People often ask which language is easiest or hardest to learn. To me this depends on the learner, the languages he or she knows, similarity of vocabulary and script, availability of compelling learning content, but most of all it depends on our motivation. --- FREE Language Learning Resources 10 Secrets of Language Learning ⇢ www.thelinguist.com LingQ Grammar Guides ⇢ www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/ My blog ⇢ blog.thelinguist.com/ The LingQ blog ⇢ www.lingq.com/blog/ My Podcast ⇢ soundcloud.com/lingostevepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learn-languages-with-steve-kaufmann/id1437851870 --- Social Media Instagram ⇢ instagram.com/lingosteve_/ TikTok ⇢ www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve Facebook ⇢ facebook.com/lingosteve Twitter ⇢ twitter.com/lingosteve LingQ Discord ⇢ discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN
Thank a lot for that video, and as a person who speaks almost 5 languages (still learning French) I agree 100%. I admire you, it would be great to know you personally Steve, maybe one day there will be an opportunity. Have a good one!
@@hey_richard_this_is_tony Cantonese has a decent amount of materials available - there's Teach Yourself Complete Cantonese, the Routledge series of grammar workbooks, Assimil Le cantonais sans peine (if you speak French), plus Glossika, Lingq and Olly Richards' Cantonese Conversations. In contrast, I'm currently trying to learn Nepali and can only find one decent book...
@@hey_richard_this_is_tony Languages in the middle of nowhere are definitely not going to have very many resources. Even languages that are the only official language of a country don’t have more than a couple alright resources.
in my experience, it depends on: 1. how different it is from the ones you already speak. 2. how interested you are in the language/culture 3. how much interesting content is actually available
I think if you take a second language to C2, that's probably true. If you're just talking about fluent enough to function in society, I think 4 languages is the magic number after which new language acquisition becomes natural.
I grew up with two languages: Irish and English. While they have similarities due to being Indo-European languauge, and some overlap due to Sprachbund effects, they're still _very_ different. OTOH, aspects of Irish make it easier for me to understand, say, Polish, than would be for the typical English speaker, because of similar phonological processes and overlaps in grammar, in spite of the Celtic languages being more closely related to the Germanic languages than the Slavic ones. And Japanese isn't too difficult because I'm mostly primed for some of the things it does owing to growing up with VSO and SVO languages, and linguistic patterns that make the Japanese subject vs topic contrast kind of make sense. Essentially, the hardest language is the one most different from those you know. And yet, the more diverse the languages you know are, the easier it is for you to understand other languages that are different from the languages you already know. Think of linguistic parameters like muscles: if you can stretch between extremes, everything in the middle is easier. I mean, the biggest problems I have are down to laziness and phonology, which is one of the reasons why I've difficulty, mainly down to nerves, speaking French, but I shouldn't. I should really suck it up and use Italki!
What you say about motivation is absolutely true for me. Growing up I had to choose a language to study in school (in addition to my native English). I wanted to study Chinese, but the administrators were not keen on this for whatever reason. They told me Chinese is too hard and was normally only studied by immigrant students. I ended up in Spanish classes instead, which killed all motivation to learn either language. It was just another school course. I continued it for 5 or 6 years and in spite of doing reasonably well in the classes I retained nothing because I spent the whole time wishing I was studying something else. Over 10 years later I've learned several other languages to different levels, but I never found any as difficult as Spanish (which on paper "should" be easy for English speakers), because they were all languages I wanted to learn. Knowing what I do now, I wish I tried harder to get into Chinese classes back then. I don't know if the classes would have been any better, but at least I would have had motivation to continue. Not only do I not know Chinese now (which I would still like to learn), but I also don't know Spanish (I'd also like to learn it seriously at some point).
Biggest problem with school...students think they have a choice but the choices are already made... You're just choosing the best of someone else's choices. I did French and at first I loved it because I found it easy but I never actually thought about actually learning so I can speak French.. I was just good at memorising vocab back then. You get older you get wiser and suddenly you do what's right for you and makes you happy. Interestingly I only 1 subject in 5 years... French! Go figure!
@@ParagonPKC that's the beauty of it though.. We shouldn't have to learn a language just because we're surrounded by those speakers. If you're drawn to a language then you'll find it much easier and won't even care how much time you put into it.
I'm a 50 year-old Indonesian. I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities. I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German. It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1. But it seems that my German deteriorates. I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English. Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019. The problem is maintaining the ability. Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language. And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained. I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level. My German deteriorates. Language is a matter of habits and habitation....
My experience is that even once you obtain fluency the habits of your old language stay with you. My ex-wife is from Vietnam. She would still have problems with plurals (since there are no plurals in Vietnamese) even after 30 years of English language speaking. Being a good husband I only corrected her when she wanted me to edit formal written materials.
Good point. Our brains are constructed to be as flexible and adaptive as possible, to learn what it needs and forget what it doesn’t need. Making it learn multiple languages really confuses this design and makes it have to take a middle-of-the-line approach when it is struggles to remember specific grammatical rules for instance. It may default to what it does know. Not just “may” but will or must.
Another great video Steve. When it comes to language learning, I think of the following quote from the movie The Shawshank Redemption: "Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure and time".
I think this really changes from what your native language is. For example, Chinese is HARD for everyone, but from a Japanese perspective, at least the writing system is easy (we share the same hanzi/kanji).
I'm Chinese. For me, Japanese is an easy and funny language to learn. I saved a lot of time on the vocabulary part because I already know plenty of them.
Coming from Japanese, it’s the pronunciation you really have to put in the work for. The grammar is really intuitive and you have a giant leap start for writing.
You are so right about writing systems. A Latin/Greek alphabet reader can literally learn the Cyrillic alphabet in half an hour -- it's roughly 60% Latin, 20% Greek, and then a dozen or so new characters. I learned some Russian 50 years ago, but the reading is still slow going.
My native languages are all written in the Latin alphabet. Russian is my fifth language; I find Polish harder to read than Russian because of the digraphs. "sz" in particular, I have to remember whether I'm reading Polish or Hungarian.
Agree with you Steve motivation is key factor. Sometimes it’s not easy to stay in focus on motivation. It’s important to boost up language hunger every day.
I think even as an individual, it would be hard to pick a single “most difficult.” I think most languages kind of balance themselves out. For example, there is a list from the US government that people quote with Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic at the most difficult level. I haven’t studied Arabic, but the rest have super easy bits that counteract their difficult bits. Like, Korean has eight zillion verb forms, BUT also the most scientific writing system, which some people learn in a few hours. Chinese pronunciation and writing might be a struggle, but the grammar is super simple. Japanese has the writing system and some grammar issues, but the pronunciation is phonetic and most sounds overlap with English.
Grammar, reading, and writing are easy for me. Speaking is challenging, but doable. Hearing languages is incredibly difficult. It took about 2 year to understand suburban Tennessean when I moved there from CA, but I never grasped rural or urban Tennessean, let alone any Alabaman, Arkansan, Kentuckian, or Carolinian. Your (Canadian?) language in this video is difficult, but I can make it out thanks to pause and rewind. It took about 20 years of visiting the Philippines before I could kind of figure out where one word of Filipino ends and another begins. Indonesian sounds the same, but without the Hispanic and English words mixed in. I was immersed in Mexican for about 5 years before I could almost hear the words, but I can't hear Spaniard no matter what I do. German is similarly difficult for me. I read and write Spanish and German pretty well from years in school. Australian is difficult, but not nearly as bad as South African English. The UK is filled with languages I can't understand. I can't understand Indian English at all, but nearly every Indian I've interviewed for a job has used a lot of giant English words in their resumes to describe their perfect English skills. I still struggle to hear Bostonian. I hear Russian better than most languages too. I can't recognize ASL at all, but I can sign thousands of words just because my toddlers taught me. For some reason they could understand more languages than me before 3 years old. I might not be a good representative sample for this discussion. I would say Swahili is probably the easiest language to hear and pronounce that I've come across. North Carolinian is probably the most difficult to hear and pronounce that I've come across, although I've heard a similar dialect somewhere in the UK I can't remember right now...
