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What do you think is the easiest and the hardest language to learn?


rhangg

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I like learning different languages. :)>-
I'm a Filipino and aside from English, I can also speak conversational Spanish, Japanese and (*so-so) Korean. Since there's Spanish influence in Filipino culture, it's quite easy to learn the Spanish language. I learned Japanese, because I was exposed to Japanese anime and stuff at a young age and also for having Japanese speaking friends around. 
I tried to study Chinese some years back, but I really find it difficult, so I dropped it, only to learn it again later because Chinese characters are also used in Japanese writing. (*there's no escape =(( )  :P I also think that Thai language is hard to learn, it also sounds weird to me, and Russian as well, plus the writing. *nosebleed*
So for me, the Easiest: *Spanish *Japanese ; the Hardest: *Chinese  *Thai  *Russian 

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the easiest is English, because it's a universal language, go to any country and somebody may  not know your native language but I bet somebody will know basic English

English is the most well known and used universal language in the World

all asian languages are hard to learn because they arent used much unless you live in those countries


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Guest I_play_with_dolls

Spanish because it's like English where it isn't really tonal except for the whole ll and n and that n with the squiggly line I can't do with my keyboard lol. The hardest I would have to say is Chinese because of the characters and it's tonal. Possibly Russian would be the least. 

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Alright, I'm pretty sure I'm biased...but I think Korean = easiest to read, and pronounce. The characters have a set sound in which there is no discrepancies in terms of pronunciation (unlike the English language). Put aside sound, and you have one of the most flexible languages in the world in terms of expressing yourself. 

Any language with accents are hard to learn. Of the more well known languages, Cantonese has to be the hardest. Not only are their written characters ridiculously complicated (and vast in number), different accents on the same "word" have drastically different meanings. I feel for all the aspiring native Chinese singers because they're musically limited simply by inherent accent swings in their language :/

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Guest HERMIT

The easiest language for me would probably be Spanish since it's the only one I've bothered to learn.

The hardest language in the world would probably have to be Greek because whenever anybody can't understand something they invariably compare it to being 'all Greek' to them.

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  • 2 weeks later...

i believe malay is the easiest language to learn... korean has easy to pronounce language but complicated grammar and abit confusing spelling as some words are just sound the same.
hardest language for me is chinese, thai and arabic. chinese and thai tones are hard to hear and remember.. thai got too many letters, and chinese characters need to be memorize as you can't spell them.arabic, i can read them.. (im a muslim) but... i learn abit of arabic in school, its seriously hard.. 

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Guest C Yuan

English is the easiest for me because it had a simple alphabet and was used everywhere.I would consider Chinese to be the hardest, because there is no alphabet and one must memorize the words, however, there is no alphabet in the hanzi system, so a foreigner could be able to read and write chinese but not be able to speak or understand it. 

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Guest taija

easiest would be English, not sure when or how I learnt it but it is what I use 98% of the time though my first

language is Zulu. Hardest would be

Chinese, too many characters and tones.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest SharonW1430293910

Being a chinese person, I think chinese is the easiest to learn, and the hardest would be arabic.

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Guest bebbik

It's impossible to say which language is the easiest or hardest because it definitely depends on what your native language is and which other languages have similar grammatical structures. Chinese is often perceived as a hard language but the grammar is actually quite similar to english grammar so once you have the pronunciation and script down it's not all that hard to learn. The hardest languages are probably the ones with really complicated and subtle grammatical changes which is the case for a lot of central Asian languages.

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dang this is so biased...

well, I'll try to stay unbiased. I am a native speaker of English and Chinese.

Easiest language to learn: Spanish, Japanese, Korean- there is almost no ambiguity in alphabetic pronunciation.
Hardest: Mandarin Chinese- tonal, makes it very difficult for western speakers, script contains no alphabet and learning it is straight memorization.

Ok, so it is a little bit biased... I would have to say that English conjugations and Japanese particles + conjugations are far more complex than simple Chinese grammar, but this is not important for beginners. Beginners only care about the basics, pronunciation, reading etc. If you could actually get past the hump of even being able to speak a Chinese word properly, then a language with more complex grammar would be considered more difficult; however... it is not easy to get over that pronunciation hump...

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Guest zelda4u

I agree with a lot of people's sentiment that chinese is the hardest to learn. I'm fortunate enough to have learned it in school, but if were to do a self-study on it, it would be super difficult because different tones would imply different meanings, etc..

But it's beneficial to learn Mandarin as you can use it in learning Japanese as well (lot of borrower characters - Kanji)

P.S. i speak mandarian, filipino, and a tiny bit of japanese

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I was born outside the US and immigrated here when I was a baby and I am grateful that I grew up speaking English. If you think about English grammar, there are so many things that are confusing and don't make much sense. 
I really like learning languages and I've found Spanish to be super easy. I also think Mandarin Chinese is an easy language to learn (only when I'm being taught the language, not self-taught although I'm sure it could be done:)). 

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Guest pulchirin

Trying to be unbiased, I'm fairly sure that Chinese and English are the hardest to learn, but their difficulty is relative to the individual's native language, obviously.
While English in some form present almost everywhere, you can't forget how strange the rules of the language are, yaknow. But as a native English speaker, I'd say Chinese would be the hardest to learn.
And the easiest for me would be French.

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Guest Narda

I'm Filipino-American. Speak both languages fluently. I took up Japanese lang (cause 'yanno it was the closest thing I could to learning a foreign lang) for three years back in High School but did NOT retain a thing I learned. *scratches my head* on that one.At least with Korean lang, watching Kdramas helps to retain/gain new information but I can't for the love of me cannot converse seamlessly. Oh, did I mention I managed to pass Kor 102 when I was at a community college? Guess I just really needed to learn more vocabularies
Overall, I'd say it's easy to learn Japanese and Chinese would be the hardest mainly because of the tone.

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Guest nuwera

For me, the easiest language I learned was English and the hardest is Japanese. Even though it's been years since I studied Japanese but I'm still not fluent yet. 

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