense'

For English speakers, it's Russian/Chinese. Chinese is like completely different in pronunciation and tones are a hard concept for English speakers, especially once you start getting into Cantonese, gives me a cold sweat just thinking about it

 

[uncleniccius]

Depends on your previous experience but of the Western European languages is say English is the easiest. And then German is the hardest. French/Italian/Spanish are in the middle. These are all easy as shit compared to JapaneseChinese.

Here is actually a list of how long it takes for an English speaker to reach a "general professional proficiency" level in other languages: https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/

So according to this if you wanna be upper intermediate in Spanish in one year, you'll have to learn 1.5-2 hrs every single day. For Chinese it would theoretically be 6 hours per day, but in practice it probably is not possible.

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Yeah believe this comes from the state department data from training diplomats, so it seems that this is likely to be the answer for most native English speakers (with exceptions of course).

 

[Hound]

English speaker here, so Dutch would be easiest as it's basically the Easy Mode for German. The most difficult I've ever tried to even learn the basics of is Hungarian, and I didn't get very far at all.

 

[Osahi]

Gonna second the many people here saying it alle depends what your native language is. A language close in grammar and vocabulary should be easier to learn, though there is always a huge danger of 'false friends' (similar words with completely different meanings) and other mix-ups. I believe strongly tonal languages are probably the hardest to master for someone whose own language isn't or only somewhat tonal.

Anyway, good luck with Portuguese. It's a bitch, especially the grammar and conjugations, and the continental vesion spoken in Portugal can be very hard to comprehend because of the speed it is spoken with and the amount of vowels that are often left unspoken. I followed Portuguese in evening class for 5 years and I am still on a very basic level (they weren't the most advanced lessons of course, it was mostly introductory to be able to converse in day-to-day life). It's also hard to practice unless you can talk to portuguese people regulary.

 

[Monsterqken]

Spanish is really logical so with the right method you can learn it from scratch in 12 weeks. A rich vocabulary obviously takes longer but the grammar is just about studying. In 14 weeks I completed Dele at B2 level: https://www.dele.org/?page=dele/dele-levels/high-intermediate-level

I went to school with people from all over the world and most seemed to get a hang of it in between 10-18 weeks.

 

[The Curry Witch]

As a native German speaker who actually studied the language, I must confess... it's still kicking my ass. German may not be a super duper hard language to grasp in the beginning but it certainly is hard to master. But I wouldn't want to make comparisons to other languages since the only other language I've ever learned is English.

 

[Duo VII]

Enough. To me, it's the easiest.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

youtu.be

 

[Mars People]

Japanese is a bizarre language to me in that its super easy to speak and understand, but next level hell to atually write and read.

 

[Stranger Things]

French is easy. I took it for 3 years in highschool. I assume Spanish is also easy when compared to English as well.

I assume the hardest languages to learn are Chinese, Korean, Japanese. They all seem really tough to read and write especially.

 

[sweetmini]

Russian looks really hard with how many cases it has.

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Muuuuuch harder than anything else i tried to learn... if you could see my Russian manual, it took a beating...
and i forgot all i learned in no time as well when i eased it out.
It's as if somebody took the worst they could off of Latin/German etc to make the hardest language to learn.
I love it though.

edit: no need for listing, still, i wish i had a few less years under my belt, so i could absorb languages as easily as i could up to my late twenties.

 

[Deleted member 8196]

English and French are pretty easy (but i'm too lazy for the latter)

 

[Kain]

I dare you learn polish or any slav language with all those damn cases bullshit. God that sucked. At least the rest of the grammar and conjugations are one the easy side. But then you get to pronunciation and orthography and BAM in your face.

I remember Hungarian being weird as shit, Basque levels of weird (they may be related?).

 

[GCX]

A classic example of Finnish grammar:

 

[Mukrab]

English is stupidly easy

 

[Hikarilie]

Gonna second the many people here saying it alle depends what your native language is. A language close in grammar and vocabulary should be easier to learn, though there is always a huge danger of 'false friends' (similar words with completely different meanings) and other mix-ups. I believe strongly tonal languages are probably the hardest to master for someone whose own language isn't or only somewhat tonal.

Anyway, good luck with Portuguese. It's a bitch, especially the grammar and conjugations, and the continental vesion spoken in Portugal can be very hard to comprehend because of the speed it is spoken with and the amount of vowels that are often left unspoken. I followed Portuguese in evening class for 5 years and I am still on a very basic level (they weren't the most advanced lessons of course, it was mostly introductory to be able to converse in day-to-day life). It's also hard to practice unless you can talk to portuguese people regulary.

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Be it Brazilian or European, I have no reason why someone would try to learn Portuguese as a second language, looks like torture. (I say as a native speaker)

 

[Arebours]

Hardest is the language that is furthest from you culturally. Pronunciation doesn't need to be perfect, grammar is very grindable but the cultural context that underpins idioms and the way people actually speak and write and think is the real challenge and is not something that quickly can be learned.

 

[phonicjoy]

Frisian is most closely related to English, so I'd say that..

