As a Finnish speaker, Japanese was easiest language to learn. I have also studied English, German and Swedish of which English was the easiest only because much of the media I consume is in English. Compared to English, Japanese was much easier. Didn't really need to learn to pronaunce words (I still have trouble pronauncing English as some of the sounds don't come naturally to me). Grammar is much easier and similar to Finnish. Learning kanji is the hardest part as he explained. But I prefer memorising kanji over grammar rules that don't make sense to me.
I heard that about Hungarians have it easier learning a language like Kazakh. Turkish speakers have an easier time learning Japanese and Korean as well.
I think it would be fun if He tried finish. at least I think that would be a hard langauge to learn. The only thing I know. Is that Swedish isn´t of any use, I can kind of understand the other nordic languages.
Very impressive. I struggled especially with memorizing the pitch accent of each word and applying the right grammar rules in the right contexts. There are also so many grammar particles, it's been four years and I still struggle with using ための ために correctly and using が、へ、に、and で in the right contexts.
Metatron, your English is impeccable in my opinion. If didn't know your background, I would say that you sound like someone who picked up English at very young age. Your accent is very minimal which makes you perfectly clear and easy to understand. I say this a native English speaker. I'm definitely jealous of your talents when it comes to learning multiple languages. I struggle to reach proficiency in a second language. Like you say, it largely comes down to consistent exposure and practice.
@@-Dazai- And what is your native language, if you don't mind sharing? I hope you find your journey through the language rewarding, as although it might not be THE hardest language to pick, it can be quite challenging and I always praise foreigners for trying. If you meet any obstacles, don't let them discourage you :)
@@verAlvyn thank you:3 and my native language is English but Polish was very hard in the beginning but now I am at conversational level but I keep trying to get better because one day I wanna live in Poland
I dont know Spanish, but have heard from native teachers that it's simple at an easy level, but then it becomes complicated...? My language is Norwegian, it's not so difficult ... to read. But you will not be able to pronounce it😊 because of a million (almost😂) dialects, varieties and pitch and tones...
Japanese must certainly be the hardest major language for a European to learn. The writing system is so colossally illogical and difficult, it’s an enormous effort just to be able to read very simple texts, and this significantly slows down acquisition. It’s also not helped by Japanese people culturally not correcting foreigners, meaning that many Japanese L2 speakers seriously overestimate their own abilities. One curiosity about Japanese though is that basic ‘tourist’ Japanese is actually really easy - you can communicate in a restaurant with just a few dozen easy to remember words (unlike with tonal languages, where even pronouncing simple words requires a lot of practice). So the jump from basic Japanese to intermediate is enormous, while the opposite is to an extent true with mandarin.
For me (American born of Indian descent), in order of hardest to easiest of the languages I've studied: Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, German, Telugu, Hindi/Urdu, Russian, French, Persian, Spanish
It’s quite endearing hearing that Latin was difficult for you, even though you speak Italian. I was always angry at my Italian classmates that they have it easy with Latin, but now I see they really had to put in a lot of work and effort to nail it!
it's like German and Swedish somehow or Russian and Bulgarian. There are more grammatical complexity in German, Russian and Latin than in Swedish, Bulgarian, Italian.
@fivantvcs9055 I agree that despite German being a West Germanic language like English, I find Swedish and especially Norwegian much easier to grasp. Dutch however would probably be easier than the two forementioned north germanic languages.
Spanish seems closer to Latin than Italian does, at least to me. I studied Latin in high school half a century ago and, because of that and Latin derivatives in English, I was able to read signs and things in Spain while being unable to understand what was said. This is similar to my being able to read toilet signs, for example, ㊚ men ㊛ women, without knowing the Chinese or Japanese language, in Korean I know they are namja and yoja.
Thanks to the large number of Japanese kanji words shared among East Asian languages, as a Han Chinese speaker, I find this is really helpful in learning Japanese and Vietnamese. Especially Vietnamese is almost like a sister to Han Chinese. -Indonesian is not as simple as many people recommend. Many affix systems and semantics are quite vague. -I'm struggling more than expected with learning Spanish. -I don't know what the hell German language is doing. -I gave up ancient Greek language within half a year.
Prima di iniziare a seguire il tuo canale ero incuriosito dai tuoi contenuti, ora che ho scoperto che anche tu hai studiato giapponese all'Orientale come me ( tra l'altro io sono proprio di Napoli) hai definitivamente catturato il mio interesse! Ahah
it's crazy to me how like ~2 hours of italian on duolingo combined with already speaking spanish and portuguese makes it possible to understand this comment. i love languages man
@@DafniKemand with whom would you practice speaking ancient Greek? Latin at least is spoken in the Catholic church. I live in Greece and have never met anybody who's fluent in ancient Greek. Not even highschool teachers who teach it are fluent.
There were at least some fluent speakers of ancient greek in Germany. I remember, I once was invited to one of their meetings - in Düsseldorf, I guess. Yet ancient greek is mostly read.
@@helgaioannidis9365 He didn't mention ancient Greek at all, he's talking about the languages that he studied and speaks fluently, not every language in the world.
I started studying Latin a couple of years back and I ended up getting very flustered - not so much with my grammar books, but more with the Latin language learning community, I guess you could say. So I decided that maybe it would be helpful for my overall language learning to pick up a language that is much more commonly studied. So that ended up being German. I always wanted to learn it. Then a little while later, I wanted to pick at French. I found that studying German definitely helped me in Latin. And then I found that studying French really helped me with German, especially in speaking. I ended up dropping my French study as life got in the way. From the amount of time that I did study it, I found it very easy to pick up if reading was your main goal. Speaking it is a challenge. With Latin, what has proven to be most difficult is the heavy amount of declension/conjugations and grammar, grammar, grammar you have to learn. German's challenge for me is that guttural pronunciation and dear lord, the word order. I have been so frustrated with the word order as there are rules, and then a bunch of exceptions. It's hard to say what language is harder for me, as both have their unique challenges. I am American, by the way. I was never raised bi-lingual, and at this point in time, I am learning at my own pace in self study. I would love to take classes one day, but now is not that time.
It won´t help you, but English most likely was guttural too once, a couple of centuries ago in the middle ages. Remnants of that should be the "gh" in night, knight, enough... As for the word order, here too there are some minor remnants. And the word order when asking a question is pretty much the same in contemporary English and German.
If you ever wanna pick up latin again I just wanna say the community has changed(and grown!) a lot in the past decade or so. In general, there was an influx of younger, passionate people and I'd say the atmosfere is a lot nicer now. Also, I don't know if you've heard about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, if you hate grammar memorization that might be something for you won't find any grammar tables there and it's a wonderful, almost effortless way to learn.
@@rvdzst I hope the American teaching methods for German have improved since the 1970s. I was taught basics in one semester, Meine name ist Friedrich. Gern trinke ich Bier. Immer ich, nimmer ish oder ik. On my first trip to Germany I found that it was actually pronounces ish in the Northwest, and some of the cultural information was over a century out of date. In the second semester it was Faust, and not Goethe's but the earlier one! Germans can easier read and understand older German writing, than English speakers, especially many of my fellow Americans, can read Shakespeare. I liked the plays so much that I read many more than the high school requirements, and even so I occasionally need the side notes. Some of that made German a bit easier for me, Four and twenty Blackbirds = vier und zwanzig schwarzvogeln. The biggest problem for English speakers are cases and gender, unglaubliches unsinn ist das!
In middle school & high school in the 1980s (in the Midwest region of the US), I took Spanish and German. 8th-11th grade Spanish & 10th-11th German; overlapping (taking them both during the same school year) Spanish & German in 10th and 11th grade. Interestingly, in 11th grade, I had the same teacher-Mr. McLaughlin) for both-back-to-back one semester). He also spoke Latin (school didn’t teach it anymore). I went on to join the US Army as a Spanish linguist; attending the Defense Language Institute for 26 weeks for Spanish. Two duty stations and 5 years later I was sent to a contracted school to learn Indonesian for 9 months; then 5 years later again, I spent 10 months learning French at the Foreign Service Institute.
I taught English to foreign military personnel, with training at DLI, Fort Sam in 1975. I have been a professional ESL/EFL/SPE teacher for years since then, having obtained a MS in ESL. The methods and materials used and taught at Ft. Sam were, IMO, less than optimal and definitely not outstanding, the teachers found it necessary to slyly "supplement" in order to achieve better results. DLI, Monterey, however, has an excellent and well deserved track record. My first 2 years teaching on a non-US navy base were interesting, enjoyable and productive. Thanks Uncle Sam for your assistance! Teaching Korean officers was a dream job, no disrespect, no slacking, teaching in the ME, however....the less said, and remembered, the better*!!! *EDIT: Don't take the last bit as absolute, there were bright spots, few and far between. Americans and Koreans tend to respect [or at least comply] with instruction, and will work, often well, to achieve goals. In the ME this was often not the case, or the personality chemistry and cultural affiliations were far more important and far more likely to present problems. For example, in one ME class, I had a student who had been in the US at an American high school, had a good grasp of English already, was of high status, took a liking to me and decided to act as my "enforcer" with his wingman. He kept the others in line, respectful, doing their homework and practicing. In other classes the situation was different, sometimes the opposite.
@@mr-vet I also don’t have a (British) English accent in French, I think it’s now unplaceable, one of those uncanny valley accents. A few years ago a Frenchman said I had a Quebec accent, now long gone since I listen to standard French. Incidentally, to speak French well you need to pronounce every syllable clearly, and there is only a mild stress with syllable timing. But you probably know that anyway.
I grew up speaking Greek and English in my household. Was taught Ancient Greek and Latin in Greek school. Also lived in Germany for years. I've dabbled in: Mandarin, Japanese, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Finnish, Farsi (gave up on all of those). And I'm currently learning Italian. TL;DR: As a Greek, hardest is hands down Mandarin while easiest is hands down Italian. Mandarin is hands down the hardest to pronounce and also to learn vocabulary in. Doesn't even compare to the rest. It's crazy. My friend has been living in China for 13 years now, and he still has trouble with all the "ever so slightly different" sounds, which do make a big difference. Learning Italian, it's really really easy. Especially when learning them via Greek instead of via English. Cause Italian and Modern Greek seem very similar to me. As a Greek you just need to learn the vocabulary and you can speak it. They are similar with Ancient Greek and also Cypriot and Cretan Greek in their intonation (singing). And of course, many many words have the same root. German is easier to learn via English instead of via Greek. However, the odd thing is that they are also similar to Ancient Greek as well, both in their syntax, as well as some root words, which are straight out of ancient greek, but then in modern greek they have changed. How the hell? O_o And the fact that they use this "mathematical" or "molecular" style of forming words, like Greek does. Which English and most other languages don't do. And that frees up so much "memory space" in your "brain-drive" forcing you to crate/calculate instead. Which is super fun. Honorable mention to Japanese, which still mind-fucks me. Having what to me seems like sometimes "multiple" and some times "none at all, monotone" syllabic stress (sýllable èmphasis).
Irish polyglot here. Defo Irish was the greatest challenge. Bronze-age grammar & vocabulary. Utterly crazy numbers of exceptions & special cases. And an Orthography that feels like LSD in your head.
Ironically enough, despite Irish spelling supposedly being more modern and up-to-date, I find its spelling to be less reliable for deriving sounds than Gaelic. Maybe I'm biased in favour of Gaelic, but I feel like Irish spelling still has loads of vowel combinations that are simply swallowed up in speech, whereas in Gaelic those spellings do generally notate a slight variation in the sound.
I made no progress in one year of Irish. Certainly no one around here can practice with me. My grandparents were the last to converse in it but didn’t think we would need it. Sad to say.
First took French in Junior High School. Then I took Latin in High School. Finally in uni, I first took Japanese. Late uni., I took Korean. French wasn't terribly easy for sounds but the clock bit for me was incredibly frustrating to figure out. Latin had some difficulty but I remember less of the difficulty of it. Latin was really nice to me in clarifying some old sayings and general English grammar points. Japanese was fairly easy to speak once I got the "ra" and "tsu" sounds down. To be honest the former was worse. Some of the grammar in Japanese can definitely be a bit confusing. Korean if I am being honest is definitely harder to read than Japanese because some of those sounds aren't part of English's native sounds. After all this to get back on the horse and encourage myself in Japanese I took Portuguese by way of lingq then started up Pimsleur. I found Portuguese not too bad, it helped having a lot of common or similar words in English. This being said I have a bigger vocabulary than most in English. That can be a help as well as a hindrance, a help in that I find some popular yet less well known and used English words would at times nearly pop up 1 for 1 or quite close. A hindrance in that you will also fall into the false friends trap. Latin also helped because a few of the words unfamiliar for English I would kind of remember from Latin. Heck even Japanese helped me in at least one pairing, connecting "hontou ni?!" to "e mesmo". I have also done a few others ok? So here are my short experiences through Pimsleur: German-Harder for me to speak certain words or sounds correctly vs. Japanese. Like a real pain. Hindi-Not the easiest in terms of the structure for direction but the general sentence structure is not bad and fairly easy to speak. Some of the gender sound shifts can be harder to distinguish at times. Russian-Enjoy this and a few sounds are harder to speak but I find German worse. The alphabet I need to crack down on, that gives me fits wanting it to look clean given Roman letters and nice fonts. There is of course learning the different sounds to the same letter too. I want to write in Russian later and have it be at a decent speed when I do the act of writing so I will have to learn Russian cursive which looks totally different at times than print. What else? Mandarin and Cantonese. Well hearing them on Pimsleur...I much prefer Cantonese soundwise even though it has many more tones. It seems the pitch shifts are more clear. I plan to come back and learn both but will focus on Cantonese first after substantially improving my Japanese. Hopefully it will give me a leg up learning Vietnamese too given how similarly they sound. Hope the same for Khmer. I did start out Catalan at lingq and given how deeply I got into Portuguese it was a definite help in how many words were close or similar. It feels like French getting blended into Spanish or Portuguese. The writing is generally not bad but at first my mind was annoyed at having the lowercase i not being capitalized when it was alone. Also had looked at Welsh, Hawaiian and Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo. Some of the structure of Welsh and Gaelic isn't difficult and a number of loan words help. Hawaiian I find I really like so far and the sounds are very easy. So far some of structure seems clear as well. edit: I do NOT know all these languages by the way, Portuguese then Japanese I am the furthest along.
Another great vid, Metatron-先生。I lived in Japan for seven years, and I reached about early high school level in Kanji by the time I left. Besides writing letters to friends in Japanese to keep in practice, seeing station names in Kanji, Hiragana, and Romaji every day plus receiving business cards where most Japanese surnames are made up of characters Japanese would have learned by 3rd grade, I found Kanji knowledge fairly easy to retain. However, travels to northern Honshu, Hokkaido, and especially Ryukyuan place names could really throw me for a loop, but as you said: many Japanese would not know how to read some of them first time out, so I didn't feel too embarrassed! On another note, may I respectfully request a video on Bergamasch with explanations of differences between Western and Eastern Lombard and how they relate to standard Italian and maybe German. Molte grazie!
I lived in many countries and had many different ex wives from different countries. My native language is English. I speak C1 Cantonese and lived 12 years in Hong Kong. This was super hard to learn, took years to learn how to memorise tones for each word. I speak C1 Russian. This took 6 months to get to C1. I lived 10 years in Ukraine. I speak B2 Croatian. This is my heritage language, can't get more advanced, there is no decent content to progress. I guess this helped my Russian. I speak French B2/C1. I went to French international school and did my schooling in French. Never used it in real life outside of school. Getting rusty. I speak C1 German, took 1500 hours in total and 300 hours of italki, 6 intensive courses at Goethes. In my opinion, German was super easy. I am now learning Italian and find it 100% kindergarten easy. So easy that I reckon I can be fluent in 3 months with intensive studies. Had 4 wives (1 chinese and 3 Ukranians). My strongest languages are the ones that I had a wife to speak to daily. though with German, daily italki classes for German is my new wife replacement.
Somehow having wife after wife to practice a language is selfish self serving narcissistic even. Perhaps add emotional abuse to that. Your boasting and prideful ways and attitudes are not impressive qualities. Enough said. I have other thoughts… 💭 🤯🤓🥶🫥
As a native Swede, fluent in english since a very early age, 5 years of learning spanish in school and over 1 year of daily practise of japanese under my belt. I gotta say that the most important thing is to imerse yourself in the language. Casue I learnt spanish for 5 years however, I´m actually better at japanese in my opinion. It has to do with my dedication and will of learning the language. I watch, read and practise it everyday and it really helps if you fully imerse in it. So for example watching anime with japanese audio and subtitles. And even though you learn english in Sweden since a very early age, I was already quite good at it because of one simple reason. All of the youtube videos and media I consumed as a child was English with English subtitles, so it basically became like a second native language. There are times that I know words in English but can´t come up with the Swedish one. However I don´t have anyone to speak or write english with so my pronounciation and spelling is lacking a bit. But my understanding of English is probably better than my native understanding, which I find quite facinating. Anyways I just wanted to say that you shouldn´t focus on the difficulty. If you like or really want to learn it, you will find a way.
I was raised by an Anglophone mother and a father who was Anglophone by personal history but who had learned Latin in church, Spanish on his own, and German in the university (also perhaps French). The altars had been pulled out from the back wall of the churches and priests had started saying "The Lord be with you" instead of "Dominus vobiscum" to us when I was nearly six. I had learned some German from Dad, some from reading (as also Latin), and then some in the university. (Yes, I'm from the U.S., and two generational removes from steerage, as in my immigrant paternal grandsire.) I had tested to a B 2:level in German. (I fid learn the Hebrew alphabet as well as its adaptation for writing Yiddish, so I can read some Yiddish and understand it.) For what it's worth, my preference in Latin is the ecclesiastical pronunciation with which I was already familiar before I had seen S. Giampaolo (Jan Pawel) II say Christmas Midnight Mass in it after my attending Midnight Mass in my own parish in English. I had been taking Spanish since I was in elementary school through the 11th grade, then French in the 12th grade, i.e., the last year of high school. Because we had a knot or three of Spanish-speakers outside our parish church after Mass during my adolescence, I had gotten some (albeit limited) practice speaking conversational Spanish. I had learned the Greek alphabet as a child but didn't get the hang of declensions of nouns in it until I had taken ancient Greek in my undergraduate time (last year thereof) at the university. (I would later encounter the Byzantine pronunciation of Greek when I had attended a Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgy as a student.) Modern Greek I had not really learned, and there are enough differences between patristic Greek and dhimotiki that I'd really have to learn the latter. I've never really formally studied "Wälsch" (archaic German word for "Italian"), though I have gotten some albeit limited ken of Italian from having read a bilingual version of the Divine Comedy (Allen Mandelbaum's translation). But when I had taken a test online of my knowledge of Italian, my knowledge thereof was categorized as A 1 to A 2. (Not good.) Anyway, I had on a lark tried to learn Gaeilge (once upon a time we'd had Irish nuns and priests in my North Florida home, but by then they were not in my part of the world any more), but never really got anywhere with it, nor with Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew. (I can maybe get a wee bit of some Hebrew prayers and prayers in Syriac, and on a really good day can figure out some things in Arabic.) Russian was just too intimidating grammatically for me, as was Polish, so I had never gotten under my belt more than a few phrases. (I can ask "gdye twalyet," but heaven help me if the answer with all the turns and paces comes back to me po-russki.) I had but a few rudiments of Nihongo (never learned Japanese pitch, much less its writing systems other than romaji) and am utterly innocent of Putonghua beyond being halfway able to murder "ni hao." Of the languages I had learned, Spanish was probably easiest, though the truth is I can understand the Spanish of Mexican intellectuals or technocrats from "de-efe" (Distrito Federal, Mexico's equivalent to D.C. in the States) a lot more readily than full-on Cuban Spanish. I had a family advantage with German, as well as its shared vocabulary with English, so I can't really put it in a difficulty league. I think you can guess my estimates of what languages I'd found harder and what ones I would find easier based on my remarks.
