Comments

hellloooo

Well, just like to say that the tone thing in Chinese is a bit exaggerated. You can actually speak Chinese all in one tone and be be perfectly understood, except that it will sound a little weird. The tone doesnt really change the meaning of the words except for may be a few of them. So its the characters that makes Chinese hard to learn.
Juhan

This article is so cursory, casual. Take a look of Estonian, then you realize that Russian isn't that hard.
Take a look at this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_grammar
euphoriajoca

May I ask where are you from? I think that you do not even realize that Russian, Serbian etc. has something called “padež”, or case on English. You should research a little bit and you will see how Russian is “easy” to learn

Here are some useful links:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%B…
http://www.rlcentre.com/manuals_e.shtml
http://twitter.com/MrDanStewart Dan Stewart

English hasn't completely lost cases, we still use the genitive for nouns (that's adding “apostrophe-s” to denote ownership) and accusative for pronouns (I/me, they/them, etc.). Russian is even consistent with our use for the genitive case for using words rather than numbers to describe amounts, like “a week's worth of apples”. Russian becomes a lot easier when you understand a little more about the English rules you already use without knowing.

Finnish should have made the list though. Where Russian has six noun cases, 3 of which we use in English to some extent and the other 3 at least make logical sense, Finnish has sixteen. Sixteen! Some of which are on the way out because even native Finnish speakers don't have any clue what they mean anymore.
Gearhead

Any article supposedly covering bizarre and difficult to learn languages that doesn't cover Basque was no't written by a linguist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_grammar
Em

Japanese, “bizarrely difficult”? Having studied it for 3 years, I can tell you that it is NOT that hard. Yes, it has a different writing system. But the grammar is pretty simple, and this …

“Oh, also keep in mind that the way each character sounds changes according to whether it’s on its own, in a word in front of another character, in a word behind another character, which character it’s next to, and sometimes just for the hell of it.”

… is only sort of true. Pronunciation is actually way more regular than English, and the rules are very intuitive. I'll give you the forms of politeness, but if you know the basic one or two of them (standard/polite and informal) you'll be fine in 99% of situations.
Dave

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Thai.
http://www.letutor.com Language School

There are a lot of lesser known languages that are left out but of the major languages I would mostly agree with this. I think Japanese and Chinese are the hardest with Arabic and Russian following.
zach

Uhh, no. The article is correct.
zach

much of what you say is true, but I still agree with the article, just for different reasons – it's the social structure of japanese that makes it extremely difficult. The author touched on this a little but didn't do the problem justice. keigo, etc is VERY hard for a non-native speaker to master, because almost by definition it requires that you *be* japanese, or at least have grown up there.

Regarding grammar, the conjugations themselves are pretty easy. What's hard is understanding sentence patterns. For example, why does stringing together this seemingly random assortment of particles in this way equal some certain meaning? Certain patterns you can just learn, but when you enter regular japanese speech you find tons of variations of these patterns, that mean completely different things because one particle was replaced with another, or was moved to a different part of a sentence, and it ends up with a totally different meaning that is very hard to reason about.
jtotheb

Japanese isn't that hard. Yeah, there are a lot of conjugations, but they are all regular.
zingwoo

Dude thats amazing Love those Google eye things.

LOu
http://www.vpn-privacy.us.tc
The More You Know

Third tone in chinese is falling-rising, not rising-falling.
The More You Know

Very incorrect. The words “to follow” and “vagina” sound very similar and are differentiated by tone, as I found out during one embarrassing encounter.
Greg

I studied Japanese in university for 3 years, including 6 months in Japan. I also lived there for two years. Yes, Japanese is insanely difficult to learn. However, this article is a little off. The writing system is hard to learn because the way it's taught to English learners doesn't make sense. In fact, it makes it really difficult to retain characters. Still, writing is difficult. The Kanji for the verb to be born is used all over the place and has many different pronunciations. It's used in draft beer, birth, and student, all with completely different sounds. However, it really doesn't take that long to get used to this.

The real problem with learning Japanese is that how it is taught is not how it is spoken. This is further compounded by the fact that general sentence structure in writing and speaking is different. Basically, how it is written is not how it is spoken. If I knew then, what I know now, I would have structured how I studied Japanese much differently. Also, learning Japanese happens in plateaus. Once you understand certain concepts, it makes learning certain things much easier. For example, many people struggle with pronunciation, but in reality, it's really easy. However, if you don't bother to learn the phonetic characters first, it can be an issue. Either way, Japanese is hard, but not impossible, well aside from Keigo and properly using Wa and Ga.
Greg

What proficiency level are you at?

