Hardest to easiest

blanche   Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:47 am GMT
I don't think Finnish or Hungarian are that hard. In my view Chinese, Japanese, Arabian people might have more problems to learn Russian or Polish than a finno-ugric language
cnalbumen   Thu Aug 20, 2009 4:06 pm GMT
For a Chinese or English speaker, how hard are:

Basque
Faroese
Sanskrit
Navajo


Compared to the languages already mentioned?
Sjarel Gulden   Thu Aug 20, 2009 4:27 pm GMT
I'm not a linguist, but my guess would be (from hardest to easiest):

Navajo (lots of fonemes and very purist)
Sanskrit (my experience with these synthetic IE language is that they require a creative mind to use properly)
Basque (no idea, it's an agglutinating language and its speakers seem to articulate well, all I know)
Faroese (a very purist Germanic language, but as far as I know, the purist factor is main thing that makes it so hard I think. They also write more fonetically than Icelandic.)
jkj   Thu Aug 20, 2009 5:06 pm GMT
Faroese should be much easier to learn for an English speaker than a Chinese...