An Analysis of the Difficulty of Learning Various

Foreign Languages for English speakers –

Indo-European Languages

By Robert Lindsay

Method. 42 IE languages were examined. A literature survey,

combined with interviews of various L2 language learners was
conducted. In addition, 100 years of surveys on the question by
language instructors was reviewed. The US military's School of
Languages in Monterey's ratings system for difficulty of learning
various languages was analyzed.
Results were collated in an impressionistic manner along a majority
rules line in order to form final opinions. For example, a minority said
that Portuguese or Spanish were very hard to learn, but the
consensus view was that they were quite easy. In this case, the
minority opinion was rejected, and the consensus view was adopted.
The work received a tremendous amount of criticism, often hostile to
very hostile, after publication, and many changes were made to the
text.
Clearly, such a project will necessarily be more impressionistic than
scientific. Scientific tests of the relative difficulty of learning different
languages will have to await the development of algorithms
specifically designed to measure such things. And even then, surely
there will be legions of "We can't prove anything" naysayers.
One common criticism was that, "In Linguistics, the standard view is
that there is no such thing as an easy or difficult language to learn. All
languages are equally difficult or easy to learn." Unless we are talking
about children learning an L1 (and even then that's a dubious
assertion) this statement was rejected as simply untrue.

Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it

would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In
the case of English, English was judged according to how hard it
would be for a non-English speaker to learn the language. Speaking,
reading and writing were all considered.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-6, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2

= moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4
= very difficult, 5 = extremely difficult, 6 = most difficult of all.
Ratings are impressionistic.

Time needed. Time needed for an English language speaker to learn

the language "reasonably well": Level 1 languages = 3 months-1 year.
Level 2 languages = 6 months-1 year. Level 3 languages = 1-2 years.
Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but
some may take longer. Level 6 languages = more than 4 years.

Conclusion. The results of this study indicate that languages do

indeed differ dramatically in how difficult they are for L2 English
language learners.

Indo-European

Indo-Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Indo-Ayran languages like Kashmiri, Hindi and especially Sanskrit are

quite hard, and Sanskrit is legendary for its extreme complexity.

Central Zone

Western Hindi

Hindustani

Khariboli
The Hindi script is quite opaque to Westerners, some of whom say
that Chinese script is easier. You speak one way if you are talking to a
man or a woman, and you also need to take into account whether you
as speaker are male or female. Gender is also as prominent as in
Spanish; you have to remember whether any given noun is masculine
or feminine. Hindi is definitely an IE language by its rich system of
gender, case and number inflection.
The most difficult aspects of Hindi are the pronunciation and the case
system. In addition, Hindi is split ergative, and not only that, but it
actually has a tripartite ergative system, and the ergativity is split by
tense like in Persian.
The distinction between aspirated/unaspirated and alveolar/retroflex
consonants is hard for many to make. There is a four-way distinction
in the t and d sounds with aspirated/unaspirated dental and
aspirated/unaspirated retroflex t's and d's. The are three different r
sounds - one that sounds like the English r and two retroflex r's that
are quite hard to make or even distinguish, especially at the end of a
word. Hindi also has nasalized vowels.
If you come from a language that has case, Hindi's case system will
not be overly difficult.
In addition, there is a completely separate word for each number from
1-100, which seems unnecessarily complicated.
However, Hindi has a number of cognates with English. I am not sure
if they are Indic loans into English or they share a common root going
back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

loot - plunder/destroy, English loot

mausaum - season/weather, English monsoon

toofan - storm, English typhoon

kammarband - something tied around the waist, English cummerbund

badnaam - literally bad name, means bad reputation. These are both
cognates to the English words bad and name.
bangalaa - house, English bungalow

jangal – English jungle

pandit - priest, English pundit

Nevertheless, Hindi typically gets a high score in ratings of difficult

languages to learn. Based on this high score across multiple surveys,
we will give it a relatively high rating.
Hindi is rated 4, very hard to learn.

Punjabi is probably harder than any other Indic language in terms of

phonology because it uses tones. It's like Hindi with tones. It has
either two or three tones: high or high-falling, low or low-rising and
possibly a neutral or mid tone. It is very odd for an IE language to
have tones.
Punjabi is rated 4.5, very difficult.

Eastern Zone

Assamese–Bengali

Bengali is similar to Hindi, but it lacks grammatical gender, and that

fact alone makes it much easier to learn. Bengalis speak tend to make
stereotypical gender errors when speaking in Hindi. Nevertheless, it
uses the Sanskrit alphabet, and that alone makes it hard to read and
write.
Bengali is rated 3.5, harder than average to learn.
 Northern Zone

Eastern Pahari

Nepali is a very difficult language to learn as it has a complex

grammar. It has case not for nouns themselves but for clause
constituents. It has tense, aspect, and voice. Nepali has an
unbelievable 11 noun classes or genders, and affixes on the verb
mark the gender, number, and person of the subject. It even has split
ergativity, strange for an IE language.
Nepali has the odd feature, like Japanese, of having verbs that have
completely different positive and negative forms.

hũ ~ hoina (I am ~ I am not)
chas ~ chainas (you (intimate) are ~ you are not)
bolchu ~ boldina (I speak ~ I don't speak)

Note the extreme differences on the conjugation of the present tense

of the verb to be between 1 singular and 2 familiar singular. They look
nothing like each other at all.
Adjectives decline in peculiar way. There is an inflection on adjectives
that means "qualified." So can say this by either inflecting the
adjective:

dublo ~ dublai (tall ~ quite tall)

hoco ~ hocai (short ~ rather short)
rāmro ~ rāmrai (nice ~ nice enough)

or by putting the invariant qualifying adverb in front of the adjective:

ali dublo quite tall

ali hoco rather short
ali rāmro nice enough
Nepali gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Northwestern Zone

Sinhalese-Maldivian

Sinhala is also difficult.

Sinhala is rated 4, very difficult.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is legendary for its difficulty. It has a script that goes on for
long sequences in which many small individual words may be buried.
You have to take apart the sequences to find the small words. The
words are further masked by tone sandhi running everything together.
Once you tease the sandhi apart, you have to deal with hundreds of
compound characters in the script. After you do those two things, you
are left with eight cases, nine declensions, dual number, and other fun
things.
Even native speakers tend to make grammatical mistakes and admit
that parts of the grammar are fiendishly difficult. There are many
grammatical features that are rarely or never found in any other
language. Noun declension is based on the letter that the noun ends
in, for instance, nouns that end in a, e, or u all decline differently.
There are three genders for nouns, and all decline differently. Each
noun has eight cases and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural),
so there are 24 different forms for each noun. Counting the different
combinations of endings and genders (all subsumed into a sort of
noun class system), there are 20 different "noun classes."
Combining the "noun classes" with the three genders, you end up
with 1,440 different regular forms that nouns can take. To make
matters worse, some of the cases have different forms themselves.
And there are some exceptions to these rules. The I and you
pronouns decline differently, but pronouns are simple compared to
nouns.
For the verbs, each verb exists in 10 different forms of tense or mood
(one from Vedic Sanskrit is no longer used). There are six tenses and
four moods. The six tenses are: one present tense, two future tenses,
and three past tenses.
The moods are: imperative, dubitive (expresses uncertainty), optative
(expresses hope or offers a benediction), and a form that expresses
the concept if only, then... There are two different conjugations based
on who is the beneficiary of the action, you or others. There are ten
different classes of verbs, each of which conjugates differently.
Additionally, each verb has a different form in the singular, dual, and
plural and in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons.
Once you get past all of that, you are ready to take on the really
difficult parts of the language - participles, noun derivatives and
agglutination - each of which is far more complicated than any of the
above. To add insult to injury, Sanskrit has pitch accent.
Nevertheless, the language is so mathematically precise and regular
that some have said it is a perfect language for computer
programming. There may not even be a single irregularity in the
whole language.
Sanskrit is rated 5, extremely difficult.

Indo-Iranian

Iranian

Western Iranian

Southwestern Iranian

Iranian

Persian is easier to learn than its reputation, as some say this is a

difficult language to learn. In truth, it's difficulty is only average, and
it is one of the easier IE languages to learn. On the plus side, Persian
has a very simple grammar, and it is quite regular. It has no
grammatical gender, case, or articles, and adjectives never change
form. Its noun system is as easy as that of English. The verbal system
is a bit harder than English's, but it is still much easier than in even
the Romance languages. The phonology is very simple.
On the down side, you will have to learn Arabic script. There are many
lexical borrowings from Arabic which have no semantic equivalents in
Persian.

English: two (native English word) ~ double (Latin borrowing)

Note the semantic transparency in the Latin borrowing.

Persian: do (native Persian word) ~ tasneyat (Arabic borrowing)

Note the utter lack of semantic correlation in the Arabic borrowing.

Some morphology was borrowed as well:

ketāb book
kotobxānah library (has an Arabic broken plural)

It is a quite easy language to learn at the entry level, but it is much

harder to learn at the advanced level, say Sufi poetry, due to difficulty
in untangling subtleties of meaning.
Persian gets a 3 rating as average difficulty.

Northwestern Iranian

Kurdish

Kurdish is about as hard to learn as Persian, but it has the added

difficulty of pharyngeals, which are very hard for English speakers to
make.
Like Persian, it is no gender or case, and it also has a tense split
ergative system.
Kurdish gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Eastern Iranian

Northeastern

Ossetian is a strange Iranian language that has somehow developed

ejectives due to proximity of Caucasian languages which had them.
An IE language with ejectives? How odd.
Ossetian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Indo-European

Romance

Italo-Western

Italo-Dalmatian

Italian is easy to learn, especially if you speak a Romance language

or English, but learning to order a pizza and really mastering it are
two different things. Foreigners usually do not learn Italian at
anywhere near a native level.
For instance, Italian has three types of tenses - simple, compound,
and indefinite.
There are also various moods that combine to take tense forms - four
subjunctive moods, two conditional moods, two gerund moods, two
infinite moods, two participle moods, and one imperative mood.
There are eight tenses in the indicative mood - recent past, remote
pluperfect, recent pluperfect, preterite (remote past), imperfect,
present, future, and future perfect. There are four tenses in the
subjunctive mood - present, imperfect, preterite, and pluperfect.
There are two tenses in the conditional mood - present and preterite.
There is only one tense in the imperative mood - present. Gerund,
participle and infinite moods all take only present and perfect tenses.
Altogether, using these mood-tense combinations, any Italian verb
can decline in up to 21 different ways. However, most Italians have
little understanding of many of these tenses and moods. They do not
know how to use them correctly. Hence they are often only used by
the most educated people. So an Italian learner does not need to
learn all of these tenses and moods.
Italian has many irregular verbs. There are 600 irregular verbs with
all sorts of different irregularities. Nevertheless, it is a Romance
language, and Romance has gotten rid of most of its irregularity. The
Slavic languages are much more irregular than Romance.
Counterintuitively, some Italian words are masculine in the singular
and feminine in the plural. There are many different ways to say the:

Masculine:

il
i
lo
gli
l'

Feminine:

la
le
l'

Few Italians even write Italian 100% correctly.