It's true that there are languages that are objectively more difficult than others. The grammar of Slavic languages is way more complex than the Chinese grammar. Latin languages have more than ten tenses while Hebrew has just three. The pronunciation in Spanish or Greek is clearly easier than in Chinese or Polish. But at the end of the day I think that the biggest factor to judge the difficulty of a language is the degree of similarity with your mother tongue or with a language that you already speak to a descent level. For example, Polish is a very hard language for a Spanish speaker like me, nonetheless I already speak Russian. So I'm already familiar with the Slavic pronunciation, the two verbs system (robic-zrobic), the declinations, and so on. If Polish was my first Slavic language, as a Spanish speaker, It would be very hard to get to a descent level in that language. But my Russian knowledge gave a great push forward to my Polish learning journey.
Hello from France ! Thank you for this very interesting video. I'm passionate about learning languages because it makes you communicate with people you would never knew in other circumstances.
Steve is totally right about motivation and the need to find interesting material in the language. I tried learning Chinese but failed badly. I couldn't find things of interest in the language and struggled to get the basics of pronunciation and tone right. Eventually I lost both confidence and interest, and gave up.
Loved this video so much! Tried learning German for quite a while. Wasted some money and i don’t remember anything now. On the other hand with 1/100 amount of money and in 1/10th of time i have learned thrice the amount of Korean. 😅
9:01 I was sure you were about to mention Hungarian & Finnish (Uralic language family) or Polish for their notorious case systems (18 cases) which seems to me much harder than German and Russian
Even tho finnish language has more cases they are easier in russian in which more complex, and overall russian language has a lot of rules which in my opinion both finnish and russian are equally difficult. I know both of them
@@NanosoftRussia wow cool man ! It's my dream to speak fluent Finnish and Russian in the next 10years. Where are you from ? How did you learn those 2 languages ?
@@NanosoftRussia wow that's cool ! What are the other 5 ? English obviously, I know Swedish is the 2nd language in Finland...how old are you ? I'm 21. I'm from Montreal, Canada, so my first language is French, then English, Spanish , Portuguese B2, German B2, talian A2 and some Russian A2, so yeah I speak 4 languages very well, 2 intermediate, and 1 beginner.
As a Korean, i can say for certain that Korean is amongst the top 10 most difficult language to learn. There are so many verbal conjugations depending on the social status or the formality and also the adjectives are so detail that it has dozens of words for red or reddish. I sometimes find it annoying because i just wanna say the same to everyone regardless of their age or social status.
I expected Korean to be super easy, since I speak Japanese. Hahaha. Nopes. More verb forms and I think Japan has a lot of politeness levels that are often ignored.
They say Polish is very hard to learn. I'm Polish. 😁 Anyway, for me it would be really hard to learn WRITING Persian, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin etc. - because I have never had nothing to do with them. I believe the best idea is to start learning another foreign language at age 10- when you know your mother language quite well and you won't mess things easily. And your brain is like a sponge 😅
It's not not true with that 'brain like a sponge' phrase unless you had eidetic memory as a child and you lost it while maturing. The only advantages of child's brains is a possibility to learn a native accent a'ka perfect pitch. Maybe correct to some extent with tonal languages. Second one is curiosity but the other side of the coin is relatively, in many cases acute, difficulty of maintaining the focus for prolonged time, and seeing target behind the horizon. You probably know the experiment with the marshmallows.
The hardest language to learn depends on what is the mother language. For English-speaking people, the easiest language to learn is Dutch / Holland, but for Russians, Ukrainan and Polish are as easy as Dutch because of close relationship in vocabularies. In general linguists agree that Arabic, Mandarin, and Russians are among the hardest languages in the world to learn. And I have learned all those 3 languages besides German and French that I had learned long time ago....
You missed out Japanese. We can all agree that those languages are harder to learn. So saying it depends on what your own language is or what you already know only partly true. Anyone can learn any language. Some just require more work, effort and study time.
@@batdude811 I read it in a Link. I don't know why they don't include Japanese. That's true, Japanese and Mandarin are difficult languages. Mandarin is difficult to start with, but the more you learn Mandarin, the easier it becomes. On the contrary, Japanese is easier to start, compared to Mandarin. However, the higher level you learn, the more you get confusion with polite and plain forms.... Maybe because they have Hiragana. My cousin who speaks Japanese and got N4 level often updates status writing Hiragana, and not Kanji.
@@Big-guy1981 No language is that hard but you have to go through the process of overcoming the challenges you might face. However to make a blanket statement like "Russian is not that hard", not everyone would agree.
@@Big-guy1981 Russian isn't that hard. It depends on your language background. For Indonesians or Turks, Arabic isn't that hard because we have lots of borrowed vocabularies from Arabic. Russian and Japanese are harder than Arabic. For English-speaking people, Dutch / Holland is much easier that Thailandese, but for Indonesians who don't speak English at all, Thailandese is a piece of cake compared to Dutch. My daughter learned Thailandese, and she told me that Thailandese grammar is very-Indonesian, with an execption that Thailandese is also a tone-language like Mandarin... American linguists make a general comments on difficult languages to learn. They say 3 most difficult languages in general are Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin. I don't know why they didn't mention Japanese. Maybe because Japanese has common words, like Aeroportu, Toiru, Resutoran, Terebi, etc. which are easily recognized as airport, toilet, restaurant, TV, which in Chinese, they make different words : jichang, cesuo, fanguan, dianshi, It's more difficult to memorize Chinese translations than Japanese's. or maybe they encourage Americans to learn Japanese due to political reason. Japan is a friend of USA nowadays, cimpared ro China, Eussia, and middle-east countries. CMIIW.....
A language which doesnt have much or any books about it. And also a language that isn't spoken anymore too! those are important factors to consider when talking about it too. :/
I am learning Ossetian and this is a relatively simple IE language, not hard compared to its Caucasian neighbors, but it has so few resources available in English and even in Russian. So these small languages with few resources (no dictionary, no teachers, no online/google auto translate) are in my opinion the most difficult.
I find that most music makes language learning harder unless you are studying the music itself. I still listen to music outside of active studying. But separating listening to music from active studying is helping me learn more.
I think its because the way you're learning from music, this is my ways in learning from it: 1\ find a song that you like and git used to it 2\ search for a lyrics video for the song 3\ try singing and humming to the song 4\ sing out loud with accurate pronunciation as possible 5\ try to learn the meaning of the song and write the new words within a sentence to understand them better maybe that was your technique and it didn't work with you or maybe it's different from your learning style that you're comfortable with i don't know but it's really make a huge different in your speaking and fluency later on **sorry for any mistake I'm still learning the language **
I wonder if Steve can still learn Arabic and Persian at his age right now. When you learn something at youth, the skill will linger on.. But when you learn something when the golden age has gone, it is difficult to absorb. I'm 25 years younger than Steve, I should call hin uncle Steve, because he's 2 years younger than my mother.... I'm learning Chinese now, and I myself have difficulties to memorize Chinese vocabularies. Not to mention the scratches... I got Hsk-3 in October 2019, and I think, my skill is stuck in Hsk-4 level, which equals to A2 or B1 of European languages. I learned German 30 years ago, and I can still speak German much better than Chinese, although I don't use it anymore. I had a lot of opportunities to practice speaking German when I was young.. I also learned Russian, and when I get bored to memorize Chinese vocabs, I turn to Russian, to refresh my kbowledge of Russian. Memorizing Russian grammar with all its complexities is as difficult as menorizing Chinese vocabularies with all its scratches.... Nevertheless, what Steve is doing right now learning Arabic and Persian motivates me to keep learning Chinese at my age.
We have a false view of age related decline in the West Everyone smokes, drinks and is obese and then say "look we decline with age" Actually Steffan Lindberg's research into tribal cultures found no indication of these things amongst people who eat wholefood diets and sleep well, exercise moderately and get fresh air So just be healthy and go for it. Twenty years from 40 can be as productive as 20 years from 20
Hey Steve, big fan here. I'm currently learning turkish but struggle with the pronounciation of the letter "R". Nonetheless, I won't stop learning. Has that ever been the case for you? Learning a language and kind of "hoping" you'd get the pronounciation right with time? Thanks in advance.
I'm feeling the same way about the rolled 'R' of the Stockholm dialect of Swedish. I'm better than when I started, and other dialects don't require it, but of course the hardest dialect is the one closest to my heart. I'm pretty sure if we just give it time and practice, it will come.
Do you recommend books for learning language or just an interesting read in general. I would love to get into books other than my usual romance novels lol. Those books I feel are more for entertainment rather than learning anything new.
Yup. Danish and Swedish are too similar to Norwegian for me to even consider them different languages. more like different dialects. English and German Though are different enough to immerse in without interference.
As a native Norwegian it would feel silly to start learning Swedish or Danish. For me it would be a waste of time because we can communicate together pretty well just because of the similarities. However, if I was to move to one of those countries I would most likely attempt to learn them, and I would be immersed so I would learn either way. But all in all it would be difficult to learn because I would just use my Norwegian to speak.
Bonsoir Steve! J'aimerais profiter de cette occasion pour vous remercier pour vos précieux conseils et votre enthousiasme envers les langues! Je parle français et anglais; je vis dans la région de Montréal. Maintenant, j'apprends (ou plutôt, j'acquiers) l'islandais. Mon but est d'être trilingue! Merci, thank you, takk fyrir! :)
I'm about 5 months in with french, and I'm trying not to get discouraged. I read at least 30 minutes daily and I watch and listen to about an hour of comprehensible input. I listen to french music throughout the day. I can only catch small pieces of spoken conversation still. Will my brain be able to catch up with how fast french is spoken?
I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities. I'm a 50 year-old Indonesian. I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German. It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1. But it seems that my German deteriorates. I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English. Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019. The problem is maintaining the ability. Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language. And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained. I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level. My German deteriorates. Language is a matter of habits and habitation.... What Steve is doing at his age, learning Arabic and Persian motivates me to keep learning Chinese. I spend 10 - 30 minutes a day to memorize Chinese vocabularies. When I feel bored to memorize Chinese vocabularies, I turn to open my Russian grammar book to memorize Russian grammar. Memorizing Russian grammar is as difficult as memorizing Chinese vocabularies....
Don't be discouraged, French is hard even for natives. I advise you find a tutor (italki) or boy/girlfriend to speak as much as you can. It will motivate you and make you active. Stay strong
Hi sir, This is so very helpful and also so interesting. Thank you. And it is like we get to tap into a source of knowledge of all these languages by listening to you. Also at one point you mentioned about how different languages can communicate basically the same thoughts. I have thought about how equivalent words are, say if we can put a number between say 「子供」and “child/children.” So in this simple, more conceptually concrete case we would think that both refer to children. However, the majority of people who use 「子供」are specially thinking of Japanese children when they use it. Therefore the equivalency is defined by the conglomeration of people who use it. The meanings of words cannot ever have a 100% equivalency among different languages. Words are relative to the social architecture that constructs their meanings. I thought of this because I was thinking about how translation apps are designed and how to make an app that can quantify through deep learning equivalency among words and recommend the translation with the highest equivalency. It is all so interesting to think about! I am learning Japanese now.
Hello everyone I would like to ask about learning along with a tutor. What features should the valuable tutor posses? I wonder whether to start learning German with a tutor but I have never studied with kind of a private teacher. What should I require from my potential teacher? What is the most important to make of teacher's help? What could I suggest to my tutor and the most important what activities are not worth to do with a tutor? I mean I don't imagine to focus on some exercises "circling" and so on.
Living in Germany I'm supposed to learn german but it's hard when you don't use it (workplace uses english). German doesn't seem hard, prononciation is for the most part easy, seems quite phonetic like hungarian, but the hard part is, how the hell am I supposed to dedicate like 1 hour per day to it, when I have work up until 5-6, then have to do stuff around the house, grocery shopping, some sports so I don't get fat, and have a hobby that also takes an hour? Day is over... :(
Sir, one thing puzzles me much that why most polyglots (including you) are not interested in learning South Asian languages like Hindi or Bengali? Please make a video about it. It’s my long awaited curiosity.
One language at a time. I'm hoping will get Hindi on LingQ in the near future and then I will learn it or maybe I'll do Urdu first since the writing system is essentially the same as Arabic and Persian.
Here’s my overall ranking of which languages are easier and harder for native English speakers. The higher the level, the more difficult: - Level 1: Spanish, Italian, Scots, Esperanto, Jamaican Patois, Irish - Level 2: French, Swedish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Indonesian - Level 3: Russian, Polish, Japanese, Mongolian, Ukrainian, Turkish - Level 4: Mandarin, Korean, Thai, Hindi - Level 5: Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese
You know what for me it was English and Welsh learned could speak the two of them fluently as a child too. Such a shock that the two of us learned languages as children and saw it so much easier.
I absolutely agree. My native language is German, I’m fluent in English (live in US), and took 5 years of French and Latin in high school and later a semester of Spanish. English is the easiest by far, Latin the most difficult, and I’m so glad I grew up learning German…. I’m now learning Mandarin. Yes, the characters are a challenge, but it gets easier, and I now really enjoy writing them. When I first started, I was completely stunned when I found out that there are no conjugations, declinations, plural, gender,…. I absolutely love it!
I think Georgian would be up there with the hardest... a different alphabet, its difference to Western European languages, its diabolical consonant clusters and some very strange grammar...
@@azhivago2296 I guess that would depend on what language you're coming from and on your motivation,. But if you're a slavic/germanic/romance language native speaker, you may very well perceive Georgian as being harder than Korean. Its grammar is pretty unfamiliar and involved, its pronunciation is challenging to say the least, it's a whole new alphabet and there are way less resources for learning it. But, hey, maybe that's not the case for you. Why not give it a shot?
Hello Steve. I wanted to apply for Ukrainian Citizenship and i started to learn Ukrainian language for citizenship exam. I had just 3 weeks till exam . I have just studied 2-2.5 weeks.I had that exam at 11th March and i have learnt that i have passed this exam. I will apply with my documents
I wonder if Steve can still have the same ability to immerse Persian or Arabic, the languages that he learns now. When you learn something in youth, the skill lingers on....
@@ayi3455Maybe his experience learning all those languages he speak now give him the ability to immerse in a new language, experience that he didn’t have when he learned his second langauge.
I learn Chinese, now. It seems that my ability is stuck to B1 level I can't improve my skill up to B2. I don't know, is it because of my age, or because I don't have a chance to take a summer course, like I had when I learned German long time ago. When I arrived in Munich, I spoke German a little, like I speak Chinese now. When I left Munich, my German got better significantly. I could have convrrsation relaxedly that day. Now I don't have such opportunity for my Chinese....
He made a video on this topic, the take away : Yes but it's hard and he spends 80%on the time on language A and 20% on language But. Because he needs to dive into the language
I feel like the beginning levels of Korean are pretty straight forward and simple to learn. Then you get to the intermediate levels and it hits you like a truck. So many sentence endings that have very similar meanings and also many many words that you have to learn because often times there are two+ words that have the same meaning (one that comes from Chinese origin and one from pure Korean)
English is you want to speak the American patois with the idiomatic expression currently in use, it is not an easy language. I’m a chess player and relate English to chess .. you may play chess forever and don’t improve unless you study, you may speak English and not improve unless you study and exercise it.
