English is the hardest language to learn

"English the hardest language? Nah.

It's believed that Navajo is the hardest language on the Earth to learn. The limited amount of research I've done on Navajo supports this conclusion."

Not if you speak Chiricahua, Apache, Mescalero, Lipan, Jicarilla or any other closely-related language.

Being so closely-related (members of the Southern Athabaskan family) the people who speak these languages wouldn't think that Navajo is the hardest language to learn.

Although Navajo is a strange language it does have many things in it that make it seem wuite SIMPLE, rather than difficult.

Many concepts expressed using NOUNS in other languages appear as VERBS in Navajo.

The majority of true nouns are NOT inflected for number, and there is NO case marking. Noun phrases are often not needed to form grammatical sentences due to the informational content of the verb.

There are two main types of nouns in Navajo: simple nouns and nouns derived from verbs (called deverbal nouns). The simple nouns can be distinguished by their ability to be inflected with a possessive prefix, as in béézh "knife", bibeezh "her knife" and hééł "pack", shiyéél "my pack".

Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human or lightning) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):

humans/lightning → infants/big animals → med-size animals → small animals → insects → natural forces → inanimate objects/plants → abstractions

Generally, the most animate noun in a sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second. If both nouns are equal in animacy, then either noun can occur in the first position. So, both example sentences (1) and (2) are correct. The yi- prefix on the verb indicates that the 1st noun is the subject and bi- indicates that the 2nd noun is the subject.

(1) Ashkii at'ééd yiníł'į́.
boy girl yi-look
'The boy is looking at the girl.'


(2) At'ééd ashkii biníł'į́.
girl boy bi-look
'The girl is being looked at by the boy.'

Hey I learn many, many languages i am fluent in English aswell as spanish, latin and swedish and my original language German however, I agree English is the hardest language I tried to learn Mandirin but I gave up because English was too hard and i needed to learn the language(English) for furthur careers.
I can pronounce my w's and v's correctly although sometimes it is rather diffucult and you can forget.
Helga is wrong. English is very hard to learn unless you are brought up with it very well spoken In a family, people from england cant even write their own language and spell their own language nor be able to do the punctuation and grammar involved. It is quiet a difficult language but if you put your mind to it; it's easy!

If you find English hard to learn, what about the various other Asian languages, Japanese (my other half) has three forms of alphabet, whilst the English language uses the Roman alphabet, which most European languages also use to a various extent.

Forgot to add that the Japanese also use the Roman alphabet and spell in the American (simple, but just plain wrong:) way. They also use English in ways the English and Americans would never do.

Easiest to learn adolescent - just shout and point, grunt for for affirmative

I am a native speaker of the English language and i can tell you that you all still need to work on your sentence structure and grammar.

Hello everyone.

First of all, I want to clarify the next thing: I'm not a native speaker of the English language, so I may have a lot of mistakes in this writing.

Second of all: there is no hard language. It's impossible the simply idea of mastering a language (even a native speaker will never speak perfectly his own language). so one cannot say: "English is the hardest language" nor "Persian is the hardest language", that's dump! I can learn any language if I make an efford to do that, so do everybody.

Lastly... that was all. :)

P.S..

Don't get angry with me just because I showed you the truth.

I think it's funny that many of you say how easy it is to learn English and how you are completely fluent, yet you sound like retarded 9-year-olds. I don't mean to put you down I think it's great that many of you speak conversational English but most of you are no where near fluency.

The forum owners have been fisted in their anuses for some hours last night because they refused to suck eachother's willy. When King Kong walked inside of their work place, he obliged them to suck his big back dick without mercy. They all got a great satisfaction. That's why they love to speak English saying double k for KING KONG, yeah!

What a gay group which they enjoy that shit I hate they do!

Please delete this forum that nobody learns English. I don't see grammar teaching or pronunciation rules. They just enjoy some criticism against this language and differences between American English and British English. Guys, please do a better job to show things you already knew.

I think Polish is one of the hardest languages to learn if you are not from Eastern Europe and dont speak a slavic language. The spelling is difficult and the grammer and the words are very hard to remember. POlish is very difficult, I grew up speaking it so it is easy for me, but if you speak Russian Polish will come easily

I think English is relatively simple to learn and that is one of reasons why it is an international language. And people can understand each other even with lot of mistakes in their English.

BTW there can be some unexpected difficulties in learning a language that is rather close to your native language. For example, there are many cases when the same words mean absolutely different things in Polish and Russian (maybe they are not exactly the same, but sound very similar)

PS. Nice idea with "I hate spam", makes me laugh ))) What's the point ? Protection from spambots ?

>>I think English is relatively simple to learn and that is one of reasons why it is an international language. And people can understand each other even with lot of mistakes in their English.<<

The thing about is that English is that its morphology, syntax, and usage are *superficially* simple and straightforward, and it lacks the memorization of large amounts of inflectional morphology that one gets from, say, Slavic languages; however, its syntax and usage can actually get very complex in reality (such as with verb tense and aspect, verb particle usage, and adposition usage). Also, English is really only "easy" if one already speaks a Germanic language, as many of them already share much of the same characteristics as English underneath it all; one is far worse off with English if one's native language is something such as Romance language.

At the same time, though, yes, English is rather forgiving, and one can absolutely butcher it and still be understood relatively well. English does not really have all that many elements that have to be memorized on a word-for-word basis that would totally trip up beginning speakers, even if the finer points of its syntax, usage, and semantics may be highly nonobvious in nature. The hard parts of English are not the beginning parts (as with, say, German) but rather stuff that one will come across as one uses English in a more advanced fashion. Even with verb inflection, English is already very tolerant of variation in verb forms in native usage (to a much greater degree than, say, German), and one is unlikely to be not understood if one replaces with a non-regular form with an analogous regular form.

Travis

You are right, but yet even with a language like German you can get a fair amount of the grammar wrong (i.e. gender, plurals, cases and adjective endings) and still speak/write German that is for the most part comprehensible. If you totally mangled it maybe not, but if you have a feel for the language and structure it in a reasonable way, some incorrect inflectional morphology will not for the most part get in the way of what you are trying to say, at least not at an every day level.

Also, I definitely agree that English is only superficially simple. German for example is indeed hard to get your head around at first, but once you get the rules, they are very systematic. I think the difficulties of English grammar are much more subtle. For example I heard a German friend say about some harmless animals 'They won't do you anything'. She meant 'They won't do anything to you'. Why is this wrong? In other instances you can omit the 'to' when referring to the dative object in English. For example both 'Give the book to me' and 'Give me the book'. In German the use of the dative form is more consistent. Maybe that wasn't the best example, maybe that particular example was more about prepositional usage, but still there are definitely examples of this kind of thing in English, which actually make the dative construction in English more complicated. I will try to think of them.

>>You are right, but yet even with a language like German you can get a fair amount of the grammar wrong (i.e. gender, plurals, cases and adjective endings) and still speak/write German that is for the most part comprehensible. If you totally mangled it maybe not, but if you have a feel for the language and structure it in a reasonable way, some incorrect inflectional morphology will not for the most part get in the way of what you are trying to say, at least not at an every day level.<<

In the case of German, though, this is because German is already well on the way towards being a more English-like language morphologically and syntactically than many other languages that use cases heavily, such as Slavic languages (save Bulgarian and Macedonian) and Uralic languages. Yes, it preserves the old four-case system that used to be present in Germanic languages (some instrumental case forms in Old English and vocative case forms in Gothic which had not quite died yet when those started being put to pen aside), but it is in no fashion really all that reliant upon cases.

Word order alone does not do a lot of distinguishing things syntactically in German in practice, and largely obviates much case usage to begin with; the main situations where they really are distinguishing at all (provided one does not do weird things with weird order) are between some usages of prepositions. Furthermore, the genitive case has been highly marginalized in many German dialects, very commonly only being limited to use with personal names and like when it is retained at all. All in all, cases are largely vestigial in practice in German in most usages, and they do not have the weight and freedom of usage that cases have in many other case languages (where one is far more free to do weird things with word order where case alone is needed to distinguish verb arguments).