Which Language Was the Hardest to Learn?

[fruittreesys]

Hi, CS! I was curious about something and figured this would be a fun place to ask! For those of you who speak multiple languages...

Which language was the hardest to learn? What made it difficult? What's your native language?

For me, my native language is English, and I'm learning Japanese and ASL (I'm close to a conversational level in both), and neither are particularly difficult for me. I'd say Japanese is a little harder, but I think it's less that the language is hard for me, and more that I had constant feedback and help from a teacher with ASL, as well as other students to practice with. As for Japanese, I have to seek that kind of help out all on my own, each time I need it, so it's a bit slower going.

Although those are the only two languages I'm actually somewhat proficient in, I've also poked around with several others. Russian didn't feel too difficult, nor Korean. Indonesian, however, got so confusing so quickly! So many prefixes and suffixes...! Although, it didn't help that I was having a really hard time finding grammar resources. Everything I learned was in bits and pieces that I had to string together with a bit of help from native speakers. Toki Pona, too, funny enough, was a little challenging. The language itself is simple, of course, but its minimalistic vocabulary forces you to be more creative in how you express yourself. It was a fun brain teaser!

Those are some of my experiences thus far. I'm still working on strengthening my Japanese and my ASL, but I'm looking forward to picking up a fourth language that I can make these comparisons with as well!

[Schuyler]

Well. I've only made any real progress in two languages so far, so I can't say I have enough of a sample size to properly judge the difficulty, but here goes. I'm an (American) English native. I've been learning German for a bit over 16 years and consider myself around B2. I can generally understand it and write without too much effort unless it's an unfamiliar topic like sports or something. My speaking is pretty bad still, but I'm bad at speaking in general and also haven't practiced since finishing school, so. *shrug*

And I started Polish in September 2022, learned some basic stuff in the first couple weeks before falling out of the habit for ~6 months and picking it back up for real in March/April. I'd say I'm probably like A1.5 at this point, relatively comfortable with the grammar but still with far too small a vocabulary to really make use of it yet without constantly having to look stuff up and having no idea if what I'm saying is how people actually talk. But the Poles I've tried talking with so far seem to understand me fine and swear I write very well, so I guess I must not be doing too badly, lol.

So which one is harder? Honestly, I don't know if I would say either has been especially hard for me. With German, I had the advantage of learning in school for several years before I even thought to seriously pursue learning it on my own, so I had structured lessons with a teacher and was able to establish a solid foundation to expand on later. Once I started on my own, all I really needed to focus on was listening practice, vocabulary building, and just generally refining what I'd already learned.

And with Polish, I'm learning completely on my own just with textbooks, Youtube/videos, and social media, but now I have the advantage of having learned German first. If you understand what's going on with German grammar, then Polish grammar is fairly straightforward: more complicated (eg. 7 cases instead of German's 4 and masculine nouns subdivide into animate/inanimate in singular and person/non-person in plural) but for the most part it's just kind of more of the same stuff. The only parts that feel new to me and a bit tough right now to get the hang of are the verb aspects and the much more flexible word order. Not to mention there are a lot of German loanwords in Polish as well as similar phrases and structures, so that's pretty nice. ^^ My speaking skills are still non-existent and pronunciation is way harder than German, but eh, I'll work on that when I need to. For the sake of my sanity speaking simply isn't the priority for me at the moment.

So I think I'd say aside from pronunciation, German was a little harder for me because it was my first foreign language and my first time working with concepts that English either doesn't have or barely uses, like cases, grammatical gender, and conjugation. But I'd expect Polish to be much tougher as a second language for a native English speaker since there's a lot more to keep track of and you don't have the benefit of all the shared Germanic roots between English and German -- some people legit say it's the hardest language for English speakers to learn, and while I personally think that's objectively an exaggeration (well, as objective as you can get when it comes to language learning), I can certainly agree it's not the easiest.

Besides those two, I also started learning Russian some 8-9 years ago. I didn't get very far with it before deciding I wasn't ready yet to shift focus to a third language and wanted to work on my German some more first, but I don't remember finding the start especially difficult and probably would have gone back to it for my 3rd language as planned if I hadn't accidentally fallen in love with Polish in the meantime. xD

I've also very briefly dabbled in French, Spanish, Irish, and Mandarin at different points over the years, but not enough to use them at all or really judge how hard they are. But I think of those, if I were to study them further, I'd expect Mandarin to be the hardest for me because while the grammar is very simple (which is not a positive for me because I'm weird like that, but at least it's easy, lol), the writing system would be an absolute nightmare for my very writing-orientated brain to adapt to. Even Russian throws my processing off quite a bit with the written language, and that's just a different alphabet. Which I DO know how to read, but not how to get my brain to process effectively. 😅

[dewypower]

I'm a native English speaker with advanced French, and have also tried learning a lot of other languages here and there. We were required to learn Spanish in primary school but I barely know any of it now. While it's considered one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, I think my experience was very hard because it wasn't taught well - I barely remember learning Spanish besides for two times when it really frustrated me. Not something you want anyone's education experience to be.

I've tried learning Japanese and didn't get past beginner level (though I'm hoping to start studying it again soon) but strangely I didn't find it super hard. Of course since it's a Category 5 language it's quite hard, but I didn't struggle so much with motivation since I had genuine interest in the language. Or immersion, since I listen to a lot of Japanese music and will even come across a good amount of Japanese posts on social media.

Which brings me to another language I have a hard time with - ASL. That one I found quite hard because I'm not really sure how to go about immersion, very important for learning another language. I have genuine interest in the language and tried learning it again since we often see deaf people at my job, but I still don't really know past the basics.

Finally, the easiest language for me personally has been French. I took it in high school and was lucky to have a good experience with awesome teachers. I'm also half French so there's a good reason to learn it - connection to a language is important to keep learning, and I suppose it's in my blood as well. It also definitely helped my experience being able to ask my mom for help with classwork so it wasn't as frustrating. As I mentioned I have an advanced level in it, so considering the many other languages I've tried and failed to learn past the basics, I definitely haven't had a problem sticking with it

That's just my personal experience though, it's definitely heavily affected by Spanish and French being the only languages other than English I learned in school.

[Silverfang]

Ive never managed to learn much of anything useful. Native English speakers only (which is embarrassing...) I've dabbled in Italian, German, begrudgingly Spanish in High School.

But I've actually been trying to learn Dutch this past year. I've not made as much progress as I'd hoped. Can barely form basic sentences and keep messing up pronunciation. My love for etymology has helped a bit but only for specific words, not word order.
Its been tough with the word order especially. I also have issues hearing because of my auditory processing disorder and possible dyslexia. Its why I struggle with any language but especially Nederlands.

Sadly I'm considering giving up because I don't have any real tutors, friends, or ambition. The last bit because my reason to learn was to move to the Netherlands but finding a job is impossible. So my motivation is...crushed. (I dont want to try German anytime soon again. Then I'm just reminded of my impossible previous goal. Sigh.)

[Sulin]

Oml so I have really close German ancestry (native English) and have always wanted to learn the language since I was little, so for 4 years now I have been learning some basic German and I am doing really well in it, like I can speak full sentences and say a couple of harder words now. Though, I have slowly started learning Romanian over my German and I guess that I'm doing pretty okay, but it's like super hard imo, I can read Romanian pretty damn well but speaking and writing it is a whole different story. I plan on going to Romania and Germany at some point for a few of my own personal reasons... and I really want to be able to speak the languages. So, what I am basically getting at is; Romanian has been harder for me to learn compared to German lol