Muchas gracias. Todos sus vídeos tienen contenido muy importante y es muy motivador. Empece a amar el aprendizaje de idiomas gracias a usted. Muchísimas gracias. Saludos desde Colombia.
For me is Georgian, is the hardest one, a teacher explained to me that you have to speak through your throat, many Gregorians don't even know most of the vocabulary
@@azhivago2296 Because the sound has to come out through the throat, I had slept on my tongue, I almost lost my voice just trying to speak this language
@@azhivago2296 Korean you can learn online, I think Lingodeer can solve your problem, but Georgian, still dificult because of the pronunciation you need a tutor or teacher
I learn Chinese now. I got Hsk-3 in October 2019. In my opinion, Chinese is difficult because : 1. the Hanzi. The characters. 2. the Tone. The grammar is relatively easy, compared to Japanese and Korean. But sometimes, there are things which are not available. The word : Or : You need to use 还是 and 或者. The first 'or' is for asking a question. What do you want to drink...?? 茶 还是咖啡..?? The second 'or' is used when the option is already available. There are many drinks on the table. 你可以喝茶或者咖啡.... Sometimes, construction like this is confusing. Chinese compared to Russian is like basketball compared to football. The one is contradictory to the other. Learning to read and write Cyrillic alphabets is relatively easy. The problem is the grammar. I learned Russian, too.. but I don't download Cyrillic keyboard, like I have downloaded Mandarin keyboard. For me, I can read Russian articles still better than Chinese articles. I have to scrutinize Chinese articles to understand what it is about.... However, now I think I can speak Chinese and listen to Chinese conversations a bit better than Russian... I often listen to Chinese-speaking channels, from mainland-China as well as from Taiwan. I take 10 - 30 minutes a day to memorize Chinese vocabularies. When I feel bored to memorize Chinese vocabularies, I turn to Russian books on grammar. Memorizing Russian grammar with all its complexities is as difficult as menorizing Chinese vocabularies with its scratches. Thankyou....!!
Spoken Finnish Estonian - Hungarian... Different than any other languages, Written and spoken differently, hard to pronounce. Polish- hard to pronounce, genders are often oppressed to German, conjugation is complex and a lot of exceptions, too many idioms in a spoken language that no one substitutes with solid verbs. To me Russian is easier than Polish. The conjugation and spoken language is more logical, less exceptional cases, and if you’re a visual person l, reading is easy with a bit of practice, it becomes the easiest actually.
If I get LingQ premium so that I can upload lessons I want to use, when it expires after a month, would I still have access to al the stuff I uploaded as a paid member?
Hardest language to learn? It has to be Sentinelese. How would you ever learn it? You have to somehow sneak in to their island without getting killed and make them accept you as one of them and then over time you could learn their language but even that is against the law and so is the plan b.. which is to kidnap one of them and teach them English or what ever language you speak and make them teach Sentinelese to you. Or maybe send a drone there with recording equipment and gather enough material to cipher what they are saying. But in any case good luck!
Bienvenue chez les cht'is Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopatre Le tout nouveau testament Le grand restaurant (a lot of movies with Louis de Funès are very funny) Cyrano de Bergerac Le boulet Le magnifique Les visiteurs OSS 117 TV show: Les petits meurtres d'Agatha Christie
Learning to speak many languages means that you have no respect for anyone of these languages. Learning to speak a foreign language means you are in love with the language and the culture of it. It's exactly the same as having many women. It means you don't love one of them with all you heart and mind. Language is an extremely serious issue. You have to know perfectly and in depth you mother tongue and quite in depth one or two more (if you want and it is necessary).
@@sharonoddlyenough That is true. I teach English as a foreign language. I know the mistakes for both native and foreign learners. The mistakes they make is embarrassing to say the least.
@@batdude811 Wow never thought about what it’s like for those studying english as a second language can you give some common examples of the mistakes :)
People often ask which language is easiest or hardest to learn. To me this depends on the learner, the languages he or she knows, similarity of vocabulary and script, availability of compelling learning content, but most of all it depends on our motivation.
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Thank you so much for not dumbing down your explanations. I've really learned a lot from your videos.
Your relationship to the language is exactly right! 😎
Thank a lot for that video, and as a person who speaks almost 5 languages (still learning French) I agree 100%. I admire you, it would be great to know you personally Steve, maybe one day there will be an opportunity. Have a good one!
The hardest language to learn is the one you can't find material for.
This is actually so true.. You're only as good as your tools eh? And if you have none then...
So ... Cantonese.
@@hey_richard_this_is_tony Cantonese has a decent amount of materials available - there's Teach Yourself Complete Cantonese, the Routledge series of grammar workbooks, Assimil Le cantonais sans peine (if you speak French), plus Glossika, Lingq and Olly Richards' Cantonese Conversations. In contrast, I'm currently trying to learn Nepali and can only find one decent book...
@@hey_richard_this_is_tony Languages in the middle of nowhere are definitely not going to have very many resources. Even languages that are the only official language of a country don’t have more than a couple alright resources.
Oh yea like a lot of the languages of India and Africa and and endangered languages.
in my experience, it depends on:
1. how different it is from the ones you already speak.
2. how interested you are in the language/culture
3. how much interesting content is actually available
I love the language learning community. Everyone is looking to help one another always.
Mike Campbell of Glossika says the hardest foreign language to learn is your first one. He may well be right.
I've never thought about it, makes total sense.
hyperpolyglot Emanuele Marini said that the first nine languages are the hardest.
I think if you take a second language to C2, that's probably true. If you're just talking about fluent enough to function in society, I think 4 languages is the magic number after which new language acquisition becomes natural.
@@Doing_Time ironically, I could testify to the number, but it probably varies from person to person. I have two native languages though..
The hardest language to learn is the one you are least excited about :)
Dude....🤯 That's so true
I grew up with two languages: Irish and English. While they have similarities due to being Indo-European languauge, and some overlap due to Sprachbund effects, they're still _very_ different. OTOH, aspects of Irish make it easier for me to understand, say, Polish, than would be for the typical English speaker, because of similar phonological processes and overlaps in grammar, in spite of the Celtic languages being more closely related to the Germanic languages than the Slavic ones. And Japanese isn't too difficult because I'm mostly primed for some of the things it does owing to growing up with VSO and SVO languages, and linguistic patterns that make the Japanese subject vs topic contrast kind of make sense.
Essentially, the hardest language is the one most different from those you know. And yet, the more diverse the languages you know are, the easier it is for you to understand other languages that are different from the languages you already know. Think of linguistic parameters like muscles: if you can stretch between extremes, everything in the middle is easier.
I mean, the biggest problems I have are down to laziness and phonology, which is one of the reasons why I've difficulty, mainly down to nerves, speaking French, but I shouldn't. I should really suck it up and use Italki!
What you say about motivation is absolutely true for me. Growing up I had to choose a language to study in school (in addition to my native English). I wanted to study Chinese, but the administrators were not keen on this for whatever reason. They told me Chinese is too hard and was normally only studied by immigrant students. I ended up in Spanish classes instead, which killed all motivation to learn either language. It was just another school course. I continued it for 5 or 6 years and in spite of doing reasonably well in the classes I retained nothing because I spent the whole time wishing I was studying something else.
Over 10 years later I've learned several other languages to different levels, but I never found any as difficult as Spanish (which on paper "should" be easy for English speakers), because they were all languages I wanted to learn. Knowing what I do now, I wish I tried harder to get into Chinese classes back then. I don't know if the classes would have been any better, but at least I would have had motivation to continue. Not only do I not know Chinese now (which I would still like to learn), but I also don't know Spanish (I'd also like to learn it seriously at some point).
Going back I really wish I picked Mandarin over spanish, I live in socal I would've been fine on the spanish lmao
Biggest problem with school...students think they have a choice but the choices are already made... You're just choosing the best of someone else's choices. I did French and at first I loved it because I found it easy but I never actually thought about actually learning so I can speak French.. I was just good at memorising vocab back then.
You get older you get wiser and suddenly you do what's right for you and makes you happy.
Interestingly I only 1 subject in 5 years... French! Go figure!
@@ParagonPKC that's the beauty of it though.. We shouldn't have to learn a language just because we're surrounded by those speakers. If you're drawn to a language then you'll find it much easier and won't even care how much time you put into it.
I'm a 50 year-old Indonesian.
I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities.
I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German.
It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1.
But it seems that my German deteriorates.
I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English.
Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019.
The problem is maintaining the ability.
Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language.
And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained.
I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level.
My German deteriorates.
Language is a matter of habits and habitation....
@@ayi3455 The brain is a creature of habit and optimally learns what it uses more and forgets what it doesn’t. It’s quite amazing.
My experience is that even once you obtain fluency the habits of your old language stay with you. My ex-wife is from Vietnam. She would still have problems with plurals (since there are no plurals in Vietnamese) even after 30 years of English language speaking. Being a good husband I only corrected her when she wanted me to edit formal written materials.
👏👏👏
Good point. Our brains are constructed to be as flexible and adaptive as possible, to learn what it needs and forget what it doesn’t need. Making it learn multiple languages really confuses this design and makes it have to take a middle-of-the-line approach when it is struggles to remember specific grammatical rules for instance. It may default to what it does know. Not just “may” but will or must.
Another great video Steve. When it comes to language learning, I think of the following quote from the movie The Shawshank Redemption: "Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure and time".
the one you love least
this is the cold, hard truth
You beat me to it
As an English dude I choose: English
Dziękuję za wszystko, Steve!
I love your work.
It's wonderful to have you on YT.
I am thankful for your content Steve.
I think this really changes from what your native language is. For example, Chinese is HARD for everyone, but from a Japanese perspective, at least the writing system is easy (we share the same hanzi/kanji).
I'm Chinese. For me, Japanese is an easy and funny language to learn. I saved a lot of time on the vocabulary part because I already know plenty of them.
I also Chinese, I am learning Japanese now but I think the writing system has a little bit different. But other aspects is easy
I wouldn't call Chinese hard, just tedious.
Coming from Japanese, it’s the pronunciation you really have to put in the work for. The grammar is really intuitive and you have a giant leap start for writing.
@@alexanderoahz1995 you must be at beginner's level. To become fluent in Japanese is not easy at all
You are so right about writing systems. A Latin/Greek alphabet reader can literally learn the Cyrillic alphabet in half an hour -- it's roughly 60% Latin, 20% Greek, and then a dozen or so new characters. I learned some Russian 50 years ago, but the reading is still slow going.
My native languages are all written in the Latin alphabet. Russian is my fifth language; I find Polish harder to read than Russian because of the digraphs. "sz" in particular, I have to remember whether I'm reading Polish or Hungarian.
Agree with you Steve motivation is key factor. Sometimes it’s not easy to stay in focus on motivation. It’s important to boost up language hunger every day.
I think even as an individual, it would be hard to pick a single “most difficult.” I think most languages kind of balance themselves out. For example, there is a list from the US government that people quote with Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic at the most difficult level. I haven’t studied Arabic, but the rest have super easy bits that counteract their difficult bits. Like, Korean has eight zillion verb forms, BUT also the most scientific writing system, which some people learn in a few hours. Chinese pronunciation and writing might be a struggle, but the grammar is super simple. Japanese has the writing system and some grammar issues, but the pronunciation is phonetic and most sounds overlap with English.
Grammar, reading, and writing are easy for me. Speaking is challenging, but doable. Hearing languages is incredibly difficult. It took about 2 year to understand suburban Tennessean when I moved there from CA, but I never grasped rural or urban Tennessean, let alone any Alabaman, Arkansan, Kentuckian, or Carolinian. Your (Canadian?) language in this video is difficult, but I can make it out thanks to pause and rewind. It took about 20 years of visiting the Philippines before I could kind of figure out where one word of Filipino ends and another begins. Indonesian sounds the same, but without the Hispanic and English words mixed in. I was immersed in Mexican for about 5 years before I could almost hear the words, but I can't hear Spaniard no matter what I do. German is similarly difficult for me. I read and write Spanish and German pretty well from years in school. Australian is difficult, but not nearly as bad as South African English. The UK is filled with languages I can't understand. I can't understand Indian English at all, but nearly every Indian I've interviewed for a job has used a lot of giant English words in their resumes to describe their perfect English skills. I still struggle to hear Bostonian. I hear Russian better than most languages too. I can't recognize ASL at all, but I can sign thousands of words just because my toddlers taught me. For some reason they could understand more languages than me before 3 years old. I might not be a good representative sample for this discussion.
I would say Swahili is probably the easiest language to hear and pronounce that I've come across.
North Carolinian is probably the most difficult to hear and pronounce that I've come across, although I've heard a similar dialect somewhere in the UK I can't remember right now...
It's true that there are languages that are objectively more difficult than others. The grammar of Slavic languages is way more complex than the Chinese grammar. Latin languages have more than ten tenses while Hebrew has just three. The pronunciation in Spanish or Greek is clearly easier than in Chinese or Polish.
But at the end of the day I think that the biggest factor to judge the difficulty of a language is the degree of similarity with your mother tongue or with a language that you already speak to a descent level.
For example, Polish is a very hard language for a Spanish speaker like me, nonetheless I already speak Russian. So I'm already familiar with the Slavic pronunciation, the two verbs system (robic-zrobic), the declinations, and so on. If Polish was my first Slavic language, as a Spanish speaker, It would be very hard to get to a descent level in that language. But my Russian knowledge gave a great push forward to my Polish learning journey.
Great video as always Steve !
Hello from France ! Thank you for this very interesting video. I'm passionate about learning languages because it makes you communicate with people you would never knew in other circumstances.
Thanks dear Steve. Cari saluti from Italy 🇮🇹. Gracias por compartir tus interesantes vídeos con nosotros. I admire you!
Steve is totally right about motivation and the need to find interesting material in the language. I tried learning Chinese but failed badly. I couldn't find things of interest in the language and struggled to get the basics of pronunciation and tone right. Eventually I lost both confidence and interest, and gave up.
Steve, You are a fantastic person to listen to! So inspiring! Thank You for sharing with us Your way of life!
Being far removed from your language plus inflections plus different script is a safe metric for how hard a language in (plus motivation of course)
Loved this video so much! Tried learning German for quite a while. Wasted some money and i don’t remember anything now. On the other hand with 1/100 amount of money and in 1/10th of time i have learned thrice the amount of Korean. 😅
Such a great youtube channel.
Bless from Brazil.
really hope it's my thrift store that just got 3 full boxes of language learning books lol
Too bad I live on the opposite side of Canada lmao
9:01 I was sure you were about to mention Hungarian & Finnish (Uralic language family) or Polish for their notorious case systems (18 cases) which seems to me much harder than German and Russian
18😳 and i thought the 6 in russian is alot
Even tho finnish language has more cases they are easier in russian in which more complex, and overall russian language has a lot of rules which in my opinion both finnish and russian are equally difficult. I know both of them
@@NanosoftRussia wow cool man ! It's my dream to speak fluent Finnish and Russian in the next 10years. Where are you from ? How did you learn those 2 languages ?
