Which language is difficult to learn?

"Italian is not so hard, just a little harder than Spanish or French, but easier than German, much easier than Russian, and much much easier than Arabic"


Obviously since you state so easily you certainly know all these languages perfectly. Turn on the brain before the tongue.

It seems that most languages around the world have the reputation of being "hard to learn". Examples:

Arabic, Chinese, Navajo, Irish/Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Chinantec, Japanese, Polish, Finnish, Lithuanian, Russian, Hungarian, Basque, Greek, Korean, Armenian, Croatian, Ashi, Icelandic, Zuni, Thai, Turkish, Telugu, Hebrew, Malayalam.




(For assessing learning difficulty, I suppose we'd have to exclude cases where someone was learning a 2nd language related to their mother tongue. I also assume we're not talking about acquiring native-level fluency, which would be difficult for any language, even English.)

I've learnt Hungarian and Russian and I don't think they're that hard. As K.T said, all languages have their "challenging" areas: Russian: cases, Hungarian: a totally different structure and vocabulary, Portuguese, Italian: verbs, English: spelling and pronunciation. Anyway, I think Hungarian is much more regular than many european languages. I started learning Modern Greek a few days ago but I can't say anything about it yet, I'm still stuck at the alphabet and some basic sentences....:-)

Italian is easy, I learned it in a few days.

Guest I'd like to hear your Italian and besides it all depends on your mother tongue. If your mother tongue is Spanish I'm sure you can speak in a few days a beautiful italinized Spanish:-) No language can be learnt in a few days, please turn on your brain before you'll speak next time

I speak better Italian than many Italians, it is easy.

Guest What is your mother language?

"Italian is easy, I learned it in a few days."

I wonder who are the people who usually write in this forum. No reasonable person could make a statement like this

Fèrti, you should accept that there are people extremely brilliant who learn languages quickly . Only because it falls beyond your possiblities does not mean that it can't be true.

The most difficult language to learn is Chinese but if you already speak Japanese it may not be that difficult.

The most difficult language to learn is Chinese but if you already speak Japanese it may not be that difficult.

Another stupid and illogical statement

Fèrti, you should accept that there are people extremely brilliant who learn languages quickly


Everyone who is interested in linguistics and languages should know that it's impossible to learn a language in just a few days. In a few days you can learn some basic rules and words even if these languages are quite similar. Actually if the languages are too similar the pupil always tends to mix them up, especially at the beginning

How much time is necessary in order to learn a language? What you say is not backed by any linguists.

<< The most difficult language to learn is Chinese but if you already speak Japanese it may not be that difficult. >>

Yeah right. Other than the fact that spoken Chinese and Japanese are nothing alike. They both use Chinese characters but Japanese does so differently.

True, but 90% of Japanese Kanji are just identical to Chinese traditional Hanzi.