Ta for the input so far folks.
Glad to see some early votes for Mandarin and Cantonese, because apart from the difficulty in pronouncing some of the word sounds for a European the tones can be really difficult to get your ear to hear in the first place, then you have to be able to say them just right
every time. Plus of course there's the written side of things, which is just so much work.
English.
...
Heck, it even has sentences that can't be written without using phonetics.
(Ignoring spelling rules to do it here, because I don't know how to do phonetic letters)
The irregular spelling is probably the hardest part of English - ghoti spells fish - and all the homonyms, homophones.
Although punctuation is often cited it's not hard, much as it confuses the hell out of most people (down to bad teaching, not it being difficult).
Tenses...
Run, ran
throw, threw
walk, walked
But it's so much worse in some other languages. French for example.
In English we have the benefit of being able to use just one form often:
they ran for the bus;
I ran for the bus;
we ran for the bus;
he/she ran for the bus.
they slung their bags;
I slung my bag;
we slung our bags;
he/she slung their bag.
Also on the plus side no gender, which is a huge boon (there are apparently seven genders in Polish, yikes!)
In truth, even native speakers of the language can't get it right.
That is actually true of other languages too though. Bad spelling, sloppy grammar and punctuation are all apparently rife. We're just more aware of it in English as English speakers.
...my Danish friend swears that Polski was a bear to learn.
That was what topped the list I saw. I was surprised because I hadn't previously heard Polish was especially difficult and Hungarian has this reputation for being the hardest major European tongue (it's definitely hard, but Polish does look like it would have the edge).
i would imagine anything with a non latin alphabet would be hard
Agreed, but trumped by no alphabet though :excruciating:
I'd imagine a language where the sounds are not used in your own, something like one of those languages in Africa (I forget which language or country) that uses the clicking sound, would be tricky.
Xhosa is maybe the major one. From what I've heard of it and San it's not the hardest part to say though!
Einion
