Is Polish the hardest language?

[Jaga]

Polish is hard, but I do not think it is the hardest considering the writing of Chinese. I agree that Italian is an easy language, but French is not.

Language learning, citizenship, visas and travel

claritaslux.com/blog/the-hardest-language-to-learn/

1.Extremely Hard: The hardest language to learn is: Polish – Seven Cases, Seven Genders and very difficult pronunciation. Average English speaker is fluent at about the age 12; the average Polish speaker is fluent in their language after age 16. .
2.Very Hard: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian – These languages are hard because of the countless noun cases. However, the cases are more like English prepositions added to the end of the root.Pretty Hard: Ukrainian and Russian complex grammar and different alphabet but easier pronunciation. Serbian-Also similar to other Slavic languages with a complex case and gender system, but it also has many tenses.
3.Simply Arduous: Ukrainian and Russian – Second language learners wrongly assume because these languages use a different script (Cyrillic) that it out ranks Polish. This is not objective, as an alphabet is only lets say 26 letters. It is really the pronunciation and how societies use the language that influences ranking.

4.Challenging contender jockey for position: Arabic - Three baby cases which are like a walk in the park compared to the above, but the unusual pronunciation and flow of the language makes study laborious and requires cognitive diligence if you want to speak it.
5.Fairly Hard: Chinese and Japanese - No cases, no genders, no tenses, no verb changes, short words, very easy grammar, however, writing is hard. But to speak it is very easy. Also intonations make it harder but certainly not harder than Polish pronunciation. I know a Chinese language teacher that says people pick up Chinese very easy, but he speaks several languages and could not learn Polish. I am learning some Chinese, it is not the hardest language maybe even the easiest language to learn. Not the hardest language by any measure. Try to learn some Chinese and Polish your self and you will see which is the hardest language.
6.Average: French - lots of tenses but not used and moderate grammar. German-only four cases and like five exceptions, everything is logical, of course.
7.Easy: Spanish and Italian - People I know pick these up no problem, even accountants and technical people rather than humanistic language people.
8.Basic to hard: English, no cases or gender, you hear it everywhere, spelling can be hard and British tenses you can use the simple and continues tense instead of the perfect tenses and you will speak American English. English at the basic level is easy but to speak it like a native it’s hard because of the dynamic idiomatic nature.

[Jaga]

i0.wp.com/claritaslux.com/blog/images/hardest-language-in-the-world.jpg?resize=500%2C782

[Eric]

I don't think Polish is necessarily harder than the other Slavic languages. Polish orthography (spelling), however, can be challenging to those who are unfamiliar with it, even though it has a regular pattern. (Too many "Z"s, for example.)

To English speakers, I would say non Indo-European languages would be vastly more difficult to learn than Polish, which is at least distantly related to English.

English is a rather unique experience. "Simple English" is relatively easy to learn. A small vocabulary of just a couple hundred words can allow simple ideas to be expressed easily. The verbs in this category are more or less regular, verbs of motion can be combined into one simple "go," and so on. But beyond this, English becomes much more difficult, with roots from both Germanic, French, and other sources. For example, a man is masculine (from Germanic), but a woman is feminine (from Romance).

[kaima]

The author likely has some valid points, but I estimate he is an amateur linquist and not a professional. First strike is his less-than-sterling writing in English! He is NOT a good writer in this language.

I enjoy reading about languages and their relationships to one another, but am also unimpressed with most of his commentary in the column quoted. Google also has a cached copy of a column he did on Rosetta Stone in 2010, and he does use the title "Rosetta stone reviews – Notes from a linguist" so I guess he does consider himself a linguist.

OK, he is a language teacher. I won't try to define linguist. With two languages I am quite functional in and a third I am working on, I definitely lay no claim to being a linguist.

He may be a teacher (those who can't do, teach!) and he may be a linguist. He is also a lousy writer of teh English language. This one jumped out and bit me in his writing about the Rosetta Stone software:

"He paid 500 dollars for I think two levels of Spanish, now is not used."

* * * *
To the point of Polish being most difficult: I have heard other opinions, and would wonder why he holds it as more difficult than the other western Slavic languages. He clearly does rank Eastern Slavic languages as less difficult, but goes no further.

From personal experience I must agree with him that Polish is difficult! I wonder if he is in the same trap I am, where the sounds are difficult to hear and distinguish, and the spelling is a system to which we are not accustomed.

[Eric]

I am a linguist by education AND a former language teacher, so perhaps I can offer some insight.

I have met and worked with teachers of English as a second language who were not native speakers. Most spoke the language so well that it truly was a fluent second language for them. But some had such a poor command of the language that I found it absolutely shocking that they were in a position to teach a language that they could barely speak (or even understand, and I found out the hard way) themselves. It was beyond frustrating having to correct another teacher's mistakes when those teachers' students became my students. Of course, they wanted to believe that their teacher couldn't make mistakes, and so they found themselves in the unenviable position of being caught in the middle of "he said, she said." I had the advantage of being a native speaker, but the disadvantage of being the youngest teacher in the language schools where I worked, so I had some respect, but also a lack of respect. It was a frustrating part of my job that I never thought I would ever have to deal with, but I did.

Just as all Romance languages can be traced back to Latin, meaning they all have many common similarities, despite their differences, the Slavic languages form a continuum from one to the other. The Eastern Slavic languages (Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian) are all relatively similar to each other, the major difference being that Russian was "modernized" throughout its history to be more in line with other European languages, but Belarussian and Ukrainian were repressed throughout most of the tsarist times, meaning they are "older" in their vocabulary and grammar than Russian is. That said, if you speak one, you can already understand the other two with little difficulty, and virtually all speakers of Belarussian and Ukrainian speak Russian, anyway. I also find the Southern Slavic languages to be relatively easy to understand; for example, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian give me little difficulty.

But the Western Slavic languages are different. They've had different influences because the histories of those countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc.) have had different histories and different cultures than the other Slavic languages. They have always been more European and have had less in common with their Slavic cousins to the east and south. Thus, these languages have more differences than with the other Slavic languages. Polish in particular has a very silibant pronunciation, with consonant clusters that don't exist elsewhere in the Slavic languages. In a way, it sounds like Polish is spoken almost through one's teeth or with a closed mouth, with the tongue performing acrobatic performances to make some of the sounds. Pronunciation alone makes Polish more difficult for speakers of other languages, even other Slavic languages. The grammar is also somewhat different, but the rules aren't really THAT different from other Slavic languages. They just take some getting used to.

[Jaga]

Eric, interesting.

+++Polish in particular has a very silibant pronunciation, with consonant clusters that don't exist elsewhere in the Slavic languages.++++
Still, the bunches of consonants together are also in Serbo-croatian languages. For instance the island Krk... in Croatia, does not have any vowel.
Polish language has probably more "sz" "cz" than Czech or Serb, it might have more vowels than these two other languages, but it sound probably more rough, brief and faster than Russian does. Russian language is slow and had more melody, it is good for songs, but bad for politics.....

[Jaga]

here is more about the language difficulty:
aboutworldlanguages.com/language-difficulty

Polish is grouped with other Slavic languages, not the most difficult, especially comparing to Chinese or Arabic

[Eric]

Sept 22, 2013 23:00:12 GMT -7 Jaga said:

Russian language is slow and had more melody, it is good for songs, but bad for politics.....

[Nictoshek]

If he can speak po polsku.....anyone can: