I second what Zgarbas says. I can imagine Korean to be pain in the ass, too.

I heard languages spoken in Africa and regions geographically close to Africa typically have richer phonetical inventories because they tend to retain older phonemes like clicks. Don't quote me on this though. Anyway, if this is the case, those languages might be good candidates if you want to master pronunciation as well, though other phonological aspects may be actually simpler.

There are many languages whose grammatical aspects are completely different from English. But those linguistic aspects are the easiest part for an adult to master because you can take full advantage of your adult brain. What's really difficult to learn when it comes to learning a foreign language as an adult is actual usages rather than general rules. Or you could say it's the exceptions to the rules that is the hardest. Every language is equally complicated at this level, so any language is equally difficult if you really want to be awesome at the language; linguistic similarity to your native language and superficial simplicity in grammar may give you a head start, but it's pretty much negligible if you set your standards high enough.

Also, it's known that adults can't learn certain phonetical aspects for biological reasons while it seems many other aspects not directly related to your accent such as grammar, usage, and vocabulary can be mastered even better than your average native speaker. Research has shown that bilinguals who started learning a language naturally at age 6 the same way as any other kids would still exhibit differences in perception of sound from real native speakers who have been exposed to the language since they were born. In short, you can't get away with interference from your native language you've been exposed to since you were a baby. So you need to compromise or come up with a way to get around this disadvantage. So if oral aspects are equally important to you and if your standards are quite high, you might want to look into what you can't learn anymore and how this affects your learning a specific language.

With that all said, I think, in a sense, it's your native language that is the most difficult to master. If you're learning a foreign language, people think your command of the language is great if you're just as good as your average native speaker, which is quite mediocre if you think about it. But you should hold much higher standards to be considered great when it comes to your native language. There are tons of nonnative speakers who have achieved "great" proficiency in their second languages. But usually the level they actually achieved is just mediocre or even poorer when compared to native speakers. People give you no slack when they judge your mastery of your native language.

Of course, if you just want to impress ignorants out there, you can always pick an Asian language or two plus Arabic or maybe some really exotic language. Don't forget to throw in popular ones like Latin and French if you want to look smart to people who look down on certain groups of people for racial reasons as well.

So, I think it all depends on your purpose, the level you want to achieve, and which aspect you care most.

Last edited by magamo (2012 September 29, 4:14 pm)

is japanese harder than chinese for english speakers?

I thought Korean was the most difficult among the popular Asian languages...

One thing you have to be careful about is whether writing is being factored into the difficulty or not; remember that to most linguists a "language" means speech (or signs) so if you're reading something comparing languages, they may not be taking the writing system into account.

Actually Hungarian scares me because I've known how to ask for a beer for what, 6 years now. I've been to Hungary numerous times. Where I've asked for a beer. This after having been explained how to pronounce stuff in Hungarian dozens of times.
And yet, every time I ask for one, any Hungarian who hears me has no idea what I'm saying. Then explains to me how to ask for a beer and no matter how hard i try it always sounds just like I said it. This happens with roughly any Hungarian word or phrase I know.

And then there's the crazy grammar, but the fact that I've never gotten past the basic phonetics with it just keeps me from even attempting it .

The Foreign Service Institute says Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are the five hardest.  Actually, different publications from the FSI have sometimes said that either Korean or Japanese are hardest of them.  So Japanese and Korean are definitely up there, at least compared to the 63 languages the FSI has programs for.

Which means, we're all a little crazy for studying Japanese.

kitakitsune wrote:

FSI is the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department....

I'm sorry, did my post offend you somehow?  There's no need to be so defensive on behalf of the FSI.

All I said was that it seems weird to me that Japanese is always at the top of these lists, because I can't help feeling like there must be languages that are harder than this.

I'm well aware why that list only has a certain selection of languages on it, but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't give very conclusive answers as far as this thread's discussion goes.

yudantaiteki wrote:

One thing you have to be careful about is whether writing is being factored into the difficulty or not; remember that to most linguists a "language" means speech (or signs) so if you're reading something comparing languages, they may not be taking the writing system into account.

This is noteworthy; accordingly, languages that use han characters are often considered harder than any other in that regard. In a related subject, people in other places (not in RevTK) often mention the considerably higher number of hanzi that Chinese uses as something that makes it harder than Japanese, but this is to some extent overcome by the fact that they are much more consistently used in Chinese and have a much better integration with the spoken language for having grown organically with it (plus a better standardization of all the characters people use nowadays, in both Taiwan and China) while in Japanese the kanji was seemingly forced on top of it, as in they had the words and said, "what Chinese characters from this list can we use for this Japanese word?", which invariably caused that which people call "multiple pronunciations for the same kanji", source of so many problems for learners, and what gives Japanese the highest rank when it comes to the difficulty of the writing system. More when reading than when writing, though, because when writing by hand is possible to use kana in the place of the kanji you don't remember.

Last edited by gdaxeman (2012 September 30, 3:13 am)

CarolinaCG wrote:

is japanese harder than chinese for english speakers?

For the most part, unless the English speaker has an incredible difficulty with the sounds of Chinese, which are much more abundant and different than Japanese, and a block concerning the much bigger number of hanzi being used all the time. That doesn't mean it would take the learner a lot less time to be 'fluent' in Chinese than in Japanese, though - that's a wrong interpretation of the facts.

Last edited by gdaxeman (2012 September 30, 3:35 am)

Here's a good comparison of the difficulty of various aspects of Chinese and Japanese on different stages of learning. And here (starting from the second comment) is a rather well-known polyglot's argumentation for his opinion that Korean is more difficult than Japanese.

Why do you think the African and Native American languages have "very small" vocabularies?  These are languages used for communication by real people and communities so they have fairly developed vocabularies, actually.  They may lack some specialist words (which could easily be added to the languages if it was necessary), but for learners I doubt the vocabulary size would be very relevant.

I find the assumption that clicks must be an old feature of human language dubious

As you should; it's a dubious claim.  No current language, dialect, or language we have any records of is more or less "primitive" than another, and the only languages that are "old" are dead languages that are no longer spoken by anyone.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 September 30, 9:51 am)