 

[Osahi]

Be it Brazilian or European, I have no reason why someone would try to learn Portuguese as a second language, looks like torture. (I say as a native speaker)

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Well, I have an apartment in Portugal and hope to move one day. I love the country and culture, and language is the key to understanding both.

But you're right, it's torture. At first you you think it can't get any worse than the confusing conjugations of 'vir' and 'ver', but then they introduce you to the the different types of conjuntivo (which doesn't even exist in my native language dutch, except in some expressions).

 

[AlwaysSalty]

It depends, like I bet portugues and italian are easy if you have a spanish background. English is probably easy to speak, but I imagine people have a hard time with spelling. Many words are spelled a certain way because someone felt like it.

 

[amanset]

Depends on your previous experience but of the Western European languages is say English is the easiest. And then German is the hardest. French/Italian/Spanish are in the middle. These are all easy as shit compared to JapaneseChinese.

Here is actually a list of how long it takes for an English speaker to reach a "general professional proficiency" level in other languages: https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/

So according to this if you wanna be upper intermediate in Spanish in one year, you'll have to learn 1.5-2 hrs every single day. For Chinese it would theoretically be 6 hours per day, but in practice it probably is not possible.

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I sent this to my girlfriend to show how much I love her by putting myself through pain to learn Cantonese.

She pointed out she speaks three of the five category five languages.

Screw her.

 

[amanset]

English seems like a horrible language to learn though. A mosaic of vocabulary, full of bewildering spelling and unpredictable idioms.

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This is true. Grammatically it is very simplistic and most people have some degree of ability, but its complexity just comes from it being dumb as fuck. People here in Sweden ask me all the time to explain things and I just shrug my shoulders. "Because English".

 

[IggyChooChoo]

Be it Brazilian or European, I have no reason why someone would try to learn Portuguese as a second language, looks like torture. (I say as a native speaker)

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Ha, as a native English-speaking American, I don't think it's so bad. (Bear in mind, my experience is primarily speaking, listening, and reading, and almost never writing.) I find pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese to be easier to do well than Spanish, by contrast. Brazilian slang can be tough, for sure. But language is as much a social skill as an intellectual one, and Brazilians are generally fun, easy people to talk to, in my experience. Just don't bring up the Wright Brothers or Santos Dumont, and it's all good!

 

[Noctilum]

I'm native English speaker but my dad speaks native Romanian and my mom native Italian so I learned those growing up. I also took Spanish for 5 years which is very similar. All were very easy in my opinion.

My wife speaks native Norwegian and that has seemed a little more tough for me though I am older now its harder to retain and comprehend I guess.

 

[werezompire]

As an English speaker, Mandarin has a steep learning curve up front as you have to learn how to use & recognize tones (speaking/listening) and learn enough characters to start noticing patterns (reading/writing), but after that, it becomes much easier. The grammar is like English but more logical & with less bizarre exceptions. Cantonese is drastically harder IMO since the sounds are more different than English sounds, there are more tones, and there's much less English learning materials for Cantonese than there is for Mandarin.

I feel like learning Japanese is the opposite situation for English natives to learn. You can make rapid progress early on - pronunciation is easy, hiragana & katakana can be quickly learned in like a week, and there are a TON of English loanwords. However, to achieve mastery is incredibly difficult - grammar is drastically different than English, a single kanji character can have a score of different meanings & pronunciations, and there's a heavy emphasis on context.

 

[Hikarilie]

Ha, as a native English-speaking American, I don't think it's so bad. (Bear in mind, my experience is primarily speaking, listening, and reading, and almost never writing.) I find pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese to be easier to do well than Spanish, by contrast. Brazilian slang can be tough, for sure. But language is as much a social skill as an intellectual one, and Brazilians are generally fun, easy people to talk to, in my experience. Just don't bring up the Wright Brothers or Santos Dumont, and it's all good!

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You're probably the first I've met with that sentiment. Also, Santos Dumont team here for sure.

 

[IggyChooChoo]

You're probably the first I've met with that sentiment. Also, Santos Dumont team here for sure.

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I suspect that if I had to write more, I would find it a lot more frustrating ;)

 

[l2iv6]

I'm learning japanese, greek, korean, and and mandarin, and I think for me japanese has been the easiest. it's definitely the language I'm best at out of the 4. even though greek is something I've been exposed to my entire life (I'm half greek), I still can't get entirely used to the gendered element to the language. like I find reading it, listening, and pronouncing things really easy, but putting sentences together myself is so tough because I just can't get a grasp on the whole gendered word thing. this is coming from english as my native language btw!

 

[RedSparrows]

My partner is Russian speaking, and while mechanically I don't find the language that difficult or different, actually speaking it makes my tongue feel weird. On top of that, while I feel like my pronunciations are pretty on point, she tells me otherwise. To my ears I'm simply saying what she's saying, but to her ears I'm way off base.

Good thing she moved here instead of the other way around lol.

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Case in point: забил / забыл. I always choose the wrong one and get laughed at. The pronunciation of Russian vowels is quite subtle, I find.

Tho on Russian more generally, the alphabet is fine. Cases take some time to learn but you can get the basics fairly quickly. The hardest thing for me is sheer vocab, because there just aren't enough similar-to-English words, haha. Never lived there though, so.