So to start off, I'm a native speaker of Polish. My first foreign language was English but I don't really remember much of my earlier times of learning it because, as everyone in Poland, I was learning, and still am, English in school. I never cared for English until I was like in 6th grade of primary school. And also by that time I was pretty good in English, one, because of all that time in school. Two, because my parents are teachers of English so they helped me a lot. Having said all this, I don't really know where to put my English. My second foreign language was Latin. I started it in school two years ago, after maybe one year (which was not very productive) I started to learn from LLPSI and started to speak Latin also. Then I had stopped learning Latin for like 5 months and in the beginning of this year I got back to it and also started speaking again (which continues to this day). Now my conversation ability is maybe not basic fluency but I think I'm pretty good as it comes to speaking. When I came back to Latin after my 'pause' I began to learn Italian, and pretty much from the beginning, to speak it (and still am learning). My speaking is still a little bit 'rusty' but I'm feeling a lot more comfortable. Also when I started Italian I also began German but sort of gave up on ut after short time. The reason was probably lazyness but also now I'm focused on Latin and Italian. So having said all this this is my list from the hardest to the easiest language: 1. Latin 2. English 3. Italian (These are languages that I jnow the best) I'm also learning Spanish in school now but I don't really care about is so.. yeah. Sorry to all of you for the wall of text.
I'm a french Canadian, and I just met a woman in Mexico. Now I practice Spanish with her, and she practice French, Spanish looks easy to me, but I had 3 years of it in secondary school. French is hard for her, but I made her practice, and she is great
For me I just didn't get Russian. I tried to learn it in college and I did horrible in that class even though I studied very consistently. The Slavic words bounced out of my brain as soon as I put them in there. Japanese is difficult at times for the reasons mention in the video, but there was something about it that clicked in my brain and I didn't struggle with the grammar or kanji hardly at all. One thing that really helped was taking time to make Anki decks of Japanese places and famous people to get used to reading non-standard Kanji names and just being familiar with Japanese names in general. When I started I had to idea what sounded like a female or male name which definitely can make a difference in how to address people politely.
You are right, all is in the practice! In high school, I got one year of Spanish, At the end of that year, I wrote a letter all in spanish. Then, I didn't practice and forgot pretty much everything. I remember a few words, yes. No, I can't sustain a conversation. I can recognize two people speaking spanish and that all. I am tempted to pick it up again but now, I know a few people who can speak it. It was not the case in high school. For English, I start to form my ear to the language before learning it more formally in school. Reading and writing English was hard for me for a long time but it got better while reading it. I must to admit that my high school Spanish teacher was the coolest one even if he was old. It was more than easy to learn with him. He had little tricks to makes thing easy to remember. We had a game period when we ended the day with him. He was inspiring. He knew French, English, Spanish, German and at the time, was learning Russian by himself.
Korean to me is easy, cause I am in love with korean but Greek is a nightmare cause I have a love/hate relationship.😅 I live in Greece so it should be easy for me to learn but is not the case. I think if you like a language, if you really love that language, then it will be easy but if you have a negative view against a language then, no matter how much time, you spend on it it will never easy.
I've been learning Japanese for almost a year. The basics are pretty easy and I haven't faced anything overwhelmingly difficult YET, like it's so hard that climbing Mt. Fuji would be easier. I do have a hard time memorizing a lot of the kanji for many of the words I use and have to keep looking them up, but I'm finding kanji easier to write because many have similar patterns. I think I find it easy because of all the anime and Japanese content I've consumed over the past 25 years and I take a huge interest in the culture. I would say it can be a challenge to find Japanese people to practice with because where I live, while there are some they're not as abundant as, say, Spanish-speaking people but at least I do have resources where I can practice. Also, when you're first learning it, almost no one is going to be at your level so that can be a real challenge as well.
Basque was arguably the hardest language for me. I started learning it at the end of the 1970's. While the grammar is quite bizarre for a Western European language, indeed, it is the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe, it is totally logical and once you learn the basic structure, it all comes together. The verbal morphology is very baroque and the verbs are devilishly complex but, then again, they are almost mathematical. What made Basque difficult was that I learnt it precisely in the 1970's, right after it was officially "unified", i.e. Euskara Batua. By 1979, all of the teachers knew Euskara Batua but the people who spoke Basque did not. They all spoke in their various dialects which often differed greatly. The other great difficulty posed by Basque was the dearth of materials to learn it with. The reading material was scant. The grammar books were generally not for learners but for those who were already fluent. The dictionaries were very bad and there were no Basque-English dictionaries. I actually wrote one to help me learn Basque and it is now the most used English-Basque dictionary, Morris Basque dictionary. Another problem was that people didn't , and still don't, have a big vocabulary in their own language. They don't know how to say things such as knuckle, rye, oats, badger, temple (of one's face or head), etc. Another thing was that, in the 1970's, there was no TV in Basque or even a newspaper. Not even a Basque radio apart from Loialako Herri Irratia that had some programs in Basque plus Mass and Rosary in Basque. Chinese was and is very hard for me, perhaps because I started when I was in my 50's. Having said that. I have been to China and my level is HSK 3. I taught myself how to read basic Chinese and was able to talk to a Chinese taxi driver for 3 hours. I still think that Chinese is easier than Basque but I will never speak Chinese right until I live there for a while, something which I doubt I ever will. I grew up speaking Portuguese (living as a child in Angola) and English and so learning Spanish, and Catalan was a cinch. Basic Italian was easy. French proved harder. I still cannot understand French movies but I understand news programmes and documentaries at 90%. My African experience also allowed me to learn a good basic Afrikaans which made it easier to learn how to speak German at a B1 or B2 level.
I can say, from my personal experience, I had much struggle studying Japanese for a couple of years at university ( the same uni in Naples as him btw) but then I had to abandon it and also move to another university, where I'm currently studying English and German, and I must say that German maybe cannot be compared to Japanese in terms of language difficulty, but still among, let's say the European languages it's surely one of the toughest, maybe after Russian or alongside it.
For me the list goes: ancient Greek classical Latin Italian English I have to elaborate a bit :) As a half italian who grew up in Germany, German and the local dialect in Palatinate are my native languages. Unfortunately my father missed the opportunity to teach me Italian or his dialect, which would be Sicilian. In school I started with Latin, which was really hard for me back then (I was 10 years old). Then I learned English in school which was quite easy for a German, and when I was 14 I did ancient Greek (which was mainly attic Greek, but we also did a bit ionic and Koine). Greek was by far the hardest, and after I had looked deeper into that language I must say that Latin seems to be quite easy now :) Italian is a bit complicated. I started to learn proper Italian when I was 16. I had some trouble with it, because I wasn't able at that point in my life to spend much time on it. What made it worse was the fact that I had on one hand the italian pronunciation in my mind (because I was always surrounded by italian people. But it was a mixture of Italian and Sicilian and I couldn't tell the difference :) Today I would say that I'm quite fluent in English, I can hold a simple conversation in Italian and I can read and partly understand Latin texts. Although I was very good in my Greek class in school, this was 20 years ago and I have fortgotten a fair share.
Unlike most of my schoolmates, I have never learned a bit of French (which is a pitty, since I grew up 2 km from the French border). Anyway, when I did my PhD in mathematics, I had to read a french paper, and I actually could read it and get the main point I was looking for. This was due to the fact that French is quite similar to Latin and Italian (especially the written words) and that mathematical technical vocabulary seems to be partly identical in English, Italian and French.
I'm a native Spanish speaker. Now I'm learning French and it's been very enjoyable 😊 once achieving level b2 in French I'd like to start learning japanese and I'm also interested in italian and chinese.
As a Scandinavian/Norwegian speaker: easiest has been Dutch, then English, French, Italian, German. I grew up in Japan and can read Japanese well. Knowing kanji is a huge aid when learning Chinese now.
I ran away from Latin after one year. Took Spanish native teachers: 1 Castilian 2 Cuban, dated exchange student from Argentina , 3 Mexican teacher who lived in Mexico. After all that teaching aside from exchange student I never was able to speak Spanish with Spanish speakers. Tragic!!! At this point in life 70 I can pick out a few phrases in movies or radio, songs but that is a sad state after so many yrs taking the language scholastically…
I'm a native English speaker. I studied ASL as a najor in college and im currently learning Spanish. ASL was easier to learn because I felt more confident in conversations, because I could just spell out a word if I didn't have the sign, and a speaker could spell out a sign I didn't know. That fallback gave me confidence. Spanish is harder for just that reason - I lack confidence in conversation. I become so self conscious when I make a mistake my Spanish goes to crap if I make one tiny mistake.
My native langauge is English and I'm fluent in Spanish. I've been studying Italian and Hebrew (and barely just started with Mexican Sign Language). I would say Hebrew has been easier than Italian because Italian is almost too easy. Since I can usually understand spoken and especially written Italian, it is harder to make an effort for the words to stick to produce them. Hebrew is phonetic and actually has a lot in common grammatically with Spanish (and Italian). I used to teach Spanish and now I teach English in Mexico. It's so much more complicated and I have to go at a lot slower pace.
I suppose it depends on the individual but in my experience it is absolutely possible to reach a great level of speaking without a language partner, and moreover, a language partner will only be able to help you so far. The thing is that most likely you will only discuss simple everyday things with your friend, but if you really want to achieve an advanced level you should be able to discuss complex topics like science, politics, etc, and it's very likely that your language partner won't want to talk about it with you days and nights. So the only reliable way here is to do it by yourself - you can either write lots of essays on these topics and/or have monologues on these topics. This will boost your level way further than talking with your buddy about what he had for breakfast.
I have done many language courses: Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish, British Sign Language, Mandarin.... and forgotten almost everything. I have seen in lists for English speakers that Japanese is the most difficult language. I am bilingual English and French...I learnt French in school but really learnt it from living for six years in France.... I have now lived for 14 years in Georgia (the country not the US State), living with my Georgian wife (whose English is excellent) and I am still at a very low level in Georgian... it is a nightmare language for me, the alphabet is unique, so I don't recognise words by sight, I have to spell them out and they love long words with bizarre combinations of consonants... I live in თბილისი Tbilisi (in English we don't have words beginning t and b and that is one of the less bizarre combinations!)... Practice is necessary as you say with fluent (not necessarily native) speakers, also spaced repetition is good for learning vocabulary.
What a great video. My son is currently 11 years old and has been learning Japanese for a few years. He has always been fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. I feel by the time he is a late teenager he will be very good at the language.
For myself, Hangul. I can memorize the characters & some approximation of the sounds but they also have Chinese characters randomly thrown in. Then there is appropriate context in society that I didn't know about. You understand it more in your culture and it takes time to learn those things in another. I'm embarrassed that I spoke down to older people accidentally when I lived there because I was taught the informal first (I understand the reason). I had surgery on my ankle there and I had old people offering me their seats on the subway and all I could say was the most impolite form of no thank you. I had an elder man grab my shoulders & push me into his seat in the section reserved for them because I was trying to say that it's okay. He stood, I sat. I felt horrible
When I lived in Japan in the 80s, being near the Korean section, I met several older Koreans who had come to Japan pre-WWII. One gentleman owned a business and I ended up teaching him English in exchange for Korean lessons. He taught me from 1st and 2nd grade readers. Since I had already taught myself hiragana and katakana before moving to Japan, memorizing to the point that I could easily write in Hangul was not a problem. Unfortunately, I never advanced into readers with Chinese characters. On the rare occasion I did see both in a sentence, if I knew the Kanji and had the vocabulary for the rest of the sentence, I could understand the meaning, but I of course wouldn't know the Korean reading of the character. As an old guy hoping to keep what's left of his mind reasonably sharp, I'm considering taking up Korean as a 3rd language since I have Korean friends locally and still hope to visit Korea in the future. Thank-you for your post. As with Metatron, I enjoy comparing my language learning experiences in a totally different culture with others.
im sure the natives heard your accent and were understanding, picture someone with clearly foreign english saying something possibly impolite, everyone knows that its because they aren't fluent not because they are rude
In Seoul, foreigners who may know some Korean are common, but in the country at a farmers market I once drew a crowd of dozens of people hanging on my every word. My Korean is very basic, my attempts not to be "the arrogant foreigner" were taken, even though I made mistakes, to be well meaning, even noblesse oblige. You have hit the main problem with the Korean language, the level used depends on relative status. I don't think they were angry with you, because by trying not to take the place of an older person you were very culturally correct, that you could only use a little Korean in the "panmal" form was less important.
@@jamesbernardi6783 My experience in Korea was that they really appreciate foreigners who try to use their language and are respectful of the culture. In fact, too much so. They were often impressed with my efforts to learn Korean, but quickly asked me to give them English practice as that is very necessary for advancement there, in school and in employment.
Isle of Tenerife, Spain, Africa. Mister Metatron, well done! You've mentioned the different salient difficulties of each language, but you didn't mention English's infamous phrasal verbs, surely its most elusive impediment to native-like proficiency for adult learners, would you agree? While your own English is truly excellent, I wonder if you'd agree that the phrasal verbs are something you still struggle with. For example, in English we don't brush up a language (unless we happen to be the dictator of the country where it's spoken, or maybe an author inventing a fictional language within a novel). We brush up ON a language. Not including that tiny preposition in the phrase makes it sound weird, and for a few seconds even incomprehensible, to a native English-speaker. My point is that your English is truly excellent, with perfect cadence and fluency, but those who wish to fully master English to a native-like level should maybe consciously try to avoid using phrasal verbs until they take the time to intensively study them, for example vetting and processing each one before incorporating it into their vocab repertoire, making sure it's mulled over for its correct use, as I remember doing as a child, consciously processing each one upon noticing a grown-up or older speaker using it. Best wishes, Patrick.
The intro is true enough. I found Korean easier to learn than German, though, even though English is a Germanic language [with a lot of overlay by French and Latin] with many cognates. This is principally because, like English, Korean does not have gender [as applied to all nouns and which requires that the "gender" of the articles and adjectives must match the "gender" of the nouns]. The Korean alphabet is more uniform, that is, unlike English, the sound of each letter is not as unpredictable as C and G in English [cage vs cinema for example]. Korean has a long relationship with Chinese, so they generally have a single pronunciation of the character, one of the exceptions ㊎ can be either Kum or Kim. The long association with Japanese, however, is so little appreciated that many Korean [Japanese] words that I learned from older people in the 1970s had been purged by the 1980s. Both Koreas have been purging Chinese characters. In the 1970s Korean newspapers looked like Japanese papers, many Chinese characters with Korean additives. Now most papers are either all Hangul [한글] or with a few Chinese and more English words. The South Korean and French governments have, apparently given up the campaign to keep the languages pure and free of English. This has resulted in the rise of Franglaise and Konglish! I lived and taught English in Korea for 6 years [at separate periods over 20+ years] compared to 4 consecutive years in Japan. I was constantly confused in Japan about pronouncing the kanji, as I would usually understand but mispronounce the written form. My ability to speak Japanese was never more than minimal! When visiting Taiwan I was the caricature of the hena gaijin, unable to speak, but writing notes in Chinese characters. My Korean should be much better than it is, but as an English teacher I represented an essential resource, as English proficiency is required to get into the best high schools, and good performance in English there is required to get into the best universities. Getting the best jobs often requires good English skills, even promotions in the military require high test scores and speaking competency. It was not unusual for me to go into a shop and begin with a Korean polite expression before making a request in Korean, I would then be asked to wait while a student was called to practice English with the 영어교수, this also occurred with taxi drivers and people taking seats next to me on trains and busses. Thanks, Metatron, for an extremely interesting video.
I self-studied Japanese forty years ago. Glad you ranked it high up the difficulty scale. [BTW, I grew up in Canada, so was force fed French to go with my English, so that gave me a head start on the more common languages. I sat in on a few Spanish lectures (due to having a crush on a girl/hanging out with her sister to see more of her, sister was taking Spanish) Anyway, Spanish looks to be one of the easiest languages to pick up.]
A very noble reason to learn Spanish! Also, please pardon my asking, but do you know anything about the double spaces that you use when starting a new sentence? I find a lot of people from previous generations often write this way, but is this how it was taught in schools back in the day? In my case we never received that kind of instruction, and so I never consciously or subconsciously even think about whether there should be 1 space or 2 - I just always put 1.
@@spaghettiking653I took typing (two years) in middle school (50 years ago). Learned to use two spaces then. Still makes sense today so I use it today. I've even blogged about it. It shows how impressionable people are to illogic that most use only one today. We used 2 spaces, when all characters were monospaced. Today, with the space itself using the least width, it is even more important to use 2 spaces. As I say, this is the generation that throws out the egg yolk and eats the whites -- very screwed up.
@@FloydMaxwell Could you explain your reasoning for why using two is better? I don't find it to be as big of a deal as you make it sound like, though. As I say, there's just no such custom for us. I don't think 99% of people even notice that two is possible or practiced.
@@spaghettiking653 Sentences are thoughts. When they are not obviously delimited, it makes it hard to read the writing. Modern fonts (like this YT font) are proportionally spaced -- meaning that each letter (or space) takes up a different amount. Since the space itself takes up the least width...AND there is only one of them (in most cases)...it makes it maximally hard to read the comment/tweet/etc. For no good reason. Giving up the yolk, eating the white -- done for no good reason. People are, for the most part, sheep. Hats off to you to at least notice.
@@FloydMaxwell Haha, thanks. It's a good point. It's probably part of what contributes to the modern zoomer mindset of wall-of-text-aversity; when people see a "wall" of text, they instinctively close it because the dopamine density is too low, even though they would gladly read 10x that amount interspersed across a handful of vapid memes. I might start writing with two spaces as you say :') thanks for explaining, and have a great weekend.
Here's my list: 1) Native in both English and Spanish. 2) currently learning: a) easy languages for me: Portuguese and French. b) hard languages: Thai (cuz of my in laws) and Japanese. At some point I would like to tackle Japanese but that writing system is just daunting. I found learning to speak Japanese is actually quite straightfoward because of the pronounciation but the writing....... Thai on the other hand is pretty straightforward to learn how to read because they use an Abugida writing system. Speaking is another story: mastering the tones and vowel system is a huge pain. And if you get those wrong in conversation people will just not understand you.
As a native Spanish and English speaker, I won't count those two. My easiest language I feel was ASL. It is very visual and I took it in a class. My teacher was really good and at times would not allow us to speak English, so I picked it up relatively quickly. Plus no writing system, so one less thing to worry about. It is just because of my lack of people to use the language with that I am rusty right now, but with exposure I could probably get back into it pretty quickly My next easiest that I am learning or have learned is a tie between French and German/Yiddish. I learned French as a wee lad in school due to living in a Francophone country, but after leaving it I didn't have any need for it and forgot it all. Now when I do speak it, my Spanish kinda gets in the way, which helps but also makes me speak in a kind of French-Spanish pidgin lol. For Yiddish, I am progressing quickly and can understand a fair amount in both Yiddish and German without much difficulty Next I would say Hebrew. Hebrew is the language that started my language learning journey, it's what I speak the most and my strongest language aside from English, Spanish, and ASL. I of course had an interest in the language for a long time which made it easier to learn. I also have friends who speak it so I have a lot of practise Next is Arabic and Greek, which are also kind of tied. My Hebrew helps with my Arabic, and Spanish somehow helps a lot with Greek, however each have their own unique challenges. I have slightly more exposure to Arabic than Greek, but Greek being written in an alphabet also kind of cancels that out. That's my current ranking from easiest to hardest, but I'm always trying to learn more languages and sometimes swap some out, so within even a year it is bound to change lol
As an Estonian speaker English was the easiest just because of all the exposure I got through TV and games. Currently I consider myself just bilingual, but I have also studied Russian in primary school and I guess that would be the one that was most difficult for me. I forgot pretty much all I learned after graduating since I wasn't motivated to learn it, I wasn't immersed in it, and didn't need it for anything important. I've also been studying Danish for a few years while living in Copenhagen and I'm way better at Danish than I ever was at Russian. Getting close to a B1 level in that. Cognates between Danish and English definetly made it easier to learn and Danish and Estonian also share similar words with either a Proto-Germanic or Low German origin. After Danish I might go for Finnish next just to make things easier for myself, but I'd like to get comfortable talking in Danish before I divert my attention to something new.
Answer me this. I speak Finnish and when I hear Estonian it sometimes feels like I'm listening to Funnish while having a stroke. Do you have the same phenomenon when you hear Finnish? I can't really compare any germanic language that way to English except maybe the ever increasingly rare Scots.
The easternmost part of England used to be called the Danelaw, and was colonized and ruled by the Danes. If you haven't gone there or to Friesland you might find the local languages fascinating.
As an English speaker, I have learned Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian. Contrary to what I am always hearing, I found Portuguese to be the easiest Romance language but Italian to be the most difficult to learn. Also, I agree that Sicilian is a separate language from Italian 💯
I know English, Romanian and Spanish. Fluency is in that order. My first language is English, second language is Romanian and I have learned Spanish up to a conversational level.
This is wonderful, thank you! My native language is English. I am fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian, and have passive Catalan, and am working hard right now on German. Here's a funny little thing I learned when studying Danish: Danish has very easy grammar--far easier than German grammar--but the phonology of Danish is A KILLER. It is very difficult for foreigners to get to a level of fluency, because of the blurred nature of Danish sounds. Fortunately, reading the language is easy. I've also studied a little bit of Korean; phonologically, it is easy, because it has no tones. But achieving actual fluency would be difficult. Mille grazie!
I sat through a course of basic Danish. Poor teacher tried to make us hear the difference between vowels. We couldn't help but laugh. Nordic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swesish) are basically the same in terms of grammar, and most of the vocabulary. Swedish grammar is incredibly easy.
Finnish, Swedish, German, French and Spanish. Started Russian but dropped it for... ahem... non-linguistic reasons... These were all easy to learn, except Finnish. After five years of studying, my Finnish was the level of a five-year old... it being my mother tongue... I'm a language teacher, and we are horrible students.
I learned Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin in countries that speak those languages. Japanese wasn't that difficult, but everyone wanted to speak English with me. Mandarin was too difficult for me. Spanish was easy. I learned Italian during the pandemic by watching RUclips. It was easy but when I speak Italian I throw in a lot of Spanish words.
Yeah, Japan is one of those countries where natives will really try to speak English with you instead of the local language. It's to the point that even if you are a native speaker but look non-japanese some people will try to speak English to you unless you speak some more and make them realize you are japanese or hafu. I mostly just force myself to talk in Japanese(or whichever other language I'm trying to learn) anyway, sometimes the other person will do the same and force themselves to speak English and both of you will just end up talking in your non-native language but it's fine
Mind you, the more you learn languages the easier learning to become. Language learning is, at the end of the day, a combination of cognitive abilities and behavioral conditioning. Contextual inference, grammatical comprehension, implicit memory, a lot of things one needs to learn a language become better and better with experience, to a point where one could theoretically learn languages in really small periods of time with enough skill. In my experience for example, I learnt french from nothing to C1 in less than 4 months of study while only using series, audiobooks, chatgpt for writing, and online chats for speaking. It is my fifth tongue, and I've learned german and norwegian in the last 3 years, so it came as an end of a long process of cognitive 'training'. I have absolutely no idea of the grammar rules, the exceptions, or the logic, I just write and speak 'automatically' how it feels right and go with it, to results that got me my passing notes on Dalf C1. This would have never been possible if i didn't train my brain for it and designed specific and personal methods to efficiently and effectively jury-rigg the whole process. The more you learn, the better you get at learning, to the point the final results may seem satirical to the starting you.
In Greece we have to study Latin at school similarly to Italy,but here we also study ancient Greek. We start ancient Greek 4 years earlier than Latin and then we do both for another 2 years.(6 years of ancient Greek,2 years of Latin) We don't learn any accents(we speak ancient Greek the same way as modern Greek and for Latin we use kind of the Greek way of pronouncing the Latin alphabet with some exceptions) We learn all of the grammar and syntax and learn how to translate Believe me,Latin,to me,is kindergarten as opposed to ancient Greek. And I am Greek. The only part where ancient Greek is easier is translation(if you haven't worked with that text before)and it's still not easy cause it has to be very specific
@@tomgu2285 Pretty different, Greek and ancient Greek are probably more different to each other than Latin is to any of its descendants. Just look up iotacism, a famously extreme example of a vowel shift which occurred between classical and modern Greek. Imagine trying to read old English, except it's from longer ago, and even more different. Not sure why a native Greek speaker would find Latin easier though?
@@kraba1081 iotacism isn't a problem at all,as I said we read it in modern Greek pronunciation. And Latin is so much easier because of our training in ancient Greek. The grammar is stupendously easy compared to ancient Greek or even modern Greek grammar and the syntax is very similar but less complex. Ancient Greek and modern Greek are similar,but that's part of the problem. You see,a native Greek doesn't really need to learn modern Greek syntax;and modern Greek grammar;you just know it by the time you're 8. But with ancient Greek you have to actually learn it,and it's the harder version. As for translation I already said it's easier in ancient Greek. If you know modern Greek well(trust me many Greeks don't)most of the words you already know about. And that's what helps you with Latin translation too,Greek and English vocabulary.
@@tomgu2285 no,they are but that's mostly a positive in translation. A Greek who knows modern Greek well knows most of the words but even though the grammatical structure and syntax are virtually the same with modern Greek,ancient Greek usage of those things is much more complex. Also as natives we never really learn modern Greek syntax or modern Greek grammar,we just know it after the age of 8. In ancient Greek we have to actually learn it and that's a way you understand how crazy modern Greek is too. Latin from the other hand,much less complex usage of everything,the grammar is super easy and not a nightmare to learn with like 100 basic verbs not being conjugated the way they're supposed to,the syntax is basically the same as ancient Greek(and you better know ancient Greek syntax after 4 years...). Overall it's just easier for anybody
@@kraba1081 Nope, greek is far more close to ancient greek than romance languages are to latin. If we are talking about Koine greek then modern greek is the evolution of it. As for ancient greek you will have to consider which period and which dialect. As far back you go the hardest it becomes. But the words are pretty much the same.
As a Russian native speaker, the hardest are Erzya and Gaelic; Erzya is illogical and confusing, and Gaelic, let's say, has a very bizarre way of phrasing things. Then it's Moksha, because of the similarity to Erzya. English was hard back I was monolingual, but if I were to start learning it now, I don't think it would've been that hard. Norwegian was mid 'cause it was my third language. Danish, on the other hand, is also mid, 'cause c'mon, it's Danish. It's cursed. Some other middle difficulty ones are Hebrew(kinda like Arabic but more confusing and less logical), Xhosa, Zulu, Swati(all three have 10 noun cases and pretty much all of them are just as weird as in Slavic languages + there's generally a lot of stuff to remember, but other than that, they're pretty logical and chill), Elfdalian(the declensions are rather complicated, and the phrasing is weird sometimes), and most Uralic languages. Rather easy ones are Latin(familiar grammar and vocabulary), Mansi(idk pretty much everything is simple and makes sense except it's sometimes hard to express oneself without spamming Russian loanwords), Vepsian(a lot of stuff to remember, but again, pretty much everything simply makes sense), Bulgarian(familiar vocabulary and easy grammar except for verbs), Old Church Slavonic(a bit more complicated declensions, conjugations and way of expressing oneself than in your average Slavic language + sometimes hard to not mix it up with Russian and modern Bulgarian, but other than that, nice and easy), Romanian(familiar vocabulary + I engage with Romanian speakers and learners a lot), French(same reasons as Romanian), Piedmontese(because of the similarity to French and Italian but sometimes the constructions are weird), Batak Toba(kinda similar to Lojban + it's my friend's first language), Malay/Indonesian(pretty chill and fun affix juggling like in Esperanto), Arabic(chill and logical but there is a lot to remember but pretty much all of it is easy to remember), German(yeah, fun with genders and noun cases, but you get used to it easily), and Turkic languages(again, chill and logical + fun and very similar to each other). The very easy ones are most Romance languages, and, obviously, Slavic languages other than Bulgarian. The easiest are Gullah(because of the similarity to English), Swedish(because of the similarity to Norwegian), and, obviously, Ido, Toki Pona and Interslavic :p
I definitely get the “people to practice with” part. I’d love to learn a few other languages, but it’s pretty hard to find people to practice with who are already fluent in those languages.
I'm Malaysian, grew up with Malay, English, Mandarin, Penang Hokkien and Cantonese, learned Korean and learning Hebrew and French, and also Taiwanese (which is another variety of Hokkien but different enough from mine that it requires effort). Korean is hard but not because of the grammar per se but the way the Koreans express things is so different, it's a bit closer to Chinese but still I find it hard to get off the book language, it's like "when can I ever start speaking the normal daily language instead of the textbook language", granted, my local language Malay is a bit like that, having two forms of the language, but since I grew up with it, I don't really feel it. Also coupled with some bad experiences, I basically stopped learning and don't speak it anymore. Hebrew is by far the easiest for me, it's the only late age acquired language that I can confidently say I've reached a decent conversational level, though I'd say reading Modern Hebrew is more difficult than reading Korean. I'm new to French, learned it by myself before together with Hebrew but I always got mixed up with Hebrew words. Pronunciation wise it's the most challenging, though strangely, it has nasal sounds like my mother tongue, Hokkien. Cantonese is the weakest of my childhood language, even though I can understand it 100%, I suck at the pronunciation, it's like my tongue always gets tangled up trying to speak it. Chinese of any kind is the hardest because of the writing, not living in China or Hong Kong or Taiwan, it's hard to maintain memory of all the characters (the common ones), as I use English and Malay most of the time. As beautiful as it is, it's a writing system that's hard to sustain, even Korean which I don't speak or read for years, I can still read it, but if I don't use read or write Chinese for a year, I think I'm gonna lose it again. The speaking part is a bliss though, no need to worry about conjugations, plural formation, etc.
For me, Latin has been more difficult than any Italo-Western Romance language (I haven't tried to learn Romanian or Sardinian). I can handle cases, having studied Russian and learned Greek by reading the NT, but I use words like "camiōnitta" (a thing that didn't exist in Classical Latin days) and "sautax" (because "accentus" has other meanings) and have trouble with tenses that didn't survive into French or Spanish. I'm not sure between Russian and Greek. Russian I learned in the classroom, and a little bit from a book when I was a kid; Greek I learned by reading the NT, which I already had in English. I guess Russian is harder because the vocabulary is less familiar. That leaves German, my fourth and first non-native language, which I started learning from a Berlitz book and later took in uni. I think it's harder than Italian or Portuguese but easier than Russian or Greek. The grammar and much vocabulary are familiar from English, but much other vocabulary is Germanic roots that English has lost.
For me it was Georgian (ქართული ენა) . It wasn’t the writing system at all but the complexity, eg a different verb “to have” for animate and inanimate objects. Same for “old”. Also some hard consonant clusters. After Georgian probably Turkish which I failed at completely. I am now learning Farsi, they biggest challenge being the script (the right to left thing is not a real issue). They leave out most of the vowels so you just have to kind of “know” Someone once told me, the hardest language is always your first new language as you are not used to learning a language and the concept the for example the letter “c” can have different sounds in Italian, Croatian etc
I'm a native Spanish speaker and my mother is Austrian so she taught me German since I was a kid and I learned English in school, I always heard that the closer a language is to another in the sense that they belong to the same language family the easier it's to learn it, so when I was in college I tried to learn french and it was a nightmare, so I then switch to Portuguese and it was extremely easy to learn. I also studied romanian in highschool because I had a girlfriend that was from Romania and it was also a mess, the grammar and the pronunciation were alien to me now that I think of it, the learning experience for french and romanian was pretty much the same for me. Right now I'm learning Russian because I want to be fluent in at least one Slavic language but man it's been hard lol.
As a Japanese learner, I concur: Japanese is not for the light of heart, but it is definitely one of the more rewarding languages to learn. No matter your level, there's always a relevant goal you can set yourself. This was at least my experience.
I'd expect one difficulty of Japanese compared to Chinese for Europeans, is that mainly Chinese being more similar to ones such as English (SVO) vs. Japanese (SOV). The characters are indeed difficult, the grammar...not so much. Being Turkish, with a SOV language, translationg Japanese is smoother for me than English. Chinese and Thai I had to quit because of them tones. I get stressful thinking "what if I say something too appropriate".
Interesting topic. I am a native Cantonese speaker, out of the languages i learned and dabbled in, the most difficult language to learn for me definitely is Georgian and the easiest one is Hakka. So the order(from hard to easy) is : Georgian > Russian > Filipino > Finnish > Hindi > Spanish > Turkish > Mongolian > Indonesian > English > Japanese > Korean > Thai > Vietnamese > Shanghainese > Mandarin > Hokkien > Hakka. I do agree with you that Sicilian is a separate language from Italian since it is unintelligible to Italian. So the same with Chinese languages, such as Cantonese Hokkien hakka Shanghainese... etc they're also unintelligible to Mandarin, thus they are different languages from Mandarin within a big language family - Sinitic language family. Actually it's very ironic that some Romance languages, Slavic languages, Germanic languages, Tukic languages and Indonesian/Malaysian, Hindi/Urdu are highly mutually intelligible, but they are still treated as "different" languages. By the way, i will start to learn Arabic in 2024 and can't wait to know where it will be rank. As far as I know, Arabic also has many "dialects" which are not mutually intelligible.
I'm studying Sanskrit and it's the most demanding language that I've ever studied. It's grammar is voluminous. I found Japanese difficult. I was thrown in at the deep end with Japanese, because my relatives in New Zealand needed help with it in their guest house and I managed to be helpful with visitors from Japan. French, German and Modern Greek came easily. I also studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Welsh and Georgian. With ancient languages, I believe that it's very important to remember that they were once spoke languages. It helps one to fully appreciate the beauty of their literature.
For me. Tagalog 🇵🇭 is a mixed bag 🎒 dude to code changing. Sometimes, a phrase is in Spanish. Then, another phrase is in English. Then, another phrase has a blend of various loan words. Tagalog is in the middle for me. Spanish 🇪🇸 is my 2nd language. Easiest foreign language for me to learn. 😃 French 🇫🇷 is slightly harder. The spelling is harder. The same with the pronunciation. Luckily, Spanish is my cheat sheet. 😃 German was hard. Latin was harder. Biblical Hebrew was harder, especially with the alphabet. Ancient Greek is the hardest.
as a Bulgarian, i caught up English from a very young age thanks to Cartoon Network (because it was only in English early on television) and from games and toys, and books. Then in 2019, I had Spanish as a subject in High school and am still learning it but needs more practice however if I didn't know English beforehand I would have had much more difficulty learning it And now in university I met someone from China(which happens by a very small chance), i'm very interested if we could teach each other
I will try to tackle Laotian soon. Wish me luck 😂 My native language is Dutch, and aside from that I speak fluent English, reasonable Italian and French, and I understand German and some Spanish. It's going to be quite difficult, I presume.
Impressive. You've made the right choice my man. As a Thai, many foreigner I know insist on studying Thai first bc they think it'd benefit them more in the future (with more high profile jobs with higher wage and larger economy and financial allat stuff, if that makes sense😅) But I always pursue them to start with Laotian first. As I always comparing Thai and Laotian as France and American English (for the foreigner to make sense). Thai and Laotian are very similar. Very, very similar. I can have a conversation with my Laotian friend/tourist/employee with my Thai and they reply in Laotian with no problem for both parties. Most Thais can read Laotian if we squint our eyes hard enough😂 And Laotian watching Thai television on their daily basis helps, too. But Laotian are more simple and true to their language structure. The words are read how it spell and spell how it sounds. It has less exceptions in grammar/spelling, and less loan words (mostly just Thai, in which Thai loan from Sanskrit already; used in formal or academic words, like in Laos school/hospital/government place). But if you can pick up Laotian first you'll have no problem communicating with Thais. Meanwhile, Thai are more unnecessarily complicated, with loan words from Pali, Sanskrit, Persian, Portuguese, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese, Laotian, Mon, Mhong, etc. baked into the language so deeply since the 1400s (when Thailand was the first stop and the major port city of Asia, so of course, we have loan some Dutch words as well😊) so there are a lot of spacial case to memorize. The spelling are a lot more inconsistent. Rule of grammar has many, many, many exceptions. More tones, which for the untrained ears will have a hard time to learn to differentiate. More consonants sounds and alphabet. Laotian will have a hard(er) time picking up Thai language than, say, Thais learning Laotian. (I know this bc I have many Laotian friend complaining to me about how Thais language are so inconsistent to its structure, while I intuitively picking up Laotian alphabet and accent just by hanging out with them and listen to them talking to each other/ to me - as i stated earlier, while we hang out, my friends speak in Laotian and I speak in Thai. That's included group chat and FB/IG comments, too) Sorry for the long ass essay you may already know all this. But i cant help but impress. As a Thai, you are the first Farang i ever know who determined to learn Laotian instead of Thai. And I'm here to support you and confirm you made the right choice picking Laotian.
@@dj.djames1830 Thanks for your kind reply and your encouragement! I actually did not know quite a few of the things you wrote in your reply, except for the part about Laotian and Thai being mutually intelligible :) The other things are very useful for me to know as well! I have already made a plan: first I'll focus on learning the alphabet, then I'll learn basic phrases and immerse myself a bit, and after that I'll hire a tutor online (I already found a good teacher who can teach both Laotian and Isaan) and try to make friends online and in real life so I can really force myself to use the language :)
Very interesting to learn Latin would be more difficult for you than Japanese. I believe the similarities to Italian do help as they help to Portuguese speakers. But of course I haven't gone so far in Latin to realize the true challenges. I've been learning Japanese for 20 years now. Still struggling with kanji memorization but I guess there is an organicity of matching Chinese ideograms to it that is really touching. Anyway I'm more scared about the fact that the level of speech is so different, from text books to the streets that sometimes I think I don't know Japanese at all.😅😅 By the way, I have a high level in Spanish, now some French, some Italian and now I'm considering to learn Ancient Tupi, the language of the original inhabitants of Brazilian coast when the Europeans arrived.