A problem with Italian is that meaning is inferred via intonation. If
you mess up the intonation of your utterance, you're screwed and will
not be understood.
However, there is no case in Italian, as in all of Romance with the
exception of Romanian.
Italian is still easier to learn than French - for evidence see the
research that shows Italian children learning to write Italian properly
by age six, 6-7 years ahead of French children. This is because Italian
orthography is quite sensible and coherent, with good sound-symbol
correspondence. Nevertheless, the orthography is not as transparent
as Spanish's.
Italian has phrasal verbs as in English, but the English ones are a lot
more difficult. The Italian ones are usually a lot more clear given the
verb and preposition involved, whereas with English, if you have the
verb and the preposition, the phrasal verb does not logically follow
from their separate meanings. For instance:

andare fuori to go + out = get out

andare giù to go + down = get down

However, in a similar sense, Italian changes the meaning of verbs via

addition of a verbal prefix:

scrivere
ascrivere
descrivere
prescrivere
mettere
smettere
permettere
sottomettere
porre
proporre
portare
supportare

In these cases, you create completely new verbs via the addition of
the verbal prefix to the base. Without the prefix, it is a completely
different verb.
Like German and French, Italian forms the auxiliary tense with two
different words: avere and essere. This dual auxiliary system is more
difficult than French's and much more difficult than German's.
Italian is somewhat harder to learn than Spanish or Portuguese but
not dramatically so. Italian has more irregularities than those two and
different ways of forming plurals, including two different ways of
forming plurals that can mean different things depending on the
context. This is a leftover from the peculiarities of the Latin neutral
gender. The rules about when plurals end in -io or -e are opaque.
In addition, Italian pronouns and verbs are more difficult than in
Spanish. Grammar rules in Spanish are simpler and seem more
sensible than Italian's. Italian has the pronominal adverbs ne and se.
Their use is not at all intuitive, however, they can be learned with a
bit of practice.
Italian pronunciation is a straightforward, but the ce and ci sounds
can be problematic. The only sounds that will give you trouble are r,
gl, and gn.
Italian gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Often thought to be an Italian dialect, Neapolitan is actually a full

language all of its own. Neapolitan is said to be easier than Standard
Italian. Unlike Italian, Neapolitan conjugation and the vocative are
both quite simple, and any irregularities that exist seem to follow
definite patterns.
Neapolitan gets a 2.5 rating, fairly easy.
 Western Romance

Gallo-Romance

Oïl

French

French is pretty easy to learn at a simple level, but it's not easy to
get to an advanced level. For instance, the language is full of idioms,
many more than your average language, and it's often hard to figure
them out.
One problem is pronunciation. There are many nasal vowels, similar
to Portuguese. The eu, u and all of the nasal vowels can be Hell for
the learner. There is also a strange uvular r. The dictionary does not
necessarily help you, as the pronunciation stated in the dictionary is
often at odds with what you will find on the street.
There are phenomena called élision, liaison and enchainement, which
is similar to sandhi in which vowels elide between words in fast
speech. There are actually rules for this sort of thing, but the rules
are complicated, and at any rate, for liaisons at least, they are either
obligatory, permitted or forbidden depending on the nature of the
words being run together, and it is hard to remember which category
various word combinations fall under.
The orthography is also difficult since there are many sounds that are
written but no longer pronounced, as in English. Also similar to
English, orthography does not line up with pronunciation. For
instance, there are 13 different ways to spell the o sound: o, ot, ots,
os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. In addition, spoken
French and written French can be quite different. Spoken French uses
words and phrases such as c’est foutu - the job will not be done, and
on which you might never see in written French.
The English language, having no Language Committee, at least has an
excuse for the frequently irrational nature of its spelling. The French
have no excuse, since they have a committee that is set up in part to
keep the language as orthographically irrational as possible. One of
their passions is refusing to change the spelling of words even as
pronunciation changes, which is the opposite of what occurs in any
sane spelling reform. So French is, like English, frozen in time, and
each one has probably gone as long as the other with no spelling
reform.
Furthermore, to make matters worse, the French are almost as prickly
about writing properly as they are about speaking properly, and you
know how they are about foreigners mangling their language. Despite
the many problems of French orthography, there are actually some
rules running under the whole mess, and it is quite a bit more
sensible than English orthography, which is much more chaotic.
French has a language committee that is always inventing new native
French words to keep out the flood of English loans. They have a
website up with an official French dictionary showing the proper
native coinages to use. Another one for computer technology only is
here.
On the plus side, French has a grammar that is neither simple nor
difficult; that, combined with a syntax is pretty straightforward, and a
Latin alphabet all make it relatively easy to learn for most Westerners.
In addition, the English speaker will probably find more instantly
recognizable cognates in French than in any other language.
A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than English.
Verbs change much more, and it has grammatical gender. There are
15 tenses in the verb, 18 if you include the pluperfect and the
Conditional Perfect 2 (now used only in Literary French) and the past
imperative (now rarely used). That is quite a few tenses to learn, but
Spanish and Portuguese have similar situations. French is also harder
to learn than Italian in that French children do not learn to write
French properly until age 12-13, six years after Italian children.
Its grammar is much more complicated than Spanish's. Although the
subjunctive is more difficult in Spanish than in French, French is much
more irregular. Like German, there are two different ways to form the
auxiliary tense to have. In addition, French uses particles like y and
en that complicate the grammar quite a bit.
French is one of the toughest languages to learn in the Romance
family. In many Internet threads about the hardest language to learn,
language learners list French as their most problematic language. This
is due to the illogical nature of French spelling discussed above such
that the spelling of many French words must be memorized as
opposed to applying a general sound-symbol correspondence rule. In
addition, French uses both acute and grave accents - `´.
French gets a 3.5 rating for above average difficulty.

Ibero-Romance

West-Iberian

Castilian

Spanish is often said to be one of the easiest languages to learn,

though this is somewhat controversial. Personally, I've been learning
it off and on since age six, and I still have problems, though Spanish
speakers say my Spanish is good, but Hispanophones, unlike the
French, are generous about these things.
It's quite logical, though the verbs do decline a lot with tense and
number, and there are many irregular verbs, similar to French.
Compare English declensions to Spanish declensions of the verb to
read.

English

I read
He reads

Spanish

Yo leo
Tu lees
El lee
Nosotros leemos
Vosotros leéis
Ellos leen
leí
leeré
leería
leyese
leyésemos
leyéseis
¿leísteis?
leyéremos
leeréis
pudísteis haber leído
hubiéremos ó hubiésemos leído

Nevertheless, Romance grammar is much more regular than, say,

Polish, as Romance has junked most of the irregularity. Spanish has
the good grace to lack case, spelling is a piece of cake, and words are
spoken just as they are written. However, there is a sort of case left
over in the sense that one uses different pronouns when referring to
the direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative).
Spanish is probably the most regular of the Romance languages,
surely more regular than French or Portuguese, and probably more
regular than Italian or Romanian. Pluralization is very regular
compared to say Italian. There are generally only two plurals, -s and
-es, and the rules about when to use one or the other are
straightforward. There is only one irregular plural:

hipérbaton -> hipérbatos

This is in reference to a literary figure and you would never use this
form in day to day speech.
The trilled r in Spanish often hard for language learners to make.
There is a distinction in the verb to be with two different forms, ser
and estar. Non-native speakers almost never learn the use these
forms as well as a native speaker. The subjunctive is also difficult in
Spanish, and L2 learners often struggle with it after decades of
learning.
Spanish pronunciation is fairly straightforward, but there are some
sounds that cause problems for learners: j, ll, ñ, g, and r.
One good thing about Spanish is Spanish speakers are generally
grateful if you can speak any of their language at all, and are very
tolerant of mistakes in L2 Spanish speakers.
Spanish is considered to be easier to learn for English speakers than
many other languages, including German. This is because Spanish
sentences follow English sentence structure more than German
sentences do. Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish one of
the easiest to learn. It is quite a bit easier than French, moderately
easier than Literary Portuguese, and somewhat easier than Italian.
Nevertheless, Hispanophones say that few foreigners end up speaking
like natives. Part of the reason for this is that Spanish is very
idiomatic and the various forms of the subjunctive make for a wide
range of nuance in expression. Even native speakers make many
mistakes when using the subjunctive in conditional sentences. The
dialects do differ quite a bit more than most people say they do. The
dialects in Latin America and Spain are quite different, and in Latin
America, the Argentine and Dominican dialects are very divergent.
Spanish gets rated 3, fairly easy.

Galician-Portuguese

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though

Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the unusual vowels such as
nasal diphthongs and a strange palatal lateral which many English
speakers will mistake for an l.
Of the nasal diphthongs, ão is the hardest to make. In addition,
Brazilian (Br) Portuguese has an r that sounds like an h, and l that
sounds like a w and a d that sounds like a j, but only some of the
time! Fortunately, in European (Eu) Portuguese, all of these sounds
sound as you would expect them to.
Portuguese has two r sounds, a tapped r that is often misconceived as
a trilled r (present in some British and Irish English dialects) and an
uvular r which is truly difficult to make. However, this is the typical r
sound found in French, German, Danish and Hebrew, so if you have a
background in one of those languages, this should be an easy sound.
L2 learners not only have a hard time making them but also mix them
up sometimes.
You can run many vowels together in Portuguese and still make a
coherent sentence. See here:

É o a ou o b? [Euaoube]
Is it (is your answer) a or b?

That utterance turns an entire sentence into a single verb via run-on
vowels, five of them in a row.
Most Portuguese speakers say that Portuguese is harder to learn than
Spanish, especially the variety spoken in Portugal. Eu Portuguese
elides many vowels and has more sounds per symbol than Br
Portuguese does. Portuguese has both nasal and oral vowels, while
Spanish has only oral values. In addition, Portuguese has 12 vowel
phonemes to Spanish's five.
Portuguese has also retained the archaic subjunctive future which has
been lost in many Romance languages.

Try this sentence: When I am President, I will change the law.

In Spanish, one uses the future tense as in English:

Cuando yo soy presidente, voy a cambiar la ley.

In Portuguese, you use the subjunctive future, lost in all modern

Romance languages and lacking in English:

Quando eu fui presidente, vou mudar a lei. - literally, When I may be

President, I will possibly change the law.

The future subjunctive causes a lot of problems for Portuguese

learners and is one of the main ways that it is harder than Spanish.
There is a form called the personal infinitive in Eu Portuguese in which
the infinitive is actually inflected that also causes a lot of problems for
Portuguese learners.

Personal infinitive:

para eu cantar for me to sing

para tu cantares for you to sing
para el cantar for him to sing
para nos cantarmos for us to sing
para eles cantarem for them to sing

Some sentences with the personal infinitive:

Ficamos em casa do Joao ao irmos ao Porto.

We are staying at John's when we go to Porto.
Comprei-te um livro para o leres.
I bought you a book for you to read.

In addition, when making the present perfect in Spanish, it is fairly

easy with the use have + participle as in English.

Compare I have worked.

In Spanish:

Yo he trabajado.

In Portuguese, there is no perfect to have nor is there any participle,

instead, present perfect is formed via a conjugation that varies among
verbs:
Eu trabalhei - because Eu hei trabalhado makes no sense in
Portuguese.

Portuguese still uses the pluperfect tense quite a bit, a tense that
gone out or is heading out of most IE languages. The pluperfect is
used a lot less now in Br Portuguese, but it is still very widely used in
Eu Portuguese. The pluperfect is used to discuss a past action that
took place before another past action. An English translation might
be:

He had already gone by the time she showed up.

The italicized part would be the equivalent to the pluperfect in

English.

O pássaro voara quando o gato pulou sobre ele para tentar comê-lo.
The bird had (already) flown away when the cat jumped over it trying
to eat it.

Even Br Portuguese has its difficulties centering around diglossia. It is

written in 1700's Eu Portuguese, but in speech, the Brazilian
vernacular is used. Hence:

I love you

Amo-te or Amo-o [standard, written]

Eu te amo or Eu amo você [spoken]

We saw them

Vimo-los [standard, written]

A gente viu eles [spoken]
Even Eu Portuguese native speakers often make mistakes in
Portuguese grammar when speaking. Young people writing today in
Portuguese are said to be notorious for not writing or speaking it
properly. The pronunciation is so complicated and difficult that even
foreigners residing in Portugal for a decade never seem to get it quite
right. In addition, Portuguese grammar is unimaginably complicated.
There are probably more exceptions than there are rules, and even
native speakers have issues with Portuguese grammar.
Portuguese gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Eastern Romance

Surprisingly enough, Romanian is said to be one of the harder

Romance languages to speak or write properly. Even Romanians often
get it wrong. One strange thing about Romanian is that the articles
are attached to the noun as suffixes. In all the rest of Romance,
articles are free words that precede the noun.

English telephone the telephone

Romanian telefon telefonul

Romanian is the only Romance language with case. There are five
cases - nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative - but
vocative is not often use, and the other four cases combine as two
cases: nominative/accusative and dative/genitive merge as single
cases.

Nominative-Accusative aeroportul
Genitive-Dative aeroportului

The genitive is hard for foreigners to learn as is the formation of

plurals. The ending changes for no apparent reason when you
pluralize a noun and there are also sound changes:
brad (singular)
brazi (plural)

Many native speakers have problems with plurals and some of the
declensions. Unlike the rest of Romance which has only two genders,
masculine and feminine, Romanian has three genders - masculine,
feminine and neuter (the neuter is retained from Latin). However,
neuter gender is realized on the surface as masculine in the singular
and feminine in the plural, unlike languages such as Russian where
neuter gender is an entirely different gender.
The pronunciation is not terribly difficult, but it is hard to learn at
first. For some odd reason, the Latinization is considered to be
terrible.
Romanian is harder to learn than Spanish or Italian and possibly
harder than French. However, you can have odd sentences with
nothing but vowels as in Maori.

Aia-i oaia ei, o iau eu?

That's her sheep, should I take it?

It may have the most difficult grammar in Romance. Romanian has

considerable Slavic influence.
Romanian gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Germanic

West Germanic

Anglo–Frisian

Anglic

People often say that English is easy to learn, but that is deceptive.
For one thing, English has anywhere from 500,000-1 million words
(said to be twice as much as any other language - but there are
claims that Dutch and Arabic each have 4 million words), and the
number increases by the day. Furthermore, most people don't
understand more than 50,000, and a majority might only understand
30,000 words. Yet your average person only uses 5,000 at most.
Actually, the average American or Brit uses a mere 2,500 words. As
we might expect, our cultivated Continentals in Europe, such as
Spaniards and French, probably have twice the regular vocabulary of
English speakers and far more colloquial expressions.
In addition, verbal phrases or phrasal verbs are a nightmare. Phrasal
verbs are probably left over from "separable verbs" in German. In
most of the rest of IE, these become affixes as in Latin Latin cum-,
ad-, pro-, in-, ex-, etc.. In many cases, phrasal verbs can have more
than 10 different antagonistic meanings.

