How difficult do you think these languages are? Rank them

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Rank them from hardest to easiest

English
Spanish
Chinese
Russian
Arabic
Portuguese
French
Japanese
German
Italian



This is my ranking:
Japanese
Chinese
Arabic
Russian
German
Portuguese/Italian/Spanish/French
English

If you had to study one (don't pick your mother tongue!), which one would it be?

Have you even tried learning the languages you ranked?

Chinese
Japanese
Klingon
Hebrew
Russian
German
French
Portuguese
English
Latin
Italian
Spanish


At some point I'd like to start studying Hebrew again, and perhaps Klingon. I still need to get back to studying Latin, but my mom dying last year kind of threw me off of being able to focus about anything.

Rank them from hardest to easiest

10 - English
9 - Spanish
1 - Chinese
2 - Russian
4 - Arabic
5 - Portuguese
7 - French
3 - Japanese
6 - German
8 - Italian

1= hardest
10= easiest

If I had to study one it would be Japanese [/quote]

I speak two of them and studied one (I can read it but I'm not fluent at all). I also speak another which is not listed here. And I'm about to start learning German the next week!
What about you?

Btw, I'm just curious to know what people think. If I wanted an expert opinion I'd simply search the net.

Nah, I only know German and English, then some Japanese and a tiny bit of Mandarin Chinese. I don't want to rank anything until I've attempted to learn what I've ranked. I haven't spent a minute on trying to learn Arabic, for example, so I have no idea how difficult I find it.

Last edited by jmnixon95 on 31 Jan 2012, 2:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It would depend on your mother tongue. Spanish speakers would find Portuguese and Italian easiest. I imagine Chinese would be hardest for Europeans to learn because of the different tones. For an English speaker, I think the ranking would be:

Chinese
Japanese
Arabic
Russian
German
French
Portuguese
Italian
Spanish
English

I think Chinese would be the most interesting to learn.

Interesting opinion. Merci beacoup =).

Interesting opinion. Merci beacoup =).



Well, my question was what you think, not how hard they actually come. But I'd like to know something due to German is a language I'd like to speak. How hard do you think it is in comparison to English?

Thanks in advance

Oh, sorry about that; I guess I misread the question.
German isn't too difficult for me, but a lot of English speakers have issues with the genders and things. Is English your first language?

What's your native language if you're willing to say? How hard you might find German could be connected to this, quite apart from the fact that you are clearly talented for languages as well as interested in them.

No, it's my third language. I taught myself English. Spanish is my first language, but I learnt Catalan in school. I guess the genders won't be so difficult since those two languages have them, but I don't know if it's going to be hard because there are neutral words too!



I honestly think it's gonna be harder than any language I've ever dealt with, but I'm really interested in learning German so I guess that will make the process easier. It doesn't have much to do with romance languages,but knowing English might help me acquire lexicon. Some German students I know say you have to know it's not as easy as English before starting if you don't want to get frustrated. They say it takes a lot to master. Let's see

I second Seashell's list for a native English speaker.

CWulf, that's impressive.

he trouble with German is not restricted to gender, in fact that's pretty universal to many European languages. And yes, there is the neutral case, plus the gender that you know from Spanish may be reversed, the moon is masculine and the sun feminine in German.

There are the cases (don't know if you have them in Spanish but I rather suspect not), ie nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, for expressing relationships between subject and object.

English has residual traces of dative (to whom did you speak?) and of course the genitive s.

And, as mentioned elsewhere, because of the cases which show as suffixes on nouns and pronouns, word order is highly flexible and for some reason the most important verb is often right at the end of a very long sentence.

Finally, the tendency to combine nouns into long, undivided compound nouns!!

What do you reckon?

I've learned some German, and of course English is easy for me because it's what I've spoken my entire life. But I would imagine English being difficult for someone who has never spoken it before, because of it's vast vocabulary.

All languages have their ups and downs.

Oh, and I'm starting to pick up on Japanese a little bit (God knows why).

I know a little Japanese and Spanish, and they came pretty easily to me. I always imagine that English would be a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn, because there are so many spelling and grammar rules that don't make a lot of sense - for example, the word "read" is spelled the same but pronounced differently if you're using it in the past or present tense, and the "gh" is pronounced differently in the words "dough" and "laugh".