Which of these languages is most difficult?

Question

Could anyone order these languages in terms of their difficulty level and offer an explanation?
I'm a 17-year-old native English speaker and fairly fluent in French as I've studied it for nearly 6 years. I'm wondering about the relative difficulty of these languages simply because I'm interested in attempting to learn all--or at least most-- of them eventually :-)

English
French
Italian
German
Russian
Icelandic
Portugese
Korean

Any input would be helpful, even if you're only familiar with a few of these languages. Thanks!

Answer 1

It really does depend A LOT on your native language to asses difficulty but I will try my best.



English - Can be challenging for some people as there is a lot of slang, idioms, and spelling is nowhere near phonetic.

French - Commonly taught and not incredibly difficult especially not for English speakers.

Italian - Another romance language and not very difficult.

German - Pronunciation can be a pain but very similar to English.

Russian - Very difficult unless you have a Slavic native tongue.

Icelandic - Not very familiar but hear it is a very distinct language that can be challenging to write and speak.

Portuguese - Has similar roots to English and French.

Korean - Incredibly challenging for any English speaker.

Answer 2

I was trying to find the table online from the Defense Language Institute that ranks launguages by difficulty. Alas, I couldn't find it. Maybe your Google-fu is stronger than mine.



Having said that, head and shoulders above the rest in difficulty is Korean. Most linguists agree this is one of the hardest languages to learn.



From your list, I have studied French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Korean. Italian is the easiest (good regular grammar and spelling), and Korean is the hardest (way different phonology and sentence structure, lots of levels of nuance that don't exist in English, weird grammar).



For you, you will have an easy time with Italian and Portuguese, since there is so much overlap with French (since they are all in the Romance Language family).



Next easiest would be German. Lots of vocab overlap with English and fairly consistent grammar.



I'm not sure about Icelandic. I don't know too much about it. Russian is supposedly pretty hard with a fairly complex grammar system.



And, again, Korean is pretty darn hard. You have to be pretty motivated to get it right.



Bonne chance!

Answer 3

English (you are a native)

French (you are familiar)

Italian (similar to French)

Portuguese (similar to French and Italian)

Korean

Russian

Icelandic

Answer 4

English speaker have a hard time leaning any language but in this case I'd say Korean and Russian

Answer 5

The difficulty of learning any second language depends on the learner's first language. At http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/index.html languages are rated on difficulty, popularity and other factors. You might find what you are looking for on that site.



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:L… has a list of several dozen languages and their difficulty.



Hope you find what you are looking for.

Answer 6

For you it would probably be Korean. But for a non English speaking person, English is the most difficult language to learn.

Answer 7

Korean. its one of the hardest languages out there to learn for an english speaker!