Polish is the hardest language to learn
Polish is the hardest language to learn in the world
What is the hardest language to learn for English Speakers? Take a guess; it is not Chinese or Japanese. It is Polish. Polish has seven cases and Polish grammar has more exception than rules. German for example has four cases all which are logical, Polish cases seem to have no pattern or rules; you have to learn the entire language. Asia languages usually do not have cases, or at least like that. The Pronunciation is eons harder than Asia language as it usually has long tong twisting consonants. For example a Polish sentence might look like this. Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.
Further Polish people rarely hear foreign speak their language and with no accent or regional variation than pronunciation must be exact or they will have no idea what you are talking about.
So the next time you have herd someone has learned Polish have some respect. Polish is the hardest language to learn. But the truth is I doubt you will hear a native English Speaker, speak Polish beyond a few phrases. Can it be learned? Yes you can Learn Polish. People do, it just takes humility.
Tags: grammar, hardest-language, language, learn, Polish, Polish-grammar
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August 25, 2007at 8:59 am
Yes, I totally agree. I’ve made national anthem learning an interest of mine and now I’m up to the Polish National Anthem (Dąbrowski’s Mazurka). I’ve learned anthems of the USSR, Imperial Russia, France, Israel, Greek, EU (in Latin) and even Chinese. I’ve been able to get through memorizing four lines in a day (at least), but I’m getting nowhere with Poland. The only line I can remember (or even correctly pronounce is: Marsz, marsz, Dabrowski. By far, this anthem, even compared to the Chinese and Russian transliterations is very difficult. I even have difficulty listening to the words as they sing in the anthem (maybe because it’s because the music is powerful), so I have to go find someone on the internet singing it acapella. I’ve found quite a few people, but as I read a line like “Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski,” I’m reading the first part, when they’re already to “do Polski.” This is going to be quite a challenge!
P.S. I googled “Polish is the hardest language to learn in the world” out of frustration and this page happened to agree so much with me!
September 5, 2007at 11:13 am
Hi, I’m from Poland, so I’m native polish speaker. And I agree with you. Polish is very hard even for people from Poland, although they think they can speak correctly. There’s a lot of people in my contry, who makes awful grammatical mistakes like “poszłem” instead of “poszedłem”, using incorrect grammatical cases, and so on. Many of Poles also have a big problem with orhography. They use “ch” instead of “h”, changes “rz” with “ż”, or “u” with “ó”. Very common mistake is also writing “wogóle” and even “wogule” instead of “w ogóle” (at all) and “wziąść” instead of “wziąć” (take). Of course there are lots of people who can their language really good. Did you ever hear about professor Jan Miodek?
And there’s a mistake in this blog entry in first weird polish sentence:should be “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”. You forgot about “W” in the beginning
September 15, 2007at 10:37 am
I agree. I’m Polish, but I’m nearly average- I think so. Grammar and Orthography was always my weaker side.
After all, I liked writing poetries.
September 18, 2007at 7:43 am
Hi
I found this page intriguing and amusing. I was born in Poland and am therefor a native speaker, but I’ve always been interested with culture and language of other people and studied hard. Now, I know 6 different languages, of which I have to say I know Polish the least. It’s an amazing, beautiful language but so hard to master, no matter whether you have gotten it in your blood…
..no wonder Conrad wrote in English!
It’s worth studying it though - Polish people (me included) are ridiculously proud of their versatile language and they appreciate more then any other culture I’ve encountered if a tourist or a foreigner tries to master at least a few simple phrases!
October 7, 2007at 4:34 pm
Hmmmm. . . . . . but in regards to the writing system, Japanese or Chinese would be harder. In Japanese you have to remember 2 syllabries each with about 109 syllables and about 1800-2000 kanji characters (4000 or more if you are in university) and in Chinese you have to remember 1000’s and 1000s of Chinese characters. Also japanese have alot of verb forms that don’t exist in english or polish and that also reflect japanese culture.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchi-soto
Chinese ‘tones’ are alot harder and if you’ve studied Chinese you’d actually know.
oh and have you heard of Finnish? They have 15 noun cases.
you should read this too: http://www.language-learning-advisor.com/hardest-language-to-learn-survey.html
October 8, 2007at 1:50 am
Good points made, however, what is more important to speak a language or to write a language? I think speaking. Also many people repeat the mantra, what about tones in Chinese etc; my rebuttal is that Polish pronunciation for a foreigner is much harder than tones in an Asian language. Polish is just about exceptions, further every single word changes based on tense, case, number, and gender. My reply to Hungarian cases is there may be more cases but they at more like prepositions rather than like Polish cases. That is why I still think Polish is the hardest language to learn.
October 9, 2007at 5:15 pm
. . maybe. . . . . .I don’t particularly thnk that one language is the ‘hardest to learn’ because the difficulty of learning another language is dependent on several factors such as how similar the language is to your own, cultural differences and so on. For example it might be easier for a person who speaks english as their first language to learn french but not an asian person because the syntax, grammar, and culture are completely different. Likewise a person who speaks a slavic or a Lethitic Language would probably find Polish easier to learn than a person who speaks a Germanic Language. Think about these factors before making such a bold statement. Even though a Polish person finds Polish difficult, you can say that about anybody elses language
Ps:
A lot of Asian languages don’t use tones. Tones are mainly found in Chinese. Japanese ( or the japonic Language Family) and Korean are ‘Language Isolates’ which means that they have no relationships with other languages in the world. ( On the other hand Polish is a slavic Language ) and Just as a side note even though every word in polish changes depending on gender, personhood, animacy, number, formalities and etc they don’t change depending on ‘politeness’. Eg lets take the verb iść which means to walk or go to say you are going is ‘(Ty) idziesz’ right? well in japanese it would be ‘iku’ which is plain, (Anata wa) ‘ikimasu’ which is polite, ‘irrashaimasu’ which is honourific, ‘ukagaimasu (or ukagau)’ which is humble and ‘mairimasu (or mairu)’ which is another polite form.
October 30, 2007at 8:13 pm
Hungarian, which has 35 cases as opposed to the 7 in Polish, is probably harder to learn. But if you want even more challenge try learning Tabassaran, a Caucasian language that has 48 cases.
November 3, 2007at 10:08 am
Polish is not the hardest language in the world, it is not so hard, as here speaks about it. There are a lot of languages, which are MORE hard than Polish - Japanese, Basque, Icelandic, Hungarian, and many others. How about Kabardian (ergative Caucasian language)? Its pronunciation is really hard. For example, кIухъузыгъэкхъуазIу (tc’huhwuzeugheqwazuheu) or just лI (th-l’) - common words.
And sentences like “szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz” are just the tongue-twisters, not more.
November 5, 2007at 5:15 pm
I don´t agree , harder is slovak and czech because too have harder grammar then polish and everybody who learn slovak or czech talk that it is harder than polish or germans and romans languages
April 15, 2008at 3:17 pm
Yes, polish is hard language, but people who think is the hardest, should talk fast in hungarian
April 16, 2008at 4:15 pm
oh please czech. Polish has 17 cases can by the way hungarian has about 14. Hungarian is hard but not as hard as polish. Try to speak polish very fast. Czech and slovak are deffinetly not hard. I would not even put them as hard they have 7 cases only and its an easy language to learn. My friends tell me that polish is harder than hungarian. I guess it is true. Im polish it is a complicated language to learn as is hungarian but im am possitivley sure that polish is harder.