I only ask because it went like this for me. At first, I couldn't get anything and almost flunked out of my first semester of Japanese. The teacher helped me along that semester. Before the end of the semester something clicked and I ended up getting straight A's in Japanese. I rapidly absorbed beginner Japanese and then I went to Japan. I spent 2 months struggling and then like before, something clicked and I rapidly absorbed the next few levels of Japanese. I moved back to Japan to teach and started studying higher level Japanese and the same thing happened. Finally, I started working towards taking one of the proficiency tests and I slammed against a wall. Some of the high level grammar I could understand when hearing, but was just not able to integrate it into everyday speech. The real problem started when I got to stuff that you really couldn't translate adequately into English. You had to intuitively understand it's relative function in Japanese. Integrating that stuff, that really has no equivalent in English can take a long time.

However, I agree. A lot of Japanese is dead simple. If you learn the foundation of the language such as proper pronunciation of hirigana and katakana, it's just a matter of effort to become conversational.
chinag8r

the three tones of chinese are rising, falling, FALLING THEN RISING (think of a “U”) and a high tone. Not rising then falling.
Paul

You forgot Finnish. Finnish has 15 cases, and 27 different ways a noun can change based on it's spelling. And we haven't even got to the verbs…
Pedant

To be pedantic…The high tone is the first tone, follow by a rising second tone, then the third tone which falls then rises, and then the falling fourth tone.
http://www.guccicn.net Adam

I AM chinese and I am here buy soy home..
Mel

Basque anyone?
mmfish

You obviously don't know much about the cultures whose languages you're trying to write about. Would make it a lot easier for you to learn if you did and you would probably change this list.
http://www.freecreditreportsinstantly.org/ Jeri

I found that Klingon to be rather difficult to learn between all of the wedgies that I received.
Meezh

Icelandic is harder than all of these
Chris

I'm all for a little hyperbole to make a comedic point, but to say that English is easy because there's only 3 ways to modify a verb, just doesn't fly:

I play I do not play
he plays He does not play
I played
I was playing
I will play
I am playing
I will be playing
I will have played
I will have been playing
I had played
I had been playing
I am being played
I was being played
I will be played
I will have been played
I had been played
I was played

Of all the things I'm thankful for, not having to learn English as a second language is pretty high on my list.

Hm

Get over it, English IS easy. I’ve studied 5 languages and English is probably just a little harder than Dutch. Not sure what you’re trying to say by your list of tenses. You can say the same in other languages. In English, all you need to know is the right auxiliary verb to construct present, future or past and the corresponding ending for passive or active tense. That’s it. In Slavic languages, for example, it’s not the same cookie-cutter style plus the verb endings change depending on what gender you’re talking about and whether it’s plural or singular. Your head would star spinning if you ever tried to learn a foreign language because you wouldn’t even understand the concepts.

Yusuke

You were born in the West, you have no excuse NOT to know English. For those of us who didn’t grow up in the West/America, English was probably a bit more of a challenge. No need to be a dick.

http://www.oneworldtosee.com/ Tbull

Agreed, tittle should read “The 4 Most Bizarrely Difficult Languages To Learn for English born speakers”
http://www.hghtruth.org/ Jack

Since the article is written in English and not say, Urdu, its safe to assume that the reader will speak English and then compare the subsequent languages to their mother tongue. Your insufferable nitpicking aside, yes, it probably is pretty easy for a Serb to learn Russian.
pedro

why would your last page of your article be nothing? fuck you
Sarah G.

Surprised Finnish isn't on the list, or Basque.
ojkosasa

Ladies and gents, I was raised in former Czechoslovakia (and I still live in Slovakia) near the Czech, Austrian and Hungarian borders. After reading this article I feel very happy. I've got three mother tongues: Slovak, Hungarian and Czech. Czech and Slovak are very similar but there are differences so many kids nowadays don't understand it well. I studied German for 4 years on the high school so I speak it almost fluently. Also I studied Russian for 4 years in the elementary school (pretty mandatory in the communist era) so while I forgot a lot I still understand the point and I can read the cyrillic alphabet. Oh yes, I almost forgot English with which I use every day in the office Some time ago I started to learn Japanese. It's not easy because I lack the time for it but I'm listening to audio lessons in my car. I love the sound of it. I love to learn foreign languages. It's fantastic to be able to communicate with so much different people.
And BTW, the Slovak language possess almost all those 'traits' you mentioned in those languages in the article. The exceptions are: Chinese like toning, we use standard alphabet (with a few special characters) and we have a difference in you and You (You means you as a crowd or showing someone more respect).

