Not sure if this should be in IMHO, but what would be the most difficult ‘living’ language for me (a native UK English speaker), discounting travel distance (eg I could hop over to France pretty much at will, money notwithstanding).
I’m guessing one of the sub-Saharan African languages?
pukey
It may just be English.
Dammit, I misread that!
Perhaps Chinese would be rather difficult as well. It has something like three alphabets.
It wouldn’t be possible to single out just one. Too much depends on the individual.
That said, Chinese, Finnish and Hungarian are all said to be extremely difficult for native English speakers to learn.
I’ll give you a language you can make a long day trip to hear - Basque.
Basque has a bad reputation among linguists for difficulty when one is trying to learn it the old-school way, in a classroom setting. The grammar is pretty daunting because of many linguistic factors.
To bowdlerize considerably, Basque words just seem to change too damn much, even to convey the slightest shades of meaning. In English, you could ask for ‘some ketchup’, ‘a spot of ketchup’, and ‘lots of ketchup’ – and the words ‘some’, ‘spot’, and ‘lots’ can be used similarly with many different things (mayonnaise, praise, rain, etc.) In Basque, however, you can’t do that – it’s more like ‘ketchupaz’ means ‘some ketchup’, ‘ketchupiza’ means ‘a spot of ketchup’, and ‘ketchuporza’ means ‘lots of ketchup’ (not real Basque endings). Plus, those endings may or may not be applicable to different words, so the memory of the Basque learner is pushed to the limits. Mentally sorting and choosing the right form in which to use a noun really can mess with one’s attempts at Basque fluency.
That’s only one difficulty with Basque. Another is the wide use of the ergative construction, which (very roughly) reverses the concepts of Subject and Object in Basque sentences … but not always! When the ergative construction is used and when it is not can seem pretty haphazard and counter-intuitive to a non-native Basque speaker.
You may think you’re ordering a latte in a Bilbao cafe, but your Basque waiter hears ‘A latte is ordering me’! Then you go down the street to the butcher shop. To compensate for your coffeeshop foible, you tell the butcher in Basque that ‘Some beef orders me’. But no! You should NOT use the ergative in that case! You should have just said ‘I’d like to order some beef’! (not real Basque examples, but you get the idea)!
All that said, I doubt learning stock phrases (‘One beer, please’, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’, etc.) are any more difficult in Basque than in any other language. Also, Basque words are very easy to learn to pronounce - no tricky sounds.
Other European contenders include Hungarian (complex grammar) and Estonian (tough pronounciation).
Daowajan, to my knowledge Chinese doesn’t have three scripts, just one, the Chinese characters, and Chinese folks use anywhere from 10K to 20K characters. Japanese, however, does have three scripts; the Chinese characters, which Japanese folk call kanji–Japanese use anywhere from 3K to 5K of the Chinese characters; hiragana, phonetic symbols used in conjunction with Chinese characters or alone for Japanese words; and katakana, phonetic symbols used for words in non-Japanese languages.
But I agree that Japanese is difficult–I’ll rank it the third most difficult language behind Navajo and Chinese–because in addition to learning three scripts, for the standard Tokyo variety there are three levels on which to speak it: most formal, neutral, and humble. It can get confusing when folks use contractions of verb forms too. Then there are varieties that women use–women generally must be more polite than men–and varieties that men speak. It is also tricky because there are certain polite forms one must use for members in one’s in-group (family and friends) and certain polite forms that one must use in when talking to folks who are outside of one’s in-group (non-family and friends). And of course there are regional differences in pronunciation say between the Oosaka variety and the Tokyo variety. Japanese is difficult too because it is such a polite and indirect language, but that’s what makes it fascinating to study. 
As far as the most difficult language, hmmm. I’m thinking Navajo because this language does some really funky things with subordinate clauses.
I’ll give the nine plus varieties of Chinese my vote for second place because one must remember the tone(s) of a word as well as the Chinese characters.
I’m unfamiliar with varieties of African tonal languages, but I’ll say that many tonal languages are very difficult to master, particularly if your native tongue has no tonal inflections.
Now having said all of this, folks who are native speakers or experts of any of Chinese, Navajo, or Japanese, please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.
I did a google.com search on ‘most difficult language’ and came up with several Christian sites that do Bible translations. This site
http://www.ripnet.org/triumphant/evangtv.htm
states: “The world’s most difficult language is spoken in the Caucasus region. So claims the Guinness Book of Records. The language of Tabasaran is classified as the most difficult language according to grammatical complexity. The Tabasaran language has the most cases or endings to words.”
Did a quick Guinness search but couldn’t find any language entries.
Skimming through a few related sites it appears that several languages in the Caucasus region are among the most difficult and one classification of Tabasaran lists ‘two unintelligible dialects.’
I suggest you don’t holiday there - California is nice and the language is only marginally different from your own.
I have heard that Finnish is one of the most difficult languages. I met a linguist once who specialized in Northern European languages, but even for him Finnish was very hard (it is not really related to the languages of Finland’s neighboring countries). He said he’d had an easier time learning Korean than Finnish.
You might be interested in an ongoing controversy that appeared in the pages of Triumph of the Straight Dope, in the How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters? column:
What about the clicking language they used in “The Gods must be crazy”?
I have always heard it is English. No wonder I have such trouble with it should have been born Italian or something. 
Finnish is not an easy language to learn if you are a native born endlish speaker. Too many vowel combinations.
IMO, the hardest language would depend on your native tongue. I would assume that learning one of the more complex Asian languages for a speaker who uses a phonetic alphabet would be extremely hard and vice versa. Putting aside languages in which one would have to learn a new alphabet I would say it would be Finnish. When I am in Latin class and we complain about declensions and case endings my teacher always retorts back don’t complain Finnish has 37 case endings. I am not sure if she is right about the number, but that must be amazingly hard.
