Which language is most difficult and which language is most easy to speak?
914421
Yes, it needs to be from the perspective of your native language. For example, Portugese is much easier for a Spanish speaker to learn than it is for and English or Chinese speaker to learn.\n\nJapanese is often pointed to as the most difficult language for English speakers to learn. This is because it differs from English on several significant scales:\n\n- Family Relationship: There's a "family tree" (and also a wave diagram) of the Indo-European languages, based on what languages developed from others and somwhat on where they came in contact and had significant exchanges. It's generally assumed that you'll have an easier time learning a language that's near your branch on the family tree. Japanese is not even ON this tree.\n\n- Vocabulary: Languages that share similar vocabulary are often considered easier to learn. Japanese contains many loanwords from English, but this is not the same thing as having authentically similar vocabulary related to the languages being, um, related. The vast majority of Japanese vocabulary sounds nothing at all like any words you already know. This makes memorization of vocabulary much harder.\n\n- Writing system. Japanese has a very simple phonetic (speech sound) system and a very straightforward way to "spell" words that makes it almost impossible to misspell or mispronounce a word. HOWEVER, they ALSO have over 2,000 "kanji" that one must know to be literate, and no text for adults is written in the easy simple phonetic alphabets, it's written with the super complicated kanji. Each kanji is a "pictogram" that is an extremely abstract picture of a concept. Each kanji has multiple pronunciations and meanings, which you must guess from the context or the other kanji it appears with in combination words. It takes Japanese students all of compulsory education (through highschool) to learn all of these kanji, and THEY already know the meanings of the spoken words in Japanese. YOU must learn the meaning and pronunciation in addition to the crazy complicated lines.\n\n- Syntax, for at least three reasons:\n1. Word order. This is true for many languages, not just Japanese, but I'll mention it because it's just one more difficulty. English is an "SVO" language- we say "The boy eats the cake." Japanese, however, is an "SOV" or "verb-final" language: in their word order, one would say "The cake eats the boy." You run into different structures when constructing more complicated sentences, too.\n\n2. Particles. There are little grammatical speech helpers in Japanese that don't conceptually translate well to English. I guess other languages have this too, but it's just one more complication to the extremely foreign syntactical structure.\n\n3. English and Japanese are on opposite ends of the Low Context ------- High Context continuum. English is Low Context. This means that it is IN MY SPEECH that I tell you who is doing what when where why how with definite articles and other relevant grammatical markers, and you'd better not leave anything out! Japanese, however, is extremely High Context. This means that the Japanese sentence for "I killed him" is exactly identical to the sentence that means "they killed her," "you killed me," "his brother killed my aunt," "that dog killed the president," and "Aaron Burr killed President Lincoln." Knowing which of these sentences is dependent entirely on context: have you just mentioned your aunt, or are you viewing a news report, in essence what are you talking about? However, I personally think this makes Japanese a comfortably ambiguous, gentle, and forgiving language, and actually makes it EASIER to communicate in.\n\nThis said, I have taken three years of Japanese, and it was incredibly interesting, and not too terribly hard. All humans have the same kinds of brains, so we are n
883171
If I should limit myself to only one language it would be probably Arabic, it is very challenging. And of course, to improve my Spanish.\nHave a nice time!
726255
egyptian arabic is the simplest, and all the arab world knows how to speak egyptian slang, because they watch our movies and songs all the time, so its gonna be more useful.\nbut i have to tell u something, arabic is one of the most difficult languages in the world, its better if u can take courses (not online), and u need to practice with someone too.\nGoodluck:)
44648
No its not true. English is one of the easiest languages to learn, almost anybody can be perfect at it because its gramma is too easy and the sounds of the words is also easy to learn. The most diffecult languages are Arabic and Chinese, their writing and grama including their sounds are one of a kind.
581474
Italian is pretty easy to learn. It is very similar to Spanish, and it is a romantic language so it rolls off the tongue.
