Most useful language and hardest language

[DonDanny]

THANK YOU to all of them who posted their thoughts

[ekalicious]

most useful: English, French, German, Spanish

hardest: Georgian (i'm Georgian and it really is a very very hard language ) , Asian languages, Arabic

[LLLS]

My favorite language is russian because I'm from Russia.
And the hardest language IMHO maybe japanese.

[tedinkyyy]

Uhh, a topic for me
The most useful languages, I'd say: English,Spanish..maybe German,French also.. I mean they're most widely used in the whole world.
My favourite and most hard to learn language is the same and it's Slovenian Believe me,it's the hardest Slavic language u can imagine ... but it sounds like a fairytale, so cute But as for usefulness... it's spoken by only 2 million...
I also absolutely LOVE Croatian,Bosnian and Serbian ... they sound a bit harsher (especially Serbian) than the other Slavic ones but I'd say that's their charm
And of course Russian, it's kinda in my blood becuz my mum is a Russian philologist... I began learning words from it at the age of 9.
Well, it's seen I'm a student of Slavic studies But I also love non-slavic ones of course

[Crisa]

In my opinion the most useful languages are English , Spanish and French.
English used to be my favorite one , but after studied it 10 years I'm not into it anymore and it is a very easy language to learn.
Now my favorites are French (I have to relearn it ) for being sensual and Arabic (also one of the hardest, maybe because I haven't got time to study it...). Another hard language for me is Slovenian although I've lived there for 3 months and I learn only some words ...

[PollyBG]

To me the hardest language is Finnish.For IT you will need one year to learn the basic and then another 3 in order to learn all the cases and the grammar rules and to be able to cope with everyday situations.Ahh and one year more to learn the so called *puhekieli* - spoken language which is like another language But hard or not I love Finnish and hope someday I'll speak it fluently.Actually all northern languages are difficult to learn. In addition to this Hungarian language has about 30-34 cases!!!!!!Probably this is the hardest language ever!!!

[panselinos]

In addition to this Hungarian language has about 30-34 cases!!!!!!

Not really.

[Hatshepsut]

English and french are the most useful

i would like to learn turkish , albanian , portuguese and spanich

[Milka]

Which language do you like most and which language is hardest to learn..
Post your thoughts here please..

The hardest to learn no doubt is Sanscrit. It requires 2-3 decades to master. It can be most useful in that it is the oldest preserved language -- which once was in Europe -- and through it I can search the roots and meaning of my native Macedonian (or other Indoeuropan) words.

Similarly difficult to learn is Ottoman Turkish.

For my study of history, Latin is helpful as well as medieval Macedonian.


Naturally, most useful is English, the "lingua franca" of today and to a lesser extent French and German (in that order) as these were the imperial language of late.

Russian can be important for scientists as there is the largest number of printed books in math and similar disciplines in Russian.

[craigaio]

I have studied the following to different levels:

Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Malayalam, Persian, Japanese, Yoruba (spoken in Nigeria)...

and I have to say that in my opinion Arabic is the hardest to learn for its very complex grammar, the many dialects and the fact that the Classical language - which you need to read books, newspapers and listen to the news on TV, is very different from the dialects although native Arabs will tell you otherwise. In fact Arabic would not be so difficult if they chose just one language to use rather than the many varieties in use.

Chinese and Japanese have the hardest writing - most scripts in the world you can learn within 1 week to a month of studying hard (including Arabic and all the Indian languages) - but these two are exceptions and more likely to take years.

Most beautiful languages - this one is very difficult because the most beautiful language depends on personal opinion. For example, to my ears, Italian sounds like music whereas Arabic sounds very agressive - but I still find Arabic beautiful for its harsh sounds.
Some languages are also more poetic than others. Indians tend to use their languages beautifully

[Carmen123]

I think the most useful language is english.

I could imagine that chinese or japanese must be really hard to learn as they have ac ompletelly different way of writing and I have heard that words change their meaning due to the way they are spoken.

yes, i agree with you that English is the most useful language in the word now. But i am not sure in the future.


Chinese have some its own rules like many other languages. But that is difficult as long as you study had. Every language is easy if you get familiar with it. Good luck to language learner.

[Lya]

I've studied French, Italian, English, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, German, Swedish and Norwegian. And of all that I find German and Finnish the most difficult languages. And Japanese have the hardest wrinting.

And I agree, English is the most useful language by now.

And for me the most beautiful languages are Turkish and Arabian, I like how they sound. I hope I can study these language one day.

[pinky_girl]

there is no doubt that English is the most useful language and fortunately i think it's the easiest one to learn...but i guess that German must be the hardest language and my favorite language is French which i'm learning right now and it's really sweet....

[Daki Kibe]

Most useful?
At this day and time, English, followed by Chinese (considering China's increasingly optimistic economic future).

Most difficult?
I learn Japanese and Chinese, and I think when it comes to memorising the actual alphabet itself (or the pictograms/kanji in Chinese), it's insanely hard. But that's about the only difficult aspect of the language. The grammar is really easy to pick up on. No neuters, for a start.

