Languages That Are Difficult to Learn

[victoria9273]

Hello everyone,

This community has a variety of people from different countries, and I see that lots of people here have passion for learning foreign languages. So I thought better to post something that everyone can tell something - like the difficulty of what they're learning foreign languages and also their mother tongue.

I was personally interested in German but they are quite different from English, albeit they are cousin languages. I couldn't learn their difficult nouns and three grammatical genders. Articles changes to grammatically function and I thought I'd better choose French.

Grammatical genders French has only 2 but their verb conjugations is something that bothers even native speakers. And dropping the last consonant is making me confused so much!

But I guess it's a good language. So I'm going to strive on to learning it after I finish reading the Oxford dictionary. Haha...

What about Russian? You don't have to fret over grammatical gender but the grammar itself is totally different to major european languages. And there are many rules.... still an attractive language I think.

My mother tongue, which is Korean, is quite difficult. Native speakers are always bothered about grammatical usage and spacing words. And we have complex honorific system. I don't know how I know all these rules but if my mother tongue was not Korean, I know I would not think of learning it.

So what's your story? Do you have anything to tell us about the difficulty of languages so that language learners here can prepare in advance?

 

[victoria9273]

Here are some Korean verb conjugations if you're interested.

 

[JohnAdams]

Annyeonghasayo.

Korean is kinda hard.

German is easy if you speak English. It is more straightforward than English, the hardest part is learning the genders, which isn't hard.

Hello = Hallo

Mayor = Bürgermeister



Basically the same.

I love the German language, it's culture, and its history.

 

[Kotve]

Albanian is hard. I shares come words with other languages such as turkish or italian. It has also a lot of latin loan words but the fact that is a unique language in the indo european tree it makes it hard to learn as there is not language you can rely on.

 

[all to gain]

For an English speaker:

Chinese
Japanese
Finnish
Hungarian
Arabic
...and plenty of others

Really depends on what your native language is.

What about Russian? You don't have to fret over grammatical gender but the grammar itself is totally different to major european languages. And there are many rules.... still an attractive language I think.

Russian uses gender (male, female, neuter).

 

[Juan]

Hello everyone,

This community has a variety of people from different countries, and I see that lots of people here have passion for learning foreign languages. So I thought better to post something that everyone can tell something - like the difficulty of what they're learning foreign languages and also their mother tongue.

I was personally interested in German but they are quite different from English, albeit they are cousin languages. I couldn't learn their difficult nouns and three grammatical genders. Articles changes to grammatically function and I thought I'd better choose French.

Grammatical genders French has only 2 but their verb conjugations is something that bothers even native speakers. And dropping the last consonant is making me confused so much!

But I guess it's a good language. So I'm going to strive on to learning it after I finish reading the Oxford dictionary. Haha...

What about Russian? You don't have to fret over grammatical gender but the grammar itself is totally different to major european languages. And there are many rules.... still an attractive language I think.

My mother tongue, which is Korean, is quite difficult. Native speakers are always bothered about grammatical usage and spacing words. And we have complex honorific system. I don't know how I know all these rules but if my mother tongue was not Korean, I know I would not think of learning it.

So what's your story? Do you have anything to tell us about the difficulty of languages so that language learners here can prepare in advance?

My advice is try to learn all you can before your hearing deteriorates. Even mild hearing loss makes learning a lot harder.

With hyperacusis one can hear crystal clear; sometimes there may be a bit of distortion, but not always.

As for languages, my guess is the hardest are either tonal languages like Chinese or Vietnames (plus the writing!) and also slavic languages like Czech. Hungarian is on a league of its own as well, with roots only remotely similar to Finnish...

 

[Bill Bauer]

What about Russian? You don't have to fret over grammatical gender but the grammar itself is totally different to major european languages. And there are many rules.... still an attractive language I think.

He doesn't use grammar. It is still possible to understand him. Of course one can immediately tell that Russian isn't his native language. However, few nonnative speakers can conceal that Russian isn't their native language.

 

[all to gain]

He doesn't use grammar. It is still possible to understand him. Of course one can immediately tell that Russian isn't his native language. However, few nonnative speakers can conceal that Russian isn't their native language.

Do you speak Russian Bill?

 

[Bill Bauer]

Do you speak Russian Bill?

Yes, it's my native language.

 

[all to gain]

Yes, it's my native language.

You are in the US, right? Did you grow up in a Russian speaking country or were you born in the US?

 

[Bill Bauer]

You are in the US, right? Did you grow up in a Russian speaking country or were you born in the US?

I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. My family immigrated to Canada when I was 11. This happened over 30 years ago.