In your opinion, what is the most difficult language to learn?

[Halfsoul]

Itīs rather interesting, that the more languages you know, the easier it becomes knowing another one, especially if you know indoeuropean languages like latin or cl. greek(which i know), so learning i.e. french, italian becomes a lot easier if you know latin. Knowing danish help you to understand sweedish and norweigean, but also german because they are both germanic and thus have many words in commen, although the grammar is german is based on cases like in Latin with nominative, accusative, genitive ect.

The most difficult language i learned was cl. greek, mainly because itīs a dead language meaning that nobody speaks it anymore, but in neardy societies :d and thus you have to learn it academically through grammar et cetera whereas with a "living" language you could become better quite quickly, by talking the language with people, watching tv or hearing radio. That option doesnīt exist with dead languages, so it becomes a whole lot harder.

[Halfsoul]

i forgot to mention, that my native tongue is danish, but i also know german, english, french quite well and pro tempore i am learning arabic.

[Leopold Stotch]

Hmm, maybe Muzzy can help me... >.>

MUZZY!!! yay!! hehe!

Cantonese first language.
English and French learned at the same time.

I am super best. Nothing is difficult for me because I am the smartest person in the world.

now, correct me if i am wrong (PLEASE!), but don't other countries start teaching foreign language when the kids are young enough still to absorb it better? iirc, America doesn't start teaching foreign lang. until middle school or high school. i mean, you may have some interaction with it when you are younger in the classrooms, but not much... eh, maybe im just remembering how my skool days were. idk if that's still true or not. forgive me.

[trashX]

Europeans do learn languages at an early age. Switzerland got it all ****ed up though and teaches french first and english in middle school.

[boogyman19946]

My dad was studying German for a while when he was in school. My mom on the other hand was learning Russian. I doubt any of them can actually speak the language now but my mom can understand Russian quite well to be frank. My sister and I had to study English beginning first grade I believe. It was British English so coming to America where a different accent is used most of the time and not to mention plenty of slang, the English I was taught in Poland came out to be quite useless It took me roughly a year in America around English speaking kids for 8 hours each day to learn to speak English fluently =]

Reasoning behind being able to learn languages quicker when you already know a couple is because many of the words repeat and the pronunciation of the spoken language becomes familiar a lot quicker because usually it's just a variation of a language you already know. If I knew Chinese, studying Japanese for me would be no problem. Knowing Polish and English gives me a cookie cutter recipe to learn Spanish because I can pick out words really quickly =] I have never tried learning French and I'm not sure if I will take the time to do so I hope that I can master the difficult and awkward languages early on so later on in life when I become old and have to work, learning a new one won't be as much of a hassle as it is for my parents Who after 5 years are struggling to put together a correct sentence in English.

[Nazdakka]

Mark Twain on the difficulties of learning German.

[krischan]

That was an enjoying read

But who said "English is like a mix of German and French, lacking the good features of the two" ? I'm pretty sure it was a native English speaker.

[BobCox2]

All my Grandkids get American English and Mexican Spanish as milk tongues.

[boogyman19946]

All my Grandkids get American English and Mexican Spanish as milk tongues.

I separate my languages too. I use Polish as my pick up line (I guess people with accents are awesome...), English as my milk tongue, and I will use Japanese as an extra act of coolness to win brownie points in anime loving people Besides, knowing 3 languages is awesome Oh... and taking years of Spanish only looks good on a college applications because on Resumes... Japanese is FAR better Knowing 4 languages is even better ^_^

[Galabab]

native:
russian.

learned ukranian from the first grade on and engish from 5th, moved to germany and had to learn french in 7th grade.
From the experience of having learned those 5 languages I can say none of them was really difficult for russian native speaker. Russian has suffixes depending on the case, its super complicated, I heard german russian teachers making mistakes all the time!
Like if I say "Rogop was running" in russian you can tell the gender of the subject from the verb form that means every verb has 3 forms, and there are a bunch of exceptions ofcourse. While german has its 3 articles, russian has them too but they are built in in the end of the words and get changed from case to case. Its super complicated.

In english you have:
I run you run he she runs we run you run. 2 forms altogether for 1 tense. SUper easy. Geraman has like 4 and russian 6.

But in the end its just an other indogermanic language.
I believe its all about the language family. The closer it is to your native language the easier you learn it.
For english native speakers it would be like:
1.german, dutch, swedish
2.french, spanish, italian
3.greek, russian, polish and other indogermanic languages not having influanced english.
4.Chinese, japanese, hebrew, finnish, arabic, african languages, native amercian and all the non indogermanic ones no big difference which exactly.

On a sidenote, while reading english writers I prefer original but german over russian because its closer. But recently reading Murakami I realized german is as distant to japanse as russian is, so it doesnt really matter.