Here is a list of 123 phrasal verbs using the preposition up after a

verb:

Back up - to go in reverse, often in a vehicle, or to go back over

something previously dealt with that was poorly understood in order
to understand it better.

Be up - to be in a waking state after having slept. I've been up for

three hours. Also to be ready to do something challenging. Are you
up for it?

Beat up - to defeat someone thoroughly in a violent physical fight.

Bid up - to raise the price of something, usually at an auction, by

calling out higher and higher bids.

Blow up - to explode an explosive or for a social situation to become

violent and volatile.
Bone up - to study hard.

Book up - all of the booking seats have been filled for some
entertainment or excursion.

Bottle up - to contain feelings until they are at the point of exploding.

Break up - to break into various pieces, or to end a relationship,

either personal or between entitles, also to split a large entity, like a
large company or a state.

Bruise up - to receive multiple bruises, often serious ones.

Brush up - to go over a previously learned skill.

Build up - to build intensively in an area, such as a town or city, from

a previously less well-developed state.

Burn up - burn completely or to be made very angry.

Bust up - to burst out in laughter.

Buy up - to buy all or most all of something.

Call up - to telephone someone. Or to be ordered to appear in the

military. The army called up all males aged 18-21 and ordered them
to show up at the nearest recruiting office.

Catch up - to reach a person or group that one had lagged behind

earlier, or to take care of things, often hobbies, that had been put off
by lack of time.

Chat up - to talk casually with a goal in mind, usually seduction or at

least flirtation.
Cheer up - to change from a downcast mood to a more positive one.

Chop up - to cut into many, often small, pieces.

Clam up - to become very quiet suddenly and not say a thing.

Clean up - to make an area thoroughly tidy or to win completely and

thoroughly.

Clear up - for a storm to dissipate, for a rash to go away, for a

confusing matter to become understandable.

Close up - to close, also to end business hours for a public business.

Come up - to approach closely, to occur suddenly or to overflow.

Cook up - to prepare a meal or to configure a plan, often of a sly,

ingenious or devious nature. They cooked up a scheme to swindle the
boss.

Crack up - to laugh, often heartily.

Crank up - elevate the volume.

Crawl up - to crawl inside something.

Curl up - to rest in a curled body position, either alone or with another

being.

Cut up - to shred or to make jokes, often of a slapstick variety.

Do up - apply makeup to someone, often elaborately.

Dream up - to imagine a creative notion, often an elaborate one.

Dress up - to dress oneself in formal attire.

Drive up - to drive towards something, and then stop, or to raise the

price of something by buying it intensively.

Drum up - to charge someone with wrongdoing, usually criminal,

usually by a state actor, usually for false reasons.

Dry up - to dessicate.

Eat up - implies eating something ravenously or finishing the entire

meal without leaving anything left.

End up - to arrive at some destination after a long winding, often

convoluted journey either in space or in time.

Face up - to quit avoiding your problems and meet them head on.

Feel up - to grope someone sexually.

Get up - to awaken or rise from a prone position.

Give up - to surrender, in war or a contest, or to stop doing something

trying or unpleasant that is yielding poor results, or to die, as in give
up the ghost.

Grow up - to attain an age or maturity or to act like a mature person,

often imperative.

Hang up - to place on a hanger or a wall, to end a phone call.

Hike up - to pull your clothes up when they are drifting down on your
body.
Hit up - to visit someone casually or to ask for a favor or gift, usually
small amounts of money.

Hold up - to delay, to ask someone ahead of you to wait, often

imperative. Also a robbery, usually with a gun and a masked robber.

Hook up - to have a casual sexual encounter or to meet casually for a

social encounter, often in a public place; also to connect together a
mechanical device or plug something in.

Hurry up - imperative, usually an order to quit delaying and join the

general group or another person in some activity, often when they are
leaving to go to another place.

Keep up - to maintain on a par with the competition without falling

behind.

Kiss up - to mend a relationship after a fight.

Knock up - to impregnate.

Lay up - to be sidelined due to illness or injury for a time.

Let up - to ease off of someone or something, for a storm to

dissipate, to stop attacking someone or s.t.

Lick up - to consume all of a liquid.

Light up - to set s.t. on fire or to smile suddenly and broadly.

Lighten up - to reduce the downcast or hostile seriousness of the

mood of a person or setting.

Listen up - imperative - to order someone to pay attention, often with

threats of aggression if they don't comply.
Live up - to enjoy life.

Lock up - to lock securely, often locking various locks, or to imprison,

or for an object or computer program to be frozen or jammed and
unable to function.

Look up - to search for an item of information in some sort of a

database, such as a phone book or dictionary. Also to admire
someone.

Make up - to make amends, to apply cosmetics to one's face or to

invent a story.

Man up - to elevate oneself to manly behaviors when one is slacking

and behaving in an unmanly fashion.

Mark up - to raise the price of s.t.

Measure up - in a competition, for an entity to match the competition.

Meet up - to meet someone or a group for a get meeting or date of

some sort.

Mess up - to fail or to confuse and disarrange s.t. so much that it is

bad need or reparation.

Mix up - to confuse, or to disarrange contents in a scattered fashion

so that it does not resemble the original.

Mop up - mop a floor or finish off the remains of an enemy army or

finalize a military operation.

Move up - to elevate the status of a person or entity in competition

with other entities- to move up in the world.
Open up - when a person has been silent about something for a long
time, as if holding a secret, finally reveals the secret and begins
talking.

Own up - to confess to one's sins under pressure and reluctantly.

Pass up - to miss an opportunity, often a good one.

Patch up - to put together a broken thing or relationship.

Pay up - to pay, usually a debt, often imperative to demand payment

of a debt, to pay all of what one owes so you don't owe anymore.

Pick up - to grasp an object and lift it higher, to seduce someone

sexually or to acquire a new skill, usually rapidly.

Play up - to dramatize.

Pop up - for s.t. to appear suddenly, often out of nowhere.

Put up - to hang, to tolerate, often grudgingly, or to put forward a

new image.

Read up - to read intensively as in studying.

Rev up - to turn the RPM's higher on a stationary engine.

Ring up - to telephone someone or to charge someone on a cash

register.

Rise up - for an oppressed group to arouse and fight back against

their oppressors.

Roll up - to roll s.t. into a ball, to drive up to someone in a vehicle or

to arrest all the members of an illegal group. The police rolled up that
Mafia cell quickly.

Run up - to tally a big bill, often foolishly or approach s.t. Quickly.

Shake up - to upset a paradigm, to upset emotionally.

Shape up - usually imperative command ordering someone who is

disorganized or slovenly to live life in a more orderly and proper
fashion.

Shoot up - to inject, usually illegal drugs, or to fire many projectiles

into a place with a gun.

Show up - to appear somewhere, often unexpectedly.

Shut up - to silence, often imperative, fighting words.

Sit up - to sit upright.

Slip up - to fail.

Speak up - to begin speaking after listening for a while, often

imperative, a request for a silent person to say what they wish to say.

Spit up - to vomit, usually describing a child vomiting up its food.

Stand up - to go from a sitting position to a standing one quickly.

Start up - to initialize an engine or a program, to open a new business

to go back to something that had been terminated previously, often a
fight; a recrudescence.

Stay up - to not go to bed.

Stick up - to rob someone, usually a street robbery with a weapon,
generally a gun.

Stir up - stir rapidly, upset a calm surrounding or scene or upset a

paradigm.

Stop up - to block the flow of liquids with some object(s).

Straighten up - to go from living a dissolute or criminal life to a clean,

law abiding one.

Suck up - to ingratiate oneself, often in an obsequious fashion.

Suit up - to get dressed in a uniform, often for athletics.

Sweep up - to arrest all the members of an illegal group, often a

criminal gang.

Take up - to cohabit with someone - She has taken up with him. Or to

develop a new skill, to bring something to a higher elevation, to cook
something at a high heat to where it is assimilated.

Talk up - to try to convince someone of something by discussing it

dramatically and intensively.

Tear up - to shred.

Think up - to conjure up a plan, often an elaborate or creative one.

Throw up - to vomit.

Touch up - to apply the final aspects of a work nearly finished.

Trip up - to stumble mentally over s.t. confusing.

Turn up - to increase volume or to appear suddenly somewhere.

Vacuum up - to vacuum.

Use up - to finish s.t. completely so there is no more left.

Wait up - to ask other parties to wait for someone who is coming in a

hurry.

Wake up - to awaken.

Walk up - to approach someone or something.

Wash up - to wash.

Whip up - to cook a meal quickly or for winds to blow wildly.

Work up - to exercise heavily, until you sweat to work up a sweat. Or

to generate s.t. a report or s.t. of that nature done rather hurriedly in
a seat of the pants and unplanned fashion. We quickly worked up a
formula for dealing with the matter.

Wrap up - To finish something up, often something that is taking too

long. Come on, let us wrap this up and getting it over with. Also, to
bring to a conclusion that ties the ends together. The story wraps up
with a scene where they all get together and sing a song.

Write up - often to write a report of reprimand or a violation. The

officer wrote him for having no tail lights.

Here are phrasal verbs using the preposition down:

Be down - to be ready to ready to do something daring, often s.t.

bad, illegal or dangerous, such as a fight or a crime. Are you down?

Burn down - reduce s.t. to ashes, like a structure.

Get down - to have fun and party, or to lie prone and remain there.
Get down on the floor.

Drink down to consume all of s.t.

Kick down - Drug slang meaning to contribute your drugs to a group

drug stash so others can consume them with you, to share your drugs
with others. Often used in a challenging sense.

Party down - to have fun and party

Pat down - to frisk.

Take down - to tackle.

Cook down - to reduce the liquid content in a cooked item.

Run down - to run over something, to review a list or to attack

someone verbally for a long time.

Play down - to de-emphasize.

Write down - to write on a sheet of paper

There are figures of speech and idioms everywhere (some estimate

that up to 20% of casual English speech is idiomatic), and it seems
impossible to learn them all. In fact, few second language learners get
all the idioms down pat.
The spelling is insane and hardly follows any rules at all. The English
spelling system in some ways is frozen at about the year 1500 or so.
The pronunciation has changed but the spelling has not. Careful
studies have shown that English-speaking children take longer to read
than children speaking other languages (Finnish, Greek and various
Romance and other Germanic languages) due to the difficulty of the
spelling system. Romance languages were easier to read than
Germanic ones.
This may be why English speakers are more likely to be diagnosed
dyslexic than speakers of other languages. The dyslexia still exists if
you speak a language with good sound-symbol correspondence, but
it's covered up so much by the ease of the orthography that it seems
invisible, and the person can often function well. But for a dyslexic,
trying to read English is like walking into a minefield.
Letters can make many different sounds, a consequence of the insane
spelling system. A single sound can be spelled in many different
ways: e can be spelled e, ea, ee, ei, eo, ey, ae, i, ie, and y. The k
sound can spelled as c, cc, ch, ck, k, x, and q.
The rules governing the use of the indefinite, definite and zero article
are opaque and possibly don't even exist. There are synonyms for
almost every word in a sentence, and the various shades of meaning
can be difficult to discern. In addition, quite a few words have many
different meanings. There are strange situations like read and read,
which are pronounced differently and mean two different things.
English word derivation is difficult to get your mind around because of
the dual origins of the English language in both Latin/French and
German.
See and hear and perceptible and audible mean the same thing, but
the first pair is derived from German, and the second pair is derived
from Latin.
English word derivation is irregular due for the same reason:

assume - assumption (Latin)

child - childish (German)
build - building (German)

In English we have at least 12 roots with the idea of two in them:

two
twenty
twelve
second
double
dual
twin
pair
half
both
dupl-
semi-
hemi
bi-
di-

However, English regular verbs generally have only a few forms in

their normal paradigm. In this arrangement, there are only five forms
of the verb in general use for the overwhelming majority of verbs:

present except 3rd singular steal

3rd person singular steals
progressive stealing
past stole
perfect stolen

Even a language like Spanish has many more basic forms than that.
However, coming from an inflected language, the marking of only the
3rd singular and not marking anything else may seem odd.
The complicated part of English verbs is not their inflection - minimal
as it is - but instead lies in the large number of irregular verbs.
There is also the oddity of the 2nd person being the same in both the
singular and the plural - you. Some dialects such as US Southern
English do mark the plural - you all or y'all.
English prepositions are notoriously hard, and few second language
learners get them down right because they seem to obey no
discernible rules.
One problem that English learners complain of is differential uses of
have.

1.Perfect tense. I have done it.

2.Deontic (must). I have to do it.
3.Causative. I had it done.

