What is the most difficult language for English speakers to learn?

Inflectional languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, are often very difficult for English-speaking people to learn. Perhaps that is because English is not inflectional, but I’m not really sure.

Malbolge.

Japanese is not inflectional and is not difficult to learn. It’s like the Spanish of Asian languages.

Chinese though can be difficult for many Westerners to vocalize because it’s tonal.

But I think even Chinese is easier than, say, Polish (regardless of whether or not one is a native English speaker).

@CaptainHarley You are correct about that. I only know some Chinese and some Japanese, as my main language is English. I learned to speak Chinese and Japanese from my grandparents, who are Chinese and Japanese. It was difficult, because like you said, they are so highly inflected. Interestingly, however, Chinese, grammatically, is closer to English than Japanese. And syntax-wise, English resembles Chinese more than most European languages——an interesting tidbit I read somewhere.

Both written Chinese and Japanese are very difficult to learn——I didn’t like learning the written languages when I was young and have mastered only about 300 characters, not enough to read a newspaper, which normally requires a knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Written Japanese is a bit easier, with the help of a phonetic script, but it still employs a lot of borrowed Chinese characters. And of course, the tonal language of Chinese, particularly Cantonese, is another obstacle——the verbal language uses up to 7 or 8 tones. That means a pronounced word can have up to 8 different tones, with 8 different meanings, even though it is similar in pronounciation. Think of the English word “affect”. Affect can be pronounced af-fekt’ and used as a verb meaning “to affect”, or it can be pronounced af’-fekt, and used as the noun meaning “a certain behavior or way of acting”. The Chinese spoken language is full of these kinds of words. Eg., the Chinese word “gao” can mean “dog”, “nine”, “to stir”, or “tired”, depending on the tone it is spoken. In this case, there are 4 different tones, denoting a different meaning——dog, nine, to stir, and tired.

@MRSHINYSHOES

Domo arrigato, MrShineyshoes-san! : )

I would say a language that has clicks and glottal stops would be the hardest to learn because we simply cannot learn to make those sounds. There is a muscle that develops in your mouth/throat when making those sounds and it must develop by a certain age. So late learners can rarely get the sounds correct. We can mimic those sounds but you know not quite the same.

My initial thought was Chinese, due to the reasons that @MRSHINYSHOES mentioned, but I hadn’t thought of the clicks, @RedPowerLady. I disagree with the statement that Japanese is not inflectional. With Japanese, there is both high register and low register types of sounds, and they can help differentiate between some words such as sake (salmon) and sake (rice alcohol), and hoshi (~to want) and hoshi (star). Of course, context and kanji also differentiate these. Another thing that can be difficult is that in English at least one syllable of each word is stressed, but that is not always the case in Japanese, sometimes each syllable is equally stressed. This can make English speakers talk with a peculiar cadence in Japanese sometimes.

@CaptainHarley Dozo Captain Harley-san! ;)
@noodlehead710 Yes, you are correct that Japanese is highly inflected. And yes, I forgot to mention that——most words in a Japanese sentence are equally stressed, unlike English, where one syllable of each word is stressed. In contrast, English is quite an easy language to learn, especially spoken English.

@noodlehead710

That’s not entirely correct. In the case of ‘salmon’ and ‘rice wine’, sake is pronounced the same. And in the case of ‘star’ and ‘want’, the words are ‘spelled’ differently (hoshi is ‘star’ and hoshii is ‘want’).

@absalom Aha, you caught me in an off-the-cuff lie with hoshii (I apologize), but I still hold that sake is not pronounced exactly the same in both meanings. For a second example, I will use instead hashi (bridge) and hashi (chopsticks).

I think German is. It’s got masculine, feminine and neutral words. But madrin’s also pretty hard because of all the inflection and tones.

Walking around the streets of England you’d have to conclude it’s proper English!

All languages that are not part of the Indo-European languages, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families#Major_language_families

which include for example, Sino-Tibetan languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Austronesian languages and Dravidian languages.

Even within Indo-European languages some are very hard such as Finnish or Hungarian, because they are so distant from English.

Real answer = Probably Mandarin/Cantonese for the reasons already mentioned, or Arabic because of the strange changing of prefixes/suffixes and whatnot.

Fake answer = Woman-speak.

Dutch. I have been a nursing assistant overseas and worked in The Netherlands for a couple of months. The grammar there is soo difficult. I talked to someone over there and evidently it’s much easier to learn English for them than for others to learn Dutch because of the many grammar, spelling and sentence structure rules. Speaking the language is even hard. They role their “r” and Growl with the letter “G”. LOL. Great country though but the language takes quiet some practice.