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

Paiwan,When I was really young my grandfather taught me some Polish words and they had always stuck with me.When I was in my early

20's, while living in Alaska,I had met these Polish crab fisherman who were living in the same building as me.I had said good night to them.

I guess my pronunciation must have been dead on because when I told them I wasn't from Poland,they actually thought I was lying.I really

should learn the languages,I would also like to learn Russian.

but they juuuuuuuuuust can't seem to stop saying "I am in Wroclaw 10 years."

well that makes sense at least...
an Irish person might say...
'How long are you here for', meaning 'How long have you been here for?', not ' how long are you planning to stay'.
Polish is very difficult with the case endings and such.....

Yep, I've seen visitors in Ireland get confused with that one! ;)

Maybe it's obvious, but it's worth mentioning that ambiguous questions like that are a direct echo of the Irish (Gaelic) sub-stratam; Irish has no present perfect as such. Like other such languages, the concept is expressed in other ways, particularly by context. Similarly, we say things like, 'I'm only after doing that' (lit: tá mé tar eis é sin a dhéanamh') for "I have just done that'..

One of the interesting theories behind this is that when Irish began to be widely spoken in Ireland in the 17th and 18th century many of the teachers were native Irish-speakers and therefore spoke English as a learned language, often almost entirely from books, with a lot of direct translation and then taught this to their students. What began as English as a foreign language became a new dialect of English, Hiberno-English.

shame they speak improperly. no different than half of the USA in all honesty. adverbs, present perfect, past participles.....total mess.

Chinese language is too much complicated, I think

I recently saw a posting on another language forum claiming that Estonian's the most challenging language to learn, even more than Lithuanian or Sanskrit.

Arabic has a horrendounsly complicated conjugation system, I've heard, yet I've also read that it;s almost mathematical in its logistic:-)

lol, any language is easy if you've grown up with it.

Try Inuit languages, then you can talk. It's all tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga oqaatiginerluppaa nammineersinnaassuseqarlutik and stuff like that. haha :)

German often looks like it should be easy for English speakers, because some of it looks familiar, and I think the syntax may be similar (but don't quote me on this).

You'll get something which sounds a bit like English like "und der top...." but then it's followed by a word like "...Eisenbahnknotenpunkthinundherschieber" and I just think "lol, forget it, I'll stick to Slavic languages" haha :)

Welsh and Hungarian town-name tongue twisters'll put ANY Pole through their pacesLOL

That's true, but we are trying our best. :-) Here is what I found in today's news:
Pobiedziszczanie (citizens of Pobiedziska) granted a title of "Honorary Citizen of the City and the Municipality of Pobiedziska" to Ludovic Obraniak, a French born football player, who is playing for Poland in Euro 2012. His grandfather, Zygmunt Obraniak, was born and lived in Pobiedziska, near Poznań. The official title granting ceremony will take place right after the Euro 2012.

["Pobiedziska" means "place of victories"; it stems from the Old Slavic word "pobiada" (modern Russian: pobieda) - a victory.]

I'm already consigned to seeing "śsad" and "łzy" in the same sentenceLOL

))))

??? WTF ???

Wiem, że kilka słów pisane z dwuspógłoskami. Zapewno są lepszy przykłady!LOL

I'm aware that some words are written with double consonants. Surely, there are better examples!LOL

Polish is allegedly the hardest language to learn?

What RACIST NONSENSE.

Who has been spreading this nonsense? Isn't it mostly American Jews (the worst Polonophobes in the world)?

Give me hard evidence that Polish is the hardest language to learn. Can you?

Don't be so bloody silly. Read the thread before posting nonsense. And for the record, I don't find Polish particularly complicated.

No more so than an ignorant non-registered poster should expect. Racist nonsense? This is a thread about the complexity of a language.

oh come on ... big, big statement ... surely not true? if so, i am like Einstein on coke ... which of course I am not ... is Polish SO hard? So what, it has cases? So what, the verb endings change? I did Latin ... now that WAS bloody hard ... like Lego, all the time ... any living language is a gift, because you can listen to it ... Polish isn't so bad. And the pronunciation is WAY easier than French, for an English tongue. Like a million times easier.


oh yes, I did German as well - and you are right - Polish again way easier. German was all bits stuck together (again, very Lego-like) (or much like the new Polo ...). And Polish easier to pronounce than German. For goodness' sake - a few consonant clusters, a couple of 'sh' sounds and everyone is having kittens ... what is this?? Polish is a perfectly reasonable language.

Believe I raised this issue on PF almost two years back, but it's been said that Welsh has even more quixotically chaotic-looking consonant shifts/mutations than Polish:-) As I don't speak the former, I'm bereft of examples upon which to buttress my claim. Did though read a piece on Wiki and elsewhere (in an actual paperback text) about Welsh since I was just intrigued by various Celtic languages, and this substantiated my statement.

Natasia, you probably mean those separable verb prefixes in German, right? Yeah, my students find them a pain tooLOL

Czech is interesting as I've been told that it's colloquial language is COMPLETELY different from the standard formal: different grammar, vocab, everything!

I won't reply to guests. Let them register if they want replies.