While English seems simple at first - past tense is easy, there is little
or no case, no grammatical gender, little mood, etc., that can be quite
deceptive. In European countries like Croatia, it's hard to find a
person who speaks English with even close to native speaker
competence.
There are quite a few English dialects - over 100 have been recorded
in London alone.
The problem with English is that it's a mess! There are languages with
very easy grammatical rules like Indonesian and languages with very
hard grammatical rules like Arabic. English is one of those languages
that is simply chaotic. There are rules, but there are exceptions
everywhere and exceptions to the exceptions. Grammatically, it's
disaster area. It's hard to know where to start.
However, it is often said that English has no grammatical rules. Even
native speakers make this comment because that is how English
seems due to its highly irregular nature. Most English native speakers,
even highly educated ones, can't name one English grammatical rule.
Just to show you that English does have rules though, I will list some
of them.

*Indicates an ungrammatical form.

Adjectives appear before the noun in noun phrases:

Small dogs barked.

*Dogs small barked.

Adjectives are numerically invariant:

the small dog

the small dogs

The dog is small.
The dogs are small.

Intensifiers appear before both attributive and predicative adjectives:

The very small dog barked.

*The small very dog barked.
The dog was very small.
*The dog was small very.

Attributive adjectives can have complements:

The dog was scared.

The dog was scared of cats.

But predicative adjectives cannot:

The scared dog barked.

*The scared of cats dog barked.

Articles, quantifiers, etc. appear before the adjective (and any

intensifier) in a noun phrase:

The very small dog barked.

*Very the small dog barked.
*Very small the dog barked.
Every very small dog barked.
*Very every small dog barked.
*Very small every dog barked.

Relative clauses appear after the noun in a noun phrase:

The dog that barked.

*The that barked dog.

The progressive verb form is the bare form with the suffix -ing, even
for the most irregular verbs in the language:

being
having
doing
*wasing
*aring
*aming

The infinitive verb form is to followed by the bare form, even for the
most irregular verbs in the language:

to be
to have
to do
*to was
*to are
*to am

The imperative verb form is the bare form, even for the most irregular
verb in the language:

Be!
Have!
Do!
*Was!
*Are!
*Am!

All 1st person present, 2nd person present, and plural present verb
forms are equivalent to the bare form, except for to be.
All past tense verb forms of a given verb are the same regardless of
person and number, except for to be.

Question inversion is optional:

You are leaving?

Are you leaving?

But when inversion does occur in a wh-question, a wh-phrase is

required to be fronted:

You're seeing what?

What are you seeing?
*Are you seeing what?

Wh-fronting is required to affect an entire noun phrase, not just the

wh-word:

You are going to which Italian restaurant?

Which Italian restaurant are you going to?
*Which are you going to Italian restaurant?
*Which Italian are you going to restaurant?
*Which restaurant are you going to Italian?

Wh-fronting only happens once, never more:

What are you buying from which store
Which store are you buying what from?
*What which store are you buying from?
*Which store what are you buying from?

The choice of auxiliary verb in compound past sentences does not

depend on the choice of main verb:

I have eaten.
I have arrived.
*I am eaten.
*I am arrived.

cf. French

J'ai mangé.
Je suis arrivé.

English can be seen as an inverted pyramid in terms of ease of

learning. The basics are easy, but it gets a lot more difficult as you
progress in your learning.
While it is relatively easy to speak it well enough to be more or less
understandable most of the time, speaking it correctly is often not
possible for a foreigner even after 20 years of regular use.
English only gets a 2.5 rating, somewhat difficult.

High German

German's status is controversial. It's long been considered hard to

learn, but many learn it fairly easily.
Pronunciation is straightforward, but there are some problems with
the müde, the Ach, and the two ch sounds in Geschichte. Although
the first one is really an sch instead of a ch, English speakers lack an
sch, so they will just see that as a ch. Further, there are specific rules
about when to use the ss (or sz as Germans say) or hard s. The r in
German is quite strange, and of common languages, only French has
a similar r. The ç, χ and ü sounds can be hard to make. Consonant
clusters like Herkunftswörterbuch or Herbstpflanze can be be
difficult. German permits the hard to pronounce shp and shtr
consonant clusters. Of the vowels, ö and ü seem to cause the most
problems.
German grammar is quite complex. It recently scored as one of the
weirdest languages in Europe on a study, and it also makes it onto
worst grammars lists. The main problem is that everything is
irregular. Nouns, plurals, determiners, adjectives, superlatives, verbs,
participles - they are all irregular. It seems that everything in the
language is irregular.
There are six different forms of the depending on the noun case:

der
die
das
den
dem
des

but 16 different slots to put the six forms in, and the gender system is
irrational. In a more basic sense and similar to Danish, there are
three basic forms of the:

der
die
das

Each one goes with a particular noun, and it's not very clear what the
rules are.
One problem with German syntax is that the verb, verbs or parts of
verbs doesn't occur until the end of the sentence. This sentence
structure is known as V2 syntax, and it is quite alien for English
speakers. There are verbal prefixes, and they can be modified in all
sorts of ways that change meanings in subtle ways. There are dozens
of different declension types for verbs, similar to Russian and Irish.
There are also quite a few irregular verbs that do not fit into any of
the paradigms.
German also has Schachtelsätze, box clauses, which are like clauses
piled into other clauses. In addition, subclauses use SOV word order.
Whereas in Romance languages you can often throw words together
into a sentence and still be understood if not grammatical, in German,
you must learn the sentence structure - it is mandatory and there is
no way around it. The syntax is very rigid but at least very regular.
German case is also quite regular. The case exceptions can be almost
counted on one hand. However, look at the verb:

helfen help

in which the direct object is in dative rather than the expected

absolutive.
An example of German case (and case in general) is here:

The leader of the group gives the boy a dog.

In German, the sentence is case marked with the four different

German cases:

Der Führer (nominative)

der Gruppe (genitive)
gibt dem Jungen (dative)
einen Hund (accusative).

There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. Yet it is

difficult to tell which gender any particular noun is based on looking at
it, for instance, petticoat is masculine! Any given noun inflects via the
four cases and the three genders. Furthermore, the genders change
between masculine and feminine in the same noun for no logical
reason. Gender seems to be one of the main problems that German
learners have with the language. Figuring out which word gets which
gender must simply be memorized as there are no good clues.
Phonology also changes strangely as the number of the noun
changes:

Haus house (singular)

Haeuser houses (plural with umlaut)

But to change the noun to a diminutive, you add -chen:

Haueschen - little house (singular, yet has the umlaut of the plural)

This is part of a general pattern in Germanic languages of roots

changing the vowel as verbs, adjectives and nouns with common
roots change from one into the other.
For instance, in English we have the following vowel changes in these
transformed roots:

foul filth
tell tale
long length
full fill
hot heat
do does

Much of this has gone out of English, but it is still very common in
German. Dutch is in between English and German.
German:

For sick, we have:

krank sick
kränker sicker
kränklich sickly
krankhaft pathological
kranken an to suffer from
kränken to hurt
kränkeln to be ailing
erkranken to fall ill

For good, we have:

gut good
Güte goodness
Gut a good
Güter goods
gütig kind
gütlich amicable

German also has a complicated preposition system.

German also has a vast vocabulary, the fourth largest in the world.
This is either positive or negative depending on your viewpoint.
Language learners often complain about learning languages with huge
vocabularies, but as a native English speaker, I'm happy to speak a
language with a million words. There's a word for just about
everything you want to say about anything, and then some!
On the plus side, word formation is quite regular.

Pollution is Umweltverschmutzung. It consists, logically, of two words,

Umwelt and Verschmutzung, which mean environment and dirtying.

In English, you have three words, environment, dirtying and pollution,

the third one, the combination of the first two, has no relation to its
semantic roots in the first two words.
Nevertheless, this has its problems, since it's not simple to figure out
how the words are stuck together into bigger words, and meanings of
morphemes can take years to figure out.
German has phrasal verbs as in English, but the meaning is often
somewhat clear if you take the morphemes apart and look at their
literal meanings. For instance:

vorschlagen - to suggest parses out to er schlägt vor - to hit forth

whereas in English you have phrasal verbs like to get over with which
even when separated out, don't make sense literally.
German, like French and Italian, has two auxiliary tenses - habe and
bin. However, their use is quite predictable and the tenses are not
inflected so the dual auxiliary is easier in German than in French or
especially Italian.
Reading German is actually much easier than speaking it, since to
speak it correctly, you need to memorize not only genders but also
adjectives and articles.
German is not very inflected, and the inflection that it does take is
more regular than many other languages. Furthermore, German
orthography is phonetic, and there are no silent letters.
German, like Dutch, is being flooded with English loans. While this
helpful to the English speaker, others worry that the language is at
risk of turning into English.
Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to
grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as
the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are
created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.
Rating German is hard to do. It doesn't seem to deserve to a very
high rating, but it makes a lot of people's "hardest language you ever
tried to learn" list for various reasons.
German gets a 3.5 rating, moderately difficult.
 Low Franconian

Dutch

While Dutch syntax is no more difficult than English syntax, Dutch is

still harder to learn than English due to the large number of rules
used in both speaking and writing. The Dutch say that few foreigners
learn to speak Dutch well. Part of the problem is that some words
have no meaning at all in isolation (meaning is only derived via a
phrase or sentence).
Word order is somewhat difficult because it is quite rigid. In particular,
there are complex and very strange rules about the order of verbs in
verbal clusters. It helps if you know German as the rule order is
similar, but Dutch word order is harder than German word order.
Foreigners often seem to get the relatively lax Dutch rules about word
order wrong in long sentences.
Verbs can be difficult. For instance, there are no verbs get and move.
Instead, get and move each have about a dozen different verbs in
Dutch. A regular Dutch verb has six different forms.
Dutch spelling is difficult, and most Dutch people cannot even spell
Dutch correctly. There are only two genders - common and neuter -
as opposed to three in German - feminine, neuter and masculine. In
Dutch, the masculine and feminine merged in the common gender.
But most Dutch speakers cannot tell you the gender of any individual
word, in part because there are few if any clues to the gender of any
given noun.
There are remnants of the three gender system in that the Dutch still
use masculine/feminine for some nouns. In the Netherlands now,
most Dutch speakers are simply using masculine (common) for most
nouns other than things that are obviously feminine like the words
mother and sister.
However, in Belgium, where people speak Flemish, not Dutch, most
people still know the genders of words. Not only that but the 3-
gender system with masculine, feminine and neuter remains in place
in Flemish. In addition, in Flemish, the definite article still makes an
obvious distinction between masculine and feminine, so it is easy to
figure out the gender of a noun:
ne man, nen boom, nen ezel, nen banaan (masculine)
een vrouw, een koe, een wolk, een peer (feminine)

In addition, most Dutch speakers cannot tell you what pronoun to use
in the 3rd person singular when conjugating a verb.
This is because there are two different systems in use for conjugating
the 3 sing.

The basic paradigm is:

hij he
zij (ze) she
het it

System 1

male persons hij

female persons zij
neuter words het
animals hij, unless noun = neuter
objects hij, " "
abstractions zij, " "
substances hij, " "

System 2

male persons hij

female persons zij
all animals hij
all objects hij
all abstractions zij
all substances het

For instance, melk is a common noun. Under system 1, it would be

hij. But under system 2, it would be het because it is a substance.
The er word is tricky in Dutch. Sometimes it is translated as English
there, but more often then not it is simply not translated in English
translations because there is no good translation for it. There are two
definite articles, de and het, and they are easily confused.
Dutch has something called modal particles, the meanings of which
are quite obscure.
Some say Dutch is irregular, but the truth is that more than Dutch has
a multitude of very complex rules, rules that are so complicated that
is hard to even figure them out, much less understand them.
Nevertheless, Dutch has 200 irregular verbs.
In some respects, Dutch is a more difficult language than English. For
instance, in English, one can simply say:

The tree is in the garden.

But in Dutch (and also in German) you can't say that. You have to be
more specific. What is the tree doing in the garden? Is it standing
there? Is it lying on the grass? You have to say not only that the tree
is in the garden, but what it is doing there.

In Dutch, you need to say:

Daar ligt een boom in de tuin.

The tree is standing in the garden.
Daar ligt een boom in de tuin.
The tree is lying in the garden.
Dutch pronunciation is pretty easy, but the ui, eu, ij, au, ou, eeuw and
uu sounds can be hard to make. Dutch speakers say only Germans
learn to pronounce the ui correctly.
Dutch was listed as one of the top weirdest languages in Europe in a
recent study.
Dutch is almost being buried in a flood of English loans. While this
helps the English speaker, others worry that the Dutch nature of the
language is at risk.
Dutch seems to be easier to learn than German. Dutch has fewer
cases, thus fewer articles and and adjective endings. There are two
main ways of pluralizing in Dutch: adding -'s and adding -en.
Unfortunately, in German, things are much more complex than that.
Dutch has only two genders (and maybe just a trace of a third) but
German definitely has three genders. Verb conjugation is quite similar
in both languages, but it is a bit easier in Dutch. Word order is the
same: complex in both languages. Both languages are equally
complex in terms of pronunciation. Both have the difficult ø and y
vowels.
Dutch gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Afrikaans is just Dutch simplified.

Where Dutch has 200 irregular verbs, Afrikaans has only six. A Dutch
verb has six different forms, but Afrikaans has only two. Afrikaans has
two fewer tense than Dutch. Dutch has two genders, and Afrikaans
has only one. Surely Afrikaans ought to be easier to learn than Dutch.
Afrikaans gets a 2 rating, very easy to learn.

North Germanic

West Scandinavian

Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian,

German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The
grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no
Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic. Modern loans
are typically translated into Icelandic equivalents rather than
borrowed fully into Icelandic.
There are four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive - as
in German - and there are many exceptions to the case rules, or
"quirky case," as it is called. In quirky case, case can be marked on
verbs, prepositions and and adjectives. The noun morphology system
is highly irregular. Articles can be postfixed and inflected and added to
the noun. In fact, Icelandic in general is highly irregular, not just the
nouns.
Verbs are modified for tense, mood, person and number, as in many
other IE languages (this is almost gone from English). There are up to
ten tenses, but most of these are formed with auxiliaries as in
English. Icelandic also modifies verbs for voice - active, passive and
medial. Furthermore, there are four different kinds of verbs - strong,
weak, reduplicating and irregular, with several conjugation categories
in each division. Many verbs just have to be memorized.
Adjectives decline in an astounding 130 different ways, but many of
these forms are the same.
The language is generally SVO, but since there is so much case-
marking, in poetry all possibilities - SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and
OVS - are allowed. There is also something odd called "long distance
reflexives," which I do not understand.
In addition, Icelandic has the typical Scandinavian problem of a nutty
orthography.
Icelandic verbs are very regular but the sounds change so much,
especially the vowels, that the whole situation gets confusing pretty
fast. In addition, there are three different verbal paradigms depending
on the ending of the verb:

-er
-ir
-re

Icelandic verbs are commonly cited as some of the hardest verb

systems around, at least in Europe. Even Icelandic people say their
own verbs are difficult.
Icelandic has a voiceless lateral. This can be a hard sound to make for
many learners, especially in the middle of a word. In addition, there
are two alveolar trills (the rolled r sound in Spanish), and one of them
is voiced while the other is voiceless. Learners say they have
problems with both of these sounds. In addition to voiceless l's and
r's, Icelandic also has four voiceless nasals.
There are also contrasts between aspirated and nonaspirated stops
including the odd palatal stops cʰ and c. In addition, there is a strange
voiceless palatal fricative ç (similar to the h in English huge). In
addition, Icelandic has a hard to pronounce four consonant cluster
strj- that occurs at the beginning of a word.
Icelandic does have the advantage of being one of the few major
languages with no significant dialects, so this is a plus. Icelandic has
been separated from the rest of Scandinavian for 1,100 years.
Icelandic is spoken over a significant region, much of which has
inhabited places separated by large expanses of uninhabitable land
such as impassable glaciers, volcanoes, lava flows, geysers and
almost no food. How Icelandic managed to not develop dialects in this
situation is mysterious.
Icelandic has traditionally been considered to be one of the hardest
languages on Earth to learn. It may be even more complex than
Czech and Polish, but since it is a Germanic language, it should be
easier for English speakers to learn than the other two.
Icelandic gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some

very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.
Faroese has strong, weak and irregular verbs. It also has a strange
supine tense.
The Faroese orthography is as irrational as Icelandic's. There are so
many rules to learn to be able to write Faroese properly. Faroese, like
Icelandic, prefers to coin new words rather than borrow words
wholesale into its language. Therefore the English speaker will not see
a lot of obvious borrowings to help them out. Some argue against this
nativization process, but maybe it is better than being buried in
English loans like German and Dutch are at the moment.
computer telda (derived from at telja - to count. Icelandic has
a similar term.

helicopter tyrla (derived from tyril - a spinning tool for

making wool or loom.)

music tónleikur

pocket calculator telduhvølpur (Lit. computer puppy), roknimaskina

(Lit. calculating machine)
Faroese has the advantage of having no verbal aspect, and verbal
declension does not differ much according to person. However,
Faroese has a case system like Icelandic.
Faroese gets a 5 rating,extremely difficult.

Norwegian is fairly easy to learn, and Norwegian is sometimes

touted as the easiest language on Earth to learn for an English
speaker.
This is confusing because Danish is described below as a more difficult
language to learn, and critics say that Danish and Norwegian are the
same, so they should have equal difficulty. But only one Norwegian
writing system is almost the same as Danish the Danish writing
system. Danish pronunciation is quite a bit different from Norwegian,
and this is where the problems come in.
Nevertheless, Norwegian dialects can be a problem. Foreigners get off
the plane having learned a bit of Norwegian and are immediately
struck by the strangeness of the multiplicity of dialects, which for the
most part are easy for Norwegians to understand, but can be hard for
foreigners.
There is also the problematic en and et alternation, as discussed with
Danish. Norwegian has an irrational orthographic system, like
Swedish, with silent letters and many insensible sounds, both
consonants and vowels. It has gone a long time without a spelling
reform. It has the additional orthographic issues of two different
writing systems and a multitude of dialects. Norwegian, like Danish
and Swedish, has a huge vowel inventory, one of the larger ones on
Earth. It can be confusing and difficult to make all of those odd vowel
sounds: 18 contrasting simple vowels, nine long and nine short.
Norwegian has very little inflection in its words, but the syntax is very
difficult. Norwegian also has "tonemes" which distinguish between
homophones.

tanken the tank

tanken the thought

have two different meanings, even though the stress and

pronunciation are the same. The words are distinguished by a
toneme.
For some reason, Norwegian scored very high on a study of weirdest
languages on Earth, but Swedish and Danish also got high scores.
However, Norwegian is a very regular language.
Norwegian gets a 2 rating, moderately easy to learn.

East Scandinavian

Danish is a harder language to learn than one might think. It's not
that hard to read or even write, but it's quite hard to speak. However,
like English, Danish has a non-phonetic orthography, so this can be
problematic. It has gone a long time without a spelling reform, so
there are many silent letters and sounds, both vowels and
consonants, that make no sense. Danish makes it on lists of most
irrational orthographies of all.
In addition, there are d words where the d is silent and other d words
where it is pronounced, and though the rules are straightforward, it's
often hard for foreigners to get the hang of this. The d in hund is
silent, for instance. In addition, the b, d, and g sounds are somehow
voiceless in many environments, which must be a hard sound to
make. There are also the strange labiodental glide and alveopalatal
fricative sounds. In certain environments, d, g, v, and r turn into
vowels.
There are three strange vowels that are not in English, represented by
the letters æ, ø and å. They are all present in other Scandinavian
languages - æ is present in Icelandic and Norwegian, ø is part of
Norwegian, and å is part of Norwegian and Swedish, but English
speakers will have problems with them. In addition, Danish has
creaky-voiced vowels, which is very strange for an IE language.
Danish language learners often report having a hard time pronouncing
Danish vowels or even telling one apart from the other. Danish makes
it onto lists of the wildest phonologies on Earth,and it made it high on
a list of weirdest languages on Earth.
One advantage of all of the Scandinavian languages is that their basic
vocabulary (the vocabulary needed to converse at a basic level and be
understood) is fairly limited. In other words, without learning a huge
number of words, it is possible to have a basic conversation in these
languages. This is in contrast to Chinese, where you have to learn a
lot of vocabulary just to converse at a basic level.
As with Maltese and Gaelic, there is little correlation between how a
Danish word is written and how it is pronounced.
Pronunciation of Danish is difficult. Speech is very fast and comes out
in a continuous stream that elides entire words. Vowels in the middle
and at the end of words are seldom expressed. There are nine vowel
characters, and each one can be pronounced in five or six different
ways. There is nearly a full diphthong set, and somehow
pharyngealization as accent is used as an accent. Danish has a huge
set of vowels, one of the largest sets on Earth. The sheer number of
vowels is one reason that Danish is so hard to pronounce. Danish has
32 vowels, 15 short, 13 long and four unstressed.
There is also a strange phonetic element called a stød, which is a very
short pause slightly before the vowel(s) in a word. This element is
very hard for foreigners to get right.
Just about any word has at least four meanings, and can serve as
noun, verb, adjective or adverb. Danish has two genders (feminine
and masculine have merged into common gender), and whether a
noun is common or neuter is almost impossible to predict and simply
must be memorized.
Suggesting that Danish may be harder to learn than Swedish or
Norwegian, it's said that Danish children speak later than Swedish or
Norwegian children. One study comparing Danish children to Croatian
tots found that the Croat children had learned over twice as many
words by 15 months as the Danes. According to the study:
The University of Southern Denmark study shows that at 15 months,
the average Danish toddler has mastered just 80 words, whereas a
Croatian tot of the same age has a vocabulary of up to 200 terms.
According to the study, the primary reason Danish children lag behind
in language comprehension is because single words are difficult to
extract from Danish’s slurring together of words in sentences. Danish
is also one of the languages with the most vowel sounds, which leads
to a ‘mushier’ pronunciation of words in everyday conversation.
Danish gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Swedish has the disadvantage of having hundreds of irregular verbs.

Swedish also has some difficult phonemes, especially vowels, since
Swedish has nine vowels, not including diphthongs. Pronunciation of
the ö and å (and sometimes ä, which has a different sound) can be
difficult. Swedish also has pitch accent. Pronunciation is probably the
hardest part of Swedish.
Words can take either an -en or an -ett ending, and there don't seem
to be any rules about which one to use. The same word can have a
number of different meanings.
Swedish, like German, has gender, but Swedish gender is quite
predictable by looking at the word, unlike German, where deciding
which of the three genders to use seems like a spin of the Roulette
wheel.
Word order is comparatively free in that one can write a single
sentence multiple ways while changing the meaning somewhat. So I
didn't know that can be written the following ways:

Det visste jag inte.

Det visste inte jag.
Jag visste inte det.
Jag visste det inte.
Inte visste jag det.
For some reason, Swedish got a very high score on a study of the
weirdest languages on Earth.
The different ways of writing that sentence depend on context. In
particular, the meaning varies in terms of topic and focus.
There is a 3-way contrast in deixis:

den
den här
den där

Swedish also has the same problematic phrasal verbs that English
does:

att slå beat/hit

slå av turn off
slå fast settle/establish
slå igen close/shut
slå igenom become known/be a success
slå in wrap in, come true
slå ner beat down
slå på turn on
slå runt overturn
slå till hit/strike/slap, strike a deal
slå upp open (a book), look s.t. Up

Swedish orthography is difficult in learning how to write it, since the

spelling seems illogical, like in English. The sj sound in particular can
be spelled many different ways. However, Swedish spelling is probably
easier than English since Swedish lacks a phonemic schwa, and schwa
is the source of many of the problems in English. Where allophonic
schwa does appear, it seems to be predictable.
One nice thing about Swedish grammar is that it is similar to English
grammar in many ways.
Swedish can be compared to a tube in terms of ease of learning. The
basics are harder to learn than in English, but instead of getting more
difficult as one progresses as in English, the difficulty of Swedish stays
more or less the same from basics to the most complicated. But
learning to speak Swedish is easy enough compared to other
languages.
Swedish gets a 2.5 rating, easy to average difficulty.

Celtic

Any Gaelic language is tough. Celtic languages are harder to learn

than German or Russian.

