Which is the most difficult language in your opinion? Some people claim that it is POLISH. Well partly I do agree, our grammar is very difficult. Personally think that it's Hungarian.

Greetings to all,
Anna

hmmm... I think any language that requires noun endings to change due to declension is a hard language. After taking German for 2 semesters, I finally got the functions of the 4 cases in a sentence... and they do make sense in relation to my knowledge of the English grammar. However, I could only imagine other languages that have more than 4. I heard Slovenian has 6 cases and Russian has more than that. That's intense! ... I love it!!

hi there! i don't want to be mean, but if you had studied linguistics you should know that there is no "easy" and "difficult" languages. well, if only you've posed the question in another way, let's say, according to syntax, which do you think is the most difficult language, we could've then be able to give you a proper answer.
second, you can't actually "judge" a language just by something that you've heard! in order to answer your question anna, we should be first aware of all the languages that exist, that is the job of real linguists, then record them and finally compare them. But as i said before, this is not the point of linguistics...

Some people consider thait it is Polish as you said and others think about Finnish, they say that it is also complicated becauseof its structure

After having taught ESL (English as a Second Language), I would say that English is one of the most difficult languages.

Completely agree. The goal is not to put languages into "hard" or "easy" categories, but to understand the way they function. === Original Message === hi there! i don't want to be mean, but if you had studied linguistics you should know that there is no "easy" and "difficult" languages. well, if only you've posed the question in another way, let's say, according to syntax, which do you think is the most difficult language, we could've then be able to give you a proper answer.
second, you can't actually "judge" a language just by something that you've heard! in order to answer your question anna, we should be first aware of all the languages that exist, that is the job of real linguists, then record them and finally compare them. But as i said before, this is not the point of linguistics...

Well... I agree with Alexia... but in a simplistic way, I think that difficulty for learning a language depends on which is your mother language... for people who speak spanish its easier to learn french or italian rather than English... and very difficult to learn russian, for instance. I also think that those languages that aren't in use currently are harder to learn... like nahuatl.
Sorry I don't know much about Linguistics but I'm interested to learn...
regards

I think a good case can be made that Piraha, studied by Dan Everett (http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/) is the most difficult language to learn because it lacks recursion and other characteristics found in most other languages. Polish is really not so difficult by comparison for speakers of Indo-European languages (although the Polish genitive case is a mess) and English would not be being adapted as the world's lengua franca if it were not relatively easy. Yes, the writing system is a mess but not as difficult as Chinese or Japanese. On the other hand English lost the Indo-European case system by and large, and does not mark gender, and has a reasonably well behaved phonology etc. One of the hardest languages I have encountered is Georgian both because of a very difficult phonology and such strange cases as ergativity in which the object of a transitive verb is in the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb.

I disagree with the argument from authority that all languages are equally easy to learn. I say this from the experience of trying to learn practically every language I have encountered. I propose the following generalization: features found in many languages are relatively easy to learn and features found in few languages are relatively hard to learn.

If any of you are interested in helping me in a cross-language comparison of the meanings of emotion words, please add me.

You can find out more about me here and on my Hi5 profile:
http://cognition.clas.uconn.edu/~jboster/index.htm

And about my project here:
http://cognition.clas.uconn.edu/form_processor/forms/ECAL/

I can also be contacted as zaimokoya on either skype or icq, gawetitae on yahoo, and jsboster@hotmail.com on MSN.

Cheers,

James

I am so intersted in ur project, James. If u need some helps from me, who is Thai native speaker,one of interesting language of Southeast Asia,u can contact me as follwing e-mail:albatross093@hotmail.com

In my opinion the most difficult lanbguge is spocken by a tribe in papua Guiniea they chose their words by sounds that means when a "wo" is spocken we cant differience between stone water and dog!!!!!