@@mathiascorriveau I was born in russia and I moved to finland. I consider knowing almost 7 languages
@@NanosoftRussia wow that's cool ! What are the other 5 ? English obviously, I know Swedish is the 2nd language in Finland...how old are you ? I'm 21. I'm from Montreal, Canada, so my first language is French, then English, Spanish , Portuguese B2, German B2, talian A2 and some Russian A2, so yeah I speak 4 languages very well, 2 intermediate, and 1 beginner.
Thank for the great explanation 🌞 keeping motivation is hard, interest in the language helps so much!
As a Korean, i can say for certain that Korean is amongst the top 10 most difficult language to learn.
There are so many verbal conjugations depending on the social status or the formality and also the adjectives are so detail that it has dozens of words for red or reddish. I sometimes find it annoying because i just wanna say the same to everyone regardless of their age or social status.
You are not really in a position to say how difficult your own language is.
I expected Korean to be super easy, since I speak Japanese. Hahaha. Nopes. More verb forms and I think Japan has a lot of politeness levels that are often ignored.
@@Thelinguist
Why am i not in the position to say how difficult my mother tougue is?
I think i'm eligible to say so.
@@clairegittens3707
The overall concept between Korean and Japanese are the same except that Korean conjugations are far more difficult.
I know there are many endings in korean verb in different use but at least korean verbs are very regularly conjugated and follow a strict pattern.
They say Polish is very hard to learn. I'm Polish. 😁
Anyway, for me it would be really hard to learn WRITING Persian, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin etc. - because I have never had nothing to do with them.
I believe the best idea is to start learning another foreign language at age 10- when you know your mother language quite well and you won't mess things easily. And your brain is like a sponge 😅
It's not not true with that 'brain like a sponge' phrase unless you had eidetic memory as a child and you lost it while maturing. The only advantages of child's brains is a possibility to learn a native accent a'ka perfect pitch. Maybe correct to some extent with tonal languages. Second one is curiosity but the other side of the coin is relatively, in many cases acute, difficulty of maintaining the focus for prolonged time, and seeing target behind the horizon. You probably know the experiment with the marshmallows.
The hardest language to learn depends on what is the mother language.
For English-speaking people, the easiest language to learn is Dutch / Holland, but for Russians, Ukrainan and Polish are as easy as Dutch because of close relationship in vocabularies.
In general linguists agree that Arabic, Mandarin, and Russians are among the hardest languages in the world to learn.
And I have learned all those 3 languages besides German and French that I had learned long time ago....
You missed out Japanese.
We can all agree that those languages are harder to learn. So saying it depends on what your own language is or what you already know only partly true.
Anyone can learn any language. Some just require more work, effort and study time.
@@batdude811
I read it in a Link.
I don't know why they don't include Japanese.
That's true, Japanese and Mandarin are difficult languages.
Mandarin is difficult to start with, but the more you learn Mandarin, the easier it becomes.
On the contrary, Japanese is easier to start, compared to Mandarin.
However, the higher level you learn, the more you get confusion with polite and plain forms....
Maybe because they have Hiragana.
My cousin who speaks Japanese and got N4 level often updates status writing Hiragana, and not Kanji.
Russian isn't that hard.
@@Big-guy1981 No language is that hard but you have to go through the process of overcoming the challenges you might face.
However to make a blanket statement like "Russian is not that hard", not everyone would agree.
@@Big-guy1981
Russian isn't that hard.
It depends on your language background.
For Indonesians or Turks, Arabic isn't that hard because we have lots of borrowed vocabularies from Arabic.
Russian and Japanese are harder than Arabic.
For English-speaking people, Dutch / Holland is much easier that Thailandese, but for Indonesians who don't speak English at all, Thailandese is a piece of cake compared to Dutch.
My daughter learned Thailandese, and she told me that Thailandese grammar is very-Indonesian, with an execption that Thailandese is also a tone-language like Mandarin...
American linguists make a general comments on difficult languages to learn.
They say 3 most difficult languages in general are Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin.
I don't know why they didn't mention Japanese.
Maybe because Japanese has common words, like Aeroportu, Toiru, Resutoran, Terebi, etc. which are easily recognized as airport, toilet, restaurant, TV, which in Chinese, they make different words : jichang, cesuo, fanguan, dianshi,
It's more difficult to memorize Chinese translations than Japanese's.
or maybe they encourage Americans to learn Japanese due to political reason.
Japan is a friend of USA nowadays, cimpared ro China, Eussia, and middle-east countries.
CMIIW.....
A language which doesnt have much or any books about it. And also a language that isn't spoken anymore too! those are important factors to consider when talking about it too. :/
Yeah but what make the difficulty in your exemple is not the language in itself but the lack of knowledge on the language .
I am learning Ossetian and this is a relatively simple IE language, not hard compared to its Caucasian neighbors, but it has so few resources available in English and even in Russian. So these small languages with few resources (no dictionary, no teachers, no online/google auto translate) are in my opinion the most difficult.
I find that most music makes language learning harder unless you are studying the music itself. I still listen to music outside of active studying. But separating listening to music from active studying is helping me learn more.
I think its because the way you're learning from music, this is my ways in learning from it:
1\ find a song that you like and git used to it
2\ search for a lyrics video for the song
3\ try singing and humming to the song
4\ sing out loud with accurate pronunciation as possible
5\ try to learn the meaning of the song and write the new words within a sentence to understand them better
maybe that was your technique and it didn't work with you or maybe it's different from your learning style that you're comfortable with i don't know but it's really make a huge different in your speaking and fluency later on
**sorry for any mistake I'm still learning the language **
Most succinct, thank you.
I wonder if Steve can still learn Arabic and Persian at his age right now.
When you learn something at youth, the skill will linger on..
But when you learn something when the golden age has gone, it is difficult to absorb.
I'm 25 years younger than Steve, I should call hin uncle Steve, because he's 2 years younger than my mother....
I'm learning Chinese now, and I myself have difficulties to memorize Chinese vocabularies.
Not to mention the scratches...
I got Hsk-3 in October 2019, and I think, my skill is stuck in Hsk-4 level, which equals to A2 or B1 of European languages.
I learned German 30 years ago, and I can still speak German much better than Chinese, although I don't use it anymore.
I had a lot of opportunities to practice speaking German when I was young..
I also learned Russian, and when I get bored to memorize Chinese vocabs, I turn to Russian, to refresh my kbowledge of Russian.
Memorizing Russian grammar with all its complexities is as difficult as menorizing Chinese vocabularies with all its scratches....
Nevertheless, what Steve is doing right now learning Arabic and Persian motivates me to keep learning Chinese at my age.
We have a false view of age related decline in the West
Everyone smokes, drinks and is obese and then say "look we decline with age"
Actually Steffan Lindberg's research into tribal cultures found no indication of these things amongst people who eat wholefood diets and sleep well, exercise moderately and get fresh air
So just be healthy and go for it. Twenty years from 40 can be as productive as 20 years from 20
Hey Steve, big fan here. I'm currently learning turkish but struggle with the pronounciation of the letter "R". Nonetheless, I won't stop learning. Has that ever been the case for you? Learning a language and kind of "hoping" you'd get the pronounciation right with time?
Thanks in advance.
I'm feeling the same way about the rolled 'R' of the Stockholm dialect of Swedish. I'm better than when I started, and other dialects don't require it, but of course the hardest dialect is the one closest to my heart. I'm pretty sure if we just give it time and practice, it will come.
You can fix pronounciation at any given time, so I'd assume it's just best to keep giving it your all and learning every day.
@@god2112 💛
top 5 hardest languages:
5. Basque
4. Hungarian
3. Russian
2. Arabic
1. German
Russian is not hard at all
German really isn't that hard
Hi Steve
Any news about new Lingq update ?
Do you recommend books for learning language or just an interesting read in general. I would love to get into books other than my usual romance novels lol. Those books I feel are more for entertainment rather than learning anything new.
