what do you think are the most difficult aspects of learning a new language?
955421
Everything! :-)\n\nThe vocabulary is pretty difficult.  There is so much of it and sometimes what you say in English isn't exactly the same as it is in another language. \n\nPronunciation is also difficult because there are sounds that are difficult to produce or even to detect!\n\nAnd grammar is a whole new ball game. The language you learn may follow a different word order, have new tenses, and treat adjectives like verbs (like Japanese!).
113241
They aren't simple things to learn. They're hard to learn, and it's a long and complicated process, made more complicated by bureacacy. That's why I moved to a different country to teach.
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.
910700
Did you know new immigrants from all over the world have a much more difficult time assimilating?  Its their children and later generations who ALWAYS assimilate......Its very difficult learning a new language, but that doesn't mean later generations will NOT learn the language and culture....
285695
copy a few passages from the languange that u want to learn\nevery day.any words that u don't know immediately see in the dictionary.learn the grammar as well as the pronounciation...just a tip,depends to the person hardwork...
846916
thinking difficult  :- (\n\nshopping easy! : )
1176259
Everyone says English but it might depend on what your first language is. If you speak German as a first language for example, you might find English (a Germanic language) easier to pick up than if you spoke Japanese as a first language. Ultimately, no language is any more or less difficult to learn than any other. It depends entirely on the person learning it (their experience learning other languages, how they are taught, why they are learning, etc.).
119033
If English is your native language it will be easier to understand. If not, it will be harder but not impossible.
180144
Japanese is without question the most daunting language for a native English speaker to tackle, according to Brecht. "I would like to learn Japanese but I don't have enough time in my lifetime. That's very depressing," says the linguist, whose center is based at Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He notes that the State Department allows its students three times as long to learn Japanese as it does languages like Spanish or French.\n\nAs Brecht explains it, the challenge with Japanese is threefold. First, there's the fact that the Japanese written code is different from the spoken code. "Therefore, you can't learn to speak the language by learning to read it," and vice versa. What's more, there are three different writing systems to master. The kanji system uses characters borrowed from Chinese. Users need to learn 10,000 to 15,000 of these characters through rote memorization; there are no mnemonic devices to help. Written Japanese also makes use of two syllabary systems: kata-kana for loan words and emphasis, and hira-gana for spelling suffixes and grammatical particles.\n\nGet beyond that and you're faced with a culture that, says Brecht, is "truly foreign for most Americans." With many languages, students start by learning introductions (Comment-allez vous? Trs bien, merci, et vous?) "But with Japanese, you can't even begin to do that with lesson one because of the social distinctions involved in making introductions," says Brecht. Age, social status, gender--"all these sociological factors make it so complicated that introductions can't be the first lesson," he notes.\n\nFinally, there's the issue of grammar. In English syntax, grammar is right branching. We set a topic and then comment upon it: "I saw the man who was sitting on the red chair, which was sitting beside the door." Japanese syntax is left branching-- "totally contrary to our approach," says Brecht. Thus, the sentence above becomes something along the lines of: "I saw the red, which was the chair, which was....." You get the idea.\n\nWhile exceedingly difficult, mastering Japanese is not impossible for English speakers, Brecht concedes. "There are thousands of students in our classes at SAIS who learn to function in Japan. It takes really good students and a lot of devotion."
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
129200
I'm learning english, french and some german too ..the german is the most difficult for me >(   anyway, there is a site that help me with learning languages: www.friendsabroad.com , there you can contact people who speak the language you want to learn and you teach them your language...it help me a lot , I hope it helps you also\n \n\nI hope this helps.
700832
They're all pretty difficult.  But there are some things about each language that are just a tad bit easier than others. I've studied all four languages, and here are my impressions of each:\n\n1. Writing System:\nMandarin: Uses hanzi (Chinese characters).  Not really difficult, but if you want to be literate, you have to know at least three thousand of them. So there are a lot to remember.\n\nCantonese: No written standard, but there are Cantonese characters that people use but it's not used in schools. \n\nJapanese: Japanese uses a combination of kanji (Chinese characters) and two sets of syllables that represent 46 sounds each called hiragana and katakana.   Hiragana and katakana are easy to learn.  However, knowing kanji is essential but you have to know fewer than the Chinese have to. Also, unlike Chinese (Most of the time), each kanji can have different pronunciations depending on how it's used.\n\nKorean: Koreans rely less on hanja (Chinese characters), but it's still encountered.  Koreans have their own unique writing system called han'geul. It's very easy to learn and quite logical, as they say. Korean is definitely easy in this respect.\n\n2. Pronunciation:\n\nMandarin: Uses tones.  Each vowel can be pronounced in one of 5 tones. For example there is a high tone or a dipping tone.  Mandarin also makes use of retroflex consonants which involve curling the tongue back. This is not found in English.\n\nCantonese: There are no retroflex consonants in Cantonese, but there are more tones - 9 of them.  \n\nJapanese: Japanese probably has the easiest pronunciation out of the four. However, it does have its difficulties.  There are no tones, but there is pitch accent. \n\nKorean: Easier pronunciations. No tones.  But there are more vowels that English speakers may have difficulty with. So it's a bit harder than Japanese.\n\n3. Grammar:\n\nMandarin & Cantonese: word order is usually SUBJECT VERB OBJECT (like English).  You don't have to worry about conjugations or inflections. In fact, the structure is remotely similar to English.\n\nJapanese & Korean: Conjugation is involved.  Use of pronouns is discouraged.  Honorifics are present. There are also different verbs depending on politeness. Word order is SUBJECT OBJECT VERB. English speakers will have more difficulty in these two languages than they will in the two Chinese languages above.\n\nIn any case, don't let the difficulties scare you.  In the end, they are all equally hard. Choose whatever you think will be of most use to you in whatever you do. Good luck!
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
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.
390250
You cannot learn any language "quickly". Languages necessarily take time to learn. Anyway, if you want to hurry it up, try being exposed to the language just as much as you can.
975493
It depends on how intelligent you are,but remember,starting something new in a language other than your native language can't be so easy for any bright student.
165377
English is a very difficult language.  The hardest part seems to be our use of odd slang phrases, cliches and idioms.  The sites listed below should help: