Which is hardest to pronounce?

Totally superficial question:

Completely omitting the actual structure of the language itself, which language do you think is hardest to pronounce for an American English speaker? The easiest?

My vote:

Easiest: Hawaiian
Hardest: Navajo (4 tones, nasalized vowels, five consonants that don't exist in any dialect of English)

You may be right. Of course, the languages of the Caucasus Mountains are rich in consonant clusters (as in Georgian varskvlavi 'star' and bashvs "to the child' ) which many people find just as hard to pronounce as tonalized words.

I think the hardest languages to pronounce would be those of the Khoisan family, some of which have over 90 consonants, including a massive array (40+) of distinct click sounds.

I work with a Navajo girl, and I agree, Navajo has sounds I couldn't begin to make, especially one after the other.

I know many English speakers have no trouble rolling an R, as in the Spanish double-R, but I can't do that to save my life. I just sound like I'm gargling.

I agree with Lazar, I also think the San people, definitely have the hardest language to learn. Many reasons for that, biggest being the massive amount of constanants, the other the fact that so few people speak the language, and are able to document it, few can speak both their language and English, or another better known language.

It's a language I would love to learn, as it doesn't sound remotely like any other language...

Lazar,

I just looked up the Khoisan language family. 30 CLICK CONSONANTS?!! 90 phonemes? And four tones on top of that?

I think we have a winner, ladies and gentlemen.

To many English people (ie from England) the Celtic Languages (especially Welsh) present the biggest of "problems" in pronunciation. Very few English people make the slightest effort to pronounce place names with any degree of accuracy, not only in Wales, but also here in Scotland. They make an art form out of their perceived "inability" to get their tongues round sounds which are, in fact, perfectly easy to produce with minimal effort and application.

It can be part of some unconscious sense of "superiority" in sometimes making a joke out of either mispronouncing Celtic place names or refusing to do so altogether. It's quite common to hear an English radio/TV presenter saying something like: "On the line now we have David in some place in Wales with a totally unpronounceable name! " or "I have Cameron on the line from some unpronounceable placename on the Isle of Lewis".

I wish for once they would at least make an effort in pronouncing these Scottish or Welsh names and if they make a pig's breakfast out of it what the hell...at least they tried. Grrrrrrrr! Celtic brotherhood ire knows no bounds. :-)

You guys have a go:

Achinahuagh (Scot)
Llandderfel (Wales)
Trumaisgearraidh (Scot)
Machynlleth (Wales)

Too hard? wimps! OK try these:

Montrose (Scotland)
Newport (Wales)

If you cannae manage these then there's no hope whatsoever....

Well, I don't know about the rest of them, but the first one's definitely:

Achinahuagh (Scot) = gesundheit!

Uriel,
If you try to roll Rs in the same position they're usually pronounced in English you'll definitely be gargling. Try to pronounce them near the base of your upper teeth.

<<Achinahuagh (Scot)
Llandderfel (Wales)
Trumaisgearraidh (Scot)
Machynlleth (Wales)>>

The Welsh ones aren't so hard, since I know a bit of Welsh - in X-SAMPA I think they'd be [KAnDE4vEl] and [mAx@nKET].

The Scottish ones are baffling though. ;-)

Here's another extremely hard one, for speakers of Indo-European languages at least, as consonants go: Ubykh. Even though that's now extinct, there are other related languages which would still be very, very hard for probably most native IE language speakers with respect to pronunciation.

Wow, just looked that one up on wikipedia...scary...

Okay, Damian, I'll give it a shot: A-chinna-wah!
(Hmm. Still sounds like a sneeze.)

these are imposible hard took me 4 years living with the family to pronounce the names incredable i hope uv got a lot of time ul need it there names were bob and Liz wooooooo i no i should have done 1 at a time but if u want to learn i wil teach u £36 ex vat just leave a message m il give u the 5 second tutorial