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Many languages are claimed to be the hardest e to learn. Assessments have been used to determine language difficulty based on: the ease with which infants learn a language as their first language and how challenging language is tas a second language by older children or adults.

Natural acquisition

The question of the most difficult language to acquire can be considered by determining when children are able to speak grammatically correctly, as judged by adult speakers.

As a second language

Learning a language as an adult strongly depends on the learner's native language. Because second language acquisition strongly depends on the learner's native language it is difficult to make a universal ranking of difficulty. For example, a native English speaker will learn Frisian much easier than a native Japanese speaker would - and vice versa. In general, the closer the second language is in relation to vocabulary, sentence structure and other factors to the learner's native tougue the easier acquisition will be. This "proximity" of the target language is not nece The question which of two given languages A and B is more difficult to learn may be considered by comparing the performance of native speakers of A learning B with that of native speakers of B learning A. For example, a study on speech comprehension by German immigrants to the USA and American immigrants to Germany found that native English speakers learning German as adults had a disadvantage on certain grammatical tasks, while they had an advantage in lexical tasks compared to their native German-speaking counterparts learning English.

Diplomats and defense language training gives some interesting data, although it covers a limited selection of languages:

• The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages. Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks, are: "Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean", with Japanese being the most difficult.

See also

• Chomsky hierarchy
• Critical period hypothesis
• International auxiliary languages – some of them attempts to create the easiest language
• Language learning aptitude
• Motivation in second language learning
• Propaedeutic value of Esperanto – it may take less time to learn an easier language first, then a harder language, than to learn the harder language by itself

References

1. Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H.J., Röder, B., The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition 93 (2004),B97-B108.
2. (2007) National Virtual Translation Center

External links

• What is the most difficult language to learn?, Johns Hopkins Magazine (1999)
• Which is the hardest language?

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• Language education
• Language acquisition