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I must say that English is nowhere in terms of difficulty when compared to Russian or any of the other Slavic languages.
I'm currently learning Czech boy is it hard or what!!! The grammar is just beyond one's understanding (of course it is possible to master it after tons and tons of years). The prepositions are not as confusing as in the English language, but the cases, noun endings, relatively free syntax can be quite puzzling (and being able to understand is one thing as being able to use it is quite another).
German is also not an easy language. It's grammar is comparatively harder than English and it's syntax and vast vocabulary can be quite frustrating (but once you understand it, it can be real fun).
I've also heard that Turkish and Finnish are the hardest non IE (indo-european) languages in Europe as they are agglutinative languages (meaning you can add suffixes to a word and make it a sentence!!! result: you'd end up getting one loooon g word of about 30-50 letters which makes up the whole sentence!!)
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu (and other Indian languages), and the African languages (with the exception of a few like Swahili) can be excruciatingly hard!!!
To those of you who are non-native English language users, take heart. Here in the USA, nearly half of the native English language users have reading and writing skills that reflect the weakness of basic subjects in our education system. You too may have noticed that problem from reading many of the posts in CD written mostly by people who are native English language users - so please be careful in selecting posts in this forum to use for "learning by example".
I appreciate the efforts that are made by non-native English language users to learn and practice writing in a forum like this. Go ahead and write away, and don't worry about a few words that might not be spelled correctly or other minor grammar errors because your written words will probably be easier to understand than the posts from many native English language users!
Ha! Apparently you've never tried Chinese? Where one word's meaning can change drastically just because you put a different tone on it? Sometimes where you put the intonation itself (whether it's the beginning of the word, the middle, or the end) can change the word's meaning drastically. Don't even get me started on its written words (thousands of them, compare to 26 western alphabets). Now, that, my friend, is hard!
haha I agree...imagine some of the Indian languages...I heard the south indian languages have 20 cases....different endings....which change per gender...agglutinative endings (just like finnish and hungarian)....
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