Anonymous

The word “you” in English, with “thou”, is like the German Sie and du. English eventually dropped the informal usage and assimilated the formal/plural for informal and singular.

dgf1b

Chris, obviously you haven't grasped the English Language yet : 'I will have played, I will have been playing' WOULD is the word you were looking for as in I would have played, I would have been playing,
sethmbaker

Great post. I've learned a little survival Thai. It's not too bad, though I'll probably remain illiterate. As helllooo said, the problem with tones (in Chinese, Thai, Vietname, etc) is overrated. Just listen to native speakers and, when in doubt, use a flat, non-inflected tone

I would add that English has some terribly strange grammar going on, though not as bad as Russian. Easy for native speakers, but for everyone else.

Xxxeni

Try Lithuanian for impossible to learn…

missing language

I think you are missing IsiXhosa or even worse the Bushman language. It has very difficult click sounds
seph

What about 'iku', 'kuru' and 'suru'?
matthew

yeah arabic is definitely harder than how it's portrayed here.
the chart for arabic left out all the conjugations for plural! and they didn't even mention the case endings, which are a PAIN (working on an arabic minor). three different *groups* of case endings for those non-verbs, which group obviously determined by the role it plays in the sentence. and the ending then varies whether or not it is single, dual, plural, indefinite or definite…
the distinction between modern and classical arabic above isn't very accurate. classical arabic is what'll you'll read in the Qur'an. if you wake up in Baghdad you won't likely hear modern standard arabic, you'll hear the iraqii dialect, just like if you go to any arabic speaking country(of the 17ish?). then there are often slight regional variations as well, but that would just be like how people talk in the mid-west vs. how people talk in the south. they are all quite different, if the dialects are close in proximity they're mutually intelligable, but if they're far enough apart then not so much. that's why scholars set out to create Modern Standard Arabic, a sort of pan-arabism push. i've mostly studied MSA, a bit of egyptian, and had a crash coarse in moroccan while i was there, and they are all pretty different, especially between moroccan and egyptian. not just everyday vocab, moroccan has different uses for tenses (not just the tenses are different, but rather conversation takes place in different tenses) and conjugation as well.
but the script is so beautiful, they have the best calligraphy.
jojo

apparently one must be retarded to not understand basic math. all language is based on math so just take your time
Jarek

This is very relative. Russian is not really that hard to learn for a person who speaks similar slavic language. Moreover Russian is far from being the only language with declension system.
euphoriajoca

I agree. For instance, Serbian is much harder then Russian. We have 7 cases and strange word connections. Where Russians have vowels, we sometimes do not have them.

Death on Russian: Smert, Death on Serbian: Smrt

But the great thing in our grammar is that we have this awesome rule 'Write as you speak and read as it is written'.
http://www.google.com/profiles/lyesmith.trash lyesmith

Try Basque, Hungarian or Polish
Chris

Actually, “will have” and “would” are both valid, but don't mean the same thing. One is a tense/aspect (future perfect [progressive]) to talk about something that will happen in the past, relative to something that will happen in the future; and the other is…(rummaging through Wikipedia…) conditional mood, to indicate speculation:

“By the time II turn 40 years old, I will have refuted 20 inaccurate blog comments.”
“He would have appeared more intelligent, if he had done a little research first.”

But thanks, you've inadvertently added to my list of ways that English verbs are insanely difficult, as well as remind me of one or two more common ones:

future subjunctive: were playing / were to play

-C
kang

If you think you can get by in Chinese without using correct intonation, you must be surrounded by VERY polite Chinese people who are accustomed to dealing with foreigners. To a Chinese person, incorrect intonation sounds like gibberish. For instance, the words “buy” and “sell” are “pronounced” exactly the same — the only difference being in their tones. So if you want your child to learn a tonal language, start them off as early as possible so their ear will be well-trained.
Joss

Try this:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Most_Difficult_Languages_-_Polish
WalterSosa

I can't believed Pashto ( Spoken in Afghanistan and Western Pakistan) wasn't mentioned. Linguists confirm this ergative language and complex verb structure as one of the hardest languages to learn.
Erna

