Hardest Langauge To Learn?

I would have to say Asian languages and Indian (all of them). One of my friends is from India (a brahman no less) and he grew up having to learn two different dialects at school, and seeing him just write my name in both was baffling, plus he learned English. Languages that don't have a basis in Latin are absolutely baffling. In school I took French (because I didn't want to be like everyone else and learn Spanish, bah!!!) It was fairly easy, but still hard. When I learned Japanese, it was made a little bit easier by our sensei (we had two) which I loved because for the first time they said my last name right on the first try, THE JAPANESE TEACHERS!!! That was pretty fucked up. It's one of the easy Swedish last names to say!!!!!

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Aramaic/Hebrew. Isn't that language crazy hard? And I'm staying here in the Philippines right now. Filipino isn't easy, I'll tell you that.

You can't count words as it has no use to count them, because different nations use different forms to count them. for instance one country record serious and seriously as one word but with a different compound while another country says it are two words. Also you say 500k is much yet some people say english has 400K words. Others go as far as nearly 850K and others say 100K. Also mentioning how many words an average person knows varies from 30K to about 100K see the huge amount of differences.

Therefor saying chinese is hard based on facts alone is ridiculous. Chinese itself isn't so difficult as many would think the problem with chinese is that each province has their own dialect and these differences are larger than for instance a texan speaking to a new yorker ;)

What I see around me people consider dutch a hard language as well but that has more to do with the sentence building than the words itself. That and the fact that we have numerous words you write the same that have completely different meanings.

Dutch generally consider french a hard language to learn since it sentence structure differ so much from dutch, yet spanish is considered easier. The difficulty of a language has more to do with someones native tongue than the language you want to learn. if your own language has more similarities with the language you want to learn it will make translating it thus absorbing it easier then when it has few similarities.

hmmm... i think there is no language that is hardest to learn as long as you want it.... or need it.... unless you are lazy like me... anything is hard... hehehehe... :) :)

I believe that we could agree that the difficulty of 'learning' a language is extremely influenced by where we were geographically and culturally raised.
If you go by what Raze went by with picking his own first language(Chinese) as the hardest to learn, then I am to agree with him as well, all the while having Chinese as one of the first languages I learned as well, I cannot say how many languages we are to pick up at a young age such as... perhaps four years old? At that age, I was enrolled in a Chinese school in Hong Kong, the first language I learned was a dialect of Chinese, Cantonese, as it was used more informally in the Southeast region of China, making it more ideal for personal use with say, family and friends of that region. I also had just some experience in Mandarin, but once my classes were set in, I just had to learn this national Chinese dialect, and English, it is noteworthy that at that time, I had nowhere near 'mastered' Chinese, and I think it might be impossible to do so, as with any language that currently not dead, as we would always have new data from that language.
Learning English at that time was extremely difficult, as it was nearly entirely different. Moving to the US later on that year, once attending school in the US, I was... surprised. We only focused on ONE language in school, until halfway through Junior High, but it was still hard to pick up. Once you're in this whirlpool of perplexing languages, it'll be easy to realize that you aren't really proficient in any languages until you completely immerse yourself into their culture, and not just one aspect of it.
My main point that I am trying to address is that, depending on where you were raised, languages in other regions might seem more difficult than it is to others, that is constantly a variable, that is the human variable, the one that allows us to be different from eachother. It is just my personal belief of having Chinese as the hardest language to 'learn' as it is absolutely confusing, while being somewhat similar to English in the aspect of stringing together an assortment of words to form a sentence, it is more 'flowery' and can be interpreted in many different ways with the same sentence. You might bring on an entirely different meaning depending on how you say some sentences as well, as with writing...oh man... don't mess up your strokes. :wink:

From what I gather, it would have to be the Chinese language. It was either Mandarin or Cantonese, can't remember. Personally speaking, learning languages are alot easier when you're little. You seem to remember easier as well as not notice how boring learning tends to be. It's harder as you grow up.

Really? If you've grown up with English as a national language, then it's obviously ingrained to the point where it's not difficult at all. But I'm fairly sure that more people who learn it as a second language find it difficult regardless of exposure, because as a language, it has very loose but nonetheless prevalent structure. Every rule has so many exceptions that it's impossible to comfortably achieve some level of competence without familiarity. And the lexicon is such a careless potpourri of roots the world over that it's just as hard to learn, with the vernacular as chaotic is it is. Even a lot of native speakers seem to have some level of difficulty, as could be evidenced from the original post.

Addressing the original topic; I think it would be Chinese for native speakers of English, probably English everywhere else.

I suppose Chinese, as being fluent in it would be pretty hard, because the enunciations are allot harder to say than Japanese or English (at least to me) and memorizing the characters to even be able to read and write is really hard. And a random villahe dialect would probobly be hard aswell, since it would be impossible to find someone to teach you :?

The Chinese language is the hardest to learn, there are lots of meaning one can get from a single word if the pronunciation was wrong. I watched it on Discovery Channel :lol:

But when it comes to writing, I think Korean is the most complicated.

I dunno, Hangul looks alot simpler than Hanzi to me. Then again, I don't know how to write Hangul but i'am pretty sure theres an alphabet, making it easier than Chinese.

Chinese

In most other languages I've seen, there is some sort of "alphabet" or something that allows somebody to build words or characters. Not in Chinese though! It's pure, straight up memorization.

Now I'm actually a Chinese native, and I still think WTF when I look at a Chinese newspaper.

Chinese.

Damn, that sounds like you really need to know the language to be able to use it efficiently. I shoulda learned japanese, but the damn americans told my grandparents it was too complicated for my parents to learn. so i never learned it. too bad they didnt know any better back then.

no one speaks either...

Any language that requires you to learn symbols rather than the english alphabet.

for a second language I think english is the hardest because there are conflicting rules and silent letters that dont exist in any other language