What is the hardest language to learn?
asks Connor, WA Answer from Kate Burridge: A. There are really two aspects to this question. One is the question of relative difficulty (i.e. it depends on where you start from). The other is whether there are some languages that are harder in some absolute sense. So firstly, if English is your mother tongue, its going to be far harder to learn a language that isnt closely related or linguistically related at all! For example, an English speaker would find Irish or Welsh difficult, more difficult than Dutch and German these are all relatives, but Dutch and German are near relatives, being in the same Germanic family as English. Even harder would be to learn languages from a completely different language family, say one of the Australian Aboriginal languages, or a Dravidian language like Tamil, an Amerindian language like Nootka or Navaho etc. The vocabulary would be very unfamiliar both in form and in content. And of course, as anyone who has learnt a language knows, vocabulary is a tr
