Which language do you find to be the easiest and hardest to learn? - For anyone who has attempted to tackle and language before and what it was like.

[Alex Hogendorp]

So far I've studied around 50 different language mostly because although I most likely wouldn't be fluent in that many, it's always nice to know something about these languages but also gives me a learning experience I've never had before with new challenges.

Spoiler: Languages I attempted to work with.

Arabic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, Finnish, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Ukrainian, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Bulgarian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Indonesian, Thai, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, Esperanto, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, Estonian.

Even a very small bit of Nahuatl, Blackfoot, Cree, Yucatec Maya, Ket, Wayuu and Navajo.

Out of all the languages I just so happen to learn with at least enough experience to notice something. I find the Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew to be the hardest along with Korean (though If I invest more time in Navajo, it would make Arabic look like a cakewalk in comparison) and to no surprise I find the Romance languages like Spanish and Germanic languages like Norwegian to be the easiest. I also think the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese is overrated as it's just more a time consuming language than they are hard.

Other notes:

• Finnish and Estonian are pretty similar.
• Spanish and Portuguese are extremely similar.
• Abjads like Arabic and Hebrew are the most confusing.
• Italian is like Spanish and French mixed together.
• If you learn Russian, you pretty much got other Slavic Languages halfway done.
• Lithuanian and Latvian are pretty similar.
• Hungarian despite being in the same language family and Finnish and Estonian are relatively different.
• Chinese is a group of languages. Mandarin is the most commonly spoken.
• Most of our scientific words come from Greek and Latin.
• English is possibly the most confusing language and we don't realize it.

 

[Cats]

German and Spanish were pretty easy. Those are the only languages I know any of besides English

 

[invisibult plus+]

Spanish comes more naturally for various reasons. Japanese, on the other hand, is harder to study consistently since there are fewer practical reasons for it. I'm using Spanish to pick up Japanese again so they can reinforce each other, especially since their pronunciations are similar. In practice, it's hard to keep the staccato rhythm of Spanish, but it's easier to try to pronounce it like a Japanese speaker (vice versa with Japanese). That said, it's easier to read both than listen since words are more concrete than speech.

 

[We Are The Witches]

I'm not going to speak for the Korean language, but for Hangul (written), it seems extremely easy.

This is a meme video, but it's true. After watching it, I was reading Wikipedia pages in Korean with a pretty close pronounciation, by checking it with Google translate (the read outloud feature) afterwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4eplsFSms

It's so easy, if you want to prank someone as if you knew Korean, watch this, then go to a random Wikipedia page written in Hangul, and start reading!

 

[Lurkin' 'n' Jerkin']

Latin: I'm only ever going to read it, so I can skip learning to write, listen, and speak without feeling like I'm being lazy.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Spanish comes more naturally for various reasons. Japanese, on the other hand, is harder to study consistently since there are fewer practical reasons for it. I'm using Spanish to pick up Japanese again so they can reinforce each other, especially since their pronunciations are similar. In practice, it's hard to keep the staccato rhythm of Spanish, but it's easier to try to pronounce it like a Japanese speaker (vice versa with Japanese). That said, it's easier to read both than listen since words are more concrete than speech.

Coincidentally those are the languages I am most proficient in.

 

[Troonos]

I lived in Russia for 8 months and was Intermediate-Mid. Very difficult language, especially once you get into verb conjugation morphology and its inconsistencies.

Teaching myself Korean now. It's been really easy, but I've hit a stumbling block now that I've reached syllables with silent letters. There's no rhyme or reason which of the two consonants at the end of a syllable should be silent, and it makes no phonetic sense why the silent letter is even there to begin with.

 

[Commander Kneewing]

Depends on what languages you grew up speaking. I'm not fluent in Spanish by any means but I'm able to get the gist of a religious post on Facebook in the language after 4 semesters of it and getting near perfect marks.

I'm Filipino and a native speaker of Cebuano. If I cared to do it I'd probably be able to speak Hiligaynon or Waray after one to three months of immersing myself in it.

