In your opinion, of course.

Not getting much action, I see. You've picked a pretty esoteric assortment. How many of our members know enough about Finnish or Basque to be able to rate them?

I think you'll get a different consensus from each language community. Of the languages that are commonly studied in America, I suspect most Americans would vote for Russian as the hardest to learn. But Germans would probably not feel that way and Czechs of course think it's fairly easy.

Of course I don't know which is hardest to learn because I've never tried learning any of them. I have read Finnish, Icelandic, Turk and Asian tongues are most difficult for English speakers. But learning Arabic would be most challenging imo. A completely different language world in every way. So much emphasis on inflection. Mandarin would be my 2nd choice.

When I started to learn Russian at age 13 we were told that we'd picked the correct course (a 3rd language was compulsory for the stream I was in, everyone did French) and that the German students had picked the harder choice.
Supposedly Russian started off difficult and got easier, whereas, we were told, German started easy and got progressively more difficult.
Strangely enough the guys who'd picked German had been told exactly the same, but reversed...
I took German a few years later and didn't find either particularly difficult, and then found that I had few problems picking up snippets of Italian, Czech, Portuguese, Polish or Spanish (which my then-wife spoke as a second language) or Japanese, which a couple of friends took courses in.
I've since started (on and off) learning Arabic (but only written).

Of the few I've tried to learn, Greek has to be the toughest. Its extreme inflective nature means that, for a single verb in English, there can be effectively 15 different words in Greek.

Voted for Mandarin actually, because I know nothing about the others listed - except that Arabic and Japanese are the quintessential agglutinative languages.

BTW: just how many languages do you speak, Oli? You seem to have had a varied history of linguistic learning.

Few of them well but I read (sufficient for my purposes) most of the European languages, and enough to get my head kicked in in most countries round the world... :-)
French is my second best (after English of course), then German. Russian is nearly good enough to get through the day - but most of my languages I learnt for military technology purposes, so it's specialised, not conversational.

Not getting much action, I see. You've picked a pretty esoteric assortment. How many of our members know enough about Finnish or Basque to be able to rate them?

I think you'll get a different consensus from each language community. Of the languages that are commonly studied in America, I suspect most Americans would vote for Russian as the hardest to learn. But Germans would probably not feel that way and Czechs of course think it's fairly easy.

i know finnish looks like elvish from lord of the rings and is a very pretty language.


peace.

Most African languages are the hardest to learn, I've tried to learn some of them to no avail. Arabic seem impossibly hard too

english becusase so many word mean the same thing

Not getting much action, I see. You've picked a pretty esoteric assortment. How many of our members know enough about Finnish or Basque to be able to rate them?

I think you'll get a different consensus from each language community. Of the languages that are commonly studied in America, I suspect most Americans would vote for Russian as the hardest to learn. But Germans would probably not feel that way and Czechs of course think it's fairly easy.

Finnish is difficult to learn because the words have no relationship to other European languages. There is no way you can guess the meaning of words like you can for English or French if you happen to be Dutch or Spanish.

That means you will have to learn the meaning of every single word!

The easy thing about Finnish is that the language is pronounced exactly as it is written. That's also the most difficult part, because you have to pronounce every word accurately. Otherwise the meaning changes. And you might think Fins will compensate for this when they hear a foreigner talk, but they don't. They look like you are nuts.

Grammar is predictable. It's all rather regular. No propositions though. The structure of the language is different than most European countries. No difference between him and her.

It's probably an easy language to learn if you are very young, but every language is easy to learn when you are young.

Most African languages are the hardest to learn, I've tried to learn some of them to no avail.

Ulifanya kujifunza Kiswahili? (Have you tried Swahili?) That's not too difficult.:)