HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN

 · by  · in 
What is the hardest language to learn?
  1. Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation. Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age 16. .
  2. Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root.Pretty Hard: Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet but easier pronunciation. Serbian-Also similar to other Slavic languages with a complex case and gender system, but it also has many tenses.
  3. Simply Arduous: Ukrainian and Russian – Second language learners wrongly assume because these languages use a different script (Cyrillic) that it out ranks Polish. This is not objective, as an alphabet is only lets say 26 letters. It is really the pronunciation and how societies use the language that influences ranking.
  4. Challenging contender jockey for position:  Arabic - Three baby cases which are like a walk in the park compared to the above, but the unusual pronunciation and flow of the language makes study laborious and requires cognitive diligence if you want to speak it.
  5. Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese - No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher that says people pick up Chinese very easy, but he speaks several languages and could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even the easiest language to learn. Not the hardest language by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.
  6. Average: French - lots of tenses but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
  7. Easy: Spanish and Italian - People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
  8. Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.
hardest language to learn in the world
The most challenging language only for the strong and the brave is Polish. Most others are easy in comparison.

  • The number of hours required to achieve a degree of fluency or intermediate conversation in a language is the wrong way to approach how hard a language is to learn. The approach to rank difficulty of second language acquisition is naive and simply wrong.
second language aquisitiion training
If you learn Polish your third language will be easy to learn. It is like training and conditioning for a sport.
The following is support for my argument.
The way you approach this is a simple equation that illustrates hypothetical rankings of variables importance.
Formula for difficulty in a language = O*(G+V+(w*.1)+(A*2.0)+S+V(1.5))
O= Openness of the society to communicate in their own language to a foreigner as opposed to English.
G = Grammar, specifically the number of exceptions in each cases
V= Verbs Conjugation complexity
P= Pronunciation and Phonology.
W=Complexity of the written language, including script and alphabet variation.
A= Average number of syllables in each word. Do not underestimate this as the working memory for the brain to hold bits of information in your brain is manifold more if you are considering a language with a long orthographical constructions.
S=Speed of the language.
V=Vocalness of the people speaking.
If you can assign an O factor as the major determinant variable then you have your answer. The openness of a society to transmit their language on a person to person, on the street level day-to-day experiences is what really makes communication hard to easy to absorb. I can attest to this after living in Europe for about a decade.
ranking of difficult languages to learn
Ordinal ranking on how hard a student has it to for second language acquisition.
What go is a theoretical understanding if in reality you can not practice it to fluency beyond the classroom. Lets separate the academics from real people when trying to analysis the question..
This is not just a ranking of the hardest language to learn mind you, but realistically practical. I mean I have not considered languages that have under one million native speakers as they are too remote or inaccessible for any real life learning. Patios dialects are excluded. They are important languages, just not for the average person. I also have not considered extinct or ancient languages which have even a more alien grammatical structure.
People write me and say hey Mark here is a language that has a hundred cases and sounds mostly like whistlers, and people often talk backwards, this must be the most difficult. My reply how many people speak it? Well it is a language spoken by some children on my block, they made it up. For me unless there are a million speakers does not pass the cut.
Map of most difficult language on earth
Map of difficulty with green being a breeze and red being, well more arduous foreign languages.
Anti-glottology, Foreign Service Institute number of hours ranking to learn a language
There is an annoying mythology of language difficulty, that is perpetuated by FSI. How many hours it takes to achieve various levels in a language after academic study. This is no valid. Unless you are 18-21 and a full-time student at a university and giving equal or greater weight to written language as compared to spoken, then that is bunk.
Who has the time to study in the Ivory towers a language or prepare like a diplomat except someone in some cushy government job? It is not the real world. Speaking is much more important than writing and reading. Few people can study like an egghead, rather they want to just communicate.
The worst thing about the FSI report
It irritates me that one person will state something on the web and it is recycled by every content mill blogger ad infinitum. People take ideas for fact without looking at them objectively. I call this the flat earth syndrome of language learning. Just because an expert says it does not mean it is true.
Aristotle believed the heart was the center of human cognition and the brain was an organ of minor importance. For centuries people took this as fact.
That does not mean the FSI is wrong and Asian languages are not more difficult for a English native speaker to achieve a level of mastery, but look at this objectively.
How linguistic science is different from physical science
There is no way you can objectively measure linguistic ranking or difficulty like the hard sciences like physics or chemistry measure a phenomenon in a vacuum. Even in physics things are tested, regression are run and retested. There is debate and paradigms are challenged every few decades.
So are you telling me, that in not a social science but a humanities like Language that because some government organization for a very specific program makes a statement fifty years ago, everyone including people on the Internet take it as fact and recycle it ad nauseam?
Evolution of phraseology and variance from linguistic universals as a measure of difficulty
Departure from universal grammar and linguistic universals and structures is that are natural constructs of the human brain could be a measure of difficulty with some objectivity, however, how you measure it I have no idea how you would do this.Typological universals and other measures are left for future research.
Example of how people learn in Africa and the Middle East
When I was in North Africa (several times) I was amazed people could talk in the open market in several languages with little effort. They never opened a book or wrote in a foreign language. Language is about speaking. It is about communication not something you learn in a book. How long was it like that? The first one million years of human evolution from Primates until about 1950 when world illiteracy went from less than 1% to over 50%. So for tens of thousands of years for most humans, language was about the speaking, that is it. For a few thousand the landed elite and first estate class has some form of written language but this was not most people. Lets be real language has nothing to do with a book, only the tongue and ear. Therefore when FSI or any other person assets Chinese or Asian languages are hard, they are not if you strip away the crazy characters to a non-Asian person.
Why Asian languages are not hard – Palaver about Asian foreign language acquisition
No grammar to speak of, no cases, not complex plurals, short words. People argue they have tones but these are subtle pronunciation differences and in my experience I am understood when I speak Mandarin for example with poor pronunciation easier in comparison with Polish. I know author and teacher of Chinese in NYC and he says most of the people who walk in off he street learn Chinese pretty fast. He has a book called Easy Mandarin. It is only the written language that is hard.
It is a myth that needs to stop, that Asian languages are difficult. They are not
When you speak of Phonology, sound approximation from the native language to the target Polish ranks near the top as the tongue twisting, multi-syllabic mixing of consonants and vowels are unmatched by any shorter Asian word, even with tones.
Examples and references that back up my theory of modern of linguistics that give a better understanding of how people acquire a second language:
  • In social linguistic acculturation Model or SLA, was proposed by John Schumann and focused on how an individual interacts with the society. Some societies more easily transmit culture.
  • Gardner’s socio-educational model – Similar to above and deals with the inter-group model of “ethnolinguistic vitality”.
  • Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky developed a theory of zone of proximal development.
I want to know your feedback and research so they may benefit second language learners.