So of languages I learn (L1 being what doctors call "Individual Vocalizations"); English is easier to learn to speak, French just a confusing mess and French speakers ask me not to speak French to them as I "sound medieval", German was a lot easier, Spanish I can remember words and have been told my pronunciation is good albeit Mexican and thus has a slightly old fashioned quality, Russian made some sense and hopefully my Soviet characters seemed more authentic. List goes: English, German, Spanish, Russian, French although only English gave me conversation partners on the regularity and to read and write is more difficult although when I was little The Christians (not sure of their name but when I was 2-4 I went to a nursery where we learned about reading, writing, mathematics and Christianity so that is the name in my mind) taught me to read and write. Which makes me wonder, what factor do autism and dyslexia play in learning languages.
I am native English (American) but I've studied in order Latin, German and French. Latin was the hardest, partly because it's so stiff, but also because I had no no desire to learn it. Second year Latin was Caesar's Gallic Wars. At the beginning of my 3rd year the school hired a German instructor so I switched to that. I should mention that I went to a small all boys Catholic high school so our choices were few. In college I continued with German for another year since it was required for my major (Chemistry). After leaving school I met a group of French students one summer and that inspired me to learn French. As far as difficulty I'd say German and French are about equal.
i am a totally gringo american but taught myself spanish and brazilian portuguese as a teen and i find portuguese to be easier. spanish has a simpler phonetic system which ironically made it harder for me because spanish speakers speak more quickly than portuguese speakers and the simpler phonology makes it hard for me to distinguish between words and syllables of the same word. additionally, english has more in common with brazilian portuguese phonology than any dialect of spanish, especially regarding vowels, which makes it easier for me to pronounce. i also find that grammar and word order makes more sense to me in portuguese. while both languages are influenced by arabic, portuguese has less of an arabic influence than spanish, which makes it easier to find cognates, since portuguese retains many latin words where spanish uses arabic-derived words. the same can be said about the basque influence on both languages, but to a lesser degree. i often hear that learning two similar languages at the same time is a bad idea but that hasn't been the case for me. learning both feels like learning 1.5 languages at the same time because they are so similar. learning vocabulary or grammar in one language usually means that i learn it in the other, just applying that language's orthography. 10/10 experience, would recommend, latino cultures are fantastic
One other challenge concerning Japanese is the levels of politeness. Are there four or five? There are of course honorific, polite, plain and humble forms. In addition there is the “impersonal” form that is used in writing and lectures. As a result of this, pronouns tend to be avoided. This calls for some grammatical gymnastics in conversation. You end up talking about yourself and the interlocutor in the third person. (The basic Mandarin character 你 doesn’t exist in Japanese) And so I have to agree: Japanese is much harder than Mandarin and Arabic (both of which I’ve studied). As usual, I enjoyed your video. Keep ‘em coming!
Added complication of Japanese must be that there is the distinction between formal speech, and who is speaking, male or female. What to me is most difficult in Mandarin (besides remembering the tones) is that there are many sounds that are hard to distinguish (like x, sh, j, c, ch, z, zh) . And (looking at the pinyin) the confusing 'voiced' consonants (b d z etc) that aren't voiced at all. An other difficulty is the arabic script, when there is no indication of the vowels, especially when applied to farsi, an Indo-European language that has a completely different phonology, resulting in several characters with the same sound, the use of each depending on the word.
the second language closest to your native would be the easiest to pick up I would think. My understanding is that Frisian is fairly close to old English, so if I tried to learn it the curve would be much shorter than if I tried to learn Navajo.
Navajo has been difficult for me. I only know one person in town who speaks it. So I’d like to go to an area where there are lots of speakers and a university near enough with classes.
If you focus on learning standard Japanese, already have good pronunciation, and get lots of practice, you will develop good pitch. There is no reason to learn it separately. If you live outside the areas of Japan that do not use standard pitch, that means the dialect speaking areas, forget about it. They have their own pitch. In terms of Japanese learning, pitch is the lowest priority. Foreigners should focus on making their speech clear and understandable.
I have studied Italian, Mandarin , Russian, Dutch, German, French, Swedish and Ojibwe. Of that list, only the last three have I studied for more than a couple of months. I can, however, say that Ojibwe is by far the most difficult language I have studied. It’s so different to the other languages I’ve studied, but there is also a paucity of teaching materials and documentary materials such as grammars and dictionaries. I started to learn French after embarking on Ojibwe and in comparison it felt like so easy, almost like I didn’t even have to try
I have learned several foreign languages since the early days of elementary school. I am an Indonesian language native speaker. Based on my own experience, it was really hard for me to learn English due to English is not a phonetic language and I started to learn english at the age of 6 when I haven't got a good grasp on my own language. Luckily I didn't mix both languages into a broken form. (I guess my english is kinda broken now since I don't use it that much anymore eventhough it's my L2.) At the age of 10, my school had a curricullum where Mandarin was a subject you have to learn. I gave up instantly because I'm not good at tonal language and don't want to learn it eventhough I still had to suck it up until middle school. I learned Japanese in secondary school/highschool as a complementary subject. Japanese was quite easy for me to learn because the grammars were easy to understand and I am quite familiar with many of its vocabulary due to heavy consumption of anime (I'm a weeb lmao). I haven't learn Kanji that time, but at least I had a good grasp on the languange and I was able to maintain a prolonged conversation. I took a gap year after I graduated from secondary school and started to learn German while planning to take bachelor degree there. Sadly I didn't go to Germany, but I took German Studies major in Indonesia. It was tough at the beginning because the grammars are kind of similar with English but way more complicated than English grammar and the concept of "gender on nouns" is something completely foreign to me. After that it was quite easy though I had to sacrifice my English to be broken. As for now, I'm quite confident at my own German. During my college days I also had a chance to learn some other foreign languages like Hebrew, Russian, Italian, and relearning Japanese. I basically forgot how to speak and read Hebrew because I don't have partner to practice with. I don't have any need to learn Russian eventhough I still can read and write in cyrillic. I still remember Italian and still use it sometimes I'm considering to learn more Japanese as I'm planning to get my master degree there. Kanji will be a major challenge for me since it's basically traditional Hanzi.
I learned English, which helped me in computing, reading books, or online as most material is in English. I wanted to learn your language cause I like the sound of it and because Italia. I started studying by myself, but then I quit soon afterwards because life. I thought Chinese was more difficult than Japanese, I have no experience with either, I'm surprised to hear it's the opposite. Times I've heard Chinese, to me it sounds like way too many vowels, it's just difficult to distinguish words or anything. Japanese is probably more difficult if you say so, but it does sound a little bit like you can distinguish a word or two just from the sound of it. I don't think I would be learning either though. I could never learn Spanish, even if I wanted to, I can't, I am allergic to Spanish, I know it sounds funny, but it's the truth, I'm not really a fiesta person. 🙂I have nothing against the Spanish people, or south americans, infact Argentina would probably be my favourite south america country, for obvious reasons, I just have difficulties with the language.
Spanish speaker here. From hardest to easiest: Japanese for the same reasons you listed. There’s no point in memorizing kanji readings imo, just memorize the words and you will learn some readings along the way and that will help you out eventually. Arabic because of the huge disconnect between formal and dialect, their writing system with no vowels, overall difficult grammar in MSA and the lack of content for learning for dialects. Russian because of the complicated case system + 3 genders and somewhat spelling rules. German because of the case system and syntax. English because it was my first foreign language but also the absolute lack of consistency in pronunciation. French has been the easiest by far given how much it’s like Spanish and English but getting familiar with the nasal sounds and liaison rules might have been a little tricky.
As a native English speaker I love that u said difficulty is subjective bc it’s easier for me to get the concepts of Russian and Japanese than the concepts of Spanish and Latin (I’m learning all 4 and for example the Russian cases are easier for me than the declensions and conjugation numbers of Latin or the cases of Spanish and I have speakers to learn with for all 4 languages)
I'm learning Mandarin, and yes, Japanese looks much harder. Especially the badly cobbled together writing system. At least in Mandarin the characters make a certain amount of sense, and you can even guess the pronunciation.
In my experience of attempting to learn both languages (casually, at evening school - though I've been to language schools in Japan a few times, only for a month or less. Not a whole year like younger students - I had a job to keep!), and I think you are right. The Japanese writing system is awful! I joke with Japanese friends that train stations have place names written three times (Kanji, Hiragana, and Romanji - which is the Japanese form of Pinyin) because Japanese people can't understand the Kanji characters of their own language! In fact there are games shows which challenge people on this. Mandarin grammar is very simple - it is just the tones that are tricky. And as you say, the Hanzi characters are logical - once you have learnt the pronunciation and meaning, that's it. Not so for Japanese Kanji. Korea had a similar situation, but they dumped the Chinese characters, and it is much better for everyone now. Japan perhaps is a little too stubborn for that! ;-)
I’m native Mandarin and Hokkien speaker, I’ve learnt English and ancient Chinese for 6 years in secondary school. I learnt German and Japanese in high school for 2 years, and Latin for 2 years in college. Japanese>Latin>Ancient Chinese >German>English The reason I put Latin and Ancient Chinese after Japanese is bc we aren’t required to speak them, so I only need to deal with vocab, grammar, reading, and translations.😅 Ancient Chinese is hard in the way that the meaning of characters changed thru history, and the knowledge of Mandarin will mislead you.
I took a total 4yrs of French from high school and college ( 25yrs ago ). I'm from US my native language is English, so I did not use French at all , just liked the language. In US the 2nd language is Spanish. Here's the weird thing ..... when I hear a Spanish my English brain , translates Spanish into French 1st , then my French-a-fried 🧠 brain , translates the French back into English , so I can understand basic Spanish. 😳 Between my native English, French wedged back in my brain 🧠, I can understand basic Spanish. Unfortunately when I did try to take a Spanish class, my brain🧠 keeps mixing Spanish with French😬.
I am German. I learnt my languages in the 70s and 80s. In the 70s when I was in my teens I put a great effort in learning English and it has been my working language ever since. But in hindsight I would consider it rather difficult because writing and pronunciation absolutely don't match. I have been in Japan for one year. The spoken language is easy, I don't consider the grammar difficult. However, since you must know kanji to increase your vocabulary it is the most difficult language. I find Chinese however more difficult because of the tones and palatal and retroflex as well as aspirated and unaspirated consonants. While I have no problem (any more) to pronounce the words I find them impossible to recall. Getting Hanzi mixed up with Kanji doesn't help either and the grammar that is word order patterns I find also difficult. Being German I find Dutch difficult because of far too many "false friends". For me the easiest language is Spanish probably because like Russian I learnt it as a child from the German educational TV in the late 60s and early 70s.
I'm a native American English speaker, who studied German in college. The first time I heard "Het Wilhelmus" I thought it was a German folk-song because I could understand about 50% The line about "den Koning van Hispanje heb ik altijd geëerd" was puzzling, why the King of Spain have I what? Also Geeerd sounds like the German greeting "Geehrte herr..." It's very interesting to me that if you travel from Scotland, to Anglia to Friesland to Netherlands to North Germany to South Germany to Austria, and the reverse, you can hear the progression of the West Germanic language family. Zwischen englischen und deutschen Wörtern gibt es viele falsche Freunde oder viele Feinde, nicht wahr? Faszinierend, nicht wahr? Yes it's obvious that my German is very rusty.
Maybe catalán would be even easier for you than Spanish. It shares more vocabulary with Italian than Spanish. And "having been part of the same country" with Sicily for several centuries, it's likely to have had some kind of influence as well.
こんにちは、When I first came to California I couldn’t speak English at all. So First 1-2 years I had hard time learning specially speak in English.. ( even though I understand what people are saying) I was worried to make a mistake. But my mother in law was doing Daycare, so I start to helping her and learned so much from kids.. also I stop try to translate in Japanese in my head, that helped me tremendously… I am so glad to find your channel and enjoy watching your videos!! これからも、ビデオたのしみにしてます。がんばってくださいね！
Swedish Native here, I started to study Japanese at the age of 13 and also had the chance to do two shorter exchanges to japan during my first and second year of Highschool. Due to my young age at the time I never really struggled to have a understanding of how the languages it self was built up, and because I also had many chances to chat with natives from the start the pitch accent came kind of naturally, however the Kanji part still haunts me to this day, I read and understand most things, but hand written Japanese is something I struggle with even after 10+ years studying it. But a lot of younger Japanese do too because everything is computerized anyway, so I try not to feel so bad about it. However while studying at Japanese uni I tried to take Italian classes and it was the most difficult thing I have ever tried to learn, even though it should be closer to Swedish than Japanese per say, already being an adult and the way Italian grammatically differs from Swedish and Japanese made it very foreign to me, even if some words were the same and the alphabet too, I just couldn't get my head around the verb conjugations.
Since others will probably read this I'll type this in English but I'm Swedish too. Swedish is a pitch accent language too so we have the ear to hear pitch accent for free from the start so we, and the Norwegians, have a leg up on that compared to some other fellow Europeans. It's wild though that in all our Swedish lessons in school they never tell us this, I found out through a random youtube video and was like Swedish is WHAT? I had lived my whole life totally clueless about it but it's how "banan", "tomten" and "anden" can mean two things each depending on pitch.
I there. Love hour video, and i can't agree more with the practical aspect of learning! A bilingual french/english speaker, i only managed to learn a bit of flemish when i had to, at work. The schooling helped, but without the obligation to try to communicate it goes nowhere. I also learned greek around 30, with native speakers, a language i consider not excessively difficult because it feels like playing around with legos, haha. But what stumped me for a while was the changing tone of each word. I found i couldn't by ear identifie the beginning and ending of the words. In writing tho, it was much more evident of course (spaces between each word) and i am not tone deaf, but the changing of the tonal accent was a challenge at first. Now i correct my friends who are learning and can even make jokes based on homophones (i like a good pun), quite difficult to find in this language .
Easiest: English, everyday I listen, write and if I have luck I speak and Italian because it's italian 😁 it's like Spanish but faster and more i and e Hardest Mandarin Chinese , a challenge its writing. Ancient ones of course Latin and ancient greek, especially greek because in latin there is a fixed convention about how to pronounce whether ecclesiastical or remastered classical pronunciation but greek ...there are a lot of confussion!! Korean : the sounds are confusing and I don't sympatize with the people and its way for enterteining . So I think the hardest is Korean.
Navajo is the hardest one i tried. its the perfect storm of aspects that makes it difficult. almost no loan words from other languages tones very complex grammar .not many resources since they are native American so their population is small and are surrounded by people who speak English. i personally think that if it wasn't for the writing system Japanese would be a medium difficulty language
For me, the hardest language that I am attempting to learn is Polish. I only started a month ago, but as a native English (US) speaker, it's quite difficult in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and some consonant clusters make little sense. I have also tried German (even received a minor in university), Swedish, Norwegian/Danish (about 2 months each), French, Italian, Icelandic and Spanish. Since I have just moved to the southern USA, I started Spanish again because I will definitely hear it often - although I am personally focused on Castilian - and I am keeping steady with Polish. For me, the Romance and Germanic languages are quite easy for me, but any others would harder. I would like to try Japanese and Finnish at some point, and those would probably become my hardest challenges.
I am a native Russian and Ukrainian speaker, my third language was English and then French. I learnt French quite quickly (1.5 years until Fluency) and now I am working in my Mandarin Chinese which is the hell of a challenge. Hoping to find some native speakers with whom I can practice it
Russian native here. Spanish and japanese feels pretty much natural to me, so there for the easieast. Franch and korean felt kinda weird, therefore the most eford. Although I love the korean writing system. In my opinion the best writing system ever invented.
Is really interesting this Subject and, as you said, is completely subjective, we cannot say that have the hardest language, considering the all kinds learning their languages in about the same age.
Where was English along all those? I guess it makes sense that the languages the most different from your native language will be harder. But having people to talk to is huge. I can speak Japanese pretty well but I lived there for two years. It helped tons. I’m trying to learn Korean but it’s not going so well because I only got to take a three week vacation there and I don’t have any speaking partners online or anything.
Any language is quite easy to learn relatively quickly if you live in an environment where every single other person only speaks that language, and you yourself need to speak it in order to survive and interact with other people. Of course in practice that's extremely rarely the case, so almost nobody gets to experience that fastest possible way of learning a language.
I’m a native English speaker and studied (as an adult) Thai and Tagalog. For me Thai was much easier due to the simple verb usage. Japanese I gave up - I can’t get my mouth around it haha
As computer professional, my hardest language was a stint doing Prolog. I'll rather do various dialects of Assembler before I do anything in Prolog ever again. For actual languages I can do a passable, if heavily Acadian, French - bonjour Bayou Techné! This got me quite strange looks in France, and rightly so. But the hardest language related task I had was when I had to do an Internationalization (which us computer people abbreviate to I18N for obvious reasons) for the California State Department for voting sites and pamphlets. I had to use 22 Different languages for the documents and web sites. By far, the absolute hardest was: Thai.
It’s not a mainstream language but I am curious to know what you think about learning a South Indian language- Malayalam. It is clearly the hardest Indian language. Speaking and writing.
As an English speaker I find French fairly easy, as it is so similar to English i.e. similar word order and huge shared vocabulary. I can listen to a new subject and recognise most of the unknown words because of this link. I find German very hard because there is so little shared vocabulary e.g. empfahlen, fahren, reisen, wählen.
As a Finnish speaker, Japanese was easiest language to learn. I have also studied English, German and Swedish of which English was the easiest only because much of the media I consume is in English. Compared to English, Japanese was much easier. Didn't really need to learn to pronaunce words (I still have trouble pronauncing English as some of the sounds don't come naturally to me). Grammar is much easier and similar to Finnish. Learning kanji is the hardest part as he explained. But I prefer memorising kanji over grammar rules that don't make sense to me.
I heard that about Hungarians have it easier learning a language like Kazakh.
Turkish speakers have an easier time learning Japanese and Korean as well.
motsiron !
vinranttotsinva saikooni nihonkkoovo saperu
I think it would be fun if He tried finish. at least I think that would be a hard langauge to learn. The only thing I know. Is that Swedish isn´t of any use, I can kind of understand the other nordic languages.
Very impressive. I struggled especially with memorizing the pitch accent of each word and applying the right grammar rules in the right contexts. There are also so many grammar particles, it's been four years and I still struggle with using ための ために correctly and using が、へ、に、and で in the right contexts.
Very surprising to me.
Metatron, your English is impeccable in my opinion. If didn't know your background, I would say that you sound like someone who picked up English at very young age. Your accent is very minimal which makes you perfectly clear and easy to understand. I say this a native English speaker. I'm definitely jealous of your talents when it comes to learning multiple languages. I struggle to reach proficiency in a second language. Like you say, it largely comes down to consistent exposure and practice.