Yup. Danish and Swedish are too similar to Norwegian for me to even consider them different languages. more like different dialects. English and German Though are different enough to immerse in without interference.
As a native Norwegian it would feel silly to start learning Swedish or Danish. For me it would be a waste of time because we can communicate together pretty well just because of the similarities. However, if I was to move to one of those countries I would most likely attempt to learn them, and I would be immersed so I would learn either way. But all in all it would be difficult to learn because I would just use my Norwegian to speak.
@@eiriks680 ja, det er sant!
@@eiriks680 Intresting
Bonsoir Steve! J'aimerais profiter de cette occasion pour vous remercier pour vos précieux conseils et votre enthousiasme envers les langues! Je parle français et anglais; je vis dans la région de Montréal. Maintenant, j'apprends (ou plutôt, j'acquiers) l'islandais. Mon but est d'être trilingue! Merci, thank you, takk fyrir! :)
I'm about 5 months in with french, and I'm trying not to get discouraged. I read at least 30 minutes daily and I watch and listen to about an hour of comprehensible input. I listen to french music throughout the day. I can only catch small pieces of spoken conversation still. Will my brain be able to catch up with how fast french is spoken?
I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities.
I'm a 50 year-old Indonesian.
I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German.
It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1.
But it seems that my German deteriorates.
I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English.
Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019.
The problem is maintaining the ability.
Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language.
And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained.
I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level.
My German deteriorates.
Language is a matter of habits and habitation....
What Steve is doing at his age, learning Arabic and Persian motivates me to keep learning Chinese.
I spend 10 - 30 minutes a day to memorize Chinese vocabularies.
When I feel bored to memorize Chinese vocabularies, I turn to open my Russian grammar book to memorize Russian grammar.
Memorizing Russian grammar is as difficult as memorizing Chinese vocabularies....
Yes. With time, it will get easier. You've got this
I'll keep with it, since I want the results. I haven't missed one day in the last 5 months. I guess if it was easy, everyone would do it.
Don't be discouraged, French is hard even for natives. I advise you find a tutor (italki) or boy/girlfriend to speak as much as you can. It will motivate you and make you active. Stay strong
Thank you so mutch
Hi sir,
This is so very helpful and also so interesting. Thank you. And it is like we get to tap into a source of knowledge of all these languages by listening to you.
Also at one point you mentioned about how different languages can communicate basically the same thoughts. I have thought about how equivalent words are, say if we can put a number between say 「子供」and “child/children.” So in this simple, more conceptually concrete case we would think that both refer to children. However, the majority of people who use 「子供」are specially thinking of Japanese children when they use it. Therefore the equivalency is defined by the conglomeration of people who use it. The meanings of words cannot ever have a 100% equivalency among different languages. Words are relative to the social architecture that constructs their meanings. I thought of this because I was thinking about how translation apps are designed and how to make an app that can quantify through deep learning equivalency among words and recommend the translation with the highest equivalency.
It is all so interesting to think about! I am learning Japanese now.
Hello everyone I would like to ask about learning along with a tutor. What features should the valuable tutor posses? I wonder whether to start learning German with a tutor but I have never studied with kind of a private teacher. What should I require from my potential teacher? What is the most important to make of teacher's help? What could I suggest to my tutor and the most important what activities are not worth to do with a tutor? I mean I don't imagine to focus on some exercises "circling" and so on.
Steve, do you have advice for learning a new language with your spouse?
Living in Germany I'm supposed to learn german but it's hard when you don't use it (workplace uses english). German doesn't seem hard, prononciation is for the most part easy, seems quite phonetic like hungarian, but the hard part is, how the hell am I supposed to dedicate like 1 hour per day to it, when I have work up until 5-6, then have to do stuff around the house, grocery shopping, some sports so I don't get fat, and have a hobby that also takes an hour? Day is over... :(
Love this topic
Great video!
Sir, one thing puzzles me much that why most polyglots (including you) are not interested in learning South Asian languages like Hindi or Bengali? Please make a video about it. It’s my long awaited curiosity.
One language at a time. I'm hoping will get Hindi on LingQ in the near future and then I will learn it or maybe I'll do Urdu first since the writing system is essentially the same as Arabic and Persian.
Here’s my overall ranking of which languages are easier and harder for native English speakers. The higher the level, the more difficult:
- Level 1: Spanish, Italian, Scots, Esperanto, Jamaican Patois, Irish
- Level 2: French, Swedish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Indonesian
- Level 3: Russian, Polish, Japanese, Mongolian, Ukrainian, Turkish
- Level 4: Mandarin, Korean, Thai, Hindi
- Level 5: Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese
Finnish is the easiest language in the world, I learned it as a small child.
Interesting, I’ll check it out
@@davidjaramillo8513 he’s a native 😭
You know what for me it was English and Welsh learned could speak the two of them fluently as a child too. Such a shock that the two of us learned languages as children and saw it so much easier.
@@iolojones8810 Man Welsh is a wonderful language to learn as a child! I want to speak Welsh as well, although I've never so much as visited Wales.
I believe Norwegian is easier. I don't even remember trying to learn it. It just came to me with no effort.
Steve abi harika bir video olmuş yine Türkiye'den selamlar 🇹🇷
I guess it would be Georgian or Basque. But the Georgian letters meanwhile are extremely beautiful to see.
I find Mandarin Chinese easier to learn than Spanish. Characters are way more fun than verb conjugations!
I absolutely agree. My native language is German, I’m fluent in English (live in US), and took 5 years of French and Latin in high school and later a semester of Spanish. English is the easiest by far, Latin the most difficult, and I’m so glad I grew up learning German….
I’m now learning Mandarin. Yes, the characters are a challenge, but it gets easier, and I now really enjoy writing them. When I first started, I was completely stunned when I found out that there are no conjugations, declinations, plural, gender,…. I absolutely love it!
Where is Klingon?? I just don't see it on the state department chart!
Japanese, by far, is the hardest to learn. And I am highly motivated!
good luck! I'm climbing the Kanji mountain these days, I still have 1400 Kanji left.
がんばってなー！よかったら、俺のチャンネルでリスニングしていって〜！
Try Icelandic
@@IKEMENOsakaman 外国人が大阪弁を覚えないほうがいいって日本人の友達に何回か言われたんだけど、どうだろうね？もし自然にうつったらいいんだけど、わざと喋ろうとしたらなんか変に聞こえるって。
@@codyt4691 or Hungarian or Finnish
I think Georgian would be up there with the hardest... a different alphabet, its difference to Western European languages, its diabolical consonant clusters and some very strange grammar...
Harder than Korean?
@@azhivago2296 I guess that would depend on what language you're coming from and on your motivation,. But if you're a slavic/germanic/romance language native speaker, you may very well perceive Georgian as being harder than Korean. Its grammar is pretty unfamiliar and involved, its pronunciation is challenging to say the least, it's a whole new alphabet and there are way less resources for learning it. But, hey, maybe that's not the case for you. Why not give it a shot?
It is one of the hardest in europe i don't think its the hardest in the world.
@@belstar1128 Georgia isn't really in Europe... it is south of the Caucasus...so technically in Asia
Jangus Kan. Absolutely
Hello Steve. I wanted to apply for Ukrainian Citizenship and i started to learn Ukrainian language for citizenship exam. I had just 3 weeks till exam . I have just studied 2-2.5 weeks.I had that exam at 11th March and i have learnt that i have passed this exam. I will apply with my documents
The hardest languages to learn are those that I don’t speak.
Shock horror haha
I wonder if Steve can still have the same ability to immerse Persian or Arabic, the languages that he learns now.
When you learn something in youth, the skill lingers on....
@@ayi3455Maybe his experience learning all those languages he speak now give him the ability to immerse in a new language, experience that he didn’t have when he learned his second langauge.