Burmese seems really hard to learn. Its alphabet has letters that closely resemble those of the indigenous Tagalog script (they share a common ancestor) but the rest are hard to memorize and it doesn't help that there are two letters for the same sound sometimes. The language is also tonal so that's another thing to contend with.

 

[DSP for president 2032]

German is easy until you're trying to figure out what pronouns to use to avoid sounding retarded.

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

Arabic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, Finnish, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Ukrainian, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Bulgarian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Indonesian, Thai, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, Esperanto, Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, Estonian.

Even a very small bit of Nahuatl, Blackfoot, Cree, Yucatec Maya, Ket, Wayuu and Navajo.

OP are you a polyglot? I am impressed

 

[Commander Kneewing]

German is easy until you're trying to figure out what pronouns to use to avoid sounding retarded.
View attachment 6753660
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Joy of gendered nouns and pronouns. Much of the Slavic languages are also this mental in this regard, if not more.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

Yeah it would be nice if all the things were gendered the same across the languages. You know genders of things in your language, then you have to learn it's completely different in German.

 

[proangelwhangs]

I only ever learnt one other language as I feared studying more would spread my tiny brain too thin. Also I met a lot of people who claimed to be 'polyglot' but had a very low bar for what they considered fluent, I didn't want to be like that. I guess it wasn't too difficult (Japanese) but reading it takes a lot of brute force memorization.

Burmese seems really hard to learn. Its alphabet has letters that closely resemble those of the indigenous Tagalog script (they share a common ancestor) but the rest are hard to memorize and it doesn't help that there are two letters for the same sound sometimes. The language is also tonal so that's another thing to contend with.

I once knew a linguist who wrote a Burmese-English dictionary. He was also fluent in Japanese and is actually the reason I persisted with it. I respect that guy.

English on the other hand is a piece of cake.

 

[Scale Smerch]

Fully agreed on Arabic. The basics were easy enough, but as soon as you break with MSA, no longer have vowels represented in words (they must be implied through context), and get into the fun with pronouns (or lack of them) and it really goes into the deep end. The one benefit is the language has a true alphabet so picking up reading is easier than with Japanese or Chinese.

 

[dreamworks face]

Spanish comes more naturally for various reasons. Japanese, on the other hand, is harder to study consistently since there are fewer practical reasons for it. I'm using Spanish to pick up Japanese again so they can reinforce each other, especially since their pronunciations are similar. In practice, it's hard to keep the staccato rhythm of Spanish, but it's easier to try to pronounce it like a Japanese speaker (vice versa with Japanese). That said, it's easier to read both than listen since words are more concrete than speech.

When I vacation in Mexico and get drunk I will accidentally speak Japanese to the people who work at the resort.

Portuguese is unintelligible to me - I can't even transcribe the letters of the words I hear when I listen to portuguese speakers. I imagine if I took a class in it and powered through it I'd figure it out.

 

[Spiny Rumples]

I found sign language to be the easiest to learn vocab for. It looks fun as hell.

Different languages have challenges at different nuance levels, I think.
For example:
Spanish = Easy spelling and pronunciation. Grindy verb conjugation. Easy culture (if you're a man act macho) (if you're a catholic bonus points).
Mandarin Chinese = Highly grindy spelling (different block of angles and curves for each word) and slightly grindy pronunciation. Easy grammar. Culture is easy to look daft in but easy to get by as a dumbass.
Japanese = Writing is hard like Chinese, but pronunciation is easy. Haven't got to grammar yet but it seems weird. Culture is easy to look daft in and they will quietly let the retards fade out of existence.