Then there's my mother tongue, Telugu (a South Indian language), which, despite it being my mother tongue, I can't read/write. The grammar and the script are both really hard.

My mother used to take Russian in college and she used to find the grammar hard. She said it was probably the toughest language she knew of. But the alphabet is really easy to learn. I got it all within 10 minutes (and I've now forgotten it so it was kind of pointless -_-).

So it's either Chinese and Japanese where the grammar is pretty easy but the alphabet is a bit of a pain, or Russian where the alphabet is dead easy but the grammar is pure torture (or so my mother says).

Overall, I'd probably say most Nordic/Slavic languages are really tough to learn. But that would depend on one's flair for languages, I presume.

[1061-001]

Hey, I see this topic just now. For me the most useful languages are english and german. In a huge part of Europe people speak german. There is Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and in the BeNeLux-States (do we call them like this, or this phrase is fully german? /BeNeLux-Staaten/ ) people can undertand it too. Since I speak both of this 2, they are the most useful for me.
I can't judge it, but probably hungarian.
If you ask me, I would say, it's pretty easy Ok, everyone says it, if it's his/her native language
And finally my favourite language, what I want to learn is croatian. The best ever. Svaka čast Hrvatska, svaka čast!

[ellyali]

To me useful languages:
English, Arabic, French, Hindi, Mandarin (Chinese also but this dialect is the standard).

I asked my Chinese friends to teach me spoken Mandarin; when I speak to them they can understand me not those native speakers from China.
Characters and sounds are totally vital, to be understood. I can barely make it even with Hanyu Pinyin.

Arabic besides learning the characters or glottal sounds the grammar is a handful. Arabic is a rich language and never fails to have exceptions. Learning and practicing it is important. In a country like mine where no one speaks Arabic, I feel handicapped. That's why I am here.

French good news: close to English grammar, bad news; hard to pronounce
(for me at least) depends cause I am an Asian.

Hindi I dont want to start with the scripts, definitely needs patience of steel if you don't have any experience in this. Patience and love. Beautiful language even when spoken in colloquial manner. Thank you Bollywood.

Hard languages to me:
Arabic, French, Hindi, Russian, Tamil, Hebrew, Persian.

The reason mostly/likely being to tackle the masculine and feminine plurals and /or adjectives.

However when my friend told me Malay is an easy language, I totally disagreed. We have different types of A in English a ball , a book, a flower.
In Malay we don't use a for everything , it depends on the noun. EG:

Book = Buku
A book = sebuah buku
Ball = Bola
A ball = sebiji bola

I think those who studied languages can understand this pattern.

My bottomline is..
All Languages, have their own credibilty , their beauty; their significance and their pros and cons. No one can say which language supercedes the other. It depends on where you are and what you are attracted to. No one can master all this :-
from WikiAnswers

There are an estimated 100000000000 recognized languages in the world.
750 are lost every year. Most of them are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_d...#ixzz17XHv2TU6

Who knows what else they are speaking out there right. Hence no matter what language we are intending to learn in the future to come or for those potential language enthusiasts
every language stands on its own league

(Thank you, Shokrane, Merci, Xie Xie, Ramba Nandri, Tessekur Ederim, Terima Kasih, Arigato, Gamsa Hameda, Shokriya, Taksomyket)

[Kabelsko]

English is an obvious answer, but French is also very useful. As for the most difficult languages, I'd say Hungarian, Turkish and Mongolian are up there.

[Black Sea]

English is useful of course

hardest language is Japanese maybe
easiest is Persian

[The_Mane]

The most useful - English, no doubt.

The one i like most - Russian: it just sounds great and somehow mysterious. Just started to learn it but I'm not really good at it yet. Besides Russian there is also Finnish which i love. If you want to say something as precisely as possible, use finnish. The ones who speak it will know what i mean. Funny thing about it is that it's one of those languages where someone who hears it but can't understand it gets absolutely NOTHING, not just words, also feelings and stuff. At least to me it seems that i always sound the same when speaking finnish, no matter if I'm angry, happy, surprised or whatever.

The hardest - depends on how far you want to get. Finnish for example is very hard at the beginning, but once you understand the system, how it works (the consonant gradiation, vowel harmony, the endings and so on) you will find out that it's always the same. In the beginning you learned that the ending for the first person singular is -n, and it will always be -n. No matter which tense, verb or whatever. It's always -n. You can now think about the same with almost all other endings, not only for conjugation. The hardest languages to get onto the level of a native speaker are the ones that have a lot of irregular stuff in them - especially languages as German with 3 articles and a lot of irregular verb forms. There you really need a special feeling for it - because whenever you learn a new word you have to remember its article or if it's a verb its irregular forms if it has any. And then you have to keep that in mind until you use it the next time. But of course that's not necessary for speaking it fluently. Especially in Austria people don't really care about articles

[OutofControl]

In my country all the people try to learn English. because it's very useful when you search for a scientific article, use a computer, read a manual and many other cases.

I like Spanish so maybe try to learn it !

My favorite language is Persian. maybe it's hard for a foreign person to learn it correctly but it's worth to learn it.