Then, if we don't like them, we can block them. And if they cause trouble, the mods can ban them. Which, let's face it, is exactly why they won't register.

If we all ignored them, they would either go away, or register. As it should be ;)


Oscar Wilde on ketamine, more like ;)


True. I only did about six months of it (and Greek) at school, but we had to stay after school to do it, as an extra subject.

I eventually decided that it would be more fun going to metal pubs with my girlfriend instead lol (good choice :D ).

Of course, I didn't tell my mum this (my excuse was "as if I'm ever going to need Latin at work!" - famous last words, as it turned out, haha).


So how many languages do you know/speak, then? You almost sound familiar.

I used to know an English woman from Oxford who also "looked Polish", and was very multilingual, but I can't imagine her ever wanting to marry a Pole somehow lol.

Mädchen is neuter because of the "-chen", a diminutive suffix which automatically converts words to neuter form (das).

This provides foreigners in Germany with an easy out in case they don't know the correct gender of a noun. Just add chen to the end and declinate as neuter.

Furthermore, the concept of the neuter form being used when you don't know what something will become is totally false.
Neuter form is most commonly seen in the following situations:

1) Small things (das Kind, all words with "-chen" on the end)
2) Foreign (eingedeutschte) words: T-Shirt, Handy.

There are always exceptions to the rule: der Laptop, das Boot (the boat), usw.

Genders are not completely useless - das Tag - the tag, der Tag - the day.

Puzzie

1) Saying Polish is the most dificult language in the world to learn is not racist.
2) Automatically blaming American Jews for something is antisemitic.

I agree! Saying ANY language is "the most difficult language in the world" isn't racist; IT'S PLAIN STUPID!!!!
lol

So far, not one person has come forward to explain what makes Polish more "difficult" than English, German etc....
Because of the declensions, the aspectual forms, the pronunciation?? Uh-h, I'm sure we can come up with any number of languages with equally irritating quirks. Polish, in my long experience of studying various languages throughout several major language groups, is again, by no means the "quirkiest", believe me.

Don't get the last part of your post either. Who's blaming American Jews for what? Guess I missed something there:-)

I doubt i have the answer either Lyzko.
Polish language is completely at odds with the English language, it works in a completely different way, and for me, that was the hardest bit to get my head round. Still is tbh. E.g, Poles will often say how, when we would say what.

What is your name?
Jak masz na imię?
For me,it's constantly thinking HOW the sentence is meant to be constructed that is the problem. It does get easier, but i still make loads of mistakes.

Pronunciation, I never really had too much problem with, apart from learning how to roll r's.
Declension of nouns etc is really a matter of doing your homework. You just have to learn it, and some people, like you, will pick it up more quickly than others.

At least when i started learning, I wasn't aware of the reputation Polish has for being one of the hardest languages to learn. I'm sure had i known, i never would have started. Oh well, too late now!

What you're so ably describing, Pam, is the same issue which (in this case) Poles have trying to "wrap their mind" around English!

Don't let them fool ya; they have the SAME questions and confusions as you or I do as non-native speakers:-) The issues are merely different, but the struggle remains as real, be the learners Poles, German, Frenchmen, whoever.

Thinking in a language means above all avoiding from the outset word-to-word "translation" from the mother tongue, as this only helps to confuse, rather than clarify. Merely because certain Europeans have been around English more than you've been around their language certainly doesn't indicate that their English competence is therefore necessarily any greater than your learned skill in the others' language.

Welsh mutations are far, far easier than Polish case endings.


I don't really understand why you wrote this. Either you are extremely intelligent, or you have never really studied Polish in depth, or else you are not familiar with learning languages.

For a native English speaker, who speaks a language without either case endings or gender, and which has comparatively few inflections, Polish is one of the most difficult Indo-European languages to master.

... then ya oughta try the NON-Indo-European ones such as Hungarian. Finnish is regular by comparison.

This was my initial mistake, and I had to make a conscious effort to avoid doing it.


Apparently, Hungarian ranks as the second hardest language to learn, followed by Polish.
Winner in the difficulty stakes is traditional Chinese.
Fortunately, I have no intention of learning either of the others.

Especially minorities and Southerners..With accents i like the one they call Hollywood, it sounds really proper.


Polish no doubt is difficult to non Slavic language speakers, i think it's mostly to being just different. Since English initially developed out of German why does it use a C instead of a K like all other Germanic languages?

English may "look" transparent to German speakers, but that's where the problems arise! German doesn't look AS transparent to English speakers, therefore, the serious learners tend to take ultimate, painstaking care to make sure their case endings, gender agreement and sentence structure are perfect! The same unfortunately CANNOT be said for most German speakers of English, usually adopting the "Look-Ma-No-Hands" approach to English grammar and vocabulary. The result is a bad attitude towards English resulting in a holy mess, very tough to undo:-)

I am Polish and honestly I also have got sometimes problems with polish grammar and my friends aswell :) but I have heard some foreigner speaking in Polish and they use just basic forms and it was most of the times easy to understand but sounds a little bit funny:)

Gotta be kidding. even the native speakers have problem :O