245679
you mean East Asian languages ? I've studied Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. I would say, Chinese is the most difficult to learn whereas Korean would be the easiest among those three.\n\nkorean language is the easiest cuz it uses the Hangul script which is easy to learn and write compared with the Chinese characters, though Chinese characters are used sparingly in the Korean newspapers. Furthermore, Korean language is very similar to Japanese language grammatically.\n\nPersonally, I find it so easy to learn Korean because I had studied Japanese for a few years prior to learning Korean. \nSo I would advise those who have studied Japanese language before, to learn Korean as well. Trust me, it's really a breeze.
872493
The language that's easier is dependant on what your native language is. If your native language is English, French will be easier than German by a little bit. And French is also one of the more popular "official" languages used in international relations and business. In addition, many important international papers are published in English and French. Lastly, many graduate programs (depending on the field, of course) demand that you have at least a reading knowledge of French (of course, some demand German. Some demand both, or neither...)\n\nSo I'd recommend French. \n\nSomeone here mentioned that German is similar to Polish. It is not.
8428
The hardest languages to learn would be ones outside the Indo-European family of languages. This would include all East Asian languages, languages of the natives of Oceania, and many African languages. The hardest modern Indo-European language would probably be any of the Indo-Iranian languages, as they have had little influence on modern Romance languages, unlike the Italic, Germanic, and Greek languages. The easiest to learn would be any of the Romance languages, as they have many similar forms and cognates. Portuguese is the most like Spanish, and would thus likely be the easiest for a Spanish speaker to learn.
260624
Dependant on the language  - "language - Ease", German would be GermanEase, Russian, RussianEase, SpanishEase, FrenchEase. Implying that it is easy to learn.
484223
Pick something from a different family instead.  Russian or Greek.  It would be more challenging than any of the ones you mentioned because it isn't Germanic (like English) or Romance (like Spanish).\n\nBut if you want something easy, go for Italian.  If you speak Spanish, you will learn Italian in no time--assuming you don't get confused and start using words of one when you mean the other.
607734
Most of the foreign language students who come to my parents' language centre say that English is in fact one of the EASIEST languages they have ever learnt (and many have studied several languages in the course of their study). This is because English has significantly fewer *rules* to learn than other languages (Danish for example follows grammatical rules almost completely unswervingly). The students speak according to what they have heard said before, and learn through doing rather than learning long and complex tables of grammar.\n\nAtop that, English is based almost entirely on words that have come from other cultures. It has very few words that are entirely unique (if any). Words like 'frost,' 'candle,'\n'stand' (and I'm just choosing words more or less at random here) can be linked to common words in other languages - 'frorst' in Icelandic, 'candelabra' from Latin, 'stand' from 'standen' in German. Even the word for 'man' can be linked to Eastern Sanskrit.\n\nI would argue that the Eastern languages are the hardest for a westerner to learn, as they are so completely different from the languages to which we are accustomed. The script is different, the grammar is *completely* different and there are hardly any cognates (words that are similar to English words, such as the French words 'cinema' and 'hotel').\n\nSo I'd go with Korean, or Chinese. Both are very difficult for Westerners to get to grips with (very few ever become fluent), and even the most proficient students struggle with pronunciation.
119033
If English is your native language it will be easier to understand. If not, it will be harder but not impossible.
231024
English is regarded as the most difficult, due to its huge number of words (up to 200,000), complexity of grammar (derived from both Latin and Germanic) and haphazard rules.\n\nBy comparisom, Japanese is NOT difficult. It looks complicated because it is written differently from English, and yes, there are about 4,000 characters to learn in everyday use. But it's not that hard to learn spoken Japanese. The grammar is simple and the rules are very consistent.\n\nKind regards.
1052122
o boy good luck its one of the hardest languages in the world, i guess its because it has 4 sound for each character and you have to remember every character by memory unlike english where u can try to spell a word you never saw before. i went to school in china untill i was 9 and i remember we would write 100-1000 pages of character every day for homework
274789
It depends how good you're at foreign languages. Although, as for the average person--I'd say it's pretty hard.
403791
I depends on what your native language.   The structure of Chinese is very different compared to english.   There are even several Chinese dialects that are very different from each other.   I hear the hardest is supposed to be Mandarin Chinese.
305589
Judging by most of the questions and answers on this site, the easiest second language would have to be English.  I don't quite know what their first one was.