Toughest language to learn?

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

I'm gonna hijack @gastd's idea to ask the opposite question:

What language do you consider really hard (or even impossible) to learn?

German kicked my ass so thoroughly, it's not even funny.

We also had mandatory Italian classes at school and, while I did well enough to pass, I never actually learned it.

You?

 

[Fietto!]

Spanish & Japanese.

German makes sense though. They got several ways of saying THE, & I bet that gets worse with the other common words in it’s dictionary.

 

[FarJyyUir]

The language of Love.

I'm romance based, Asian, Indian, Pacific.....
Anything outside the Americas & Europe (lump Russia in with them).

 

[extermist]

There's a lot depending on what language you're used to.
I'd like to learn some German because I think it sounds nice, but the one I actually need to learn is Samal so I can communicate with my in-laws.

 

[Aldia Aldia]

Unironically, Portuguese.
There are SO MANY theoreticals and small little details that you NEED to get right whenever you write a formal paper.

As an example, instead of having one "why" like English does, we have: porque (answer), por que (question), por quê (question, but at the end of a phrase or isolated), porquê (cause); and I won't even get started on regional dialects.

 

[HikaruKitsune]

Any language with a completely different writing system than the one you grew up with.

 

[Pearly]

Depends on your mother tongue, the furthest removed it is from the root language of your mother tongue, the hard is is assumed to be to learn a language. For me this should be Eastern Asian languages and that is actually not the case, for me at least.

That all said I found it easiest to pick up German and Japanese, passively, and I absolutely suck at Gaelic despite it being on road signs everywhere I grew up and it being "mandatory" as part of the school curriculum, whereas I was stuck having to actually deal with German and Japanese due to the media I was exposed to, and had a desire to "understand". German TV did not have English subtitles.

Necessity will force someone to adapt to a language pretty quickly, function is what is most important. Curiosity or institution requirements (a language thought in a school to tick criteria boxes) won't allow anyone to master a language, they will retain a novelty level mastery and little more, basic small talk and write a letter to a pen pal to amuse a examiner.

I will point out that there's rare instances of someone developing a stutter/stammer in specific languages meaning not everyone's tongue can adapt to all languages, though this one is very, very controversial

 

[Sheepy765]

Mandarin Chinese can be difficult, especially when you’re learning characters and how to pronounce them, double especially when you see a character that you’ve never seen or heard how to pronounce before. Granted you can kind of tell based off of certain strokes or other characters it contains but it’s still difficult.

There’s also four different ways to pronounce vowels which can become difficult to remember. （毛，猫，冒，帽 are all spelled the same in pinyin but mean different things）

 

[FlyingToaster]

Japanese

 

[FarJyyUir]

Vietnamese! Especially since I can't replicate the ability to vocalize like the locals!
It's Dũng not dung!

 

[shaggi]

Probably Chinese or Japanese. They're both pretty unique, especially those symbols instead of letters.

 

[Xdqwerty Xdqwerty]

Anything that has symbols instead of an alphabet

 

[FarJyyUir]

Anything that has symbols instead of an alphabet

Math is hard , 's why I shizpost