Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn

That's your (and Magda's) opinion.
These guys seem to disagree tho.

I see the mod edited your post, since you called me 'idiot'.


It's PoLson, you idi...buddy ;)
I should have chosen another nickname...like Pó£śóń.

Jan Movie,

I too have had my daliances with Lithuanian:-) It is considered to be not only the most conservative of the extant Baltic languages, its cases rival even Icelandic for unpredictable stem changes (Stammvokalaenderung) and intricacy of case usage. It also has about seven active cases, much like Polish.

While I've never actually studied the language, I taught myself some beginning Latvian several years back and became quite fascinated with Baltic languages:-)

Lithuanian in fact has 9 cases because the vocative there has three variations. And simmilar to Icelandic Lithuanian has a very archaiic vocabullary with almost no loanwords from other languages.

To Polish vs Czech: Magdalena speaks both languages since her childhood and I think she has a great knowledge of languages according to her comments so I beliefe her more than I would beliefe most other people in that way.

Many People often compare Polish with Russian. This is definetally not a good idea because Russian is gramatically probably the third easiest slavic tongue (only Macedonian and Bulgarian are easier here). The Major difficulties of Russian are that it uses another alphabet and is less phonetic than other slavic languages (but relatively easy to pronounce).

To Polson,
I take back what I have written before. I have looked on you comments and you are definetally not an "idiot". I wrote this because I thought that you are one of the natinalistic Polish guys who really beliefe their language to be the hardest on earth, but you aren't one of them.

No probs, mate. I'm half Polish and still struggling with the language (so maybe my frustration showed, but that's all), and I could never tell which language is the hardest, it depends on too many things.

Furthermore, Lithuanian (like Slovene!), I believe, also has a vestigial "dual" form in the plural. Polish is morphologically more complex than Russian, this is true, and perhaps only Croatian is the "simplest" of the Slavic group in terms of her inflections.

It's a similar situation with German vs. Dutch. The latter is more structurally related to German than it is to English, yet German case morphology is far more intricate than Dutch, which essentially has no cases any longer.

Jan Movie, not only do I concur with your statement regarding Magdalena, I agree that Cyrillic is what presents the biggest hurdle for foreign learners, furthermore, that the Cyrillic alphabet follows a different "order" than ours, e.g. A, B,C,D etc.. don't apply in learning Russian. Therefore, the order of the letters must also be committed to memory in order to spell and look up Russian words easily.

We are discussing the POLISH language, please stick to the topic

I don't get your logic here.
As to the Polish language - who cares if it is the hardest one to learn. To each its own.
Some find it hard to learn and some easy peasy .....

Lolku,

It's a common misconception that certain nationalities believe the difficulty of their language to be evidence of some "cultural superiority", i.e. in order to protect their nation from lesser invaders who might take over their society, they somehow created a language so difficult that the average outsider could never possibly learn it! Language difficulty is therefore worn almost as a "badge of pride". Not sure about the Poles, Balts, Hungarians or others, but I know for a fact that the Icelanders regard their tiny language in this way (....hence will fight tooth and nail in order to preserve it, much like with the Irish and the Welsh).

I second that

See my above post (...for whatever it's worth). Just my two złoty worth:-)

Someone in the Internet has said that Polish is harder to learn than Finnish. This might be true, because Finnish has a complex crammar but very easy spelling and pronountion.

However saying that Polish is also harder than Hungarian makes absolutelly no sense. This is just laughable

Polish harder than Finnish? That is nonsense. For a native English speaker, Finno-Ugric languages are much more difficult than Slavic languages.

You clearly have no clue about the subject if some random person on the internet managed to convince you that Polish is harder than Finnish. And considering the fact that your mission on this forum is to make Polish language look as easy as possible makes it even more laughable. The fact is that Finnish is harder than Polish.

Spot on.

Anyway, the answer to the question 'Which language is the hardest?' is another question. Hardest for whom?

Right on, jon! As I've said umpteen times on PF, language difficulty's completely relative. Sooooo many folks out there claim English is "the easiest language", for instance. Those are usually the ones whose English is the WORST:-) Having taken a closer look at Lithuanian, I can safely say that Polish is comparatively transparent by contrast. The former remains proverbially archaic and has definite vs. indefinite noun declensions, something Polish doesn't have.

