Which languages take the longest to learn?
The overall hardness of a language can be seen as the sum of the difficulty of its writing system, sounds, words and grammar. These come in different proportions: one professor of Chinese has called it the most difficult language he has ever learned to write and the easiest he has learned to speak.
None of the hardest languages is written with the Latin alphabet used by most European languages. Chinese stands out for its difficulty. It is commonly said that a learner must memorise around 2,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper. Japanese is (mostly) written with a subset of the Chinese characters, but most characters can be given either a Japanese or Chinese pronunciation, making the task mind-tangling in that language too.
A second way languages can be hard is with sounds and distinctions that do not exist in the learner’s language. Mandarin and Cantonese have tones, meaning ma with an even pitch and ma with a falling one are different words. (Mandarin has four tones; Cantonese has more, though the number is disputed.)
The lexicon obviously matters too. Most European languages share an ancestor (called proto-Indo-European) and so their words, too, often come in related pairs. Languages unrelated to the European ones (Arabic from the Semitic family, or Chinese from the Sino-Tibetan one) will not only lack the “genetic” overlap in vocabulary. They are culturally distant, and so have far less borrowed European vocabulary too.
Finally there is grammar. Many people associate tricky grammar with long lists of endings that change according to a word’s use in a sentence. Mandarin, though, almost entirely lacks such inflection, as linguists call it. Foreign grammar is also difficult to the extent that it makes distinctions your language does not.
Source: The Economist
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