23 Comments (and 5 trackbacks)

• #1 by Marion Matte on November 4 - 8:14 pm

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  Great list! thats exactly what I was looking for!

• #2 by Marcell on December 24 - 12:38 pm

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  Hi, this list is very accurate, I live in South Africa, here are many languages, but Xhosa and Zulu should be under the Category 1, its really not that difficult, my mother toung is Afrikaans, very easy too!! At the moment im learning Tagalog, if anyone have any suggestions, i’ll gladly accept them.

  Ty

• #3 by jack on February 16 - 7:05 am

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  Very helpful list, but why is German on its own. I know German is not that linguistically close to English (despite popular opinion that it is), but it’s not that far away either.

• #4 by Tanja on February 16 - 10:18 am

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  jack :

  Very helpful list, but why is German on its own. I know German is not that linguistically close to English (despite popular opinion that it is), but it’s not that far away either.

  I am a German speaker myself and it makes sense to me. German is between category 1 and 2. It is definitely harder than Italian or Spanish and thats why it take on average 150 hours more to learn.

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• #5 by Joaquin Scott on September 3 - 2:08 am

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  I believe German should be in Category 1.

• #6 by Ferenc Zopcsák on November 13 - 11:18 pm

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  Why isn’t Hungarian in Column 3? Isn’t its absolutely flexible word order hard to acquire for native speakers of English? No matter what the order of the words in a sentence is, it still remains grammatically correct, but may well mean completely different things! Not to mention the vowels that are unique to Hungarian such as “á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í” and some consonants: “ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs” don’t tell me it’s as easy as Bulgarian or Icelandic… Vowel length is a distinctive feature, and should not be verlooked either.

  Can anyone tell us the reasons why it is in Column 2?

• #7 by Brian on December 8 - 5:36 am

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  i think Japanese should be in category 2, even though it is completely different than English it is very simple and Thai should definitely be in category 3 because it is tonal which can be a very difficult concept to grasp if you speak English
  looks good other than that though

• #8 by Nobody on December 18 - 2:55 pm

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  Umm…Japanese has a few thousand characters one has to learn, along with honorific language, and complex grammar. Thai has none of these. The tones do make it difficult though, which is why it is category 2 with a * as well

• #9 by Tracy on December 22 - 5:06 am

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  Because I’m originally from the Caribbean, I found learning and repeating Japanese and understanding the basics was easy. I’ve yet to learn the kanjis and the grammar IS complex at times but with practice (of course) I’m sure I’ll be able to master it eventually…hopefully

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• #10 by Cralls on January 14 - 6:43 am

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  Chinese is so overrated IMO. There are tones which are easily overcome. The pronunciations are easy and the grammar could not be simpler. There are very few similarities though and they think differently. And the dreaded characters aren’t even that hard. Just study a few a day and they all build on each other so they get easier and easier.

• #11 by Kartveli on February 14 - 2:22 am

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  Georgian, like the other Caucasian languages, is one of the most difficult languages in the world. It has a different alphabet, pronunciation is really tough and the Georgian verb is a nightmare:

  “The Georgian verb is relatively complex. If we compare it to that of many of the more familiar languages – such as English, Spanish, French, and the like – we notice a number of significant differences. These including the following:

  • the average number of morphemes (that is, basic grammatical units) per word is higher due to the process of agglutination (that is, word formation through combining sequences of elements, each with a distinctive role)

  • verbs fall into a number of contrasting classes, based on their grammatical behavior and roles

  • the familiar tenses (past, present, future, etc.) are replaced by what are known as ‘screeves’, which are characterized by more than just differences in the time reference

  • the verb can include references to the subject and the direct and indirect objects, a characteristic known as polypersonalism as, for example, in the translation of ‘I sent it to him’, which is a single word in Georgian

  • indirect objects can be marked as benefactors, possessors, and the like; this is known as ‘version’

  • subjects and objects are indicated in a more complex way through case marking

  • there is a more precise distinction of direction with verbs of motion than in many of the more familiar languages, using verb prefixes known as directional preverbs.

  As there are many exceptions to the general rules, one may sometimes encounter Georgian verbs which, in their detailed analysis, do not conform fully to models described here.” http://www.armazi.com/georgian/

  Japanese is not difficult, mainly because it has few irregularities and it’s easy to pronounce. As soon as you know the sentence patterns, you can put them to use easily. And learning hiragana, katakana and kanji is just a matter of drilling, which is not difficult, just time consuming and possibly boring.

  So, I would suggest Georgian for category III and Japanese for category II.

  Polish is very difficult to pronounce and grammar isn’t so easy either. I’d say category III.
  The Baltic languages, Finnish, Estonian, Armenian, Portuguese and Romanian should also move up a category.

  And finally, I think German should be in category I.

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• #12 by steve on April 15 - 9:37 pm

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  for what its worth, as an English speaker I’ve put significant hours studying Japanese and Chinese, and here is my perspective:

  Japanese is a nightmare for many reasons…one of which is when you learn a Kanji, you must learn it’s onyomi and its kunyomi (Chinese and Japanese reading). One Kanji can have 2, 3, 4, 5 or more readings, and you just have to memorize which reading applies where (therefore you’re not just learning the character in and of itself).

  Japanese Keigo (honorific language) is also a tough nut to crack, so you really have to understand a lot of cultural nuances to get it right. At least it doesn’t have a rich case system, and one doesn’t have to worry about agreement with this-and-that, which eases the burden a little.
  That’s not saying much though. Japanese intermediate grammar is very difficult, and unfortunately Japanese Kanji are long-form Chinese characters…very tedious to write.