If it wasn’t for all the exceptions, English would be a pretty easy language. In english there are no genders, adjectives don’t have to agree with number or gender. I have a theory that as time progresses languages get easier over time. Just a theory.
[hijack] Slight hijack here since we are on the topic, what would be the easiest language. [/hijack]
For the hardest, I nominate Finnish, or pretty much any Finno-Ugric language. It took me a month to figure out what a ‘case’ is when I started learning German, and I still sometimes trip over my tongue when trying to figure out whether to use the accusative or the dative…
For the easiest (that I know of), I’d say Danish, although I may be wrong. Verbs do not inflect, pronunciation seems pretty consistent and the case system… Let’s say that Danish is easier, gramatically, than English (although I may be wrong. IANADanish-speaker).
What about Japanese using the Roman alphabet? I’m pretty sure that the Japanese know how to read Roman letters (baseball team thread a few months ago said that, I think), and Japanese’s grammar is a piece of cake.
It’s gotta be Esperanto. It is one of only a few designed from the ground up, and has no irregular constructs.
But since it is a blend of european languages, it would probably be more difficult to master by a native asian speaker than a european.
At the Defensive language institute, if I remember various conversations correctly
(The higher the language category, the higher the difficulty)
Category 5:
English
Category 4:
Arabic
Chinese
Korean
Japanese
Category 3:
Russian
Persian Farsey (Pharsey? I don’t know)
Category 2:
Spanish
French
Italian
This is by no means anywhere near complete list, just the more commonly taught languages. And I’m sure, with the exception of English of course, that the difficulty is based on a native English speaker’s point of view, the romantic languages being Cat2.
From the viewpoint of somone learning Korean:
I have been told that Chinese is easier than Korean, due to the fact that the sentence structure and grammar are both almost identical to English in Chinese, while in Korean, word order and grammar are…not.
What’s considered difficult in Chinese is the characters, but you have to learn a good many Chinese characters in Korean and Japanese as well, under the guise of the names Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Korean alphabet is very simple;to quote a video tape we saw: " a wise man learn Hangul[the written Korean language] in one day; even a baboon can learn in one week". It was designed to be easily learned by the formally illiterate majority of Korea, who had before only used Chinese as a written language. Looking at the standard Japanese alphabet, there seems to be a few more consonants, and therefore more difficult. As I don’t know anything about Japanese grammar and the majority of the language, I don’t know how it rates difficulty-wise in comparison to Korean.
But, to get to the point, no, I don’t believe Chinese is the most difficult. English? probably, especially if you’re not familiar at all with romantic languages; even if you are, it seems that English is a language almost completely composed of jargon and such centered on each region it’s spoken in, which has to be a pain in the ass. And a language whose modern form was developed with no structure guiding it whatsoever must have kooky grammar for an outsider.
So far, the hardest part of learning Russian is the alphabet. Once you have that, it’s pretty easy-it’s a very phonetic language, and there’s no syntax structure, which makes things much simpler. No auxilary verbs, either.
It’s remembering all the words though…
Yeah, but what about all that perfective/imperfective stuff? That’s what I found hardest about Russian. Understanding when to use which. The alphabet and the pronunciation actually took very little time compared to that.
I did take Finnish (although only for a semester), and it was pretty hard…FTR, the figure given to me was 16 cases; declining nouns was quite difficult. I have varying levels of experience with learning Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Irish Gaelic (although my instructor just called it Irish), Finnish, Spanish, and French, and I’d have to say Finnish takes it going away (although Irish has some pretty funky pronunciations).
Let me chime in here.
First, I guess you’ve got to define the level of fluency. The wide adoption of English as a “trade language” would suggest it isn’t that hard to reach a basic level of fluency. However, English grammer is pretty difficult for non native speakers to master with native level fluency.
As for Mandarin Chinese, the grammer is laughingly simple. Many different ways of structuring the grammer that are all considered correct. The tones and pronunciation are difficult but certainly not impossible if you put the time into it. The real bear in learning Chinese is rote memorization of thousands of characters. It takes a long time even for native Chinese speakers to master the written word. The characters also compound the difficulty in learning the language because it takes a lot of time to look up words. As a University student majoring in Chinese, I spent at least 1-2 hours a day simply looking up characters in addition to what would be pretty tradional language study.
Chinese is also a very logical language. If you don’t know a word, chances are decent you can guess the meaning or the word. This is akin to the word “rail road” in English. Litterally, a road made out of rails. In Chinese, it is “tielu” or iron road. There are hundreds if not thousands of examples of Chinese words where if you combine two parts together it literally means the sum of the two parts.
Japanese, which I have only very basic fluency in, has pretty complicated grammar. Proununciation is not overly difficult and it uses practically no tones. The three writing systems actually are very convenient and make the language a lot more wieldy. It is also complicated by several different codified forms of speech for different situations. [English does this as well, you use different language at the church social than you do slamming beers at a wet t-shirt contest. The difference in Japanese it is much more codified, so while very difficult there is a “rulebook” to follow.]
IMHO, a basic level of communication in Japanese is not that difficult. That’s all I reached. However, as soon as you try to speak gramatically correctly, with the correct level of address to the other person, and all that, it gets real difficult fast.
Again, the OP should define what level of fluency we’re talking about.
Nik ez dut uste. Euskara oso polita da.
Basque definitely has more noun cases and tenses than any other language I’ve encountered - I have sheets of material given to me by an acquaintance of mine showing everything, and they’re packed solid with info.
My guess would be any language that has a fairly extensive system of conjugations and declensions, like Basque or (if I understand their structures correctly) Finnish and Hungarian. Remembering what case or declension to use in what context is always a pain. Far more so than simple vocabulary memorization.