Albanian also has "noun clitics", article endings tacked onto nouns (as with Bulgarian, Romanian and various Balkan languages). Almost every language, it appears, has it's share of seemingly impenetrable obstacles:-)

I have learned that it is really very subjective which languages are hard and which are easy. For example on Spanish pages it's often discussed which language is easier to learn for native Spanish speakers, German or Russian? Some Spaniards find German easier, but also some find Russian easier.

But I beliefe if you hear that a language is extremely hard, you are afraid of learning it and find it harder than when you hear that it isn't that hard. That's why my mission here is to make Polish looking relatively easy (with some comments I have definetally overdone), because I know many persons who really wanted to learn Polish but didn't try it because they have heared that it is so difficult.

I beliefe that I can pick up it quite easilly because I don't let dissmotivate me by such comments and now I want to motivate others to learn it.

I don't find Polish extremely difficult but I would really say that it is "one of the most beautiful languages in world".

Polish is easy to learn for people from Slavic countries, I'd say...

But I don't speak another slavic language, it's my first one! I just speak German, English, Spanish and have had Latin at School.

Thank you for admitting to my point


That's a new one and although I can't judge it objectively it almost always sounds bad for foreigners.

I always thought it sounded very nice. Before I came to PL I'd heard plenty - I grew up hearing it spoken daily for various reasons and liked it. Those were mostly older people from the East of the country and sounded different. When I first arrived there, I was surprised how different it sounded, but it still doesn't sound bad.

With the possible exception of the Poznań accent.

Jan Movie, I'm still curious as to whether you think Polish is harder than English, that is, to learn to speak/write CORRECTLY, not just acceptably:-) Is your Spanish on the same "level" as your English, or can only a native Spanish speaker be the judgeLOL

Polish does have more morphological permutations and exceptions than many other Slavic language, except perhaps for Czech (I'm told).

At the"Matura" (final examination) in Austria i got a "3" (medium) in English. But many of my classmates got a 4 or didn't even pass it at the first time. Why should I speak/write perfectly English since I have never been to an English speaking country for more than 3 weeks? I can say that there are many foreigners in Austria (and Germany) who speak probably worse German than I speak English despite they are living there for already many years.

Since Polish is my first slavic language i don't know how difficult the others are. I have looked a bit in Slovene and the Serbo-Croatian languages (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian) and I would say that Polish is indeed harder than them but not by much. About Czech, i trust Magdalena because she knows both languages and seems to have a very good linguistic knowledge.

Noone's "expecting" you to know perfect English, that is, to know English other than the way you do, Jan Movie. One would however expect such were you to announce to this Forum that you're an English instructor in Austria, for example:-) Then one might indeed hold you up to a higher standard. Take my Polish as another instance. While noone here expects my Polish to be perfect for someone who spent at most several days in Poland, I don't teach the language either:-)

The latter's another story entirely (eine voellig andere Kiste).

I don't think Polish is the hardest language to learn, I tried Chinese and gave up, really. Perhaps I'l come back to it some time though. For me learning Polish wasn't a challenge, it just came naturally. My great grandmother is of Polish descent, maybe my ability to quickly learn Polish lies in my blood ;) Or maybe it's because I took an intensive Polish course. It was really cool and efficient.

You think correct because it is not.

Source:
Native Polish speaker

Language ease vs. difficulty's relative anyhow:-)

Even English is much harder than Polish in my opinion since it has huge vocabulary, idioms and phrasal verbs.

I am a native German speaker, and I don't feel like Polish words are hard to pronounce. Yes, they might take some " repeats " here and there, but in general it doesn't make the entire language harder to me, just because some difficult sounding words. If you take your time to read them, you can easily pronounce them.

Just because you can't speak the language doesn't mean that others can't.

Polish is quite easy when you understand how it's constructed.

Poles can't speak Polish. Listening to them is painful. Even on the radio in Chicago, the "pros" speak without any accent but the flow is just not there. It's choppy, with hesitations as if to make it sound spontaneous and not pre-rehearsed. The best examples of this mental disorder can be seen watching the judges at the Polish singing competitions and their fake stumbling to express a simple point that a singer was excellent. None of this is done at American Got Talent. We construct sentences in milliseconds and say them almost as fluently as we read them - nouns, verbs, and the dressup words.

AMERICANS are the best in everything and everything is the biggest there....including people's sizes :-)