What's the most difficult language to lea

Although I think your first language may be the hardest to learn, technically speaking. It's hard to learn a language when you could not speak any other language in the first place. Ah ha, got you there.

The most difficult language? It is of course foreign one

I have heard that the hardest languages to learn from Indo-European are Baltic ones - Latvian and Lithuanian, due to very complex grammar and they both are mutually unintelligible, because of different influences from Finnic, Germanic and Slavic.

Like has already been pointed out, it depends entirely upon what your native tongue is. Studying a language related to your own is always easier than studying one that is so remote it doesn't even share the same alphabet or sentence structure.

As a Norwegian I suppose I'm favourably disposed for learning English, though it's been more like a natural process of assimilation than one of teaching. I've also studied Spanish for three years, which while harder than English I also found quite agreeable. French I studied last summer on my own, and I must say it's a fair bit harder than Spanish, since there is far less grammatical consistency and a pronounciation that is awkward for one used to rolling his r's. Latin, which I studied for one semester at university, is much harder than both Spanish and French, in fact it didn't really strike me how easy Spanish was until I tried to do Latin.

One a side note, I heard one linguist say Dutch would be the easiest language for a Norwegian to learn, maybe I'll check up on that.

It would be Pashtoo

Chinese is the most difficult language. Egyptians speak arabic. 

From what I've heard (and even my own personal experience), the hardest language to learn is Hungarian. Granted, the alphabet is easy since it's the latin one. But the vocabulary doesn't resemble any other language (even Finnish), the pronounciation is tricky and the grammar is exceedingly complicated.

Originally posted by pinguin Well, it depends from which mother language one comes from. Mine is Spanish so I can understand most of what is written in Latin. Besides, when I saw "The Passion" of Gibson, and I listened those Romans speaking latin, I could follow them without much effort :)   For me, the easiest languages are Portuguese, Italian and French in that order. English is the non-Latin language more easy to learn. All the rest are a lot more difficult but European languages like German and Russian seem relatively accessible for me.   Non-European languages are another matter. Korean, Egyptian and Arabic, together with Polynesian and Native American languages, seem to me in a similar level of difficulty, which is to learn a language which has an alphabet, and that is not in anyway related with the Indo-European languages.   Worst of all is Chinese, because is a tonal language, it is written with ideograms, and has no point in contact at all with western culture.   Pinguin

Agree point by point, i can't say it better

Chinese would be the most difficult, for reaons already mentioned.

non certus lingua anglorum super grammaticum latinae constricta.

just trying that for fun. anyways, i recently heard that french is germans speaking latin. this is all in response to the claim that english grammar is based on latin.

while many things we share in common, that has rather to do with the common antecedant of indo-european. english grammar derives, rather, from germanic (germanic, not german).

a simple example explaining:

it's me. (demonstrative + 3rd person + accusative)
c'est moi. (" " + " " + " ")
[insert german, i know it follows this pattern, but don't know the specific wording]

soy yo. (1st person + nominative)
sono io, etc

on difficulty of languages

amharic (ethiopian) is ridiculously difficult. in their script, every letter has 7 variations, depending on which vowels it is connected to. i.e. ha, hee, hay, ho, hu, heh, and h-. 7 x 29 = too many letters. i am sketchy on the grammar, but i believe verbs have genders while nouns and adjectives do not.

so

dehna neh?  - how are you (lit. are you well/esta' bien/va bene?) [to a male]

and dehna nesh? [same, to a female]

also, i found the Korean alphabet to be relatively simple, and perhaps the easier of the oriental languages.

vietnamese is also very difficult because the emphasis tone plays in conveying various meanings for the same sound.