I've heard finnish is very, very hard. But since I'm a native finn, I suppose I'm not the right person to say this...
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Anonymous2007-11-19 9:12
yea well i know few americans who have learned finnish. but i think that it's still rated in the top 3 of hardest languages. i can be wrong.
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Anonymous2007-11-20 7:22
Threads like these are completely meaningless. It just turns into a massive pissing contest.
This is like apples and oranges.
The difficulty of a language is an individual thing, based on your lingual (and cultural) experience, and which linguistic topics you are most comfortable with.
For some, the completely different mindset behind Russian, Japanese or Arabic might be a massive setback, for others it's the huge set of phonemes in Abkhaz, Ubykh and !Xoo, and for yet others, it's the cases in Finnish (though this is less of a problem in practice; Finnish is extremely regular, and the 'cases' are merely semi-fancy equivalents of prepositions; though, like Russian, Finnish has a completely terrifying verb system), and so on.
tl;dr: Pointless topic with a pointless question to which there's only a subjective answer. Go to bed.
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Anonymous2007-11-20 9:00
>>8
Ubykh is dead, as you should be. gtfo my /lang/
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Anonymous2007-11-20 13:06
I think swedish and finnish are the hardes to learn.
For English speakers it would be Korean because of the pronunciation, if you are slightly off in most of the languages, people will understand you but when speaking Korean, your pronunciation cannot be slightly off. Chinese difficulty is overrated.
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Anonymous2007-12-01 18:29
>>19
Korean is not so hard. i want it to be my third language.
Chinese is way harder. at least Korean allows for accents
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Anonymous2007-12-02 5:02
>>1
As far as I can tell, Chinese is dead simple for an English speaker. Fairly comfortable sounds, and less complicated grammar than most.
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Anonymous2007-12-02 5:04
mexican
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Anonymous2007-12-02 7:13
Filipino.
Do you speak it?
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Pedro Hansen2007-12-02 8:18
What about those African languages where they just use clicking-noises?
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Anonymous2007-12-02 9:30
>>19-20
Difficult or not, Korean is only useless. Learning it is just a waste of time.
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Anonymous2007-12-04 5:37
>>25
not really. most of our cars are built in Korea (from Chinese parts) and more of our electronics are being built in Korea then in the past. If anything, now if a perfect time to start learning.
>>26
to put in the immortal words of willy brandt, "If I'm selling to you, I speak your language. If I'm buying, dann müssen sie Deutsch sprechen!"
so no, not at all.
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Anonymous2008-02-27 14:13
percieved "learning difficulty" by adults is irrelevant, jap is reputed to be hard but it was a breeze for me as I speak an azn trash language myself.
A real measure of these could be a comparison of how late kids gather decent speech capabilities. I heard Arabic failed in that, but it could be something related to writing and not speaking too, I can't remember for sure now.
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Anonymous2008-02-27 17:00
A magyar nyelv nagyon nehéz van.
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Anonymous2008-02-27 17:09
Russian.
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Anonymous2008-02-29 14:40
>>41 jap is reputed to be hard
Lol what? Japanese has one of the easiest grammars in the world.
>>41
Simple grammar and simple pronounciation rules.
I don't know what makes you think Japanese is hard.
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Anonymous2008-02-29 19:24
Icelandic is regarded as the most difficult language to learn by most language experts, followed closely by Finnish. I think I'll go with that, having looked into both languages a bit.
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Anonymous2008-02-29 19:53
>Icelandic is regarded as the most difficult language to learn by most language experts
It isn't.
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Anonymous2008-02-29 20:29
By the way people use it? Probably English.
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Anonymous2008-03-01 9:02
>>44
That's why I said reputed to be, it was far easier than learning German for me.
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Anonymous2008-03-01 14:07
The only thing hard about Icelandic is preaspiration. And that's a fucking breeze.