Insular Celtic

Goidelic

Old Irish was the version of Irish written from 650 to 900 AD. It was
used only by the educated and aristocratic elites. The rest of the
population spoke a simplified version that was already on its way to
becoming Middle Irish.
The verbal system in Old Irish is one of most complicated of all of the
classical languages.
The persons are 1st, 2nd, 3rd and plural. The tenses are present,
preterite, imperfect, perfect, future and an odd tense called secondary
future. There are imperative and subjunctive moods. There is no
infinitive - instead it is formed rather erratically as a verbal noun
derived from the verb. This gerund undergoes 10 different declensions
and often looks little like the verb it is derived from.

cingid - to step -> céim - stepping

There are both strong and weak verbs, and each has both simple and
compound forms.
Bizarrely, every verb has not one but two different paradigms - the
conjunct and the absolute. You use the conjunct when the verb is
preceded by a conjunct particle such as ní (not) or in (the question
particle). You use the absolute when there is no conjunct particle in
front of the verb.
Hence, the present indicative of glenaid (sticks fast), is:

Absolute Conjunct
glenaim : glenaim
glenai : glenai
glenaid : glen
glenmai : glenam
glenthae : glenaid
glenait : glenat

The colon before the conjunct verbs indicates that a conjunct particle
precedes the verb.
The phonological changes are some of the most complicated you
could imagine. An attempt was made to orthographically portray all of
these convoluted changes, but the orthography ended up a total
mess.
Each consonant has four different values depending on where it is in
the word and whether or not it is palatal. Hence, even though the 1st
person absolute and conjunct look identical above (both are spelled
glenaim), they are pronounced differently. The absolute is pronounced
glyenum, and the conjunct is pronounced glyenuv.
The grammar is unbelievably complex, probably harder than Ancient
Greek. There is even a reported non-IE substratum running
underneath the language.
Old Irish gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.
Irish students take Irish for 13 years, and some take French for five
years. These students typically know French better than Irish. There
are inflections for the inflections of the inflections, a convoluted
aspiration system, and no words for yes or no. The system of initial
consonant mutation is quite baffling. Noun declension is mystifying.
Irish has irregular nouns, but there are not many of them:

the woman an bhean

the women na mná

and there are only about 10 irregular verbs. There are dozens of
different declension types for verbs. The various phonological
gradations, lenitions and eclipses are not particularly regular. There
are "slender" and "broad" variants of many of the consonants, and it
is hard to tell the difference between them when you hear them.
Many learners find the slender/broad consonants the hardest part of
Irish. The orthography makes many lists of worst orthographies on
Earth.
Irish gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Both Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are written with non-phonetic
spelling that is even more convoluted and irrational than English. This
archaic spelling is in drastic need of revision, and it makes learners
not want to learn the language. For instance, in Scots Gaelic, the
word for taxi is tacsaidh, although the word is pronounced the same
as the English word. There are simply too many unnecessary letters
for too few sounds. Of the two, Scots Gaelic is harder due to many
silent consonants.
Irish actually has rules for its convoluted spelling, and once you figure
out the rules, it is fairly straightforward as it is quite regular and it is
actually rational in its own way. In addition, Irish recently underwent
a spelling reform. The Irish spelling system does make sense in an
odd way, as it marks things such as palatalization and velarization.
Scottish Gaelic and Manx have gone a long time with no spelling
reforms.
Scottish Gaelic gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.
Manx is probably the worst Gaelic language of all in terms of its
spelling since it has Gaelic spelling yet uses an orthography based on
English which results in a crazy mix that makes many lists of worst
scripts.
Manx gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Common Byrthonic

Welsh is also very hard to learn, although Welsh has no case

compared to Irish's two cases. And Welsh has a mere five irregular
verbs. Welsh is easier than Irish or Scottish Gaelic because it is
written with a logical, phonetic alphabet. Welsh is also simpler
grammar-wise, but things like initial consonant mutations can still
seem confusing and are difficult for the non-Celtic speaker to master
and understand. Verbal declension is irregular.

caraf I love
carwn we love
cerais I loved
carasom we loved

The problem above is that one cannot find any morpheme that means
1st person, 3rd person, or past tense in the examples. Even car- itself
can change, and in connected speech often surfaces as gar-/ger-. And
carwn can mean I was loving (imperfect) in addition to we love. There
are no rules here, and you simply have to memorize the different
forms.
The consonant mutations are what kills the Welsh learner. There are
300,000 Welsh speakers, but very few of them are fully fluent in the
sense of getting all of the consonant mutations and other numerous
grammar rules right. Even native speakers often do not get the
consonant mutations correctly.
Probably the closest speakers to fully fluent would be the Welsh
language teachers. Residents of Wales who grew up speaking Welsh
and in addition learned it in school are also close to but often not fully
fluent. They can often figure out the mutations properly because they
simply sound right to the ear. This type of speaker often spent little
time learning the actual rules of Welsh grammar.
Welsh L2 speakers almost never become nearly fluent and are always
easy to recognize as they cannot seem to get the flow of sentences
and the consonant mutations right.
Welsh may be the hardest to learn of the extant Celtic languages.
Welsh gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Breton is about in the same ballpark as Welsh. It has a flexible

grammar, a logical orthography and only four irregular verbs.
On the other hand, there are very few language learning materials,
and most of those available are only written in French.
Breton gets a 4.5 rating, very hard to learn.

Hellenic

Greek is a difficult language to learn, and it's rated the second

hardest language to learn by language professors. It's easy to learn to
speak simply, but it's quite hard to get it down like a native. It's the
rare second language learner who attains native competence. Like
English, the spelling doesn't seem to make sense, and you have to
memorize many words. Further, there is the unusual alphabet.
However, the orthography is quite rational, about as good as that of
Spanish. Whether or not Greek is an irregular language is
controversial. It has that reputation, but some say it is not as
irregular as it seems.
Greek has four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative
(used when addressing someone). There are three genders:
masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns have several different
declension patterns determined by the ending on the noun. Verb
conjugations are about as complicated as in Romance. Greek does
retain the odd aorist tense. In addition, it has the odd middle voice
and optative mood. Greek syntax is quite complicated.
Greek gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Classic or Ancient Greek is worse, with a distinction between

aspirated and unaspirated consonants, a pitch accent system and a
truly convoluted, insanely irregular system of noun and verb
inflection. It has a dual number in addition singular and plural and it
has a very difficult optative case. Irregular verbs have one of six
different stem types. The grammar is one of the most complex of all
languages and the phonology and morphology are truly convoluted.
Ancient Greek is said to have had four different genitive cases, but it
actually had four different uses of the genitive:

1. Objective Genitive - "for obedience to faith"

2. Subjective Genitive - "faith's obedience" or faithful obedience
3. Attributive Genitive - "obedience of faith"
4. Genitive of Apposition - obedience, i.e. faith

How confusing!

Classic Greek gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all to learn.

Armenian

An obscure branch of Indo-European, Armenian, is very hard to

learn. Armenian is a difficult language in terms of grammar and
phonetics, not to mention the very odd alphabet. The orthography is
very regular, however there are some irregularities.
However, the alphabet itself presents many problems. Print and
cursive can be very different, and upper case and lower case can also
be quite different. In all, this means you have to memorize as many
as four different shapes for each letter. However, the grammar is very
regular.
There are voiced consonants and an alternation between aspirated
and unaspirated unvoiced consonants. Nevertheless, there are many
things about the grammar that seem odd compared to other IE
languages. For instance, Armenian has agglutination, and that is a
very strange feature for an IE language.
Part of the problem is that due to its location in the Caucasus,
Armenian has absorbed influences from some of the wild nearby
Caucasian languages. For instance, an extinct NE Caucasian Nakh
language called Tsov is thought to have contributed to the Hurro-
Ururtian substratum in Armenian. So in a sense when you learn
Armenian, you are also learning a bit of Chechen at the same time.
For some reason, Armenian scored very high on a weirdest languages
survey.
People who have learned both Arabic and Armenian felt that Armenian
was much easier, so Armenian seems to be much easier than Arabic.
Armenian is rated 4, very hard to learn.

Albanian

Albanian is another obscure branch of Indo-European. Albanian

nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine), five cases
including the ablative, lost in all other IE. Both definite and indefinite
articles are widely used, a plus for English speakers. Most inflections
were lost, and whatever is left doesn't even look very IE.
The verbal system is complex, having eight tenses including two
aorists and two futures, and several moods, including indicative,
imperative, subjunctive, conjunctive, optative and admirative. The
last three are odd cases for IE. The optative only exists in IE in
Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Manx. Oddly enough, there is no
infinitive. Active and passive voices are used.
Similarly to Gaelic, Albanian is even harder to learn than either
German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.
Albanian is rated 5,extremely difficult.
 Slavic

All Slavic languages have certain difficulties. For instance, the

problematic perfect/imperfect tenses discussed below in Czech and
Slovak are present in all of Slavic. The animate/inanimate noun class
distinction is present in all of Slavic also. Slavic languages also add
verb prefixes to verbs, completely changing the meaning of the verb
and creating a new verb (see Italian above).

East Slavic

People are divided on the difficulty of Russian, but language teachers

say it's one of the hardest to learn. Even after a couple of years of
study, some learners find it hard to speak even a simple sentence
correctly.
It has six basic cases - nominative, accusative, dative, genitive,
instrumental and prepositional - and analyses have suggested up to
10 other cases. The most common of the extra cases are locative,
partitive and several forms of vocative. All of these extra cases either
do not apply to all nouns ("incomplete" cases) or seem to be identical
to an existing case.
At any rate, the vocative is only used in archaic prose. And there is
also a locative case, which is what the exceptions to the prepositional
case are referred to. Russian has two genitive cases, the so-called
Genitive 1 and Genitive 2. The first one is standard genitive and the
second is the genitive-partitive (see above), which is now only used in
archaic prose.
The grammar is fairly easy for a Slavic language. The problem comes
with the variability in pronunciation. The adjectives and endings can
be difficult. In addition, Russian has gender and lots of declinations.
Like Lithuanian, almost everything in the language seems to decline.
The adjectives change form if the nouns they describe have different
endings. Adjectives also take case somehow.
Verbs have different forms depending on the pronouns that precede
them. Russian has the same issues with perfective and imperfective
forms as Polish does (see the Polish section below). There are dozens
of different declension types for verbs and many verbs that are
irregular and don't fit into any of the declension types. In addition,
there are many irregular nouns, syncretisms, and an aspectual
system that is morphologically unpredictable.
Word order is pretty free. For instance, you can say:

I love you by saying

I love you.
You love I.
Love you I.
I you love.
Love I you.
You I love.

Pronunciation is strange, with one vowel that is between an ü and i.

Many consonants are odd, and every consonant has a palatalized
counterpart, which will be difficult to speakers whose languages lack
phonemic palatalized consonants. These are the soft and hard
consonants that people talk about in Russian. The bl sound is
probably the hardest to make, but the trilled r is also problematic.
Russian has several words that, bizarrely, are made up of only a
single consonant:

s - with, off of
k - to, towards
v - in, into
b - subjunctive/conditional mood particle (would)
Z - emphatic particle

In addition, Russian has some very strange words that begin with a
doubled consonant sound:

вводить
ввести
ссылка

The orthography system is irregular, so there are quite a few silent

letters and words that are pronounced differently than they are
spelled.

Word Silent Letters Example

здн [зн] праздник

рдц [рц] сердце
лнц [нц] солнце
стн [сн] лестница
вств [ств] чувство
жч [щ] мужчина
зч [щ] извозчик
сч [щ] счастье
чт [шт] что
чн [шн] конечно
тц [ц] вкратце
дц [ц] двадцать
тч [ч] лётчик
дч [ч] докладчик
тся [цца] учится
ться [цца] учиться

Stress is quite difficult in Russian since it seems arbitrary and does

not appear to follow obvious rules:

дóма at home
домá buildings
One problem is that phonemic stress, not written out, changes the
way the vowel is pronounced. For instance:

узнаю I'm finding out

узнаю I will find out

The two are written identically, so how you tell them apart in written
Russian, I have no idea. However in speech you can tell one from the
other because the two forms have different stress.
Russian also has vowel reduction that is not represented in the
orthography. The combination of stress and vowel reduction means
that even looking at a Russian word, you are not quite sure how to
pronounce it.
Like German, Russian builds morphemes into larger words. Again like
German, this is worse than it sounds since the rules are not so
obvious. In addition, there is the strange Cyrillic alphabet, which is
nevertheless easier than the Arabic or Chinese ones. Russian also
uses prepositions to combine with verbs to form the nightmare of
phrasal verbs, but whereas English puts the preposition after the
verb, Russian puts it in front of the verb.
All of Slavic has a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns
as a sort of a noun class. Russian takes it further and even has a
distinction between animate and inanimate pronouns in the male
gender:

dvoje muzhchin two men

troje muzhchin three men
chetvero muzhchin four men
pyatero muzhchin five men
shestero muzhchin six men
semero muzhchin seven men

Compare to:
dva duba two oaks
tri duba three oaks
chetyre duba four oaks

However, Russian only has the animate/inanimate distinction in

pronouns and not in nouns in general.
Like Polish below, you use different verbs depending if you are going
somewhere on foot or other than on foot. Second there is a distinction
between going somewhere with a goal in mind and going somewhere
with no particular goal in mind. For instance, to go:

idti (by foot, specific endpoint)

xodit’ (by foot, no specific endpoint)
exat’ (by conveyance, specific endpoint)
ezdit’ (by conveyance, no specific endpoint)

The verb to carry also has four different forms with the same
distinctions as above.
In addition, there are various prefixes you can put on a verb:

into v-
out of vy-
towards po-
away from u-
up to the edge of pod-
away from the edge of ot-
through pro-
around ob-

These prefixes look something like "verbal case." You an add any of
those prefixes to any of the going or carrying verbs above. Therefore,
you can have:

poiti walk up to something

obezdit’ drive around with no goal
uxodit' walk away from something with no goal in mind

The combination of paths and goals results in some very specific

motion verbs.
Russian is harder to learn than English. We know this because Russian
children take longer to learn their language than English speaking
children do. The reason given was that Russian words tended to be
longer, but there may be other reasons.
Russian has the advantage of having quite a bit of Romance and
Greek loans for a Slavic language, but unfortunately, you will not
typically hear these words in casual conversion. Russian also has no
articles. English speakers will find this odd, but others regard it as a
plus.
Russian is less difficult than Czech, Polish or Serbo-Croatian, although
this is somewhat controversial.
Russian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

West Slavic

Czech and Slovak

Czech and Slovak are notoriously hard to learn; in fact, all Slavic
languages are. Language professors rate the Slavic languages the
third hardest to learn on Earth. Czech is in the Guinness Book of
World Records as the hardest language to learn. Even the vast
majority of Czechs never learn to speak their language correctly. They
spend nine years in school studying Czech grammar, but some rules
are learned only at university. Immigrants never seem to learn Czech
well, however, there are a few foreigners who have learned Czech
very well - say, three or fewer errors in a 30 minute monologue, so it
is possible to learn Czech well even if it is not very common.
Writing Czech properly is even more difficult than speaking it
correctly, so few Czechs write without errors. In fact, an astounding
1/3 of the population makes at least on grammatical or spelling
mistake in every sentence they write!
The younger generation is now even worse as far as this goes, as
Czech language teaching for natives has become more lax in recent
years and drills have become fewer. Nevertheless, the Czech and
Slovak orthographies are very rational. There is nearly a 1-1
sound/symbol correspondence.
Even natives often mess up the conditional (would). The 3rd
conditional (past conditional) has nearly gone out of modern Czech
and has merged with the present conditional:

3rd conditional - If I "would have known" it, I would not have asked

has merged with

2nd conditional - If I "would know" it, I would not ask.

