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.

[Flavius Claudius Julianus]

If we're talking serious study beyond '10 survival phrases' ran through for travel, I'd have to say four: French, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

As a native, especially educated English speaker, I had a huge leg up with French. Doubly so given I had a classical education and had a solid grasp of Latin. An hour of music here and there, some films every now and again, and regular rote memorisation gave me an enormous leg up when I was actually 'in situ' in France.

Japanese was second, spurred on my teenage Japanophilia. The 'alphabets' are not difficult at all, and grammar at the basic level is manageable even for first-second language learners. With an increasing intrusion of katakana in place of historically kanji/hiragana-laden words, Japanese is, strictly speaking, becoming easier over time for learners.

Korean. Learned because I was engaged to a Korean woman. I found my Japanese knowledge a helpful springboard, and the simplicity of the hangul alphabet meant I could handle reading and writing quite rapidly. Grammar is difficult, and the difference between banmal/more formal language is significant. Many Korean learners find they wade into murky territory progressing from beginner-intermediate to proficient levels of understanding - I was no different. Also, numerous different number systems is a pain in the arse.

Chinese is just fucking hard. More tones, more characters, just insanely more difficult. You have genderless language which is a benefit, but it's still incredibly more difficult than the above languages by a long shot. Immersion is absolutely critical if you want to progress beyond rank beginner.

Shortly before I got married I was learning the Georgian script, which, though it reminded me of Greek (again, classical education,) I ultimately had little time on it before I got involved in other shit.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

OP are you a polyglot? I am impressed

In a liberal sense. I can speak enough Japanese and Spanish to fairly get by. Maybe even Russian too.

In order of proficiency.
1. Spanish
2. Japanese
3. Russian
4. French
5. Finnish (Which may overtake French at the 4th spot)
6. Polish

Spanish is a very easy language and with Italian and Norwegian are the best languages to start off with if you want to become a polyglot.

Japanese being hard is overrated. It's actually a really easy but time consuming language. Like solving a larger Rubik's cube.

Russian is also very easy for me except for the pronunciation. I need to get used to words clashing around in ways I never said things before.

French is fairly complicated. I keep fucking up saying the final letter of words that are meant to be silent.

Finnish is also fairly complicated but is actually going pretty easy for me so far. Thankfully it's phonetic so it's gonna go very smoothly.

Polish is also fairly easy for me but a slightly harder version of Russian.

Hungarian doesn't seem too hard for me either so far. It might change in the future though.

Arabic is a bitch to learn because of it's various conjugations and different ways to say something. It is the hardest one I ever tackled so far.

Korean is also really hard for me due to the sounds it makes which is one I never heard of before.

Mandarin Chinese is fairly hard to. It's gonna take me a long time to get used to the tones.

Hindi is also fairly hard for me too.

 

[Equivocal_Iki]

I guess Japanese is pretty easy once you get over grinding kanji. Though of course that's because I end up seeing it everyday regardless. I got a machining job and like half the machine tools and gauges used here are from Japan so I can pretend to not be a weeb.

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.

The grind's the same regardless of what age you are. If you're a weeb I highly recommend at least learning to read hiragana and katakana because even if you don't get any farther you can at least sound out a lot of things you come across. https://gohoneko.neocities.org/learn/kana
I think if you can read hiragana you're in a good position regardless of how you tackle the rest of the language. I liked my strategy of going through the Genki books while supplementing kanji but I'm lazy and never got farther.

 

[Obstacle]

English is inconsistent in it's rules, being mainly a Germanic language with a bunch of Romance vocabulary, so my ESL friends tell me it can take a while of immersion to become fluent in English, handily, there is a glut of English language media, which helps.
As an English monoglot, I struggle with languages that use "gendered" word endings, because the only gendered words in English relate directly to the sex of the subject, aka, him and her, man and woman.
I mean, we have some instances where either a masculine or feminine ending word from French is adopted, say "Pipette" but here the "-ette" suffix morphs into an indicator of small size when in English use, with only a residual implication of the feminine from the root.
Maybe this confusion is part of why "gendered language" as a political force fomented in the Anglosphere; it is novel here.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I've only ever seriously studied French and Japanese. The former wasn't hard at all and now I can kind of read and understand any Romance language beside Romanian or those phonetically spelled microlanguages in Italy and France (beside Occitan which is also easy). Japanese took a lot longer but I get enough immersion I can compensate for it. The weirdest thing was when I learned enough kanji to read the credits in animu. I wouldn't say I'm very good at it but I can somewhat understand unsubbed animu now.

I tried Finnish since it sounds cool in metal but it has too many declensions and is a moon language. Russian is also hard too.

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

You should try learning a Coast Salish language just for the ridiculously long strings of consonants. Ubykh or other Circassian languages are great too.