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

My teacher explained it to me like that: (please donnot get offended!)
German girls/women are indistinguished. So they are DAS.

Not quite. It's

das Mädchen (the girl -> neuter)
die Frau (the woman -> female)

Ach Ja! Und "Was will das Weib"?

LOL! Okay, let's find all the different synonyms for 'woman' in the German language...

Contemporary German inflectional morphology PALES by comparison with Polish:-) Where German's four cases are often quite repetitive, the seven active cases in Polish differ from one another at the drop of a hat, rarely repeating! Although there is to be sure a certain regularity in certain noun declensions, the same can scarcely be said for the numerals.

Verbal "perfective" vs. "imperfective" aspects can also be a not so gentle challenge for the foreign Polish learner. Even in languages such as English or German which are governed typically by 'tense' not 'aspect', learning to distinguish their usage in Polish is sometimes enough to drive even the clearheaded among us to distraction:-) Mostly, this is because what English speakers see as requiring a completed action, for example, in Polish do not!

An analogy with German might be case governance. Even my advanced students would still have to sit and ponder why certain verbs which seemed like direct object (Accusative) actions in English, required the indirect (Dative) object in German, e.g. the verb 'folgen' (to follow) etc..

I continue to make mistakes in Polish aspectual distinctions.

You do indeed.

I have been learning German for some time. The "ch" sound like in the word "ich" is irritating me and I often replace it with Polish Ś :-) I bet it sounds terrible.

Most likely it does. Amazed to observe a twinge of self-effacement in this last post:-) Keep it up!

I'm just in the beginners phase, and still giving priority to Portuguese lessons, but damn I have to agree with the title.
When I was in Poland for about 3 months, eventually started to understand a bit (didn't have time to study properly though) but for the first few weeks all I heard was sh-ch. Having Spanish as first language, an often thought was "Where the hell have all the vowels gone to?"

Second stage was trying to get the 7 cases, and I just gave up on that until my next trip. Need full time dedication as my memory is just bad when it comes to learning by repetition. Hopefully will be able to get some proper Polish lessons.

Anyway it all relates to where you come from. Guess that anyone with Slavic language background could find it a piece of cake.

Portuguese, I've heard from both native as well as non-native speakers, is by the far the most complex Romance language apart from Romanian! While Portuguese doesn't have the burden of Latin declensions like the latter, nor the confusing-looking clitics of Scandinavian, Albanian or other Balkan languages, it's tense system is much more intricate than either French, Itialian or Spanish:-)

Do you agree?

Agree, but getting into Portuguese with native Spanish fluency, it's REALLY easy. It's like Czech for Poles.

Only if it's western Slavic like Czech or Slovakian, for the rest it's a bit harder.


I can indeed understand a lot of Portuguese just by knowing Spanish. I noticed they have a lot of "sh" and "ch" sounds so it sounds like Polish sometimes :-)

funny you say that Wulkan!
while at work I stream radio Trójka and my patients are consistently guessing that it's Portuguese coming out the speaker! lol
I never wold have made that connection even though i worked in a Portuguese section of New Jersey for several years :)

For whatever it's worth, the first time I heard (Brazilian) Portuguese spoken, it sounded superficially like Russian, better yet, Italian spoken with a Russian accent, because of those palatalized final dental "t's", the liquid "l's" and that sort of drawling quality of Russian.

European Portuguese may be a different story.

The most challenging language only for the strong and the brave is Polish. Most others are easy in comparison.

Crikey, that website keeps coming back like a bad penny. It was made by an American guy called mark who used to post here (people sometimes accuse Milky of being him, though I'm reliably informed they are different people) who despite living in PL for ages, has never quite managed to speak the language (or find a job). The website is about selling flashcards. I wonder if people buy them?

To be sure, it's a moot point by this stage:-)

I learn Polish since Summer. it's not easy but I also don't find it very difficult and I already can speak something (My mother language is German). If you think Polish is the most difficult Language in Europe or even in the world, then try to learn Georgian! I

Kartvelian languages bear a certain similarity to Basque. Though I suppose that's little consolation to those learning or attempting to learn PolishLOL

Havent you noticed the smiley in the title suggesting of it's sarcasm?

To about the same degree as Polish does to Japanese. They're not at all related.

Oooops, false analogy. Polish has indeed no "linguistic" affinity with Japanese, while Georgian has been found to have said structural relationships with Basque, therefore your last statement is misleading:-)

It's interesting how those languages has something in common while their users are so far away from eachother.

JanMovie, I'm an instructor of German and most of my students interestingly enough find German EASIER than either French or Spanish!! Others start tearing their hair out when the lesson moves to declensions. I always warn them though, "Lernt ihr bloss Polnisch nicht!" (Just don't learn Polish!)

:-)

Wulkan,

There were after all cross-continental migrations. Kartvelian speakers doubtless merged with Celts and Iberians...

That's wrong (both the word order and the sentence itself). It's "Lernt bloß kein Polnisch!"

I can already speak the the tonguebreaker "W szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie German: "In Szczebschäschin brummt ein Käfer im Schilf" with no problems (was not difficult for me, i could speak it after one day). A Polish woman told me that usually this is difficulty even for native Speakers and for foreigners nearly impossibly. I would say Polish is definetely not an easy language (way more difficult than for example English or Spanish, the languages I have already learned) but definetely not as bad it's Reputation says. Or am I simply a language genious?

Whereas, though off topic, one COULD say the latter, it might mean something else. Am I exhorting the class "Don't (even bother to) LEARN Polish!" or perhaps, "Don't even bother to learn POLISH!" In your sentence ( speaking as a bilingual native), the meaning is more the latter than the former:-) Possibly too, what I really meant was the former, not the latter.

As with English, Polish or any language, on certain occasions the "right" can look "wrong", depending solely on the context.

JanMovie, "brzmi" might even be translated as "summt", as we are in fact speaking about only a small insect:-) In English, we could also say, In______________, the beetle "buzzes" in the reed.

Tongue twisters are no less formidable in our common language: "Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische".
In Polish: "Cesio ciesie się cieszać się." ?? = Cesio kaemmt sich gern die Haare. = Cesio likes to comb his hair.
etc..

The German equivalent would be "Lernt kein Polnisch!". "Lernt ihr Polnisch nicht!" is grammatically wrong.

so he cant speak German either? lol

I think in Europe are at least four languages which are obviously more difficult and complicated than Polish: Icelandic, Hungarian, Basque and as I said before, Georgian.

About Icelandic: This language is described to be extremely difficult by Germans and English despite the fact that it is a germanic language.
About Hungarian: The language has not less than 18!!! grammar cases.
About Basque: It has even more than 20 grammar cases and the Basques say that "there language is so difficult that not even the devil could learn it".

About Georgian: Yes, I have also heared it is simmilar to Basque and in an official book about Georgia, I have read that for foreigners this language is nearly impossible to learn.

I think Finnish is overrated in it's difficulty and since Estonian is very simmilar to Finnish it probably is overrated too. And does anybody knows how difficult Ukranian is (for German and English Speakers)? As difficult as Polish or somewhat easier? I know it has nearly the same case System as Polish (7cases) and the kyrrilic script like Russian.

It's not, Finnish is indeed difficult