In your opinion , what is the toughest language to learn?

[OGsPhotography]

Im going to have to say the second one is harder than the first.

Also, Japanese and German, they were not " bird" courses and don't ask me why Business school requires 6 credits in " Second" language.

Technically, my province is bilingual. What a farce that is.

 

[snowbear]

I'll go along with what Lew said, and toss out Cherokee, maybe Inuktitut.

 

[jcdeboever]

The true meaning of my wife's yelling at me... I haven't learned a thing... excuse me, I have an appointment with a laundry tub...

 

[limr]

I mean...from a linguist stand point...all languages are equally easy to learn, assuming you are immersed in them during the appropriate critical periods of development. A baby who is immersed in Chinese, English, and/or whatever, will be proficient in all of them.

Thank you! All languages are equally accessible as a first language. A person's first language may influence the relative difficulty in learning a second language, and even then, there's a lot of individual variation.

I mean...from a linguist stand point...all languages are equally easy to learn, assuming you are immersed in them during the appropriate critical periods of development. A baby who is immersed in Chinese, English, and/or whatever, will be proficient in all of them.

There are people that are unable to learn languages too though.

Do you mean people who could never learn a first language or a second language? The only things that interfere with the acquisition of a first language is lack of proper input or issues of abnormal cognition. Otherwise any child can learn any language given proper exposure during the acquisition period (which does have an endpoint. If a person isn't exposed to language by about puberty, it's very unlikely they would ever gain competence in a first language.)

Learning a second language is a different story, and part of what affects a persons ability to learn a second language is competence in their first. Even when an adult can master vocabulary and grammar of a second language, they almost always have an accent in the second language. The accent is milder if that person was exposed to other languages while still a child, but it's still there.

And might I point out that we've been told that English has a) very few rules, and b) too many rules, and also told to not discuss semantics in a thread about linguistics. The irony is thick in here, folks

English spelling is a hot mess, but its grammatical structure is much more consistent than most people think.

 

[thereyougo!]

They can't all be the 'toughest' there has to be only one.
For everyone I know, it was English.

For you, maybe. For others, it could easily be something else.

So yes, there can be more than one.

The question was "In your opinion what is the toughest language to learn?"...where does that say anything about for others?

There can only be one toughest in an individual's opinion whoever that person is. The "est" on the end indicates there is only of that is the most extreme. Now if it asked what is a tough language there could be more than one per respondent.

Do you actually know how forums work?

Opinions are like faces. Everyone has one and they are all individual to the person that has them.

 

[thereyougo!]

Of the languages that I speak a little of, Japanese is the hardest followed by Korean. German and Italian are relatively easy.

 

[ashleykaryl]

I learned Italian while living in Milan for more than 10 years and it's very formal in structure with precise rules of grammar. Towards the end I did some translation work and it would often sound like 16th century English when decoded literally.

As you travel around the country there are differences in dialect and cadence that can be near impossible to understand, even for native Italians.

 

[petrochemist]

I have yet to learn all languages, so can't really have a valid opinion on which of them would be hardest to learn.
Of those I've head Zulu seemed the most alien to me.

I have often heard that English is very hard to learn because of it's many inconsistencies, but it's so common in modern world cultures that I'm not at all sure that's true.
I remember meeting 9 year old Dutch children who where totally fluent in English, and could also speak American English which is a subtly different language. They learnt one at school and the other watching films and treated them as different languages.

 

[snowbear]

Here's another take:
BASIC and COBOL were fairly easy, while Assembler was not. I have no formal training in FORTRAN, but I suspect learning it would be fairly simple. I have picked up on Python with only a few problems.

 

[Piccell]

I found assembler and ascii both fairly easy to learn.
There are 10 kinds of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.
I often confuse Christmas and Halloween because Dec. 25 = Oct. 31.

 

[Rick50]

I tried Japanese once while sitting in a bar in Japan and almost got laughed out of the place.
I did find 'C' was fairly easy but took some time.

 

[Ambient Lightscapes]

To pronounce: possibly Chinese or Korean (at least for me, I just can't repeat a Chinese or a Korean sentence after hearing it, but perhaps I am too old).

To learn all the possible word inflections and use them correctly in speech: Slavic languages, for example Polish with its 7 grammatical cases multiplied by 3 genders in the singular and 2 genders in the plural. And within one gender different noun groups take different inflections. Verbs and adjectives are inflected, too. However, once you know one Slavic language, the next ones are much easier because some inflections are very similar.

To learn the necessary speech styles and use them properly: possibly Japanese with its honorific and humble speech.

 

[webestang64]

Klingon.

 

[petrochemist]

Klingon.

I rather suspect Klingon is a fairly simple language there are many Sci-Fi buffs who seem to learn it, and there would be no point in making it complicated when designing it for TV shows.
I've even got a Christmas song 'sung' in Klingon among my MP3s

 

[unpopular]

all of them. i have literally no idea how people learn other languages. It's a total mystery to me. I feel like it's a skill that my brain is entirely not wired for. For whatever reason I simply cannot take the pieces of a language to make a whole.

I used to be able to put together written French when I was younger. But verbal language is different.