dtewi said: You know what language is difficult? Latin.
Oh. My. God.
There are like 130 (!?) different forms of one verb, 12 different forms of ONE noun, a handful of exceptions, and too many different conjugations and noun declensions (a declension being all the different forms of one noun).
Ugh... |
It is suspected that Vulgar Latin(the Latin that formed all romance languages and wasn't reconstructed), is actually much easier than Classical Latin, which is reconstructed btw. From what I can tell, most of the latin in writing is classical, while spoken latin is vulgar. That is because during those times, the literacy rate was obviously not up to par, and it was the minority educated patricians who were able to read and write. The majority of the people(Plebians) only spoke it, and when spoken it was in the form of vulgar latin. Latin is probably in the middle in terms of difficulty for a Native Speaker. I've been looking at Basque a lot lately, and it seems to be difficult for me due to it not being Indo-European. So a lot of things that you would assume to be 1:1 aren't. I've also been learning Japanese for a year, and while it is 1:1 I expected it not to be, so I'm progressing easily. Plus it has very simple grammer. Aparently some people boast Navajo as the hardest language to learn as a non-native. I would say the hardest languages for somebody coming from a European one, would definately be those of Amerindians. So Navajo might not be too off.