Of course, this is based on schooling. Immersion-based learning makes the grammar feel intuitive and gives a knack for phrases more than words. Might result in being illiterate at the start. Most importantly, it requires some interesting media that people can get a ton of easily. I think English is great for this. People can get a feel for the pronunciation and rhythms just by watching Hollywood movies and listening to Linkin Park or whatever.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

I've studies quite a few myself.
German was my first and I'm glad it was because it is complicated enough to introduce things like noun declension, but not enough to totally scare you off like Finnish and Hungarian which have ~20 grammatical cases. Spelling is reasonably easy and consistent and most Germans speak pretty clearly.
Polish was next and for me it was a slight step up in difficulty from German with 7 grammatical cases, spelling that is consistent but still an atrocity to the Latin alphabet. Polish people don't always speak as clearly as Germans, but it's still a nice sounding language. I think it's the most difficult Slavic language, and even Russian with its Cyrillic alphabet is easier, so it's a good starting point since the Slavic languages have so much overlap in vocabulary.
Arabic was next and though it is not grammatically much more complicated than German, it has some weird features, your choices are Classical, Modern Standard, or some dialect, writing and spelling are a challenge, and I've never heard a dialect where people speak clearly. In their own countries, the speakers are generally pleasant people, even if they're still inbred retards. It also didn't help that I learned Modern Standard in Morocco, where the dialect is probably furthest from Classical or Modern Standard. At least its case system is only relevant in Classical, and there are only 3 you have to worry about.
Mandarin Chinese was next. Characters are not the most difficult part of the language since so much of language learning is memorizing vocabulary. Pronunciation and tones are difficult and you have to distinguish subtle differences between consonants like sh, x, zh, ch, and q, which in English are handled by sh and ch. Amazing anyone can understand each other given they generally talk like they have shit in their mouths (and they sometimes smell that way). Grammar is very straightforward, almost a copy of English in simple sentences, though some clauses might trip you up. For example, "The dumplings made by my mother are good" word for word in Chinese becomes "The my mother made dumplings are good".
I've studied a few others. Russian is my current project, so far it seems like a dialect of Polish written in Cyrillic, which is much more suited to Slavic languages. I'm also casually studying Czech and Ukrainian solely on Duolingo, just to see how similar they are. Hungarian was actually the one language I noped out of, though I may try it again some day.

 

[not william stenchever]

I have never studied Dutch but I can understand spoken Swamp German because it's basically English but either more or less retarded than English. I'm not sure which.

 

[piombo]

got a few:

1. thanks to being italian japanese ends up being very easy to pronounce and read, but it's still hard for how you have to learn and write kanji, grammar isn't that bad to figure out but the autism regarding the type of speech that should be used makes it really fucking annoying to learn.
2. spanish is very hard to figure out since my italian accent makes shit very confusing to read, add that compared to italian there is a bigger pressure on accents, with several words that either share the writing and pronunciation but have a completely different meaning (ex. gamba in spanish means shrimp while in italian it means leg, or burro meaning butter in italian but donkey in spanish), or words that are written in a completely different manner than expected (ex. birra/cerveza or uscita/salida)
3. english is a deceptively bullshit language to learn and it needs a special level of retardation to completely figure out, fuck learning english the "normal" way.

 

[PetiteFeet]

I only feel confident in Danish (my mothertongue) and English but when I was learning German back when I was 14 I felt like I understood the language as a whole much faster than I did with English.
For context, we started learning English in 4th grade and we could choose between French or German in 7th grade out of the 9 mandatory years of schooling. This was many, many years ago and I think kids learn English in either 1st or 2nd grade in current year.

I never dabbled in other languages beyond English and I've forgotten 90% of my German simply from failing to use the language, sadly. I can still understand large parts of random German conversations and I understand basic parts of other Germanic languages that are bordering or neighbouring countries to Denmark. Norwegian and Swedish feels like a slightly different dialect of Danish, and our cultures are very similar. Icelandic and Faeroese are more difficult, especially when spoken rather than written, because they have very different pronunciation from mainland Scandinavia. Dutch is difficult for me because it sounds like a super drunk German guy with a cold, slurring words. I understand certain dialects of German much better than Dutch/Dutch-adjacent dialects, Austrian German sounds like regular German to me but accented.

I would like to go back to learning another language and being a massive weeb, I've always wanted to take Japanese lessons but a large part of me is worried I'll be unable to learn another language because I'm in my 30s and due to personal circumstances I never got back into the school system after I graduated primary. My second excuse is I don't know where to start learning from - do I study Japanese online on my own, and if so, will studying it in English make it more difficult etc. because there are no in-person courses in my city, so I would have to start learning on my own.