He sounds like he’s english, but not a Londoner, if that makes sense.
He’s Italian, and don’t know exactly if he’s from Sicily, or Sardinia.
As a Polish native speaker, Finnish was (and still is) a hell of a challenge. Working on it, though :)
I’m learning Polish
@@-Dazai- And what is your native language, if you don't mind sharing? I hope you find your journey through the language rewarding, as although it might not be THE hardest language to pick, it can be quite challenging and I always praise foreigners for trying. If you meet any obstacles, don't let them discourage you :)
@@verAlvyn thank you:3 and my native language is English but Polish was very hard in the beginning but now I am at conversational level but I keep trying to get better because one day I wanna live in Poland
Kyl sä pärjäät :)
I dont know Spanish, but have heard from native teachers that it's simple at an easy level, but then it becomes complicated...?
My language is Norwegian, it's not so difficult
... to read.
But you will not be able to pronounce it😊 because of a million (almost😂) dialects, varieties and pitch and tones...
Japanese must certainly be the hardest major language for a European to learn. The writing system is so colossally illogical and difficult, it’s an enormous effort just to be able to read very simple texts, and this significantly slows down acquisition. It’s also not helped by Japanese people culturally not correcting foreigners, meaning that many Japanese L2 speakers seriously overestimate their own abilities. One curiosity about Japanese though is that basic ‘tourist’ Japanese is actually really easy - you can communicate in a restaurant with just a few dozen easy to remember words (unlike with tonal languages, where even pronouncing simple words requires a lot of practice). So the jump from basic Japanese to intermediate is enormous, while the opposite is to an extent true with mandarin.
Well...kanji is not illogical, really, for the most part. It's actually quite fun once you get the hang of it. It's just a lot to memorize.
True. Probably japanese and arabic are the hardest imho.
For me (American born of Indian descent), in order of hardest to easiest of the languages I've studied: Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, German, Telugu, Hindi/Urdu, Russian, French, Persian, Spanish
It’s quite endearing hearing that Latin was difficult for you, even though you speak Italian. I was always angry at my Italian classmates that they have it easy with Latin, but now I see they really had to put in a lot of work and effort to nail it!
it's like German and Swedish somehow or Russian and Bulgarian. There are more grammatical complexity in German, Russian and Latin than in Swedish, Bulgarian, Italian.
@fivantvcs9055 I agree that despite German being a West Germanic language like English, I find Swedish and especially Norwegian much easier to grasp. Dutch however would probably be easier than the two forementioned north germanic languages.
Spanish seems closer to Latin than Italian does, at least to me. I studied Latin in high school half a century ago and, because of that and Latin derivatives in English, I was able to read signs and things in Spain while being unable to understand what was said. This is similar to my being able to read toilet signs, for example, ㊚ men ㊛ women, without knowing the Chinese or Japanese language, in Korean I know they are namja and yoja.
Thanks to the large number of Japanese kanji words shared among East Asian languages, as a Han Chinese speaker, I find this is really helpful in learning Japanese and Vietnamese. Especially Vietnamese is almost like a sister to Han Chinese.
-Indonesian is not as simple as many people recommend. Many affix systems and semantics are quite vague.
-I'm struggling more than expected with learning Spanish.
-I don't know what the hell German language is doing.
-I gave up ancient Greek language within half a year.
Prima di iniziare a seguire il tuo canale ero incuriosito dai tuoi contenuti, ora che ho scoperto che anche tu hai studiato giapponese all'Orientale come me ( tra l'altro io sono proprio di Napoli) hai definitivamente catturato il mio interesse! Ahah
it's crazy to me how like ~2 hours of italian on duolingo combined with already speaking spanish and portuguese makes it possible to understand this comment. i love languages man
Per quelli di noi che parlano spagnolo e italiano, il giapponese non sarà complicato. Solo il suo alfabeto può risultare complicato per noi
@@AWSMcubethe romance connection
If you think Latin is hard to learn, it's because you have not tried ancient Greek yet.
He literally said not because it's a hard language, but mostly because he didn't have anyone to practice the language.
Egyptian or Sumerian or ancient Chinese or Classical Nahuatl are way harder .
@@DafniKemand with whom would you practice speaking ancient Greek?
Latin at least is spoken in the Catholic church. I live in Greece and have never met anybody who's fluent in ancient Greek. Not even highschool teachers who teach it are fluent.
There were at least some fluent speakers of ancient greek in Germany. I remember, I once was invited to one of their meetings - in Düsseldorf, I guess. Yet ancient greek is mostly read.
@@helgaioannidis9365 He didn't mention ancient Greek at all, he's talking about the languages that he studied and speaks fluently, not every language in the world.
I started studying Latin a couple of years back and I ended up getting very flustered - not so much with my grammar books, but more with the Latin language learning community, I guess you could say. So I decided that maybe it would be helpful for my overall language learning to pick up a language that is much more commonly studied. So that ended up being German. I always wanted to learn it. Then a little while later, I wanted to pick at French. I found that studying German definitely helped me in Latin. And then I found that studying French really helped me with German, especially in speaking. I ended up dropping my French study as life got in the way. From the amount of time that I did study it, I found it very easy to pick up if reading was your main goal. Speaking it is a challenge. With Latin, what has proven to be most difficult is the heavy amount of declension/conjugations and grammar, grammar, grammar you have to learn. German's challenge for me is that guttural pronunciation and dear lord, the word order. I have been so frustrated with the word order as there are rules, and then a bunch of exceptions. It's hard to say what language is harder for me, as both have their unique challenges. I am American, by the way. I was never raised bi-lingual, and at this point in time, I am learning at my own pace in self study. I would love to take classes one day, but now is not that time.
It won´t help you, but English most likely was guttural too once, a couple of centuries ago in the middle ages. Remnants of that should be the "gh" in night, knight, enough... As for the word order, here too there are some minor remnants. And the word order when asking a question is pretty much the same in contemporary English and German.
If you ever wanna pick up latin again I just wanna say the community has changed(and grown!) a lot in the past decade or so. In general, there was an influx of younger, passionate people and I'd say the atmosfere is a lot nicer now. Also, I don't know if you've heard about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, if you hate grammar memorization that might be something for you won't find any grammar tables there and it's a wonderful, almost effortless way to learn.
@@rvdzst I hope the American teaching methods for German have improved since the 1970s. I was taught basics in one semester, Meine name ist Friedrich. Gern trinke ich Bier. Immer ich, nimmer ish oder ik. On my first trip to Germany I found that it was actually pronounces ish in the Northwest, and some of the cultural information was over a century out of date. In the second semester it was Faust, and not Goethe's but the earlier one!
Germans can easier read and understand older German writing, than English speakers, especially many of my fellow Americans, can read Shakespeare. I liked the plays so much that I read many more than the high school requirements, and even so I occasionally need the side notes. Some of that made German a bit easier for me, Four and twenty Blackbirds = vier und zwanzig schwarzvogeln. The biggest problem for English speakers are cases and gender, unglaubliches unsinn ist das!
In middle school & high school in the 1980s (in the Midwest region of the US), I took Spanish and German. 8th-11th grade Spanish & 10th-11th German; overlapping (taking them both during the same school year) Spanish & German in 10th and 11th grade. Interestingly, in 11th grade, I had the same teacher-Mr. McLaughlin) for both-back-to-back one semester). He also spoke Latin (school didn’t teach it anymore). I went on to join the US Army as a Spanish linguist; attending the Defense Language Institute for 26 weeks for Spanish. Two duty stations and 5 years later I was sent to a contracted school to learn Indonesian for 9 months; then 5 years later again, I spent 10 months learning French at the Foreign Service Institute.
I taught English to foreign military personnel, with training at DLI, Fort Sam in 1975. I have been a professional ESL/EFL/SPE teacher for years since then, having obtained a MS in ESL. The methods and materials used and taught at Ft. Sam were, IMO, less than optimal and definitely not outstanding, the teachers found it necessary to slyly "supplement" in order to achieve better results. DLI, Monterey, however, has an excellent and well deserved track record. My first 2 years teaching on a non-US navy base were interesting, enjoyable and productive. Thanks Uncle Sam for your assistance! Teaching Korean officers was a dream job, no disrespect, no slacking, teaching in the ME, however....the less said, and remembered, the better*!!!
*EDIT: Don't take the last bit as absolute, there were bright spots, few and far between. Americans and Koreans tend to respect [or at least comply] with instruction, and will work, often well, to achieve goals. In the ME this was often not the case, or the personality chemistry and cultural affiliations were far more important and far more likely to present problems. For example, in one ME class, I had a student who had been in the US at an American high school, had a good grasp of English already, was of high status, took a liking to me and decided to act as my "enforcer" with his wingman. He kept the others in line, respectful, doing their homework and practicing. In other classes the situation was different, sometimes the opposite.
That’s a nice mix of languages. I assume you found French fairly easy.
@@StillAliveAndKicking_ French was somewhat easy….but I speak French with a Spanish accent, not an American English one.
@@mr-vet I also don’t have a (British) English accent in French, I think it’s now unplaceable, one of those uncanny valley accents. A few years ago a Frenchman said I had a Quebec accent, now long gone since I listen to standard French. Incidentally, to speak French well you need to pronounce every syllable clearly, and there is only a mild stress with syllable timing. But you probably know that anyway.
I grew up speaking Greek and English in my household. Was taught Ancient Greek and Latin in Greek school. Also lived in Germany for years.
I've dabbled in: Mandarin, Japanese, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Finnish, Farsi (gave up on all of those). And I'm currently learning Italian.
TL;DR: As a Greek, hardest is hands down Mandarin while easiest is hands down Italian.
Mandarin is hands down the hardest to pronounce and also to learn vocabulary in.
Doesn't even compare to the rest. It's crazy.
My friend has been living in China for 13 years now, and he still has trouble with all the "ever so slightly different" sounds, which do make a big difference.
Learning Italian, it's really really easy.
Especially when learning them via Greek instead of via English.
Cause Italian and Modern Greek seem very similar to me.
As a Greek you just need to learn the vocabulary and you can speak it.
They are similar with Ancient Greek and also Cypriot and Cretan Greek in their intonation (singing).
And of course, many many words have the same root.
German is easier to learn via English instead of via Greek.
However, the odd thing is that they are also similar to Ancient Greek as well, both in their syntax,
as well as some root words, which are straight out of ancient greek, but then in modern greek they have changed. How the hell? O_o
And the fact that they use this "mathematical" or "molecular" style of forming words, like Greek does. Which English and most other languages don't do.
And that frees up so much "memory space" in your "brain-drive" forcing you to crate/calculate instead. Which is super fun.
Honorable mention to Japanese, which still mind-fucks me.
Having what to me seems like sometimes "multiple" and some times "none at all, monotone" syllabic stress (sýllable èmphasis).
Irish polyglot here. Defo Irish was the greatest challenge. Bronze-age grammar & vocabulary. Utterly crazy numbers of exceptions & special cases. And an Orthography that feels like LSD in your head.
Ironically enough, despite Irish spelling supposedly being more modern and up-to-date, I find its spelling to be less reliable for deriving sounds than Gaelic. Maybe I'm biased in favour of Gaelic, but I feel like Irish spelling still has loads of vowel combinations that are simply swallowed up in speech, whereas in Gaelic those spellings do generally notate a slight variation in the sound.
I made no progress in one year of Irish. Certainly no one around here can practice with me. My grandparents were the last to converse in it but didn’t think we would need it. Sad to say.
First took French in Junior High School. Then I took Latin in High School. Finally in uni, I first took Japanese. Late uni., I took Korean.
French wasn't terribly easy for sounds but the clock bit for me was incredibly frustrating to figure out. Latin had some difficulty but I remember less of the difficulty of it. Latin was really nice to me in clarifying some old sayings and general English grammar points.
Japanese was fairly easy to speak once I got the "ra" and "tsu" sounds down. To be honest the former was worse. Some of the grammar in Japanese can definitely be a bit confusing. Korean if I am being honest is definitely harder to read than Japanese because some of those sounds aren't part of English's native sounds.
After all this to get back on the horse and encourage myself in Japanese I took Portuguese by way of lingq then started up Pimsleur. I found Portuguese not too bad, it helped having a lot of common or similar words in English. This being said I have a bigger vocabulary than most in English. That can be a help as well as a hindrance, a help in that I find some popular yet less well known and used English words would at times nearly pop up 1 for 1 or quite close. A hindrance in that you will also fall into the false friends trap. Latin also helped because a few of the words unfamiliar for English I would kind of remember from Latin. Heck even Japanese helped me in at least one pairing, connecting "hontou ni?!" to "e mesmo".
I have also done a few others ok? So here are my short experiences through Pimsleur: German-Harder for me to speak certain words or sounds correctly vs. Japanese. Like a real pain. Hindi-Not the easiest in terms of the structure for direction but the general sentence structure is not bad and fairly easy to speak. Some of the gender sound shifts can be harder to distinguish at times. Russian-Enjoy this and a few sounds are harder to speak but I find German worse. The alphabet I need to crack down on, that gives me fits wanting it to look clean given Roman letters and nice fonts. There is of course learning the different sounds to the same letter too. I want to write in Russian later and have it be at a decent speed when I do the act of writing so I will have to learn Russian cursive which looks totally different at times than print.
What else? Mandarin and Cantonese. Well hearing them on Pimsleur...I much prefer Cantonese soundwise even though it has many more tones. It seems the pitch shifts are more clear. I plan to come back and learn both but will focus on Cantonese first after substantially improving my Japanese. Hopefully it will give me a leg up learning Vietnamese too given how similarly they sound. Hope the same for Khmer.
I did start out Catalan at lingq and given how deeply I got into Portuguese it was a definite help in how many words were close or similar. It feels like French getting blended into Spanish or Portuguese. The writing is generally not bad but at first my mind was annoyed at having the lowercase i not being capitalized when it was alone.
Also had looked at Welsh, Hawaiian and Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo. Some of the structure of Welsh and Gaelic isn't difficult and a number of loan words help. Hawaiian I find I really like so far and the sounds are very easy. So far some of structure seems clear as well.
edit: I do NOT know all these languages by the way, Portuguese then Japanese I am the furthest along.
Another great vid, Metatron-先生。I lived in Japan for seven years, and I reached about early high school level in Kanji by the time I left. Besides writing letters to friends in Japanese to keep in practice, seeing station names in Kanji, Hiragana, and Romaji every day plus receiving business cards where most Japanese surnames are made up of characters Japanese would have learned by 3rd grade, I found Kanji knowledge fairly easy to retain. However, travels to northern Honshu, Hokkaido, and especially Ryukyuan place names could really throw me for a loop, but as you said: many Japanese would not know how to read some of them first time out, so I didn't feel too embarrassed! On another note, may I respectfully request a video on Bergamasch with explanations of differences between Western and Eastern Lombard and how they relate to standard Italian and maybe German. Molte grazie!
I lived in many countries and had many different ex wives from different countries. My native language is English. I speak C1 Cantonese and lived 12 years in Hong Kong. This was super hard to learn, took years to learn how to memorise tones for each word. I speak C1 Russian. This took 6 months to get to C1. I lived 10 years in Ukraine. I speak B2 Croatian. This is my heritage language, can't get more advanced, there is no decent content to progress. I guess this helped my Russian. I speak French B2/C1. I went to French international school and did my schooling in French. Never used it in real life outside of school. Getting rusty. I speak C1 German, took 1500 hours in total and 300 hours of italki, 6 intensive courses at Goethes. In my opinion, German was super easy. I am now learning Italian and find it 100% kindergarten easy. So easy that I reckon I can be fluent in 3 months with intensive studies. Had 4 wives (1 chinese and 3 Ukranians). My strongest languages are the ones that I had a wife to speak to daily. though with German, daily italki classes for German is my new wife replacement.
Based. I'm looking forward to live like you old man, one life that feels like many ones.
Stop shifting though languages and start holding onto wives dude.
@@velvetcroc9827What does C1 mean?
@@dwdwoneBaseline, it means he can communicate somewhat well
Somehow having wife after wife to practice a language is selfish self serving narcissistic even. Perhaps add emotional abuse to that.
Your boasting and prideful ways and attitudes are not impressive qualities.
Enough said. I have other thoughts… 💭 🤯🤓🥶🫥
As a native Swede, fluent in english since a very early age, 5 years of learning spanish in school and over 1 year of daily practise of japanese under my belt. I gotta say that the most important thing is to imerse yourself in the language. Casue I learnt spanish for 5 years however, I´m actually better at japanese in my opinion. It has to do with my dedication and will of learning the language. I watch, read and practise it everyday and it really helps if you fully imerse in it. So for example watching anime with japanese audio and subtitles. And even though you learn english in Sweden since a very early age, I was already quite good at it because of one simple reason. All of the youtube videos and media I consumed as a child was English with English subtitles, so it basically became like a second native language. There are times that I know words in English but can´t come up with the Swedish one. However I don´t have anyone to speak or write english with so my pronounciation and spelling is lacking a bit. But my understanding of English is probably better than my native understanding, which I find quite facinating.
Anyways I just wanted to say that you shouldn´t focus on the difficulty. If you like or really want to learn it, you will find a way.
I was raised by an Anglophone mother and a father who was Anglophone by personal history but who had learned Latin in church, Spanish on his own, and German in the university (also perhaps French). The altars had been pulled out from the back wall of the churches and priests had started saying "The Lord be with you" instead of "Dominus vobiscum" to us when I was nearly six. I had learned some German from Dad, some from reading (as also Latin), and then some in the university. (Yes, I'm from the U.S., and two generational removes from steerage, as in my immigrant paternal grandsire.) I had tested to a B 2:level in German. (I fid learn the Hebrew alphabet as well as its adaptation for writing Yiddish, so I can read some Yiddish and understand it.) For what it's worth, my preference in Latin is the ecclesiastical pronunciation with which I was already familiar before I had seen S. Giampaolo (Jan Pawel) II say Christmas Midnight Mass in it after my attending Midnight Mass in my own parish in English. I had been taking Spanish since I was in elementary school through the 11th grade, then French in the 12th grade, i.e., the last year of high school. Because we had a knot or three of Spanish-speakers outside our parish church after Mass during my adolescence, I had gotten some (albeit limited) practice speaking conversational Spanish. I had learned the Greek alphabet as a child but didn't get the hang of declensions of nouns in it until I had taken ancient Greek in my undergraduate time (last year thereof) at the university. (I would later encounter the Byzantine pronunciation of Greek when I had attended a Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgy as a student.) Modern Greek I had not really learned, and there are enough differences between patristic Greek and dhimotiki that I'd really have to learn the latter. I've never really formally studied "Wälsch" (archaic German word for "Italian"), though I have gotten some albeit limited ken of Italian from having read a bilingual version of the Divine Comedy (Allen Mandelbaum's translation). But when I had taken a test online of my knowledge of Italian, my knowledge thereof was categorized as A 1 to A 2. (Not good.) Anyway, I had on a lark tried to learn Gaeilge (once upon a time we'd had Irish nuns and priests in my North Florida home, but by then they were not in my part of the world any more), but never really got anywhere with it, nor with Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew. (I can maybe get a wee bit of some Hebrew prayers and prayers in Syriac, and on a really good day can figure out some things in Arabic.) Russian was just too intimidating grammatically for me, as was Polish, so I had never gotten under my belt more than a few phrases. (I can ask "gdye twalyet," but heaven help me if the answer with all the turns and paces comes back to me po-russki.) I had but a few rudiments of Nihongo (never learned Japanese pitch, much less its writing systems other than romaji) and am utterly innocent of Putonghua beyond being halfway able to murder "ni hao." Of the languages I had learned, Spanish was probably easiest, though the truth is I can understand the Spanish of Mexican intellectuals or technocrats from "de-efe" (Distrito Federal, Mexico's equivalent to D.C. in the States) a lot more readily than full-on Cuban Spanish. I had a family advantage with German, as well as its shared vocabulary with English, so I can't really put it in a difficulty league. I think you can guess my estimates of what languages I'd found harder and what ones I would find easier based on my remarks.