@@senorrodriguez6868
Ah, oke...
I learn Chinese, now.
It seems that my ability is stuck to B1 level
I can't improve my skill up to B2.
I don't know, is it because of my age, or because I don't have a chance to take a summer course, like I had when I learned German long time ago.
When I arrived in Munich, I spoke German a little, like I speak Chinese now.
When I left Munich, my German got better significantly.
I could have convrrsation relaxedly that day.
Now I don't have such opportunity for my Chinese....
Hi, Steve! Is it possible to learn 2 languages at the same time?
He made a video on this topic, the take away : Yes but it's hard and he spends 80%on the time on language A and 20% on language But. Because he needs to dive into the language
As a Brazilian, spanish is about 60% done for me.
But I can not say the same for the english.
Any way, I am larning english.
For a Spanish and Portuguese speaking Japanese, both languages influence each other. They are too similar to use correctly.
The hardest language for people, in my opinion, is one that is furthest away from their native language grammar.
Korean and Arabic are my top 2 hardest languages
i speak arabic and learning korean lol
I feel like the beginning levels of Korean are pretty straight forward and simple to learn. Then you get to the intermediate levels and it hits you like a truck. So many sentence endings that have very similar meanings and also many many words that you have to learn because often times there are two+ words that have the same meaning (one that comes from Chinese origin and one from pure Korean)
English is you want to speak the American patois with the idiomatic expression currently in use, it is not an easy language. I’m a chess player and relate English to chess .. you may play chess forever and don’t improve unless you study, you may speak English and not improve unless you study and exercise it.
Muchas gracias. Todos sus vídeos tienen contenido muy importante y es muy motivador. Empece a amar el aprendizaje de idiomas gracias a usted. Muchísimas gracias. Saludos desde Colombia.
I made a video about this same topic 10 days ago!
Great minds think alike
How do you write that French expression at 4:07? I'd like to search it up.
« L’appétit vient en mangeant, La soif s’en va en buvant »
For me is Georgian, is the hardest one, a teacher explained to me that you have to speak through your throat, many Gregorians don't even know most of the vocabulary
Why? Harder than Korean, really?
@@azhivago2296 Because the sound has to come out through the throat, I had slept on my tongue, I almost lost my voice just trying to speak this language
@@azhivago2296 Korean you can learn online, I think Lingodeer can solve your problem, but Georgian, still dificult because of the pronunciation you need a tutor or teacher
Jjsays learns Cantonese for four months and she's already talking and singing in Cantonese.
Why do people accuse Chinese as the most difficult language, when its grammar is so far more easier than other languages?
I learn Chinese now.
I got Hsk-3 in October 2019.
In my opinion, Chinese is difficult because :
1. the Hanzi. The characters.
2. the Tone.
The grammar is relatively easy, compared to Japanese and Korean.
But sometimes, there are things which are not available.
The word : Or :
You need to use
还是 and 或者.
The first 'or' is for asking a question.
What do you want to drink...??
茶 还是咖啡..??
The second 'or' is used when the option is already available.
There are many drinks on the table.
你可以喝茶或者咖啡....
Sometimes, construction like this is confusing.
Chinese compared to Russian is like basketball compared to football.
The one is contradictory to the other.
Learning to read and write Cyrillic alphabets is relatively easy.
The problem is the grammar.
I learned Russian, too..
but I don't download Cyrillic keyboard, like I have downloaded Mandarin keyboard.
For me, I can read Russian articles still better than Chinese articles.
I have to scrutinize Chinese articles to understand what it is about....
However, now I think I can speak Chinese and listen to Chinese conversations a bit better than Russian...
I often listen to Chinese-speaking channels, from mainland-China as well as from Taiwan.
I take 10 - 30 minutes a day to memorize Chinese vocabularies.
When I feel bored to memorize Chinese vocabularies, I turn to Russian books on grammar.
Memorizing Russian grammar with all its complexities is as difficult as menorizing Chinese vocabularies with its scratches.
Thankyou....!!
Because of the writing system and tones there are harder languages but they don't have many speakers and use a phonetic script.
Dude, grammar isn't anything when it comes to difficulty of a language. Chinese has no inflections but a lot of NUANCES.
Lol dig deeper and then say that.
Spoken Finnish Estonian - Hungarian...
Different than any other languages,
Written and spoken differently, hard to pronounce.
Polish- hard to pronounce, genders are often oppressed to German, conjugation is complex and a lot of exceptions, too many idioms in a spoken language that no one substitutes with solid verbs.
To me Russian is easier than Polish.
The conjugation and spoken language is more logical, less exceptional cases, and if you’re a visual person l, reading is easy with a bit of practice, it becomes the easiest actually.
People that say Russian is easy aren't eve fluent. You are one of those people.
"L'appetito vien mangiando" in italian :) 4:10
When learning Arabic, do you notice words you already know in Spanish?
Yes... hasta and حتى must be related
If I get LingQ premium so that I can upload lessons I want to use, when it expires after a month, would I still have access to al the stuff I uploaded as a paid member?
they make you pay 2$ per month to keep your files
if you do not wish and you do need to learn a language it is going be hard for you to learn .
Tibetan language is the hardest language to learn. 🥴🥴🥴
Grammatically, Hungarian and Finnish are hard.
Steve send me the books you don’t want I will take them
Chino Mandarín. ..¡Dios!
El idioma chino has far easier grammar than Spanish with crazy conjugation and reflexive verbs.
Now going to study Minecraft Enchantment Table alphabet
Anyone learning Finnish here?
Hardest language to learn? It has to be Sentinelese. How would you ever learn it? You have to somehow sneak in to their island without getting killed and make them accept you as one of them and then over time you could learn their language but even that is against the law and so is the plan b.. which is to kidnap one of them and teach them English or what ever language you speak and make them teach Sentinelese to you. Or maybe send a drone there with recording equipment and gather enough material to cipher what they are saying. But in any case good luck!
One of the first
Ok , I think I have OCD. Him sitting off to the side and not center is driving me crazy.
Him looking away from the camera is making me sea sick. 😂
Let’s face it guys, Arabic is so hard to learn!!
Someone can recomend some French Content ( tv shows, animation... )?
Marseille,family Business on Netflix
Bienvenue chez les cht'is
Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopatre
Le tout nouveau testament
Le grand restaurant (a lot of movies with Louis de Funès are very funny)
Cyrano de Bergerac
Le boulet
Le magnifique
Les visiteurs
OSS 117
TV show:
Les petits meurtres d'Agatha Christie
I vote for the African click languages. Vietnamese, Finnish or Icelandic are pretty bad too.
Uau
Learning to speak many languages means that you have no respect for anyone of these languages. Learning to speak a foreign language means you are in love with the language and the culture of it. It's exactly the same as having many women. It means you don't love one of them with all you heart and mind. Language is an extremely serious issue. You have to know perfectly and in depth you mother tongue and quite in depth one or two more (if you want and it is necessary).
Русский язык самая трудно!, у меня есть много ошибок. Привет из чили.
I thought Steve would say: the Vietnamese language is the most difficult to learn. Anyway. LOL.
ithkuil
English is a hard language to learn.
I actually heard somewhere that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn. But who knows :)
Some of the native speakers don't know English very well, either
@@sharonoddlyenough That is true. I teach English as a foreign language. I know the mistakes for both native and foreign learners. The mistakes they make is embarrassing to say the least.
@@eiriks680 There are many grammatical concepts that are difficult for learners to grasp.
@@batdude811 Wow never thought about what it’s like for those studying english as a second language can you give some common examples of the mistakes :)
we might not find the hardest language to learn, but I'm sure the easiest is English.
Indonesian is the easiest..
It's an easy language to learn to speak poorly. Something like that.
Norwegian is really easy