  Chinese (Mandarin) is horrific in that it has a paltry work-to-results ratio: you have to worry about tones of course. If your tone if off, many Chinese speakers simply won’t understand you. Dialects are troublesome (I don’t mean Cantonese, MinNan, etc, which are their own languages, but rather northern, southern, Taiwan, central etc. dialects of Mandarin, which can differ significantly in pronunciation & impede listening comp).
  People say you need to learn the 2,000 basic characters to read a newspaper. That is not fully true.

  Just knowing these characters doesn’t really help, because almost all Chinese words are made up of 2 characters. These 2,000 characters have formed in seemingly infinite combinations over thousands of years. Its daunting. I regularly find words in the dictionary that educated Chinese have never seen, but these still show up in books etc.

  Chinese also has an amazing array of Idioms…4 character phrases that are not intuitive in meaning without historical background knowledge. Chinese has even more 4-character set phrases, which are often called idioms as well. There are endless amounts of them…more than the student could ever memorize, let alone use in conversation. The problem is in that these idioms and set phrases are common in conversation, news, etc. Chinese start learning these at an early age and they are essential to Chinese vocab. If you want to go anywhere in the language (eg progress into intermediate), you can’t escape these little nightmares. they have a fixed expression for everything, and its a source for much frustration.

  Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world. I’m convinced of that. There is no alphabet to fall back on (an alphabet makes things so much easier). And Chinese is unique as you may be able hear a word but not necessarily be able read it, and vice-versa. If I had started with a romance language in the 1st place, I could have already progressed into one or more other romance languages by now, and be fluent in all of them. Not so in Chinese. Any intermediate and advanced student of this language (I am around a lot of them) truly feels like they’re getting nowhere.

• #13 by steve on April 16 - 12:23 pm

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  Here is a well-written and entertaining article by a Chinese expert from the University of Michigan…you may enjoy it:
  ‘Why Chinese is so Damn Hard’
  http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

• #14 by Unknown on May 10 - 8:59 am

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  I’m a native chinese speaker and it gives me a lot of advantages to because I listen to chinese (cantonese) since birth. I would advice learners to first learn the pinyin and then the characters. Hope u guys have fun with it.

• #15 by Pete on May 22 - 9:54 am

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  Hi Steve,

  Thanks for recommending David Moser’s article. I’m debating whether to shoot myself or just give up Chinese altogether. All right, I can see that the writing system is hard (but kind of fun), but the grammar is easy, isn’t it?

• #16 by Judy Adkins Hill on May 29 - 6:19 pm

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  Navajo is not on this list, nor are Hopi or any of the Puebloan languages. I would be interested in where they rank in difficulty.

• #17 by Bernard Leeman on June 11 - 9:04 pm

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  I did French and Latin O level at school requiring 3-5 years study but I learnt and passed Afrikaans O level in a month. Swahili and Japanese must be among the easiest languages to pronounce and it is a pity Japanese does not solely adopt romaji writing. Korean pronunciation is much more difficult than Japanese but the writing system is great.

  A lot depends on course material and the culture of the target language. Esperanto is about world understanding and peaceful cooperation but more people relate to Klingon, which is concerned with intergalactic mayhem and blood oaths.

• #18 by Bernard Leeman on June 11 - 9:09 pm

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  If China adopted widespread use of pinyin Chinese would quickly become a world language.

• #19 by Geen on October 23 - 8:28 pm

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  Bernard:

  “it is a pity Japanese does not solely adopt romaji writing”

  How ethnocentric of you. Albeit being one of the most tedious and meticulous alphabets known to man, the mix of Kanji and Hiragana and Katakana in a given sentence in Japanese is a beautiful gem!

  I think this report from the FSI is a comprehensive and large-scale and unbiased report from an institute carefully documenting how much time is required on average for native English speakers to reach proficiency in the most common languages. Their results shows that Japanese is the most difficult for native English speakers (followed by Chinese, Arabic, and Korean in similar level).

  This was a large-scale and objective study, and so I will trust their results more than the opinions of some of these comments from people who have only studied one or two languages sporadically, and then possess a desire to claim that their target language should be placed in a more difficult level.

  To that end, I have to agree with the comments from Steve on April 15. It just will be a challenge (or in his words a “nightmare”) for English native speakers to master the language of Japan. But it could be a rewarding one.

  It does not mean, however, that the Japanese should have to change their language to make it easier for you to learn, and relegate it to one of the lower levels of difficulty.

• #20 by Da on October 27 - 8:01 pm

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  Very interesting! Being my native language Spanish, I studied German, Arabic and Japanese. I agree with the difficulty degree, but I might just add an asterisk to the Arabic language as well. The grammar (irregular past verbs), vocabulary, and pronunciation(!) makes it as difficult as Japanese.

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• #21 by Nicolas on November 9 - 8:38 pm

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  Hi there,
  I am a native speaker of the Greek language.I really liked your website-it was what exactly I was looking-and I’d like to remark that Greek is not as difficullt as rumours have it to be.Making an effort from anyone who is interested worths the try, it is one of the most historical and significant languages of the humanity.
  Thank you

• #22 by Bernard on November 25 - 11:33 pm

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  Ethnocentric to suggest the Japanese switch to Romaji ? No, I am practical and anti-elitist. Japanese sounds are ideally suited to Roman letters.My language is Swahili and I’m glad we switched from Arabic script as did the Turks and that Oromo and Somali have adopted Roman script too instead of Ge’ez script. The Vietnamese education system has benefited from abandoning Chinese characters. I support the wonderful Korean alphabet. Japanese script is just inefficient.

• #23 by john on December 1 - 4:59 pm

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  good list but im disappointed to see irish isnt here as its my first language… id say that it would be a category 3

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