Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D

... and following Spimo's thought maybe s/he speaks a language even harder than Polish and even more of his/her IQ was consumed for processing the language and less for thinking.

In terms of 'hard' - 'harder' -'hardEST'... I keep coming back to Navajo, once considered so impenetrable, i.e. "unlearnable" for outsiders, it became the code-crackers dream during WWII:-)))

Convex
I just wonder: are you comparing this discussion to "juice readily pressed" or you doubt that it is "pomarańcz" (masculine gender), but you think it should be "pomarańcza" (feminine gender)?

I just wanted to post a picture of my thumb.

You probably meant code-crackers' "nightmare"

Depends on how intelligent you are, really. A bright person will be able to learn it far quicker than your average idiot, mainly due to the way that it can't be mastered through mere exposure - unlike Italian for instance.


Quite simply, the best schools are looking to provide the best challenges for their children. It's the same reason that Latin is kept in the very elite private schools - it's not a language for stupid people.

I think we can agree that Polish, for an English speaker, is certainly much more of a challenge than French or Italian!

..."nightmare" for the enemy, dream for the Allies LOL

Yes, the enemy would be the ones to try and crack encryption.

French, indeed! All those silent letters, unpronounced 's'-sounds, written but not spoken (except for the inital 's' of the famous, now defunct, 'Les Halles'!!!!), those myriad tenses, varied patois speech etc... Polish is much easier than French, if for nothing else, the pronunciation!

Right again, Darek:-)

This though is not to say that, morphologically speaking, Polish is not much more of a challenge than either French or Italian:-) Except for perhaps only Romanian, Romance languages abandoned case endings centuries ago when they broke with Latin.

Level 3 includes Polish, Russian (despite having a more difficult script), Turkic languages, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.

Level 4 (more difficult) includes Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Pashto and Korean.

So who says Polish is the most difficult language? Also, surely these things, to a lesser or greater extent, work both ways - it should be as difficult for a Pole to learn English, assuming the same level of resources are available. Therefore, if Polish is the hardest language, then so is English, ergo neither can be the most difficult. I win.

"...it should be as difficult for a Pole to learn English..."

Thank you!! Finally, someone agrees with me out there that the myth of English 'simplicity' vs. Polish 'difficulty' is precisely that; a lazy man's fallacy.

Moral of the story? ANY language, for that matter, discipline, is 'hard' if the requisite perseverance and focus are lacking.

Why for pity's sake should Polish be different?!

...to continue, while there's never been any denying the extreme challenges posed by most conservative inflected languages, Polish, Hungarian, Basque, Lithuanian, Finnish...German etc......, I still hear so often, (frequently from native speakers of the above languages!!!) that it would be so much simpler if "we all used English".

A few questions at this point. No.1, who's "we"? No.2, simpler for whom? And finally, no.3. does one mean "used" or "abused", i.e. missused through poor use??

The fact that English has long since become lingua franca numero uno in the world for aviation, international conferences, many areas of research, banking and so forth, doesn't mean everybody reallyt knows it. All it means, is that an air traffic controler in Houston, TX and a control tower person in Moscow can make themselves basically understood for sheerly practical purposes.

The level of any world language though, pays a certain price for its accessability.

Delphiandomine wrote:


do you honestly think Latin is taught in elite schools because it is simply "not a language for stupid people"...? they chose it only because it's hard?

I think we can all agree that if I was a rich man living in the UK and was spending thousands of pounds/euros per year to send my child to a high end private school, I'd want him or her to be learning a language worth knowing.

tight rope walking over a pool of alligators is more difficult than tennis....should they be teaching them that too?

melsomelyb wrote:


roman alphabet vs. symbols/different alphabet....that's all that is. Polish is entirely more difficult than any of the above when it comes to forming grammatically correct, coherent sentences....which puts it right back at the top of the list.

Japanese is level 4, interesting! Is Polish in the same bracket? I don't find either that hard (I mean overly hard) and can more than get by on both. Heck, I picked up a version of The Ring which I assumed was in English. It was in Japanese with Polish subtitles so I comfortably got by. It's largely about state of mind. If you are relaxed and receptive then language comes that bit easier.

You just have to be careful when language deserts you. There have been occasions where both my Polish and Japanese have let me down in administrative places but maybe it was due to the pressure of needing to be precise/accurate.

The counting system in both Japanese and Polish, as I'd stated once before in this Forum, appears of equal complexity, just in different ways: Polish distinguishes between the nature of nouns being counted in terms of their quality and gender, Japanese on the other hand, in terms of their size, shape, roundness, smoothness, i.e. their texture.

Thererfore, the choice is yours: Which do YOU find harder?

:-)

Japanese counters are harder I think. There are irregularities due to sound.

I fancy an honest test in Polish counters. I came undone when I had to guess the Polish for 6 horses.

If the resident Poles wouldn't mind, I could try 1 of sth, 2 of sth and 5 of sth. Jedno piwo, dwa piwa i pięc piw, for example. I wouldn't look them up, I promise.

hey Seanus,

5 hedgehogs!

My money wouldn't be thrust forward with any conviction but I am guessing 'pięc jeży' without checking.

..then just go ahead and join Mr. Mark Twain in the 'niemiecki kącik':

'I'd rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.'

LOL

My euro's on 'pięć jeżów', but then, I'm only guessin' -:))))

Let's ask the experts, shall we? Any Poles here care to enlighten us?

Piec jezy or pieciu Jerzych lol.

Thanks, Borrka. That clears it up.

Any more teasers, Borrka?

bingo

dzięki, uczycielowi!

Uj, przepraszam! .....nauczycielOM, Darku, i Borrku:-))) lol

that's either russified Polish or polonized Russian :)

I deserved that one, mój drug.

Spasibuję he-he-he!!!!!

An annoying mistake but quite common by Polish politician and even TV moderators or weather girls:

"w cudzyslowiu" or "w cudzyslowie" ?

Interesting. Good to know, I'm sure.

The first one, Borrka. I'm fairly sure it's correct from hearing it many times.

Oh, unless it's like poszłem and the correct poszedłem.

It's "w cudzyslowie" just because we use to say "w slowie" and not w "slowiu".

'w cudzysłowie' is 'correct' in the prescriptive sense, though you can hear both in use.