I have learned 3 of the four languages you mentioned above. I learned Arabic as I attended Madrassah from elementary to high schools. In fact, I know how to read Arabic characters before I learned Latin characters. I spoke Arabic quite fluently in high school, but then I rarely use it, now I forgot most of it. I took Russian studies as my major for bachelor degree. I did a course of Japanese language for few months. I don't dare to learn Chinese because I'm kind of tone-deaf.
Of all those 3 languages I learned, I would say Russian is the most difficult one and Japanese is the easiest one.
BTW, I'm not an English native-speaker.
http://twitter.com/MoheySaleh A. Mohey Saleh

correction: there are 22 Arab countries.
Qhapaqinka

Any Athabaskan language has all of these beat. I have an MA in linguistics (currently working on my PhD) and have found many traditionally 'difficult languages' such as Modern Standard Arabic, Turkish, or Aymara, to be a breeze. But I took a year of Navajo and at the end of it could barely put together a sentence. The verbal structures are so dramatically different from Eurasian languages, and the cultural context so nuanced, that becoming a fluent L2 speaker of an Athabaskan language requires years of dedicated study and a great deal of immersion, in my opinion. On the other hand, they are gorgeous languages with a fascinating history – Geronimo, Cochise, and Manuelito, for example, were speakers.
mishmish

I taught myself how to read Russian in five days during my winter break. Granted, i get a lot of practice because of the city I live in but still, it's really not all that hard. мйшка
Research_Samurai

Heloo i thing i said this is good.But we have to increase our essay and writing skill.So you should start to writing now…
Research_Samurai

Heloo i thing i said this is good.But we have to increase our essay and writing skill.So you should start to writing now…
Research_Samurai

Heloo i thing i said this is good.But we have to increase our essay and writing skill.So you should start to writing now…
JZ

It makes a world of difference. For example, fan (constant tone) = flip, fan (rising) = irritating, fan (falling then rising) = reversed, fan (falling) = rice.
Guestato

The title is misleading. It should read “4 languages I never tried to learn but I heard that they are hard to learn”. It should also be said that it's heavily english-centric since Russian is quite easy for people who speak other slavic languages, as English is probably easier to learn for Germans than for Poles or Czechs. Japanese is not that hard either. It's just asian, so it's different. You'd probably have less problems with Japanese if you were Korean or Chinese.
MeiDaxia

hellloooo, you're the kind of foreigner that makes me ashamed to be a foreigner in China. Because, what you say is exactly the way the majority of foreigners I've met here in China react when they speak a “tone deaf” Chinese to a Chinese person. My Russian classmates don't get it, when they speak a tone neutral Chinese with worse pronunciation, and Chinese look at them like they're speaking a foreign language… because they are!

I'd just like to correct the article, as well, that the 3rd tone in Chinese is “falling and rising” not “rising and falling”. _ / v are the 4 tones.
Surenae

Ooooh, come on. All these “conjugations”, masculine/feminine forms and issues like that are a totally superficial argument for Russian or Arabic, since they appear in most European languages, just in different numbers. I acknowledge the difficulty of learning how to write in a different direction with numbers that look like a twisted string, but when it's about the cases and forms.. We have much of this in Polish too, so Russian's not impressive and I'd rather point to Finnish as one that has hella more than other languages…I don't know if the highest number tho ;P
gjk

hm, i was very surprised about mentioning russian language here, nonsense comparing it with few others, really difficult languages i was learning russian- noth difficult
& there is 1 language- lithuanian- known in linguistics as 1 of most difficul languages in the world 2 learn. it is 1 of the oldest languages in the world, derives from the same as Sanskrit, congener with it. with lot of very different dialects in that very small country, hard 2 understand 2 lithuanians themselves & so on.. & have much more word forms than russian language have, meanings, times & so on, very long story i'd replace russian with lithuanian language in that list, that's 4 shure.
the guy who wrote that article, thought he/she know enought 2 write about it lol. that makes me think that & other things in this article may be incorrect.
Max

Japanese isn't that hard. It makes much more sense than Chinese. I'll concede that the honorifics are a bit tough though.
Bader

Actually Arabic is a language that has very clear rules to learn, I cannot say the same about English.

Hastur

English actually has very few rules in comparison to most languages, the problem are the irregularities which don’t follow the damn rules, and there are tons of those in English… Many other languages have barely any.

Not to mention that English spelling and pronunciation are different from each other because of historical reasons, which makes it often impossible to know how a word is written unless you have learned it. Again, this problem doesn’t really exist in many languages at all or at least to anywhere near the extent it does in English.

