I forgot to add something to my post above.
Also, while earning my degree in Linguistics, one course required me to learn enough Navajo language to have a passable conversation. I actually managed to have a real, yet still passable, conversation with an actual Navajo a few years after I graduated. Note that Navajo is a tone language too.
I learned Korean through self-study while living in Seoul in 1977 and 1978. The writing system is easy enough, once you realize that it’s BS that “one sound matches one letter and one letter matches one sound”. It’s more a “phonemery” than an alphabet. Learn how the phonemes work in the language and then you’re golden.
In my view, all languages are equally difficult; they’re just difficult in different ways. German, while having a lot in common with English still has aspects that will trip up an English-speaker who’s not careful.
I also speak some Bahasa Malaysia. One of the things that tripped me up is the variety of roles reduplication plays in the grammar. There are quite a lot of loan words which made learning some of the vocabulary not so bad.
One of my personal projects a few years ago was to learn Hawaiian Pidgin. I enjoyed learning that and still can manage some respectable production in the language. A close friend who also majored in Linguistics and is also a native speaker of English says he cannot wrap his head around it; for much of the language, it’s just meaningless noise to him. Another friend who majored in English says he’d like to learn it too because he loves the Hawaiian Pidgin word for Old Testament: Da Befo Jesus Book. (You can read the the Hawaiian Pidgin Bible here.)
A few notes on writing systems follow.
Writing really isn’t necessarily indicative of the speech of the language. It’s a cultural artifact, an attempt at recording the language. Some systems do attempt to be representative of the sounds, while others are representative of the meaning, and yet others are a mix of those two concepts, yet again others are of some other idea. I’m fascinated by the variety of writing systems. If you find yourself as fascinated or even just a little bit, you can check out one of my favorite sites: Omniglot.
When I first learned Korean, I actually learned the Hangeul system first, then the spoken language. Back in 1977/8, having Hangeul under my belt was a help but not that much for actually writing the language the way it was done then. Hangeul was essentially just used for grammatical particles, native Korean words, and loan words from languages other than Chinese or Japanese; while Hanja (Chinese characters) was used for everything else. I did learn about a thousand Hanja during my year and a half in the 1970s. When I returned to Korea in 2005 and lived there until the middle of 2012, I was a bit disappointed that the use of Hanja is now minimal. My disappointment, IMHO, comes from the fact that I spent many hours studying them “back in the day”.
When I lived in Japan from 1990 to 1996, I was delighted that Japan also used Chinese characters (Kanji) in a similar manner as Korean. It didn’t take me too long to learn the two Kana syllabaries once I put my mind to it. What bugged me is that the Kanji are not the same as the Hanja! Japanese uses a set of simplified characters.
Now I’m living in China and I’m rather busy most of the time with my job, so I do feel that teaching English is interfering with my learning Chinese. And, of course, the Hanzi are not the same as either Hanja or Kanji–t’s a different set of simplified characters!
Let’s get back to the question posed in the OP. What language is hardest for a westerner? The answer is: it depends a lot on the particular westerner.
Another possible answer you might come to after reading a lot of comments on news sites is “English is obviously the hardest for that supposed native English speaker”.
Is there a different adjective in Yiddish to describe Ladino? I really enjoyed listening to Ladino when I watched Every Time We Say Goodbye.
Yiddish is meshuganah-cup. That’s how my Yiddish speaking grandmother described what she called speaking her native “Jewish.” The language was like a person to her, a sort of living memory of her own grandmother and a life she knew was being lost here in New York City to us modern Jews. She would sit there in our living room speaking it with my mom in front of my father and me and my bro – while making it clear she was making obnoxious comments about my dad. She used to call me Stace-lah and try to convince me that kiska was edible.
Oy.
I suggested Afrikaans because of its simplified grammar, such as the loss of gender (like English), loss of some verb forms, etc. While Frisian is more closely related to English, I think it preserves a somewhat more complex grammar than Afrikaans.
I like your post, but what is kiska? The only alleged foodstuff I’m able to find in a google search suggests that it’s a blood sausage, but somehow the idea of a Yiddish-speaking grandmother serving it kinda jars the expectations. I take it she didn’t keep kosher…
Written Chinese is practically a different language. It can textually represent various dialects of Chinese, even ones that are not mutually intelligible. There definitely is a relationship between the structure of Chinese characters and some pronunciation, but it’s nothing close to an alphabet.
It’s funny listening to Chinese with different accents try to agree on a word that’s used (e.g., the tone might be different between Nanjing and Chongqing Chinese). In order to agree on the word that’s being used, they’ll negotiate a different word that uses the same particle (part of the written character) that contains or represents the word they’re both trying to get across.
Actually, they’ll do this when trying to write names, too. My name is “He.” Which “He”? There are probably a dozen or more characters that indicate the “He” sound.
I really wish I spent more time on the characters, as it would be very useful for learning the Chinese version of what I’ll call cognates (but which probably have their own name). Like, e.g., “jue” which could mean any number of things. But if I were able to read that character than I would know that “jue de” and “gan jue” are closely related, rather than just yet another Chinese homophone (like, say, “dian” or “ma”).
One of my South African friends recently recounted that when visiting Amsterdam he could understand Dutch only when concentrating carefully. Kind of like a Spanish-speaker hearing Portuguese. In Flanders listening to the local Dutch (Flemish) was easier for him. No one was able to understand his Afrikaans and so everyone usually settled on English in the end.
I wonder just how useful Afrikaans would be to learn these days?
There are some other things about the Piraha that IMHO would make the study of their DNA quite interesting.