This means conditional events in the present are no longer

distinguished between those in the past, and the language is
impoverished.
Native speakers also mix up a specific use of the gerund:

English:

She looked at me smiling.

He walked along whistling.
He was in his bed reading a book.

This is easy to say in English, and the use of these forms is rather
common. However, it is very hard to make those sentences in Czech,
and possibly only 3% of the population can formulate those sentences
properly. Instead, they break them up into two sentences:
Czech:

She looked at me, and she smiled.

He was in his bed, and he was reading.

Czech is full of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. It is said

that there are more exceptions than there are rules. Czech has seven
cases in singular and seven more cases in plural for nouns, for a total
of 59 different "modes" of declension. There are also words that swing
back and forth between "modes." Adjectives and pronouns also have
seven cases in the singular and plural. Czech is one of the few
languages that actually has two genitive cases - one more or less
possessive and the other more or less partitive. There are six
genders, three in the singular and three in the plural.
When you put all that together, each noun can decline in 59 different
ways. Further, these 59 different types of nouns each have 14
different forms depending on case. Verbs also decline. The verbs have
both perfective and imperfective and have 45 different conjugation
patterns. Czech learners often confuse the perfect and imperfect
verbs. Verbs of motion can also be quite tricky.
One of the problems with Czech is that not only nouns but also verbs
take gender, but they only do so in the past tense. In addition, Czech
has a complicated aspect system that is often quite irregular and
simply must be memorized to be learned.
This conjugation is fairly regular:

viděl continuous past he saw

uviděl punctual once he suddenly saw
vídával repetitive he used to see (s.t.) repeatedly

Others are less regular:

jedl continuous he ate

snědl dojedl he ate it all up
ujedl he ate a bit of it
pojedl he finished eating
jídával repetitive he used to eat repeatedly

Czech also has an evidential system. The particle prý is used to refer
to hearsay evidence that you did not personally witness.

Prý je tam zima.

Someone said/People say it's cold outside.

Truth is that almost every word in the language is subject to

declension. The suffixes on nouns and verbs change all the time in
strange ways.
There are some difficult consonants such as š, č, ť, ž, ľ, ď, dz, dž, ĺ
and ŕ. It's full of words that don't seem to have vowels.
Entire Czech sentences can have extreme consonant clusters that
appear to lack vowels:

Strč prst skrz krk.

Stick a finger through your neck.
Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh.
A morel full of spots welted from fogs...
Mlž pln skvrn zvh.

However, the letters r and l are considered "half-vowels" in Czech, so

the sentences above are easier to pronounce than you might think.
The letters ř and r (Czech has contrasting alveolar trills) are hard to
pronounce, and ř is often said to exist in no longer language,
including other Slavic languages, but this is not quite correct. It is
only found in one other language on Earth - the Papuan language
Kobon, which pronounces it a bit differently. Even Czechs have a hard
time making these sounds properly (especially the ř), and many L2
speakers never get them right. There is also a hard and soft i which is
hard to figure out.
As with other Slavic languages like Russian, it has the added problem
of fairly loose word order. In addition, there are significant differences
between casual and formal speech where you use different forms for
someone you are familiar with (are on a first name basis with) as
opposed to someone you do not know well.
On the plus side, Czech stress, like that of Polish, is regular as the
accent is always on the first syllable. But if you come from a language
such as Spanish where the accent is typically on the second syllable,
this might present an obstacle.
Czech gets a 5 rating, extremely hard.

Slovak is closely related to Czech, and it is controversial which one is

harder to learn. Slovak is definitely more archaic than Czech. Some
say that Slovak is easier because it has a more regular grammar.
Slovak has the additional problem is marking acute accents: á, é, í, ĺ,
ó, ŕ, ú and ý. Slovak fortunately lacks the impossible Czech ř sound.
Instead it has something called a "long r," (ŕ) which is not very easy
to make either. This is something like the er sound in English her.
Slovak, like Czech, has retained the vocative, but it almost extinct as
it is restricted to only a few nouns. Like Polish and Sorbian, Slovak
also has an animate/inanimate distinction in gender for plural nouns.
So Slovak has five genders: masculine, feminine and neuter in the
singular and animate and inanimate in the plural.
Some say that Slovak is even harder than Polish, and there may be a
good case that Czech and Slovak are harder than Polish.
Slovak gets a 5 rating, extremely hard.

Lechitic

Polish is similar to Czech and Slovak in having words that seem to

have no vowels, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels. That's
not so obviously the case with Czech. Nevertheless, try these
sentences:

1.Wszczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z

tego słynie.
 2.Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.
3.W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

I and y, s and z, je and ě alternate at the ends of some words, but

the rules governing when to do this, if they exist, don't seem sensible.
The letter ť is very hard to pronounce. There are nasal vowels as in
Portuguese. The ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, sz, cz, dz, dź, dż sounds are hard for
foreigners to make. There are sounds that it is even hard for native
speakers to make as they require a lot tongue movements.
A word such as szczescie is hard to Polish L2 speakers to pronounce.
Polish written to spoken pronunciation makes little sense, as in
English - h and ch are one sound - h, ó and u are the same sound,
and u may form diphthongs where it sounds like ł, so u and ł can be
the same sound in some cases.
Kura (hen) and kóra are pronounced exactly the same way, and this is
confusing to Polish children. However, the distinction between h/ch
has gone of most spoken Polish. Furthermore, there is a language
committee, but like the French one, it is more concerned with
preserving the history or the etymology of the word and less with
spelling the word phonemically. Language committees don't always do
their jobs!
Polish orthography, while being regular, is very complex. Polish uses a
Latin alphabet unlike most other Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic
alphabet. The letters are: AĄ B CĆ D EĘ FGHIJK LŁ M NŃ OÓ
QPRSTUVW XY ZŹŻ.
Further, native speakers speak so fast it's hard for non-natives to
understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is
harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Listening
comprehension is made difficult by all of the sh and ch like sounds.
Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to
hearing their language mangled by second-language learners.
Therefore, foreigners' Polish will seldom be understood.
Polish grammar is said to be more difficult than Russian grammar.
Polish has the following:
There are five different tenses: zaprzeszły, przeszły, teraźniejszy,
przyszły prosty, and przyszły złozony. There are seven different
genders: male, feminine, neuter, animate and inanimate in the
singular and animate and inanimate in the plural. Male nouns have
five patterns of declension, and feminine and neuter nouns have six
different patterns of declension. Adjectives have two different
declension patterns. Numbers have five different declension patterns:
główne, porządkowe, zbiorowe, nieokreślone, and ułamkowe. There is
a special pattern for nouns that are only plural.
There are seven different cases: nominative, genitive, dative,
accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative, and the genitive case is
irregular. Verbs have nine different persons in their declensions: ja,
ty, on, ona, ono, my, wy, oni, one. There are different conjugation
patterns for men and women. There are 18 different conjugation
patterns in the verb (11 main ones). There are five different polite
forms: for a man, a woman, men, women and men and women
combined.
There are four different participle forms, three of which inflect. Some
of these are active and others are passive, but the whole system is
incredibly complex. All of the participles decline like nouns, each
gender adds its bit to each pattern which in turn change more
according to tense.
Polish has seven cases, including the vocative which has gone out of
most Slavic. Although the vocative is becoming less common in Polish,
it is still used in formal situations, and it's not really true that it is a
dying form.
In an informal situation, a Pole might be more like to use nominative
rather than vocative:

Cześć Marek! (Nom.), rather than

Cześć Marku! (Voc.)

However, in a more formal situation, the vocative is still likely to be

used:

Dzień dobry panie profesorze/doktorze! (Voc.), rather than

Dzień dobry pan profesor/doktor! (Nom.)
Case declension is very irregular, unlike German. Polish consonant
gradation is called oboczność (variation).
It also has seven genders, five in the singular and two in the plural.
The genders of nouns cause the adjectives modifying them to inflect
differently.

Noun

matka mother (female gender)

ojciec father (male gender)
dziecko child (neuter gender)

Modifying Adjective

brzydkiugly ugly

Singular

brzydka matka ugly mother

brzydki ojciec ugly father
brzydkie dziecko ugly child

Plural

brzydkie matki ugly mothers

brzydcy ojcowie ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci ugly children

Gender even effects verbs.

I ate (female speaker) Ja zjadłam
I ate (male speaker) Ja zjadłem

There are two different forms of the verb kill depending on whether
the 1st person singular and plural and 2nd person plural killers are
males or females.

I killed zabiłem/zabiłam
We killed zabiliśmy/zabiłyśmy
They killed zabili/zabiły

The perfective and imperfective tenses create a dense jungle of

forms:

kupować - to buy

Singular Simple Past Imperfect

I (f.) kupiłam kupowałam
I (m.) kupiłem kupowałem
you (f.) kupiłaś kupowałaś
you (m.) kupiłeś kupowałeś
he kupił kupował
she kupiła kupowała
it kupiło kupowało

Plural
we (f.) kupiłyśmy kupowałyśmy
we (m.) kupiliśmy kupowaliśmy
you (f.) kupiłyście kupowałyście
you (m.) kupiliście kupowaliście
they (f.) kupiły kupowały
they (m.) kupili kupowali

The verb above forms an incredible 28 different forms in the perfect

and imperfect past tense alone.
The existence of the perfective and imperfective verbs themselves is
the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb - perfective or
imperfective - is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just
being conjugated differently.
The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish:

widziec
zobaczyc

Widziałem - I saw (repeatedly in the past; I saw the sun come up

every morning).

Zobaczyłem - I saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

Some of these verbs are obviously related to each other:

robić/zrobić
czytać/przeczytać
zachowywać/zachować
jeść/zjeść

But others are very different:

mówić/powiedzieć
widzieć/zobaczyć
kłaść/położyć

This is not a tense difference - the very verbs themselves are

different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to
learn two different verbs. The irregular forms may date from archaic
Polish.
In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate
completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the
same way - note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect
as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you
can't be doing something at this precise moment and at the same
time have just finished doing it. 95% of verbs have these maddening
dual forms, but for 5% of verbs that lack a perfective version, you
only have one form.
It's often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are
only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least
eight tenses:

Indicative grac to play

Present gram I play
Past gralem I played
Conditional gralbym I would play
Future będę grać I will play
Continuous future będę grał I will be playing
Perfective future bogram I will have played*
Perf. conditional pogralbym I would have played

*Implies you will finish the action

There is also an aspectual distinction made when referring to the

past. Different forms are used based on whether or not the action has
been completed.
Whereas in English we use one word for go no matter what mode of
transportation we are using to get from one place to another, in
Polish, you use different verbs if you are going by foot, by car, by
plane, by boat or by other means of transportation.
In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look
at the following nouns:

hat kapelusz
computer komputer
dog pies
student uczen

All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate, and
student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently.

I see a new hat Widze nowy kapelusz

I see a new student Widze nowego ucznia

Notice how the now- form changed.