I'm a simple man, I see a Metatron video with a Venezuelan flag and I leave a comment and a like
So to start off, I'm a native speaker of Polish. My first foreign language was English but I don't really remember much of my earlier times of learning it because, as everyone in Poland, I was learning, and still am, English in school. I never cared for English until I was like in 6th grade of primary school. And also by that time I was pretty good in English, one, because of all that time in school. Two, because my parents are teachers of English so they helped me a lot. Having said all this, I don't really know where to put my English.
My second foreign language was Latin. I started it in school two years ago, after maybe one year (which was not very productive) I started to learn from LLPSI and started to speak Latin also. Then I had stopped learning Latin for like 5 months and in the beginning of this year I got back to it and also started speaking again (which continues to this day). Now my conversation ability is maybe not basic fluency but I think I'm pretty good as it comes to speaking.
When I came back to Latin after my 'pause' I began to learn Italian, and pretty much from the beginning, to speak it (and still am learning). My speaking is still a little bit 'rusty' but I'm feeling a lot more comfortable.
Also when I started Italian I also began German but sort of gave up on ut after short time. The reason was probably lazyness but also now I'm focused on Latin and Italian.
So having said all this this is my list from the hardest to the easiest language:
1. Latin
2. English
3. Italian
(These are languages that I jnow the best)
I'm also learning Spanish in school now but I don't really care about is so.. yeah.
Sorry to all of you for the wall of text.
I'm a french Canadian, and I just met a woman in Mexico. Now I practice Spanish with her, and she practice French, Spanish looks easy to me, but I had 3 years of it in secondary school. French is hard for her, but I made her practice, and she is great
For me I just didn't get Russian. I tried to learn it in college and I did horrible in that class even though I studied very consistently. The Slavic words bounced out of my brain as soon as I put them in there.
Japanese is difficult at times for the reasons mention in the video, but there was something about it that clicked in my brain and I didn't struggle with the grammar or kanji hardly at all. One thing that really helped was taking time to make Anki decks of Japanese places and famous people to get used to reading non-standard Kanji names and just being familiar with Japanese names in general. When I started I had to idea what sounded like a female or male name which definitely can make a difference in how to address people politely.
You are right, all is in the practice! In high school, I got one year of Spanish, At the end of that year, I wrote a letter all in spanish. Then, I didn't practice and forgot pretty much everything. I remember a few words, yes. No, I can't sustain a conversation. I can recognize two people speaking spanish and that all. I am tempted to pick it up again but now, I know a few people who can speak it. It was not the case in high school. For English, I start to form my ear to the language before learning it more formally in school. Reading and writing English was hard for me for a long time but it got better while reading it.
I must to admit that my high school Spanish teacher was the coolest one even if he was old. It was more than easy to learn with him. He had little tricks to makes thing easy to remember. We had a game period when we ended the day with him. He was inspiring. He knew French, English, Spanish, German and at the time, was learning Russian by himself.
Korean to me is easy, cause I am in love with korean but Greek is a nightmare cause I have a love/hate relationship.😅 I live in Greece so it should be easy for me to learn but is not the case.
I think if you like a language, if you really love that language, then it will be easy but if you have a negative view against a language then, no matter how much time, you spend on it it will never easy.
Exactly
I've been learning Japanese for almost a year. The basics are pretty easy and I haven't faced anything overwhelmingly difficult YET, like it's so hard that climbing Mt. Fuji would be easier. I do have a hard time memorizing a lot of the kanji for many of the words I use and have to keep looking them up, but I'm finding kanji easier to write because many have similar patterns. I think I find it easy because of all the anime and Japanese content I've consumed over the past 25 years and I take a huge interest in the culture. I would say it can be a challenge to find Japanese people to practice with because where I live, while there are some they're not as abundant as, say, Spanish-speaking people but at least I do have resources where I can practice. Also, when you're first learning it, almost no one is going to be at your level so that can be a real challenge as well.
Basque was arguably the hardest language for me. I started learning it at the end of the 1970's. While the grammar is quite bizarre for a Western European language, indeed, it is the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe, it is totally logical and once you learn the basic structure, it all comes together. The verbal morphology is very baroque and the verbs are devilishly complex but, then again, they are almost mathematical. What made Basque difficult was that I learnt it precisely in the 1970's, right after it was officially "unified", i.e. Euskara Batua.
By 1979, all of the teachers knew Euskara Batua but the people who spoke Basque did not. They all spoke in their various dialects which often differed greatly. The other great difficulty posed by Basque was the dearth of materials to learn it with. The reading material was scant. The grammar books were generally not for learners but for those who were already fluent. The dictionaries were very bad and there were no Basque-English dictionaries. I actually wrote one to help me learn Basque and it is now the most used English-Basque dictionary, Morris Basque dictionary. Another problem was that people didn't , and still don't, have a big vocabulary in their own language. They don't know how to say things such as knuckle, rye, oats, badger, temple (of one's face or head), etc.
Another thing was that, in the 1970's, there was no TV in Basque or even a newspaper. Not even a Basque radio apart from Loialako Herri Irratia that had some programs in Basque plus Mass and Rosary in Basque.
Chinese was and is very hard for me, perhaps because I started when I was in my 50's. Having said that. I have been to China and my level is HSK 3. I taught myself how to read basic Chinese and was able to talk to a Chinese taxi driver for 3 hours. I still think that Chinese is easier than Basque but I will never speak Chinese right until I live there for a while, something which I doubt I ever will.
I grew up speaking Portuguese (living as a child in Angola) and English and so learning Spanish, and Catalan was a cinch. Basic Italian was easy. French proved harder. I still cannot understand French movies but I understand news programmes and documentaries at 90%. My African experience also allowed me to learn a good basic Afrikaans which made it easier to learn how to speak German at a B1 or B2 level.
I can say, from my personal experience, I had much struggle studying Japanese for a couple of years at university ( the same uni in Naples as him btw) but then I had to abandon it and also move to another university, where I'm currently studying English and German, and I must say that German maybe cannot be compared to Japanese in terms of language difficulty, but still among, let's say the European languages it's surely one of the toughest, maybe after Russian or alongside it.
For me the list goes:
ancient Greek
classical Latin
Italian
English
I have to elaborate a bit :)
As a half italian who grew up in Germany, German and the local dialect in Palatinate are my native languages. Unfortunately my father missed the opportunity to teach me Italian or his dialect, which would be Sicilian.
In school I started with Latin, which was really hard for me back then (I was 10 years old).
Then I learned English in school which was quite easy for a German, and when I was 14 I did ancient Greek (which was mainly attic Greek, but we also did a bit ionic and Koine). Greek was by far the hardest, and after I had looked deeper into that language I must say that Latin seems to be quite easy now :)
Italian is a bit complicated. I started to learn proper Italian when I was 16. I had some trouble with it, because I wasn't able at that point in my life to spend much time on it. What made it worse was the fact that I had on one hand the italian pronunciation in my mind (because I was always surrounded by italian people. But it was a mixture of Italian and Sicilian and I couldn't tell the difference :)
Today I would say that I'm quite fluent in English, I can hold a simple conversation in Italian and I can read and partly understand Latin texts. Although I was very good in my Greek class in school, this was 20 years ago and I have fortgotten a fair share.
Unlike most of my schoolmates, I have never learned a bit of French (which is a pitty, since I grew up 2 km from the French border). Anyway, when I did my PhD in mathematics, I had to read a french paper, and I actually could read it and get the main point I was looking for. This was due to the fact that French is quite similar to Latin and Italian (especially the written words) and that mathematical technical vocabulary seems to be partly identical in English, Italian and French.
I'm a native Spanish speaker. Now I'm learning French and it's been very enjoyable 😊 once achieving level b2 in French I'd like to start learning japanese and I'm also interested in italian and chinese.
As a Scandinavian/Norwegian speaker: easiest has been Dutch, then English, French, Italian, German. I grew up in Japan and can read Japanese well. Knowing kanji is a huge aid when learning Chinese now.
I ran away from Latin after one year.
Took Spanish native teachers: 1 Castilian 2 Cuban, dated exchange student from Argentina , 3 Mexican teacher who lived in Mexico.
After all that teaching aside from exchange student I never was able to speak Spanish with Spanish speakers.
Tragic!!! At this point in life 70 I can pick out a few phrases in movies or radio, songs but that is a sad state after so many yrs taking the language scholastically…
I'm a native English speaker. I studied ASL as a najor in college and im currently learning Spanish. ASL was easier to learn because I felt more confident in conversations, because I could just spell out a word if I didn't have the sign, and a speaker could spell out a sign I didn't know. That fallback gave me confidence. Spanish is harder for just that reason - I lack confidence in conversation. I become so self conscious when I make a mistake my Spanish goes to crap if I make one tiny mistake.
"because why not". Ok. You are a natural at learning languages.
My native langauge is English and I'm fluent in Spanish. I've been studying Italian and Hebrew (and barely just started with Mexican Sign Language). I would say Hebrew has been easier than Italian because Italian is almost too easy. Since I can usually understand spoken and especially written Italian, it is harder to make an effort for the words to stick to produce them. Hebrew is phonetic and actually has a lot in common grammatically with Spanish (and Italian).
I used to teach Spanish and now I teach English in Mexico. It's so much more complicated and I have to go at a lot slower pace.
I suppose it depends on the individual but in my experience it is absolutely possible to reach a great level of speaking without a language partner, and moreover, a language partner will only be able to help you so far. The thing is that most likely you will only discuss simple everyday things with your friend, but if you really want to achieve an advanced level you should be able to discuss complex topics like science, politics, etc, and it's very likely that your language partner won't want to talk about it with you days and nights. So the only reliable way here is to do it by yourself - you can either write lots of essays on these topics and/or have monologues on these topics. This will boost your level way further than talking with your buddy about what he had for breakfast.
I have done many language courses: Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish, British Sign Language, Mandarin.... and forgotten almost everything. I have seen in lists for English speakers that Japanese is the most difficult language. I am bilingual English and French...I learnt French in school but really learnt it from living for six years in France.... I have now lived for 14 years in Georgia (the country not the US State), living with my Georgian wife (whose English is excellent) and I am still at a very low level in Georgian... it is a nightmare language for me, the alphabet is unique, so I don't recognise words by sight, I have to spell them out and they love long words with bizarre combinations of consonants... I live in თბილისი Tbilisi (in English we don't have words beginning t and b and that is one of the less bizarre combinations!)... Practice is necessary as you say with fluent (not necessarily native) speakers, also spaced repetition is good for learning vocabulary.
What a great video. My son is currently 11 years old and has been learning Japanese for a few years. He has always been fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture. I feel by the time he is a late teenager he will be very good at the language.
For myself, Hangul. I can memorize the characters & some approximation of the sounds but they also have Chinese characters randomly thrown in. Then there is appropriate context in society that I didn't know about. You understand it more in your culture and it takes time to learn those things in another. I'm embarrassed that I spoke down to older people accidentally when I lived there because I was taught the informal first (I understand the reason). I had surgery on my ankle there and I had old people offering me their seats on the subway and all I could say was the most impolite form of no thank you. I had an elder man grab my shoulders & push me into his seat in the section reserved for them because I was trying to say that it's okay. He stood, I sat. I felt horrible
Hangul is very easy, it is phonetic alphabet. Hanja the chinese characters, you dont need
When I lived in Japan in the 80s, being near the Korean section, I met several older Koreans who had come to Japan pre-WWII. One gentleman owned a business and I ended up teaching him English in exchange for Korean lessons. He taught me from 1st and 2nd grade readers. Since I had already taught myself hiragana and katakana before moving to Japan, memorizing to the point that I could easily write in Hangul was not a problem. Unfortunately, I never advanced into readers with Chinese characters. On the rare occasion I did see both in a sentence, if I knew the Kanji and had the vocabulary for the rest of the sentence, I could understand the meaning, but I of course wouldn't know the Korean reading of the character. As an old guy hoping to keep what's left of his mind reasonably sharp, I'm considering taking up Korean as a 3rd language since I have Korean friends locally and still hope to visit Korea in the future. Thank-you for your post. As with Metatron, I enjoy comparing my language learning experiences in a totally different culture with others.
im sure the natives heard your accent and were understanding, picture someone with clearly foreign english saying something possibly impolite, everyone knows that its because they aren't fluent not because they are rude
In Seoul, foreigners who may know some Korean are common, but in the country at a farmers market I once drew a crowd of dozens of people hanging on my every word. My Korean is very basic, my attempts not to be "the arrogant foreigner" were taken, even though I made mistakes, to be well meaning, even noblesse oblige. You have hit the main problem with the Korean language, the level used depends on relative status. I don't think they were angry with you, because by trying not to take the place of an older person you were very culturally correct, that you could only use a little Korean in the "panmal" form was less important.
@@jamesbernardi6783 My experience in Korea was that they really appreciate foreigners who try to use their language and are respectful of the culture. In fact, too much so. They were often impressed with my efforts to learn Korean, but quickly asked me to give them English practice as that is very necessary for advancement there, in school and in employment.
Isle of Tenerife,
Spain,
Africa.
Mister Metatron, well done!
You've mentioned the different salient difficulties of each language, but you didn't mention English's infamous phrasal verbs, surely its most elusive impediment to native-like proficiency for adult learners, would you agree?
While your own English is truly excellent, I wonder if you'd agree that the phrasal verbs are something you still struggle with.
For example, in English we don't brush up a language (unless we happen to be the dictator of the country where it's spoken, or maybe an author inventing a fictional language within a novel).
We brush up ON a language.
Not including that tiny preposition in the phrase makes it sound weird, and for a few seconds even incomprehensible, to a native English-speaker.
My point is that your English is truly excellent, with perfect cadence and fluency, but those who wish to fully master English to a native-like level should maybe consciously try to avoid using phrasal verbs until they take the time to intensively study them, for example vetting and processing each one before incorporating it into their vocab repertoire, making sure it's mulled over for its correct use, as I remember doing as a child, consciously processing each one upon noticing a grown-up or older speaker using it.
Best wishes,
Patrick.
The intro is true enough. I found Korean easier to learn than German, though, even though English is a Germanic language [with a lot of overlay by French and Latin] with many cognates. This is principally because, like English, Korean does not have gender [as applied to all nouns and which requires that the "gender" of the articles and adjectives must match the "gender" of the nouns]. The Korean alphabet is more uniform, that is, unlike English, the sound of each letter is not as unpredictable as C and G in English [cage vs cinema for example]. Korean has a long relationship with Chinese, so they generally have a single pronunciation of the character, one of the exceptions ㊎ can be either Kum or Kim.
The long association with Japanese, however, is so little appreciated that many Korean [Japanese] words that I learned from older people in the 1970s had been purged by the 1980s. Both Koreas have been purging Chinese characters. In the 1970s Korean newspapers looked like Japanese papers, many Chinese characters with Korean additives. Now most papers are either all Hangul [한글] or with a few Chinese and more English words. The South Korean and French governments have, apparently given up the campaign to keep the languages pure and free of English. This has resulted in the rise of Franglaise and Konglish!
I lived and taught English in Korea for 6 years [at separate periods over 20+ years] compared to 4 consecutive years in Japan. I was constantly confused in Japan about pronouncing the kanji, as I would usually understand but mispronounce the written form. My ability to speak Japanese was never more than minimal! When visiting Taiwan I was the caricature of the hena gaijin, unable to speak, but writing notes in Chinese characters. My Korean should be much better than it is, but as an English teacher I represented an essential resource, as English proficiency is required to get into the best high schools, and good performance in English there is required to get into the best universities. Getting the best jobs often requires good English skills, even promotions in the military require high test scores and speaking competency. It was not unusual for me to go into a shop and begin with a Korean polite expression before making a request in Korean, I would then be asked to wait while a student was called to practice English with the 영어교수, this also occurred with taxi drivers and people taking seats next to me on trains and busses.
Thanks, Metatron, for an extremely interesting video.
I self-studied Japanese forty years ago. Glad you ranked it high up the difficulty scale. [BTW, I grew up in Canada, so was force fed French to go with my English, so that gave me a head start on the more common languages. I sat in on a few Spanish lectures (due to having a crush on a girl/hanging out with her sister to see more of her, sister was taking Spanish) Anyway, Spanish looks to be one of the easiest languages to pick up.]
A very noble reason to learn Spanish! Also, please pardon my asking, but do you know anything about the double spaces that you use when starting a new sentence? I find a lot of people from previous generations often write this way, but is this how it was taught in schools back in the day? In my case we never received that kind of instruction, and so I never consciously or subconsciously even think about whether there should be 1 space or 2 - I just always put 1.
@@spaghettiking653I took typing (two years) in middle school (50 years ago). Learned to use two spaces then. Still makes sense today so I use it today. I've even blogged about it. It shows how impressionable people are to illogic that most use only one today. We used 2 spaces, when all characters were monospaced. Today, with the space itself using the least width, it is even more important to use 2 spaces. As I say, this is the generation that throws out the egg yolk and eats the whites -- very screwed up.
@@FloydMaxwell Could you explain your reasoning for why using two is better? I don't find it to be as big of a deal as you make it sound like, though. As I say, there's just no such custom for us. I don't think 99% of people even notice that two is possible or practiced.
@@spaghettiking653 Sentences are thoughts. When they are not obviously delimited, it makes it hard to read the writing. Modern fonts (like this YT font) are proportionally spaced -- meaning that each letter (or space) takes up a different amount. Since the space itself takes up the least width...AND there is only one of them (in most cases)...it makes it maximally hard to read the comment/tweet/etc. For no good reason. Giving up the yolk, eating the white -- done for no good reason. People are, for the most part, sheep. Hats off to you to at least notice.
@@FloydMaxwell Haha, thanks. It's a good point. It's probably part of what contributes to the modern zoomer mindset of wall-of-text-aversity; when people see a "wall" of text, they instinctively close it because the dopamine density is too low, even though they would gladly read 10x that amount interspersed across a handful of vapid memes. I might start writing with two spaces as you say :') thanks for explaining, and have a great weekend.
Here's my list: 1) Native in both English and Spanish. 2) currently learning: a) easy languages for me: Portuguese and French. b) hard languages: Thai (cuz of my in laws) and Japanese. At some point I would like to tackle Japanese but that writing system is just daunting. I found learning to speak Japanese is actually quite straightfoward because of the pronounciation but the writing....... Thai on the other hand is pretty straightforward to learn how to read because they use an Abugida writing system. Speaking is another story: mastering the tones and vowel system is a huge pain. And if you get those wrong in conversation people will just not understand you.
