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

I speak Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and English fluently. I am conversant in Spanish and know a little French and Italian. I learned all the languages, excluding English, as a non-native speaker, and I have to say that your poll is way off.

If I had to rank the languages in terms of difficulty, Japanese would be, by far, the most difficult language. Anyone who says differently does not speak Japanese very well, or that person is Japanese.

Chinese would be a DISTANT second to Japanese. People like to cluster Japanese and Chinese together. They are dissimilar languages, only sharing some characters.

Polish is not even on the list. It is not a very difficult language, comparatively. I understand why someone who does not speak very many languages might think that it is difficult, but to argue that it is comparable to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or Arabic is absurd.

Portuguese is wicked easy. I was conversant after only three months of study and fluent in 14 months.

Your poll is what it is: a bunch of people trying to justify to themselves that the language they learned in high school/college is the hardest language to learn. They want to feel smart, so they make a case about which they know nothing. Any list that has Japanese ranked below languages that use Latin alphabets is not worth taking serious.

Are you Sheldon from "Big Bang Theory"?

someguy wrote:


now i will ask you to tell me, since you did the same for portuguese, how long it took you to be fluent in polish along with how you learned it.

then we'll see how full of sh!t you are.

That's impressive.


Oops. Not so impressive. It should be seriously. But overall, excellent stuff. Now could you be bothered to become a member?

Someguy is full of nonsense. For a start, there is no way that he speaks all those languages fluently. Besides, Japanese is not the hardest at all. I'd be happy to speak Japanese with him and I can tell him I'm not Japanese. It is hard, yes, but it's a case of memorising some difficult counters and also some irregularities like in most languages. For example, kai is the counter for building floor but it changes to gai for 3, i.e sangai :) The animal counters are tough, right enough.

It depends who the learner is, really. Polish is harder for some people. Nihon no hatsuon ha yasashii dayo. Wymowa tutaj, to inna sprawa :0 Anyway can type any bull on the net (I should know) ;)

Can you talk jive or smack too? :)

simplified polish: slovio.com
Any idiot can learn in a couple of weeks (Even the Americans and Germans!)

What do you think about Slovianski?

steen.free.fr/slovianski/index.html

s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/index

It seems very logical and based on sound principles. I especially like their way of selecting
words for the common language based on the division of Slavic languages into six groups...

pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovianski

...there are also similar projects apart from Slovio and Slovianski, and I think we should
decide on one of them and stick to it, instead of creating many artificial Slavic languages.

Far more preferable (in the sense of being simplied yet very Slavic in feel) to Slovio, which has a very non-Slavic kind of grammar. I cannot get past the plural in -s.

Many Slavs don't even see the s which baffles me. They even change things to avoid saying it at the end, e.g its depend. I mean, do they lose God's Grace if they pronounce the s or what? Is it the letter of the devil?

Polish was chosen as the hardest language? You see, you can't have a poll where everyone chooses so it's pathetic to even have such an order of things.

In fact, the most 'grammatically paired down' Slavic language is Bulgarian which seems to have shuffled off it's mortal coil of Old Church Slovanic case endings, whereas Polish among the Slavic tongues is at the other end of the scale, much as Icelandic is among the Germanic languages-:)) Croatian is said to sound much like 'baby-talk' to Poles, Czechs and Russians, then again, this may be only auditory, i.e. based on how the language sounds, rather than its morphology or structure. Polish just sounds complicated to foreigners with all its sibilances, half-consonant mutations and nasalsLOL

Furthermore, the Slavic languages, interestingly, Bulgarian is the only one which shares with Romanian, Albanian and the five Scandinavian languages Faeroese, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Danish, the enclitic definite article "the", already attached to the noun, e.g. 'house-the' not 'house' or 'the house'.

What Bulgarian lacks in noun morphology it makes up in verbal morphology, it has a much more developed tense system than the other Slavic languages, reminiscent of Spanish or Italian.

Excellent point, Mafketis! You're right, of course. Forgot about that one-:))LOL

French and particularly Spanish though, don't utilize half the tenses they've got, especially in speaking. On the other hand, writing is a different matter.

its not that hard i started speaking fluent polish at 12! :)

I could speak English at five..

If a language is one's native tongue, naturally it's more possible to speak it perfectly than not. I trust though, you're being sarcastic-:)))

Furthermore, it depends on what you mean by 'speaking a foreign language'. Do you mean 'good enough' for the bare minimum basics, or perhaps on a higher, more interesting and socially valuable level? Just so long as the sharp distinction between these two ends are not blurred, I've no counter statements to add.

