What is the most difficult language (to learn it) ? (high school, college)

[ArkansasTgirl]

Vietnamese is supposed to be kind of like Cantonese but it only has 6 tones in the northern dialect and 5 in the southern. No symbols to learn, it has an alphabet kind of like English.
I heard Vietnamese spoken quite a bit, and also Laotion to some extent growing up. I never tried learning Spanish growing up because I assumed it would be just as difficult to learn. When I finally did take conversational Spanish I almost cracked up laughing at how easy it was in comparison, not to put down Spanish learners as becoming fluent is still probably quite a lot of work

[Trimac20]

Maybe Vietnamese? That's one of the weirdest sounds I've heard coming from human beings, sounds more like ducks quacking (sorry if you're Vietnamese). It makes Mandarin seem normal! lol

[Ryuji]

Originally Posted by liebknecht

I believe Chinese pronunciation is as hard as it gets, being a tonal language and all. add to that the 4000 or so hanzi you need to master to be fluent and you have quite the task ahead of you

I wonder which language is easier than Mandarin Chinese. Whould you introduce some?

BTW, very few Chinese people knows 2000+ Chinese characters. And you don't have to master Hanzi, Chinese characters, to speak Mandarin at the first place.

As far as I know, Japanese writing system is 9999999999 x harder than Chinese

[Ryuji]

Originally Posted by hadrett32

It's very difficult due to the 'ü' 'ö' like 'Türkiye' (Turkey), 'Günaydin' (Good Morning) or 'Atatürk' (Famous politican). Although, Turkish has the Latin alphabet (they changed it from Arab Alphabet in 1930 or something like that.) there is a sizeable number of 'own' letters.

Both ü and ö are easy. Besides, Turkish grammar is organized very well. Turkish is pretty easy to learn.

BTW, it's Günaydın, not Günaydin

[Ryuji]

Originally Posted by FriendlyFeller

Vietnamese is supposed to be kind of like Cantonese but it only has 6 tones in the northern dialect and 5 in the southern. No symbols to learn, it has an alphabet kind of like English.

I know a gril from England, who speaks Mandarin and Cantonese fluently. She once tried to learn tiếng Việt(Vietnamese) but gave it up after all.

This is all I know about Vietnamese

[pigeonhole]

In my country, people are not even able to learn correct English (let alone be fluent), but the craze nowadays is to learn Chinese, one of the most difficult languages, with ideograms. Talk of skewed priorities! I wonder how people who are not even able to speak correctly English are going to master the Mandarin language ? snobishness is actually a disease of the mind.

[joe from dayton]

I think Polish has to be at the top of the list.

[Stumbler.]

Considering there are thousands of languages that are very localized (mostly by small groups or minorities in places like Africa, Papua New Guinea etc.) that aren't related to European languages nor even the more common widespread ones like Arabic, Chinese, etc., I'm sure there are a ton that most people who speak English would find difficult.

[liebknecht]

Originally Posted by Ryuji

As far as I know, Japanese writing system is 9999999999 x harder than Chinese

I don't know about Chinese writing. In Japanese every character has at the very least (I'm sure there are exceptions) 2 completely different readings, one derived from chinese pronunciation and one purely japanese reading. So yea you have to memorize up to a dozen different pronunciations for some kanji. I think it's not as bad in Chinese but I believe Chinese people use more characters in daily writing than Japanese...not sure though.

[RedJacket]

Palinese.