What is the easiest language to learn and what is the hardest language to learn?
As you can see from all the other answers, it depends on your native language. People are saying that English is the easiest because they speak it already. For people to learn it and speak it fluently is a huge task. Being a native English speaker, I found French more natural and logical. I am also learning Chinese which I believe is the hardest language to learn. I’m doing Mandarin which is easier than Cantonese. First there are spoken tones meaning the word ‘ma’ can be pronounced in 5 (9 in Cantonese) different ways – this is the same with all words so you have to be able to distinguish between the tones. Next is writing. Each character has at least one pronunciation and you’ll need a fluent knowledge of 3,000 to be able to read a newspaper. Looking at a character won’t tell you how to pronounce it – you just have to learn. In opposition to Japanese and Korean which do have alphabetic writing systems as well as characters, Chinese is very hard to learn.
