What according to you is the most difficult language in the world to learn and why do you think so?

I've hears it takes years to learn the basics of Chinese. 

It all depends on what your native language is. What's hard for a native English speaker might be pretty easy for a native Japanese speaker.

devilyoudont wrote:

It all depends on what your native language is. What's hard for a native English speaker might be pretty easy for a native Japanese speaker.

I agree with you, it depends of your mother tongue. But I think that the most difficult languages are the ones with a complete different alphabet.

Berlitz claims that you can learn everyday Mandarin Chinese in 30 days. o_o I'm not psyched up enough to try.

Jess.PWinkler wrote:

I agree with you, it depends of your mother tongue. But I think that the most difficult languages are the ones with a complete different alphabet.

Honestly, the writing system is hugely challenging for me in Japanese, but it's not the most difficult aspect of the language.The reason Japanese is so much more difficult than Spanish, for me, is because Japanese shares far less vocabulary with English. And, of course, languages that use logographs are going to be the most difficult to learn to read in, but I somewhat doubt that a different alphabet creates that much difficulty for speakers of very similar languages, for example German and Yiddish. And then of course, there are learners who have no interest in learning to read, and languages that have no written form.

For me, a native English speaker, it was Japanese. A bit harder than Mandarin, much harder than Korean, Thai, Russian, etc.

I think its arabic

mohamed.abdennadher wrote:

I think its arabic

I think it's the easiest for a native Arabic speaker.

What you call “most difficult” could actually be someone’s easiest though.