On the other hand, if speaking a language intentionally poorly becomes a rationalization for 'basic communication' and other such nouveau jargon of the misguided left, then I start to become edgy. Someone on this Forum mentioned learning Polish as an intellectual excercise vs. as a tool for essential usage. I can only ask here whether it's not as important to keep our tools in tip-top condition? After all, who in the world needs a blunt scalpel??

Well i heard that the slovak language is the hardest...

My observations have led me to conclude that probably Czech is both phonologically as well as morphologically more complex than either Slovak or most other Slavic languages, except (of course!) for Polish!LOL

-:)

Are you asking where I found this? I don't remember... probably started with polandian.com and went from there..

I could read, write and speak Polish before I started school, so it's hard, but not that hard ;)

slavs should rather try not Slovio ,Slovianski,Slovioski etc . but Russian

while I really do like Russian it is not that perfectly suited for a pan-Slavic lingua franca or maybe it is just my prejudice

Not really. If you listen to native Polish speakers and how they pronounce words, you will start to get a sense of how to say the words. If fact, many Polish words are not difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce, namely:

Problem [problem]
Kot [cat]
Lampa [lamp]
Katedra [cathedral]
Okno [window]
Radio [radio]
Telefon [telephone]
Komputer [computer]
Mama [Mom]
Tato [Dad]
Brat [Father]
Numer [number]
Dokument [Document]
Mapa [Number]
Plan [Plan]
Dom [house]
bilet [Ticket]

Also, the consonants are very similar to English consonants. So, the pronunciation shouldn't be too difficult for the English speaker. The vowels and that strange trilled "r" could be difficult, although I'm told that some Poles pronounce it like the French "r."

I'm currently studying the language now, and I do not see what is so challenging about the language besides the word order. You have to understand that Polish is a reflexive language, meaning that the word order is more flexible than in English. I find that I can but the verb in front of the noun, something I can't do in English because of its stringent word order. For example, Mówi Maria, or Maria Mówi.

And another thing. Polish and English are both in the Indo-European system of languages, so there are many traits that they both share.

Wish I could go into this more, but I have some Polish to learn. Gotta go, or as the Poles say, Muszę już iść

Brat= brother;]

some individuals do - but you don't meet such people too often - much like some English people lisping

Structures such as Mary says... and ..., says Mary are not uncommon in English, although the second tends to be more frequent in written rather than spoken English.

Lexie0987 wrote:


Couple things....

For one, I counted 3 mistakes in your list.

Secondly, anyone that says something like this: "I'm currently studying the language now, and I do not see what is so challenging about the language besides the word order" most likely is someone who barely speaks Polish, started not long ago and has no concept of Polish cases. It's also worth mentioning that people like this, even when they get to the cases, often times ignore them and think they're speaking well.

It strikes a nerve with me when people talk crap like this because I went through years of torture learning Polish grammar and know the difficulties involved. I'd love to hear you speak Polish Lexie, we'll see just how challenging this language really is.

Thirdly, are you sure Lexie it's not "Musze juz pojsc"???

Naaah, I'm just messin' with you now.

I have some concept, but it is a work in process for me as I just started learning the language.


You misunderstand me, Fuzzywickets. I didn't write my post to state that Polish isn't difficult or that people who find it difficult are idiots or mentally slow, quite the reverse. Polish IS a difficult language, and I see that even though I've just started the language three weeks ago. The cases, the conjugations, etc, etc are very daunting and as I am currently struggling to master the language. (See my post on imperative/ conditional) My post was meant to suggest that you don't have to be a genius to learn how to speak or understand Polish. In fact, the person I was responding to suggested that it was impossible to learn it, which I find a ridiculous statement.

I can feel your pain, Fuzzywickets. I really do. The word order is baffling to me, but that doesn't have to stop me from learning the language. It's all about motivation, as someone else on here mentioned.


I've noted them. I wrote them in a hurry.

Muszę już iść is better (more natural Polish) than 'Muszę już pójść'

Lexie0987 wrote:


and then wrote:


Sorry, but you have just completely contradicted yourself. Glad I wrote what I wrote. You are exactly what I expected. Another rookie claiming that the language ain't that tough when you have no concept of Polish whatsoever.

FAIL.

gumishu wrote:


OMG, is there NO sense of humor on this forum anymore? What did you not understand about "just messin' with you".

Uuuchh......

but English does not have a stringent word order at all. The word order in English is not at all stringent...
English word order stringent not at all is...(shurely shome mishtake ed)
Anyway good luck with "the hardest language in the world" ( forgetting all about Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc etc)
Possibly what the OP meant was.."it's one of the more difficult European languages"