What is the hardest language to learn?
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M$3 Answers
The hardest language to learn really depends on what language you learned first. The 'distance' between your first language and the second language determine how difficult it is to learn that language.
If your first language is English, you will have (relatively) little difficulty with other languages that use the Roman (or Latin) alphabet. Therefore, many Western languages are quite easy to learn, including German, Spanish, Danish and others. of course, within this group of languages, differences occur, because some languages belong to the same 'family' of languages. For Dutch, English and German are easier to learn than Italian.
However, the difficulty really starts when character sets start to differ. The Russian language uses different characters than the Latin Alphabet. However, if you learn to 'map' the characters, the Russian language still has remarkable resemblance to English. Both use 'words' based on a series of characters.
The next step is to also change the meaning of the alphabet. With Chinese (and other Eastern languages), not only the 'characters' differ, Chinese also groups characters together in (parts of) words per Chinese character. Also, in Chinese the meaning of the characters differs, and one often cannot directly translate a Chinese text literally to English.
So, what is the most difficult language to learn? The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has defined the difficulty of a language as the number of weeks it takes to learn the language. According to that definition, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean are the most difficult languages for native English speakers, as these take 88 weeks to master.
Of these, Japanese is considered the truly most difficult.
Edit: To answer your second question: Norwegian is NOT difficult to learn, it will only take 23-24 weeks (575-600 class hours) to learn, placing it in the least difficult to learn category. You'll have to find another challenge :)
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M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
great answer @mithrandir! Wonder if there's anybody out there that's fluent in ALL of these - THAT would be impressive!