Hardest language to learn.

[dipsydoodle]

Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven cases, Seven genders and very difficult pronunciation. The average English speaker is fluent in their language at the age of 12, in contrast, the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age of 16.

Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – The Ugric languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root word. However, anyone arguing Asian languages like Korean trump Uralic languages in complexity, really needs to hit the books and do more research.

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. Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet, but easier pronunciation. (the Poles use a modified Latin alphabet which does not have a neat orthography fit to the sounds of their language). Slavic languages have sophisticated case and gender systems, also something that approximates a complex tense system with aspects of time-verb relationships.

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.

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http://claritaslux.com/blog/the-hardest-language-to-learn/

[JayhawkSD]

1. Where does Navaho fall in this list?

It was used by the "Code Talkers" in WW2 because so few people spoke it and, as I recall, because it was hard to learn.

[dipsydoodle]

2. Reasonable answer here

Navajo is very difficult for English speakers to learn because it is about as different a language from English as you can get. Nearly everything that a language must do be a human language is done differently by Navajo than by English. Take marking the subject of the verb on the verb, for example. In English, we only mark one person on the verb--third person singular, present tense (run --> runs) with a suffix. Navajo marks all of the persons with a prefix on the verb. Navajo is not impossible to learn, it is just very difficult for English speakers to learn because it is so different.

LATER EDIT: Navajo was not chosen as a code language because it is very hard. It was chosen because there was no published grammar or dictionary of the language and because native speakers were readily available. In the European theater, Comanche was used for the same reason (and with the same success) even though Comanche is not such a hard language for an English speaker to learn. In the Alaskan campaign, Creek was used. ANY human language that the Japanese and Germans did not know and did not have a grammar and dictionary for would have been equally useful.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071103180032AAD2Drn

Good question anyway.

[JayhawkSD]

4. Interesting, thanks.

Now that I read it, I think I had heard the bit about there being "no published grammar or dictionary," and I did know that Navaho has some structural differences, but the rest was all new to me. The "instant availability of speakers" should have been obvious, but somehow that escaped me.

[LiberalEsto]

3. Huh. I was speaking Estonian by age 1!

Thanks to my parents, Estonian immigrants who also spoke fluent English, German and Russian. I can still speak and write Estonian.

I picked up English quickly in started kindergarten. Took 3 years of German in high school. Total waste of time.

It's fairly easy to learn a language before age 7. After that it can be a bitch.

[ChazInAz]

5. Funny, isn't it?

I grew up in a neighborhood in Springfield, Illinois that consisted entirely of various flavors of Slav, Eastern European and Russian...all first generation Americans. Since they'd all been living there for decades, everybody spoke some of everyone else's native language. As a kid, I managed to pick up bits and pieces of Russ, Hungarian and Polish. though I never really learned to speak the tongues conversationally. Of course, since most of these folks were miners, brick-yard and foundry workers, a lot of what I learned was not for polite society.

[Igel]

6. Lots of silliness and multiple standards at play.

Colloquial, "understandable" is the standard here. Adherence to spoken prestige norms and written standards other there.

Here we use phonology and "speed," ignoring derivation and sociolinguistic complexity. There we use cases and orthography.

Why?

Dunno.

Is it to achieve a specific kind of ranking for some languages? Is it because it's too hard for the writer to formulate an emotionally satisfying single, coherent standard? Is it because the standard kept evolving, but the writer didn't feel like going back and revising what the finger, having written, had already moved on from?

It's fine to dismiss the FSI standard, and many do, esp. when it comes to applications that the FSI standards were never meant to cover (which is, of course, rather an important--some would say crucial or even essential--limitation). But at least the FSI standard is consistent and coherent, can actually qualify as a standard that can find application even outside its intended setting, and works fairly well in the setting in which and for which it was derived--training adult, college-educated foreign-service and military personnel in classroom setting for diplomatic and military missions.

Personally, Polish wasn't all that hard to pick up. There's a lot of case syncretism that keeps there from being 7 genders in practice. (It's like a claim I know of that Russian doesn't have 6 cases, but 8, because it also has a vocative and it has two locatives; and it doesn't have three genders, but also animate/inanimate for all three, plus a slurry of other things. Applied to Polish ... that would be a nightmare. Then again, all that "gender" stuff is just one form of noun class marking, and there are languages with scores of noun classes ... and therefore scores of "genders.&quot

[xocet]

7. The blog post in the OP makes claims that seem to be ill-defined and unsupported with data...

Here are just a few questions of many that come to mind while perusing the blog post from the OP:

[hr]

• How exactly is the difficulty of pronunciation quantified?
  
  One could think in terms of this: http://www.ipachart.com/
  
  
• Exactly how many grammatical genders are present in Polish?
  
  Does Polish more strongly bear remnants of an active-stative typology than other IE languages: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity ?
  
  
• How many cases are present in Finnish? (I suppose "countless" is equivalent to 14 or to 15 in the blog post author's mind.)
  
  This linked author seems to be able to count the cases in Finnish just fine: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/finnish-cases.html
  
  
• Why does the author write "that it out ranks (sic) Polish...." instead of "that it outranks Polish...."?
  
  Perchance care in writing should be one of this blogger's goals: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outrank?s=t
  
  

Maybe Polish is very, very difficult to learn.

However, the blog post in the OP fails to present a well-supported case for that position.

[masmdu]

8. Japanese twern't easy.

Still a functional illiterate.

[jakeXT]

9. There are some nice tongue twisters, but Finno-Ugric languages aren't bad either