As a native Spanish and English speaker, I won't count those two.
My easiest language I feel was ASL. It is very visual and I took it in a class. My teacher was really good and at times would not allow us to speak English, so I picked it up relatively quickly. Plus no writing system, so one less thing to worry about. It is just because of my lack of people to use the language with that I am rusty right now, but with exposure I could probably get back into it pretty quickly
My next easiest that I am learning or have learned is a tie between French and German/Yiddish. I learned French as a wee lad in school due to living in a Francophone country, but after leaving it I didn't have any need for it and forgot it all. Now when I do speak it, my Spanish kinda gets in the way, which helps but also makes me speak in a kind of French-Spanish pidgin lol. For Yiddish, I am progressing quickly and can understand a fair amount in both Yiddish and German without much difficulty
Next I would say Hebrew. Hebrew is the language that started my language learning journey, it's what I speak the most and my strongest language aside from English, Spanish, and ASL. I of course had an interest in the language for a long time which made it easier to learn. I also have friends who speak it so I have a lot of practise
Next is Arabic and Greek, which are also kind of tied. My Hebrew helps with my Arabic, and Spanish somehow helps a lot with Greek, however each have their own unique challenges. I have slightly more exposure to Arabic than Greek, but Greek being written in an alphabet also kind of cancels that out.
That's my current ranking from easiest to hardest, but I'm always trying to learn more languages and sometimes swap some out, so within even a year it is bound to change lol
As an Estonian speaker English was the easiest just because of all the exposure I got through TV and games. Currently I consider myself just bilingual, but I have also studied Russian in primary school and I guess that would be the one that was most difficult for me. I forgot pretty much all I learned after graduating since I wasn't motivated to learn it, I wasn't immersed in it, and didn't need it for anything important. I've also been studying Danish for a few years while living in Copenhagen and I'm way better at Danish than I ever was at Russian. Getting close to a B1 level in that. Cognates between Danish and English definetly made it easier to learn and Danish and Estonian also share similar words with either a Proto-Germanic or Low German origin. After Danish I might go for Finnish next just to make things easier for myself, but I'd like to get comfortable talking in Danish before I divert my attention to something new.
Answer me this. I speak Finnish and when I hear Estonian it sometimes feels like I'm listening to Funnish while having a stroke. Do you have the same phenomenon when you hear Finnish? I can't really compare any germanic language that way to English except maybe the ever increasingly rare Scots.
The easternmost part of England used to be called the Danelaw, and was colonized and ruled by the Danes. If you haven't gone there or to Friesland you might find the local languages fascinating.
As an English speaker, I have learned Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian. Contrary to what I am always hearing, I found Portuguese to be the easiest Romance language but Italian to be the most difficult to learn.
Also, I agree that Sicilian is a separate language from Italian 💯
I know English, Romanian and Spanish. Fluency is in that order. My first language is English, second language is Romanian and I have learned Spanish up to a conversational level.
This is wonderful, thank you! My native language is English. I am fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian, and have passive Catalan, and am working hard right now on German. Here's a funny little thing I learned when studying Danish: Danish has very easy grammar--far easier than German grammar--but the phonology of Danish is A KILLER. It is very difficult for foreigners to get to a level of fluency, because of the blurred nature of Danish sounds. Fortunately, reading the language is easy. I've also studied a little bit of Korean; phonologically, it is easy, because it has no tones. But achieving actual fluency would be difficult. Mille grazie!
I sat through a course of basic Danish. Poor teacher tried to make us hear the difference between vowels. We couldn't help but laugh.
Nordic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swesish) are basically the same in terms of grammar, and most of the vocabulary. Swedish grammar is incredibly easy.
Finnish, Swedish, German, French and Spanish. Started Russian but dropped it for... ahem... non-linguistic reasons...
These were all easy to learn, except Finnish. After five years of studying, my Finnish was the level of a five-year old... it being my mother tongue...
I'm a language teacher, and we are horrible students.
I learned Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin in countries that speak those languages. Japanese wasn't that difficult, but everyone wanted to speak English with me. Mandarin was too difficult for me. Spanish was easy. I learned Italian during the pandemic by watching RUclips. It was easy but when I speak Italian I throw in a lot of Spanish words.
Yeah, Japan is one of those countries where natives will really try to speak English with you instead of the local language. It's to the point that even if you are a native speaker but look non-japanese some people will try to speak English to you unless you speak some more and make them realize you are japanese or hafu.
I mostly just force myself to talk in Japanese(or whichever other language I'm trying to learn) anyway, sometimes the other person will do the same and force themselves to speak English and both of you will just end up talking in your non-native language but it's fine
Mind you, the more you learn languages the easier learning to become. Language learning is, at the end of the day, a combination of cognitive abilities and behavioral conditioning.
Contextual inference, grammatical comprehension, implicit memory, a lot of things one needs to learn a language become better and better with experience, to a point where one could theoretically learn languages in really small periods of time with enough skill.
In my experience for example, I learnt french from nothing to C1 in less than 4 months of study while only using series, audiobooks, chatgpt for writing, and online chats for speaking. It is my fifth tongue, and I've learned german and norwegian in the last 3 years, so it came as an end of a long process of cognitive 'training'. I have absolutely no idea of the grammar rules, the exceptions, or the logic, I just write and speak 'automatically' how it feels right and go with it, to results that got me my passing notes on Dalf C1.
This would have never been possible if i didn't train my brain for it and designed specific and personal methods to efficiently and effectively jury-rigg the whole process. The more you learn, the better you get at learning, to the point the final results may seem satirical to the starting you.
In Greece we have to study Latin at school similarly to Italy,but here we also study ancient Greek.
We start ancient Greek 4 years earlier than Latin and then we do both for another 2 years.(6 years of ancient Greek,2 years of Latin)
We don't learn any accents(we speak ancient Greek the same way as modern Greek and for Latin we use kind of the Greek way of pronouncing the Latin alphabet with some exceptions)
We learn all of the grammar and syntax and learn how to translate
Believe me,Latin,to me,is kindergarten as opposed to ancient Greek. And I am Greek. The only part where ancient Greek is easier is translation(if you haven't worked with that text before)and it's still not easy cause it has to be very specific
How? Aren't ancient Greek and Greek pretty similar? Or is it realy that much different?
@@tomgu2285 Pretty different, Greek and ancient Greek are probably more different to each other than Latin is to any of its descendants. Just look up iotacism, a famously extreme example of a vowel shift which occurred between classical and modern Greek. Imagine trying to read old English, except it's from longer ago, and even more different. Not sure why a native Greek speaker would find Latin easier though?
@@kraba1081 iotacism isn't a problem at all,as I said we read it in modern Greek pronunciation.
And Latin is so much easier because of our training in ancient Greek. The grammar is stupendously easy compared to ancient Greek or even modern Greek grammar and the syntax is very similar but less complex.
Ancient Greek and modern Greek are similar,but that's part of the problem. You see,a native Greek doesn't really need to learn modern Greek syntax;and modern Greek grammar;you just know it by the time you're 8. But with ancient Greek you have to actually learn it,and it's the harder version.
As for translation I already said it's easier in ancient Greek. If you know modern Greek well(trust me many Greeks don't)most of the words you already know about. And that's what helps you with Latin translation too,Greek and English vocabulary.
@@tomgu2285 no,they are but that's mostly a positive in translation. A Greek who knows modern Greek well knows most of the words but even though the grammatical structure and syntax are virtually the same with modern Greek,ancient Greek usage of those things is much more complex. Also as natives we never really learn modern Greek syntax or modern Greek grammar,we just know it after the age of 8. In ancient Greek we have to actually learn it and that's a way you understand how crazy modern Greek is too.
Latin from the other hand,much less complex usage of everything,the grammar is super easy and not a nightmare to learn with like 100 basic verbs not being conjugated the way they're supposed to,the syntax is basically the same as ancient Greek(and you better know ancient Greek syntax after 4 years...). Overall it's just easier for anybody
@@kraba1081 Nope, greek is far more close to ancient greek than romance languages are to latin. If we are talking about Koine greek then modern greek is the evolution of it. As for ancient greek you will have to consider which period and which dialect. As far back you go the hardest it becomes. But the words are pretty much the same.
As a Russian native speaker, the hardest are Erzya and Gaelic; Erzya is illogical and confusing, and Gaelic, let's say, has a very bizarre way of phrasing things. Then it's Moksha, because of the similarity to Erzya. English was hard back I was monolingual, but if I were to start learning it now, I don't think it would've been that hard. Norwegian was mid 'cause it was my third language. Danish, on the other hand, is also mid, 'cause c'mon, it's Danish. It's cursed. Some other middle difficulty ones are Hebrew(kinda like Arabic but more confusing and less logical), Xhosa, Zulu, Swati(all three have 10 noun cases and pretty much all of them are just as weird as in Slavic languages + there's generally a lot of stuff to remember, but other than that, they're pretty logical and chill), Elfdalian(the declensions are rather complicated, and the phrasing is weird sometimes), and most Uralic languages. Rather easy ones are Latin(familiar grammar and vocabulary), Mansi(idk pretty much everything is simple and makes sense except it's sometimes hard to express oneself without spamming Russian loanwords), Vepsian(a lot of stuff to remember, but again, pretty much everything simply makes sense), Bulgarian(familiar vocabulary and easy grammar except for verbs), Old Church Slavonic(a bit more complicated declensions, conjugations and way of expressing oneself than in your average Slavic language + sometimes hard to not mix it up with Russian and modern Bulgarian, but other than that, nice and easy), Romanian(familiar vocabulary + I engage with Romanian speakers and learners a lot), French(same reasons as Romanian), Piedmontese(because of the similarity to French and Italian but sometimes the constructions are weird), Batak Toba(kinda similar to Lojban + it's my friend's first language), Malay/Indonesian(pretty chill and fun affix juggling like in Esperanto), Arabic(chill and logical but there is a lot to remember but pretty much all of it is easy to remember), German(yeah, fun with genders and noun cases, but you get used to it easily), and Turkic languages(again, chill and logical + fun and very similar to each other). The very easy ones are most Romance languages, and, obviously, Slavic languages other than Bulgarian. The easiest are Gullah(because of the similarity to English), Swedish(because of the similarity to Norwegian), and, obviously, Ido, Toki Pona and Interslavic :p
I definitely get the “people to practice with” part. I’d love to learn a few other languages, but it’s pretty hard to find people to practice with who are already fluent in those languages.
I'm Malaysian, grew up with Malay, English, Mandarin, Penang Hokkien and Cantonese, learned Korean and learning Hebrew and French, and also Taiwanese (which is another variety of Hokkien but different enough from mine that it requires effort). Korean is hard but not because of the grammar per se but the way the Koreans express things is so different, it's a bit closer to Chinese but still I find it hard to get off the book language, it's like "when can I ever start speaking the normal daily language instead of the textbook language", granted, my local language Malay is a bit like that, having two forms of the language, but since I grew up with it, I don't really feel it. Also coupled with some bad experiences, I basically stopped learning and don't speak it anymore.
Hebrew is by far the easiest for me, it's the only late age acquired language that I can confidently say I've reached a decent conversational level, though I'd say reading Modern Hebrew is more difficult than reading Korean.
I'm new to French, learned it by myself before together with Hebrew but I always got mixed up with Hebrew words. Pronunciation wise it's the most challenging, though strangely, it has nasal sounds like my mother tongue, Hokkien.
Cantonese is the weakest of my childhood language, even though I can understand it 100%, I suck at the pronunciation, it's like my tongue always gets tangled up trying to speak it.
Chinese of any kind is the hardest because of the writing, not living in China or Hong Kong or Taiwan, it's hard to maintain memory of all the characters (the common ones), as I use English and Malay most of the time. As beautiful as it is, it's a writing system that's hard to sustain, even Korean which I don't speak or read for years, I can still read it, but if I don't use read or write Chinese for a year, I think I'm gonna lose it again. The speaking part is a bliss though, no need to worry about conjugations, plural formation, etc.
For me, Latin has been more difficult than any Italo-Western Romance language (I haven't tried to learn Romanian or Sardinian). I can handle cases, having studied Russian and learned Greek by reading the NT, but I use words like "camiōnitta" (a thing that didn't exist in Classical Latin days) and "sautax" (because "accentus" has other meanings) and have trouble with tenses that didn't survive into French or Spanish.
I'm not sure between Russian and Greek. Russian I learned in the classroom, and a little bit from a book when I was a kid; Greek I learned by reading the NT, which I already had in English. I guess Russian is harder because the vocabulary is less familiar.
That leaves German, my fourth and first non-native language, which I started learning from a Berlitz book and later took in uni. I think it's harder than Italian or Portuguese but easier than Russian or Greek. The grammar and much vocabulary are familiar from English, but much other vocabulary is Germanic roots that English has lost.
For me it was Georgian (ქართული ენა) . It wasn’t the writing system at all but the complexity, eg a different verb “to have” for animate and inanimate objects. Same for “old”. Also some hard consonant clusters.
After Georgian probably Turkish which I failed at completely.
I am now learning Farsi, they biggest challenge being the script (the right to left thing is not a real issue). They leave out most of the vowels so you just have to kind of “know”
Someone once told me, the hardest language is always your first new language as you are not used to learning a language and the concept the for example the letter “c” can have different sounds in Italian, Croatian etc
I've heard pronunciation in Georgian can be really difficult for English speakers. Were you learning it for fun or did you know some Georgian people?
@ I learned it for fun and very soon made friends
I'm a native Spanish speaker and my mother is Austrian so she taught me German since I was a kid and I learned English in school, I always heard that the closer a language is to another in the sense that they belong to the same language family the easier it's to learn it, so when I was in college I tried to learn french and it was a nightmare, so I then switch to Portuguese and it was extremely easy to learn.
I also studied romanian in highschool because I had a girlfriend that was from Romania and it was also a mess, the grammar and the pronunciation were alien to me now that I think of it, the learning experience for french and romanian was pretty much the same for me.
Right now I'm learning Russian because I want to be fluent in at least one Slavic language but man it's been hard lol.
As a Japanese learner, I concur: Japanese is not for the light of heart, but it is definitely one of the more rewarding languages to learn. No matter your level, there's always a relevant goal you can set yourself. This was at least my experience.
As a fellow japanese learner myself, i developed a sense of camaraderie with other japanese learners. We have a long road ahead. 😅
I'd expect one difficulty of Japanese compared to Chinese for Europeans, is that mainly Chinese being more similar to ones such as English (SVO) vs. Japanese (SOV). The characters are indeed difficult, the grammar...not so much. Being Turkish, with a SOV language, translationg Japanese is smoother for me than English.
Chinese and Thai I had to quit because of them tones. I get stressful thinking "what if I say something too appropriate".
Interesting topic. I am a native Cantonese speaker, out of the languages i learned and dabbled in, the most difficult language to learn for me definitely is Georgian and the easiest one is Hakka.
So the order(from hard to easy) is :
Georgian > Russian > Filipino > Finnish > Hindi > Spanish > Turkish > Mongolian > Indonesian > English > Japanese > Korean > Thai > Vietnamese > Shanghainese > Mandarin > Hokkien > Hakka.
I do agree with you that Sicilian is a separate language from Italian since it is unintelligible to Italian. So the same with Chinese languages, such as Cantonese Hokkien hakka Shanghainese... etc they're also unintelligible to Mandarin, thus they are different languages from Mandarin within a big language family - Sinitic language family.
Actually it's very ironic that some Romance languages, Slavic languages, Germanic languages, Tukic languages and Indonesian/Malaysian, Hindi/Urdu are highly mutually intelligible, but they are still treated as "different" languages.
By the way, i will start to learn Arabic in 2024 and can't wait to know where it will be rank. As far as I know, Arabic also has many "dialects" which are not mutually intelligible.
I'm studying Sanskrit and it's the most demanding language that I've ever studied. It's grammar is voluminous. I found Japanese difficult. I was thrown in at the deep end with Japanese, because my relatives in New Zealand needed help with it in their guest house and I managed to be helpful with visitors from Japan. French, German and Modern Greek came easily. I also studied Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Welsh and Georgian.
With ancient languages, I believe that it's very important to remember that they were once spoke languages. It helps one to fully appreciate the beauty of their literature.
For me.
Tagalog 🇵🇭 is a mixed bag 🎒 dude to code changing. Sometimes, a phrase is in Spanish. Then, another phrase is in English. Then, another phrase has a blend of various loan words. Tagalog is in the middle for me.
Spanish 🇪🇸 is my 2nd language. Easiest foreign language for me to learn. 😃 French 🇫🇷 is slightly harder. The spelling is harder. The same with the pronunciation. Luckily, Spanish is my cheat sheet. 😃
German was hard. Latin was harder. Biblical Hebrew was harder, especially with the alphabet. Ancient Greek is the hardest.
as a Bulgarian, i caught up English from a very young age thanks to Cartoon Network (because it was only in English early on television) and from games and toys, and books. Then in 2019, I had Spanish as a subject in High school and am still learning it but needs more practice however if I didn't know English beforehand I would have had much more difficulty learning it
And now in university I met someone from China(which happens by a very small chance), i'm very interested if we could teach each other
Are you studying in Bulgaria? Where I'm studying (not in China or even Asia) there are more Chinese than locals, lol.
I will try to tackle Laotian soon. Wish me luck 😂 My native language is Dutch, and aside from that I speak fluent English, reasonable Italian and French, and I understand German and some Spanish. It's going to be quite difficult, I presume.
Good choice ! Good luck ! Tones are tough, writing too. But very beautiful language, with time, you can achieve to speak it and read it.
Impressive. You've made the right choice my man. As a Thai, many foreigner I know insist on studying Thai first bc they think it'd benefit them more in the future (with more high profile jobs with higher wage and larger economy and financial allat stuff, if that makes sense😅) But I always pursue them to start with Laotian first. As I always comparing Thai and Laotian as France and American English (for the foreigner to make sense).
Thai and Laotian are very similar. Very, very similar. I can have a conversation with my Laotian friend/tourist/employee with my Thai and they reply in Laotian with no problem for both parties. Most Thais can read Laotian if we squint our eyes hard enough😂 And Laotian watching Thai television on their daily basis helps, too.
But Laotian are more simple and true to their language structure. The words are read how it spell and spell how it sounds. It has less exceptions in grammar/spelling, and less loan words (mostly just Thai, in which Thai loan from Sanskrit already; used in formal or academic words, like in Laos school/hospital/government place). But if you can pick up Laotian first you'll have no problem communicating with Thais.
Meanwhile, Thai are more unnecessarily complicated, with loan words from Pali, Sanskrit, Persian, Portuguese, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese, Laotian, Mon, Mhong, etc. baked into the language so deeply since the 1400s (when Thailand was the first stop and the major port city of Asia, so of course, we have loan some Dutch words as well😊) so there are a lot of spacial case to memorize. The spelling are a lot more inconsistent. Rule of grammar has many, many, many exceptions. More tones, which for the untrained ears will have a hard time to learn to differentiate. More consonants sounds and alphabet.