I’ve also heard that Russian and Navajo are very hard for native English speakers to learn.
Maybe if I spell it kishke. 
Or stuffed derma?
It’s still right up there with gefilte fish on the list of gross and disgusting Jewish foods.
Balthisar writes:
> . . . various dialects of Chinese, even ones that are not mutually intelligible . . .
They’re all mutually unintelligible. The so-called dialects of Chinese are actually something like fourteen different languages.
To be fair, each of the Chinese languages does have a number of dialects.
Monty Im very jealous of your degree, as while I am far from bi-lingual, I find other languages cool, and love learning at the very least basic phrases from them. Its almost a semi hobby for me.
Have to ask this of you, and please don’t take this as any sort of insult to your degree, which like I said, I kinda wish I had: how far away are we from a true “Babel Fish” app where you can stick an earphone in and hear a foreign language speaker, and the app translates what they said, and gives you the response?
In other words, is learning major foreign languages going to be a thing of the past due to electronic translators?
Even if so, what benefits does being a Linguistics degree holder afford you even if this happens? Im guessing many but please tell us, again not being a smart ass but an admirer of your massive scholarly accomplishments.
Those are different languages. “Shanghai dialect” is different than “Chongqing dialect,” and they’re mostly mutually intelligible, and they’ve seemed to work out how to understand each other.
Of course I say “mostly” because they’re not just localized accents; they are different dialects.
If you take a Chinese language like Tai Lü (the government will claim this is Chinese), it’s a completely different language with a different script. I’m not counting that as a dialect, but the government will happily claim it’s Chinese! (There are a lot of Chinese languages like this.)
Tai Lü is a completely unrelated language which just happens to also be spoken in China. Nobody except the Chinese government calls it a Chinese language. The Chinese government lies like crazy in order to prevent the country from splitting up into smaller pieces. One thing they lie about is the number of languages spoken in the country. They call things merely dialects when they are actually different languages.
There are something like fourteen different languages which are referred to by most linguists as Chinese: Gan, Hakka, Huizhou, Jinyu, Mandarin, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Nan, Min Zhong, Pu-Xian, Wu, Xiang, Yue, and Dungan. They are all mutually unintelligible. Dungan isn’t spoken in China actually. It’s only spoken in Kyrgyzstan. Each of those fourteen languages has dialects of its own which are truly dialects in so far as they are mutually unintelligible. The Chinese languages are part of a language family known as Sino-Tibetan which is fairly large. It includes something like 457 languages. They are all related to the Chinese languages, but they are even further from them than they are from another.
Navajo has all these strange sounds that don’t appear anywhere else. That’s why Navajo were used as code talkers in WWII. The Japanese never could break the code even though the “code” was just Navajo. The Japanese were all like, “What the fuck?!?”
And that makes me think of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Lots of clicking noises in their language.
It was more than just Navajo. It was coded words spoken in Navajo.
Speaking of Diné Bizáád (Navajo), it’s my candidate for hardest to learn of the ones I’ve tried. The verb conjugations are incredibly gnarly.
I agree with **Lemur866 **that Italian is one of the easiest for most of us, on the same level as Spanish. However it does have silent h, some digraphs that have to be specially learned, and the stress is marked with a grave accent when it falls on the final syllable. You have to learn when to pronounce /e/ and /o/ close or open. But compared to almost any language except Spanish and Finnish, the orthography/pronunciation can be learned very quickly and easily.
Malay and Indonesian are two versions of the exact same language, adapted to different nationalities. While Malay is the dominant language of Malaysia, it actually originated in nearby parts of Indonesia. Both are pretty simple and intuitive grammatically, where the’re no gender, nouns have no declensions, and verbs do not conjugate for person, number, or even tense. Verbs do get morphology for aspect, which is done with prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes (mostly prefixes). The only tricky bit is learning how the initial sound can change (phonotactics) when a prefix is applied. But it’s a regular, straightforward system and not hard to learn.
Everybody always mentions Indonesian and forgets about Malay (except Monty above mentioned Bahasa Malaysia). Of the two, Malay is distinctly easier only because it spells out words instead of turning half of them into abbreviations like Indonesian does. You can learn the grammar just fine, but you’ll be at sea in Indonesian unless you have a resource for all the abbreviations used in the fields of government, military, academia, and the like. Speaking plain street Indonesian is in practice the same as speaking Malay, though. Southern Malaysia, like Johor, speaks with an accent similar to Indonesian. Malaysia has made their official standard accent that of Kedah in the north, which is where the two most influential prime ministers came from, and probably also to differentiate from Indonesian. But the difference in accents is very small, all the same. On the whole there’s less difference between Malay and Indonesian than there is between British English and American English—except for all those damn abbreviations.
I’d like to hear more about this. The phonemes don’t seem that hard to me, except for the distinction between e.g. /tʃ/ (ch as in “Cheetos”), /tʃʰ/, and /tʃʼ/. Do these cause a lot of word confusions? Because otherwise, I thought the main problem was that the language was so alien to Japanese standards.
I’ve read that for English speakers, Arabic is right up there with Chinese as the hardest to learn
In post #34 I wrote:
> . . . which are truly dialects in so far as they are mutually unintelligible . . .
I meant:
> . . . which are truly dialects in so far as they are mutually intelligible . . .
I’m starting Korean class next week. Pretty sure that is going to be extremely difficult.
I’ve taken Latin, German, and Spanish.
I haven’t become fluent in any of them, but Spanish was the most intuitive for myself to pick up.