Easy Languages: Stories of Language Learning

19: The Hardest Language in the World (Isn’t the One You Think…)

What makes some languages harder to learn than others? In this episode, we attempt to entangle the objective factors - as to why a language is complex - from the subjective ones. We also dedicate a section to talking about our experiences with those languages which we traditionally think are the most difficult to master.

Show Notes

  • Foreign Service Institute Language Rankings (Foreign Language Training)

  • Can We Measure Language Difficulty by the Numbers? (Ofer Tirosh, TowardsScience)

  • Rank of Language Difficulty (Michael Campbell, Glossika Blog)

  • What is the Hardest Language to Learn? (Steve Kaufmann, The Linguist Blog)

  • Past tense ending in Turkish: ‑mış (TurkishTexbook)

  • 13 Russian Verbs of Motion to Move Your Learning Forward (Kelly Virginia Phelan, FluentU)

  • Chinese Classifiers: What Are They And How To Use Them ( Angie, ChineseEdge)

  • Japanese Formal & Informal Speech (Lydia Thron, Wyzant)

  • Conjugation of The Verb To Eat in Japanese (JapaneseVerbConjugator)