But the actual rules of grammar in English are not hard at all, and are very similar to Swedish and German, except easier…

svoloch

Russian is not difficult. Many other languages have cases and conjugate their verbs, and people pick them up, and russian up, with little challenge. The alphabet takes about two weeks.

The real challenge is that languages are taught as math problems, and not as real modes of communication. You cannot learn a language by it's grammar rules. It requires too much of a gap to get beyond the math problem of “subject+verb+object=sentence” and into how people actually speak. Let's hope that schools, colleges, etc.. catch up with a more modern teaching model for language, or everyone will continue to take 4+ years of a language, and not be able to order a taco, croissant, pelmeni, or whatever without a dictionary and a drool cup.
Tsss

Or Czech. I would say most (or all) Slavic languages have complicated rules. I think that the level of difficulty can be a very subjective thing since your native tongue and experience with other languages can make a huge difference.
guest

I’m Japanese, and I find Japanese difficult
Some people say it’s easy, and it is, to some extent, but to be really fluent, is really difficult. I thought I knew Japanese when I was growing up in Korea, but once I returned to Japan and enrolled in a Japanese school, I went through hell to get to the same level as everyone else… I already kinda sub-consciously knew the grammar and all, but to understand all the little nuances and to learn the difference between “katai” writing style and “desu-masu” style, was difficult. Kanji is also hard. Try memorizing a character like 檸檬　or 鬱! and you have to be able to USE them… which means you have to memorize all the different ways to read each character, and the weird exceptions… and that doesn’t even include having to learn Classical Japanese! ああ、哀れなり・・・ I challenge all the people who say learning Japanese is easy to try going through high school in Japan!
vaguelyhumanoid

This is really bogus. Arabic is one of the most grammatically logical languages on earth other than the broken plurals. There’s a whole system behind the “random vowel changes”. Russian isn’t even a different language family, and the writing system is simple and based on Greek. I was expect Xhosa, Basque, etc, but Russian? Russian is a distant relative of English!
opskrbljivanje

What is this rubbish? Are you English-speakers linguistically challenged or something?
I mean, I’m a Croat. It took me a year to learn Russian(although longer for vocabulary), two years for Latin and a year for German. There are a few languages I started learning but had no time. Japanese is unbelievably simple. Arabic is tricky because of the tricky vowels. But come on!
Croatian has 7 cases, a lot of sound changes, and a trillion cases or something, just like Russian, but ten times harder(and more beautiful imho).
guest

Hardly any of these languages are “Bizarrely difficult” to learn. They are different for english speakers. I’m prett sure learning an extinct language with no surviving speakers would be quite troublesome. Or maybe some pidgin language. Or some language used by tribal peoples with unusual syntaxes or structures.
Anonymous

I am having a hard time mastering Canadian.
Gongchangb

中国人学日语就简单多了
http://www.twu.ca/academics/graduate/leadership Jason

I think mandarin Chinese is definitely up there on the list.
Charlene

Actually Dutch seems to be one of the most difficult languages because of the many irregular verbs. Talking Dutch is not that difficult however if you can make your voice sound like a goose.
Roundeye

The author is pretty ignorant on the subject. Try Navajo, for one. And as someone mentioned, Thai. Sumerian, particularly with the cuneiform, would also pose a challenge far gnarlier than any of the four mentioned. As for cases, compare the 15 of Finnish to the “mere” seven of Russian (and learning a new alphabet is probably the easiest thing about learning a new language). The list of languages more difficult than the few listed in the article would, by any estimation, by very long.
This article is nothing more than a brief summary of some of the unique features of four world languages.
Yipedo

German is not that hard. I agree that the adjective endings and the completely random noun genders (the door is somehow feminine, so it’s DIE Tür; the girl is somehow neuter, so it’s DAS Mädchen; the fish is somehow masculine, so it’s DER Fisch, etc.) is quite difficult to memorize. Also, the positioning of the words in a sentence is not the same as in English. However, the grammar rules have relatively few exceptions, and the vocabulary is not only logical, but is also quite similar to the English words with Anglo-Saxon origins (House/Haus; Father/Vater; to swim/schwimmen; to drink/trinken; etc.). Not to mention German spelling, like Spanish, is very phonetical, unlike the monstrosity we see in French and especially English.
Anon

I speak Russian and English, and knowing these two can really help you if you want to learn another language. If you learn Russian and English, you can learn Spanish or any romance languages more easily than if you didn’t. It’s like learning the piano, after you know it you can play the violin, guitar, etc.