Laotian will have a hard(er) time picking up Thai language than, say, Thais learning Laotian. (I know this bc I have many Laotian friend complaining to me about how Thais language are so inconsistent to its structure, while I intuitively picking up Laotian alphabet and accent just by hanging out with them and listen to them talking to each other/ to me - as i stated earlier, while we hang out, my friends speak in Laotian and I speak in Thai. That's included group chat and FB/IG comments, too)
Sorry for the long ass essay you may already know all this. But i cant help but impress. As a Thai, you are the first Farang i ever know who determined to learn Laotian instead of Thai.
And I'm here to support you and confirm you made the right choice picking Laotian.
@@dj.djames1830 Thanks for your kind reply and your encouragement! I actually did not know quite a few of the things you wrote in your reply, except for the part about Laotian and Thai being mutually intelligible :) The other things are very useful for me to know as well!
I have already made a plan: first I'll focus on learning the alphabet, then I'll learn basic phrases and immerse myself a bit, and after that I'll hire a tutor online (I already found a good teacher who can teach both Laotian and Isaan) and try to make friends online and in real life so I can really force myself to use the language :)
Very interesting to learn Latin would be more difficult for you than Japanese. I believe the similarities to Italian do help as they help to Portuguese speakers. But of course I haven't gone so far in Latin to realize the true challenges. I've been learning Japanese for 20 years now. Still struggling with kanji memorization but I guess there is an organicity of matching Chinese ideograms to it that is really touching. Anyway I'm more scared about the fact that the level of speech is so different, from text books to the streets that sometimes I think I don't know Japanese at all.😅😅 By the way, I have a high level in Spanish, now some French, some Italian and now I'm considering to learn Ancient Tupi, the language of the original inhabitants of Brazilian coast when the Europeans arrived.
So of languages I learn (L1 being what doctors call "Individual Vocalizations"); English is easier to learn to speak, French just a confusing mess and French speakers ask me not to speak French to them as I "sound medieval", German was a lot easier, Spanish I can remember words and have been told my pronunciation is good albeit Mexican and thus has a slightly old fashioned quality, Russian made some sense and hopefully my Soviet characters seemed more authentic. List goes: English, German, Spanish, Russian, French although only English gave me conversation partners on the regularity and to read and write is more difficult although when I was little The Christians (not sure of their name but when I was 2-4 I went to a nursery where we learned about reading, writing, mathematics and Christianity so that is the name in my mind) taught me to read and write.
Which makes me wonder, what factor do autism and dyslexia play in learning languages.
I am native English (American) but I've studied in order Latin, German and French. Latin was the hardest, partly because it's so stiff, but also because I had no no desire to learn it. Second year Latin was Caesar's Gallic Wars. At the beginning of my 3rd year the school hired a German instructor so I switched to that. I should mention that I went to a small all boys Catholic high school so our choices were few. In college I continued with German for another year since it was required for my major (Chemistry). After leaving school I met a group of French students one summer and that inspired me to learn French. As far as difficulty I'd say German and French are about equal.
i am a totally gringo american but taught myself spanish and brazilian portuguese as a teen and i find portuguese to be easier. spanish has a simpler phonetic system which ironically made it harder for me because spanish speakers speak more quickly than portuguese speakers and the simpler phonology makes it hard for me to distinguish between words and syllables of the same word. additionally, english has more in common with brazilian portuguese phonology than any dialect of spanish, especially regarding vowels, which makes it easier for me to pronounce. i also find that grammar and word order makes more sense to me in portuguese. while both languages are influenced by arabic, portuguese has less of an arabic influence than spanish, which makes it easier to find cognates, since portuguese retains many latin words where spanish uses arabic-derived words. the same can be said about the basque influence on both languages, but to a lesser degree.
i often hear that learning two similar languages at the same time is a bad idea but that hasn't been the case for me. learning both feels like learning 1.5 languages at the same time because they are so similar. learning vocabulary or grammar in one language usually means that i learn it in the other, just applying that language's orthography.
10/10 experience, would recommend, latino cultures are fantastic
One other challenge concerning Japanese is the levels of politeness. Are there four or five? There are of course honorific, polite, plain and humble forms. In addition there is the “impersonal” form that is used in writing and lectures. As a result of this, pronouns tend to be avoided. This calls for some grammatical gymnastics in conversation. You end up talking about yourself and the interlocutor in the third person. (The basic Mandarin character 你 doesn’t exist in Japanese) And so I have to agree: Japanese is much harder than Mandarin and Arabic (both of which I’ve studied). As usual, I enjoyed your video. Keep ‘em coming!
Added complication of Japanese must be that there is the distinction between formal speech, and who is speaking, male or female.
What to me is most difficult in Mandarin (besides remembering the tones) is that there are many sounds that are hard to distinguish (like x, sh, j, c, ch, z, zh) . And (looking at the pinyin) the confusing 'voiced' consonants (b d z etc) that aren't voiced at all.
An other difficulty is the arabic script, when there is no indication of the vowels, especially when applied to farsi, an Indo-European language that has a completely different phonology, resulting in several characters with the same sound, the use of each depending on the word.
the second language closest to your native would be the easiest to pick up I would think. My understanding is that Frisian is fairly close to old English, so if I tried to learn it the curve would be much shorter than if I tried to learn Navajo.
Navajo has been difficult for me. I only know one person in town who speaks it. So I’d like to go to an area where there are lots of speakers and a university near enough with classes.
If you focus on learning standard Japanese, already have good pronunciation, and get lots of practice, you will develop good pitch. There is no reason to learn it separately. If you live outside the areas of Japan that do not use standard pitch, that means the dialect speaking areas, forget about it. They have their own pitch. In terms of Japanese learning, pitch is the lowest priority. Foreigners should focus on making their speech clear and understandable.
I have studied Italian, Mandarin , Russian, Dutch, German, French, Swedish and Ojibwe.
Of that list, only the last three have I studied for more than a couple of months.
I can, however, say that Ojibwe is by far the most difficult language I have studied. It’s so different to the other languages I’ve studied, but there is also a paucity of teaching materials and documentary materials such as grammars and dictionaries. I started to learn French after embarking on Ojibwe and in comparison it felt like so easy, almost like I didn’t even have to try
I have learned several foreign languages since the early days of elementary school. I am an Indonesian language native speaker. Based on my own experience, it was really hard for me to learn English due to English is not a phonetic language and I started to learn english at the age of 6 when I haven't got a good grasp on my own language. Luckily I didn't mix both languages into a broken form. (I guess my english is kinda broken now since I don't use it that much anymore eventhough it's my L2.)
At the age of 10, my school had a curricullum where Mandarin was a subject you have to learn. I gave up instantly because I'm not good at tonal language and don't want to learn it eventhough I still had to suck it up until middle school.
I learned Japanese in secondary school/highschool as a complementary subject. Japanese was quite easy for me to learn because the grammars were easy to understand and I am quite familiar with many of its vocabulary due to heavy consumption of anime (I'm a weeb lmao). I haven't learn Kanji that time, but at least I had a good grasp on the languange and I was able to maintain a prolonged conversation.
I took a gap year after I graduated from secondary school and started to learn German while planning to take bachelor degree there. Sadly I didn't go to Germany, but I took German Studies major in Indonesia. It was tough at the beginning because the grammars are kind of similar with English but way more complicated than English grammar and the concept of "gender on nouns" is something completely foreign to me. After that it was quite easy though I had to sacrifice my English to be broken. As for now, I'm quite confident at my own German.
During my college days I also had a chance to learn some other foreign languages like Hebrew, Russian, Italian, and relearning Japanese. I basically forgot how to speak and read Hebrew because I don't have partner to practice with. I don't have any need to learn Russian eventhough I still can read and write in cyrillic. I still remember Italian and still use it sometimes
I'm considering to learn more Japanese as I'm planning to get my master degree there. Kanji will be a major challenge for me since it's basically traditional Hanzi.
I learned English, which helped me in computing, reading books, or online as most material is in English. I wanted to learn your language cause I like the sound of it and because Italia. I started studying by myself, but then I quit soon afterwards because life. I thought Chinese was more difficult than Japanese, I have no experience with either, I'm surprised to hear it's the opposite. Times I've heard Chinese, to me it sounds like way too many vowels, it's just difficult to distinguish words or anything. Japanese is probably more difficult if you say so, but it does sound a little bit like you can distinguish a word or two just from the sound of it. I don't think I would be learning either though. I could never learn Spanish, even if I wanted to, I can't, I am allergic to Spanish, I know it sounds funny, but it's the truth, I'm not really a fiesta person. 🙂I have nothing against the Spanish people, or south americans, infact Argentina would probably be my favourite south america country, for obvious reasons, I just have difficulties with the language.
Spanish speaker here. From hardest to easiest:
Japanese for the same reasons you listed. There’s no point in memorizing kanji readings imo, just memorize the words and you will learn some readings along the way and that will help you out eventually.
Arabic because of the huge disconnect between formal and dialect, their writing system with no vowels, overall difficult grammar in MSA and the lack of content for learning for dialects.
Russian because of the complicated case system + 3 genders and somewhat spelling rules.
German because of the case system and syntax.
English because it was my first foreign language but also the absolute lack of consistency in pronunciation.
French has been the easiest by far given how much it’s like Spanish and English but getting familiar with the nasal sounds and liaison rules might have been a little tricky.
As a native English speaker I love that u said difficulty is subjective bc it’s easier for me to get the concepts of Russian and Japanese than the concepts of Spanish and Latin (I’m learning all 4 and for example the Russian cases are easier for me than the declensions and conjugation numbers of Latin or the cases of Spanish and I have speakers to learn with for all 4 languages)
I'm learning Mandarin, and yes, Japanese looks much harder. Especially the badly cobbled together writing system. At least in Mandarin the characters make a certain amount of sense, and you can even guess the pronunciation.
In my experience of attempting to learn both languages (casually, at evening school - though I've been to language schools in Japan a few times, only for a month or less. Not a whole year like younger students - I had a job to keep!), and I think you are right.
The Japanese writing system is awful! I joke with Japanese friends that train stations have place names written three times (Kanji, Hiragana, and Romanji - which is the Japanese form of Pinyin) because Japanese people can't understand the Kanji characters of their own language! In fact there are games shows which challenge people on this.
Mandarin grammar is very simple - it is just the tones that are tricky. And as you say, the Hanzi characters are logical - once you have learnt the pronunciation and meaning, that's it. Not so for Japanese Kanji.
Korea had a similar situation, but they dumped the Chinese characters, and it is much better for everyone now. Japan perhaps is a little too stubborn for that! ;-)
Love your content bro
I’m native Mandarin and Hokkien speaker, I’ve learnt English and ancient Chinese for 6 years in secondary school. I learnt German and Japanese in high school for 2 years, and Latin for 2 years in college.
Japanese>Latin>Ancient Chinese >German>English
The reason I put Latin and Ancient Chinese after Japanese is bc we aren’t required to speak them, so I only need to deal with vocab, grammar, reading, and translations.😅
Ancient Chinese is hard in the way that the meaning of characters changed thru history, and the knowledge of Mandarin will mislead you.
I started studying Japanese in school before moving to China and completely agree with your comparisons between these too. Totally can relate😅.
I took a total 4yrs of French from high school and college ( 25yrs ago ). I'm from US my native language is English, so I did not use French at all , just liked the language. In US the 2nd language is Spanish. Here's the weird thing ..... when I hear a Spanish my English brain , translates Spanish into French 1st , then my French-a-fried 🧠 brain , translates the French back into English , so I can understand basic Spanish. 😳 Between my native English, French wedged back in my brain 🧠, I can understand basic Spanish. Unfortunately when I did try to take a Spanish class, my brain🧠 keeps mixing Spanish with French😬.
I am German. I learnt my languages in the 70s and 80s. In the 70s when I was in my teens I put a great effort in learning English and it has been my working language ever since. But in hindsight I would consider it rather difficult because writing and pronunciation absolutely don't match. I have been in Japan for one year. The spoken language is easy, I don't consider the grammar difficult. However, since you must know kanji to increase your vocabulary it is the most difficult language. I find Chinese however more difficult because of the tones and palatal and retroflex as well as aspirated and unaspirated consonants. While I have no problem (any more) to pronounce the words I find them impossible to recall. Getting Hanzi mixed up with Kanji doesn't help either and the grammar that is word order patterns I find also difficult. Being German I find Dutch difficult because of far too many "false friends". For me the easiest language is Spanish probably because like Russian I learnt it as a child from the German educational TV in the late 60s and early 70s.
I'm a native American English speaker, who studied German in college. The first time I heard "Het Wilhelmus" I thought it was a German folk-song because I could understand about 50% The line about "den Koning van Hispanje heb ik altijd geëerd" was puzzling, why the King of Spain have I what? Also Geeerd sounds like the German greeting "Geehrte herr..." It's very interesting to me that if you travel from Scotland, to Anglia to Friesland to Netherlands to North Germany to South Germany to Austria, and the reverse, you can hear the progression of the West Germanic language family. Zwischen englischen und deutschen Wörtern gibt es viele falsche Freunde oder viele Feinde, nicht wahr? Faszinierend, nicht wahr? Yes it's obvious that my German is very rusty.
Maybe catalán would be even easier for you than Spanish. It shares more vocabulary with Italian than Spanish. And "having been part of the same country" with Sicily for several centuries, it's likely to have had some kind of influence as well.
こんにちは、When I first came to California I couldn’t speak English at all. So First 1-2 years I had hard time learning specially speak in English.. ( even though I understand what people are saying) I was worried to make a mistake. But my mother in law was doing Daycare, so I start to helping her and learned so much from kids.. also I stop try to translate in Japanese in my head, that helped me tremendously… I am so glad to find your channel and enjoy watching your videos!! これからも、ビデオたのしみにしてます。がんばってくださいね！
Swedish Native here, I started to study Japanese at the age of 13 and also had the chance to do two shorter exchanges to japan during my first and second year of Highschool. Due to my young age at the time I never really struggled to have a understanding of how the languages it self was built up, and because I also had many chances to chat with natives from the start the pitch accent came kind of naturally, however the Kanji part still haunts me to this day, I read and understand most things, but hand written Japanese is something I struggle with even after 10+ years studying it. But a lot of younger Japanese do too because everything is computerized anyway, so I try not to feel so bad about it. However while studying at Japanese uni I tried to take Italian classes and it was the most difficult thing I have ever tried to learn, even though it should be closer to Swedish than Japanese per say, already being an adult and the way Italian grammatically differs from Swedish and Japanese made it very foreign to me, even if some words were the same and the alphabet too, I just couldn't get my head around the verb conjugations.
Since others will probably read this I'll type this in English but I'm Swedish too. Swedish is a pitch accent language too so we have the ear to hear pitch accent for free from the start so we, and the Norwegians, have a leg up on that compared to some other fellow Europeans. It's wild though that in all our Swedish lessons in school they never tell us this, I found out through a random youtube video and was like Swedish is WHAT? I had lived my whole life totally clueless about it but it's how "banan", "tomten" and "anden" can mean two things each depending on pitch.
I there. Love hour video, and i can't agree more with the practical aspect of learning! A bilingual french/english speaker, i only managed to learn a bit of flemish when i had to, at work. The schooling helped, but without the obligation to try to communicate it goes nowhere. I also learned greek around 30, with native speakers, a language i consider not excessively difficult because it feels like playing around with legos, haha. But what stumped me for a while was the changing tone of each word. I found i couldn't by ear identifie the beginning and ending of the words. In writing tho, it was much more evident of course (spaces between each word) and i am not tone deaf, but the changing of the tonal accent was a challenge at first. Now i correct my friends who are learning and can even make jokes based on homophones (i like a good pun), quite difficult to find in this language .
Easiest: English, everyday I listen, write and if I have luck I speak and Italian because it's italian 😁 it's like Spanish but faster and more i and e
Hardest
Mandarin Chinese , a challenge its writing.
Ancient ones of course
Latin and ancient greek, especially greek because in latin there is a fixed convention about how to pronounce whether ecclesiastical or remastered classical pronunciation but greek ...there are a lot of confussion!!
Korean : the sounds are confusing and I don't sympatize with the people and its way for enterteining .
So I think the hardest is Korean.
Navajo is the hardest one i tried. its the perfect storm of aspects that makes it difficult. almost no loan words from other languages tones very complex grammar .not many resources since they are native American so their population is small and are surrounded by people who speak English. i personally think that if it wasn't for the writing system Japanese would be a medium difficulty language
For me, the hardest language that I am attempting to learn is Polish. I only started a month ago, but as a native English (US) speaker, it's quite difficult in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and some consonant clusters make little sense. I have also tried German (even received a minor in university), Swedish, Norwegian/Danish (about 2 months each), French, Italian, Icelandic and Spanish. Since I have just moved to the southern USA, I started Spanish again because I will definitely hear it often - although I am personally focused on Castilian - and I am keeping steady with Polish. For me, the Romance and Germanic languages are quite easy for me, but any others would harder. I would like to try Japanese and Finnish at some point, and those would probably become my hardest challenges.
I am a native Russian and Ukrainian speaker, my third language was English and then French. I learnt French quite quickly (1.5 years until Fluency) and now I am working in my Mandarin Chinese which is the hell of a challenge. Hoping to find some native speakers with whom I can practice it
Russian native here. Spanish and japanese feels pretty much natural to me, so there for the easieast. Franch and korean felt kinda weird, therefore the most eford. Although I love the korean writing system. In my opinion the best writing system ever invented.
Is really interesting this Subject and, as you said, is completely subjective, we cannot say that have the hardest language, considering the all kinds learning their languages in about the same age.
Another fascinating and informative essay. Thank you!
Where was English along all those? I guess it makes sense that the languages the most different from your native language will be harder. But having people to talk to is huge. I can speak Japanese pretty well but I lived there for two years. It helped tons. I’m trying to learn Korean but it’s not going so well because I only got to take a three week vacation there and I don’t have any speaking partners online or anything.
Any language is quite easy to learn relatively quickly if you live in an environment where every single other person only speaks that language, and you yourself need to speak it in order to survive and interact with other people.
Of course in practice that's extremely rarely the case, so almost nobody gets to experience that fastest possible way of learning a language.
I’m a native English speaker and studied (as an adult) Thai and Tagalog.
For me Thai was much easier due to the simple verb usage.
Japanese I gave up - I can’t get my mouth around it haha
As computer professional, my hardest language was a stint doing Prolog. I'll rather do various dialects of Assembler before I do anything in Prolog ever again.
For actual languages I can do a passable, if heavily Acadian, French - bonjour Bayou Techné! This got me quite strange looks in France, and rightly so.
But the hardest language related task I had was when I had to do an Internationalization (which us computer people abbreviate to I18N for obvious reasons) for the California State Department for voting sites and pamphlets. I had to use 22 Different languages for the documents and web sites. By far, the absolute hardest was:
Thai.
It’s not a mainstream language but I am curious to know what you think about learning a South Indian language- Malayalam. It is clearly the hardest Indian language. Speaking and writing.
As an English speaker I find French fairly easy, as it is so similar to English i.e. similar word order and huge shared vocabulary. I can listen to a new subject and recognise most of the unknown words because of this link. I find German very hard because there is so little shared vocabulary e.g. empfahlen, fahren, reisen, wählen.