In addition to completely irregular verbs, there are also irregular
nouns in Polish:

człowiek → ludzie
There are also irregularities in the way nouns form the diminutive.

pies (dog) - psiaczek

słońce (sun) - słoneczko

Poles tend to use the diminutive excessively and this drives Polish
learners mad. In addition, some diminutives have multiple forms:

Pies (dog): piesek, psiaczek, piesunio, psiak, psisko, psinka

Lalka (doll): laleczka, lalunia, lalusia, laleńka, lala

Let us look at pronouns. English has one word for the genitive case of
the 1st person singular - my. In Polish, depending on the context, you
can have the following 11 forms, and actually there are even more
than 11:

mój
moje
moja
moją
mojego
mojemu
mojej
moim
moi
moich
moimi

Numerals can be complex. English has one word for the number 2 -
two. Polish has 21 words for two (however, only 5-6 of them are in
common use):

dwa (nominative non-masculine personal male and neuter and non-

masculine personal accusative)
dwaj (masculine personal nominative)
dwie (nominative and accusative female)
dwóch (genitive, locative and masculine personal accusative)
dwom (dative)
dwóm (dative)
dwu (alternative version sometimes used for instrumental, genitive,
locative and dative)
dwoma (masculine instrumental)
dwiema (female instrumental)
dwoje (collective, nominative + accusative)
dwojga (collective, genitive)
dwojgu (collective, dative + locative)
dwójka (noun, nominative)
dwójkę (noun, accusative)
dwójki (noun, genitive)
dwójce (noun, dative and locative)
dwójką (noun, instrumental)
dwójko (vocative)
dwojgiem (collective, instrumental)
dwójkach
dwójek
dwója
dwójkami

Polish also has the paucal form like Serbo-Croatian. It is the remains
of the old dual. The paucal applies to impersonal masculine, feminine
and neuter nouns but not to personal masculine nouns.

Personal Masculine

one boy jeden chłopiec

two boys dwóch chłopców
three boys trzech chłopców
four boys czterech chłopców
five boys pięciu chłopców
six boys sześciu chłopców
seven boys siedmiu chłopców
eight boys ośmiu chłopców

Impersonal Masculine

one dog jeden pies

two dogs dwa psy
three dogs trzy psy
four dogs cztery psy
five dogs pięć psów
six dogs sześć psów
seven dogs siedem psów
eight dogs osiem psów

In the above, two, three and four dogs is in the paucal (psy), while
two, three or four men is not and is instead in the plural (chłopców)
A single noun can change in many ways and take many different
forms.

Compare przyjaciel – friend

Singular Plural
who is my friend przyjaciel przyjaciele
who is not my friend przyjaciela przyjaciół
friend who I give s.t. to przyjacielowi przyjaciołom
friend who I see przyjaciela przyjaciół
friend who I go with z przyajcielem z przyjaciółmi
friend who I dream of o przyjacielu o przyjaciołach
Oh my friend! Przyajcielu! Przyjaciele!

There are 12 different forms of the noun friend above.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is

telephones, whether you have two or 1,000 of them. In Polish, you
use different words depending on how many telephones you have:

two, three or four telefony, but

five telefonów.

Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands:

four ręce, but

five rąk.
Polish seems like Lithuanian in the sense that almost every
grammatical form seems to inflect in some way or other. Even
conjunctions inflect in Polish.
In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a
sentence. You can use up to five negatives in a perfectly grammatical
sentence:

Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedział.

Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing
in Polish. However, the meaning changes subtly with these different
word combinations, so you are not exactly saying the same thing with
each change or word order. Nevertheless, this mess does not seem to
be something that would be transparent to the Polish learner.
In English, you can say Ann has a cat, but you can't mix the words up
and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat five
different ways:

Ania ma kota.
Kota ma Ania.
Ma Ania kota.
Kota Ania ma.
Ma kota Ania.

The first one is the most common, but the other four can certainly be
used. The truth that while the general meaning is the same in each
sentence, the deep meaning changes with each sentence having a
slightly different nuanced interpretation.
In addition, Polish has a wide variety of dialects, and a huge
vocabulary. Similar to Hungarian, there may be many different words
for the same thing.
Although Polish grammar is said to be irregular, this is probably not
true. It only gives the appearance of being irregular as there are so
many different rules, but there is a method to the madness
underneath it all. The rules themselves are so complex and numerous
that it is hard to figure them all out.
Polish appears to be more difficult than Russian. For example, in
Russian as in English, the 1st through 3rd person past tense forms
are equivalent, whereas in Polish, they are each different:

English Russian Polish

1st past I went ya pashou ja poszedłem

2nd past you went ty pashou ty poszedłeś
3rd past he went on pashou on poszedł

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the

language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish
children do not reach this milestone until age 16. Even adult Poles
make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly.
However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language
(though a few hate it), and even take pride in its difficult nature.
On the positive side, in Polish, the stress is fixed, there are no short
or long vowels nor is there any vowel harmony, there are no tones
and it uses a Latin alphabet.
Polish is one of the most difficult of the Slavic languages. It is harder
than Russian (though this is controversial) and about as hard as
Czech and Slovak.
Polish gets a 5 rating, extremely hard.

South Slavic

Eastern

It's controversial whether Bulgarian is an easy or hard language to

learn. The truth is that it may be the easiest Slavic language to learn,
but all Slavic languages are hard. Though it is close to Russian, there
are Russians who have been living there for 20 years and still can't
understand it well.
It has few cases compared to the rest of Slavic. There are three
cases, but they are present only in pronouns. The only case in nouns
is vocative. This is odd because most Slavic languages have either
lost or are in the process of losing the vocative, and in Bulgarian it is
the only case that has been retained.
Compared to English, Bulgarian is well structured and straightforward
with little irregularity. In addition, Bulgarian has more Romance
(mostly French) and Greek borrowings than any other Slavic
languages. Romance came in via the Vlahs who lived there before the
Slavs moved in and Greek from the Byzantine period. In recent years,
many English borrowings have also gone in.
Bulgarian has a suffixed general article that is not found in the rest of
Slavic but is apparently an areal feature borrowed from Albanian. The
stress rules are nightmarish, and it seems as if there are no rules.
Bulgarian has grammatical gender, with three genders - masculine,
feminine and neuter. In addition, adjectives must agree with the
gender of the noun they are modifying. In English, adjectives are
invariable no matter what the noun is:

pretty man
pretty woman
pretty horse
pretty table

However, the Bulgarian alphabet is comparatively simple compared to

other Slavic alphabets. Since 1945, it has only had 30 letters.
Compare this to the 70 letters in Polish. There are only six vowels,
and it has the easiest consonant clusters in Slavic. The orthography is
very regular, with no odd spellings. The Cyrillic alphabet is different
for those coming from a Latin alphabet and can present problems. For
one thing, letters that look like English letters are pronounced in
different ways:

В is pronounced v in Bulgarian
E is pronounced eh in Bulgarian
P is pronounced r in Bulgarian

There are a number of Bulgarian letters that look like nothing you
have ever seen before: Ж, Я, Ь, Ю, Й, Щ, Ш, and Ч. Bulgarian
handwriting varies to a great degree and the various styles are often
difficult to map back onto the typewritten letters that they represent.
While Bulgarian has the advantage of lacking much case, Bulgarian
verbs are quite complex even compared to other Slavic languages.
Each Bulgarian verb can have up to 3,000 forms as it changes across
person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and gender. Bulgarian has
two aspects (perfect and imperfect), voice, nine tenses, five moods
and six non-infinitival verbal forms.
For instance, each verb has at two aspects - simple and continuous -
for each of the tenses, which are formed in different ways. Onto this
they add a variety of derivatives such as prefixes, suffixes, etc. that
change the meaning in subtle ways:

Aorist or Perfect:

да прочета to read in whole a single text/book/etc (viewed as

fact, that is the duration of the action does not interest us)
да изчета to read every book there is on the subject (viewed as
fact, that is the duration of the action does not interest us)
да дочета to finish reading something (viewed as fact, that is
the duration of the action does not interest us)
да изпоизчета to read every book/article/etc there is on the
subject (humorous) - (viewed as fact, that is the duration of the
action does not interest us)

Continuous or Imperfect:

да чета to be reading (viewed as an action in progress)

да прочитам to read in whole a single text/book/etc (viewed as an
action in progress)
да изчитам to read every book there is on the subject (viewed as
an action in progress)
Mood is very complicated. There are different ways to say the same
idea depending on how you know of the event. If you know about it
historically, you mark the sentence with a particular mood. If you
doubt the event, you mark with another mood.
If you know it historically but doubt it, you use yet another mood. And
there are more than that. These forms were apparently borrowed
from Turkish. These forms are rare in world languages. One is
Yamana, a Patagonian language that has only one speaker left.
In Bulgarian, you always know if something is a noun, a verb or an
adjective due to its marking. You will never have the same word as an
adjective, noun and verb. In English, you can have words that act as
verbs, adjectives and nouns.

Let's dance!
Let's go to the dance.
Let's go to dance lessons.

Bulgarian is probably the easiest Slavic language to learn.

Bulgarian gets a 3.5 rating, above average difficulty.

Macedonian is very close to Bulgarian, and some say it is a dialect of

Bulgarian. However, I believe that is a separate language closely
related to Bulgarian. Macedonian is said the be the easiest Slavic
language to learn, easier than Bulgarian. This is because it is easier to
pronounce than Bulgarian. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian has lost most
all of its case. But there are very few language learning materials for
Macedonian.
Macedonian gets a 3.5 rating, above average difficulty.

Western

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular

and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions.
The vocative is still going strong in Serbo-Croatian (S-C), as in Polish,
Ukrainian and Bulgarian. There 15 different types of declensions:
seven tenses, three genders, three moods, and two aspects. Whereas
English has one word for the number 2 - two, Serbo-Croatian has 17
words.

Case abbreviations below:

N = NAV - nominative, accusative, vocative
G = Genitive
D = Dative
L = Locative
I = Instrumental

Masculine inanimate gender

N dva
G dvaju
D L I dvama

Feminine gender

N dve
G dveju
D L I dvema

Mixed gender

N dvoje
G dvoga
D L I dvoma

Masculine animate gender

N dvojica
G dvojice
D L dvojici
I dvojicom

"Twosome"
N dvojka
G dvojke
D L dvojci
I dvojkom

The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imperfective and

perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from
the other, it seems irregular. This is the hardest part of Serbo-
Croatian grammar, and foreigners not familiar with other Slavic
tongues usually never get it right.
Serbian has a strange form called the "paucal." It is the remains of
the old dual, and it also exists in Polish and Russian. The paucal is a
verbal number like singular, plural and dual. It is used with the
numbers dva (2), tri (3), četiri (4) and oba/obadva (both) and also
with any number that contains 2, 3 or 4 (22, 102, 1032).

gledalac viewer
pažljiv(i) careful
gledalac pažljiv(i) careful viewer

1 careful viewer jedan pažljivi gledalac

2 careful viewers dva pažljiva gledaoca
3 careful viewers tri pažljiva gledaoca
5 careful viewers pet pažljivih gledalaca
Above, pažljivi gledalac is singular, pažljivih gledalaca is plural and
pažljiva gledaoca is paucal.
As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing.
Pronouns are so rarely used that some learners are surprised that
they exist, since pronominalization is marked on the verb as person
and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary,
similar to Russian.
Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent - low-rising, low-
falling, short-rising and short-falling. It's not the same as tone, but
it's similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you
also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in
English, is unmarked. And when the word conjugates or declines, the
pitch accent can jump around in the word to another syllable and
even changes its type in ways that do not seem transparent. It's
almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.
The "hard" ch sound is written č, while the "soft" ch sound is written
ć. It has syllabic r and l. Long consonant clusters are permitted. See
this sentence:

Na vrh brda vrba mrda.

However, in many of these consonant clusters, a schwa is present

between consonants in speech, though it is not written out.
S-C, like Russian, has words that consist of only a single consonant:

s – with

Serbo-Croatian does benefit from a phonetic orthography.

It is said that few if any foreigners ever master Serbo-Croatian well.
Similar to Czech and Polish, it is said that many native speakers make
mistakes in S-C even after decades of speaking it, especially in pitch
accent.
Serbo-Croatian is often considered to be one of the hardest languages
on Earth to learn. It is as hard as Russian but not as hard as Polish.
Serbo-Croatian gets a 5 rating, very difficult.

Slovenian or Slovene is also a very hard language to learn,

probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has three number
distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It's the only major IE European
language that has retained the dual. Sorbian has also retained the
dual, but it is a minor tongue. However, the dual may be going out in
Slovenia. In Primorska it is not used at all, and in the rest of Slovenia,
the feminine dual is not used in casual speech (plural is used instead),
but the masculine dual is still used for masculine nouns and mixed
pairs of masculine and feminine nouns.
In addition, there are six cases, as Slovene has lost the vocative.
There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but five of them
are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

Singular Dual Plural

1. Sin Sina Sini
2. Sina Sinov Sinov
3. Sinu Sinovoma Sinovom
4. Sina Sinova Sinove
5. O sinu O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom Z sinovoma Z sini

There are seven different ways that nouns decline depending on

gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules. The use of
particles such as pa is largely idiomatic. In addition, there is a lack of
language learning materials for Slovene.
Some sounds are problematic. Learners have a hard time with the č
and ž sounds. There are also "open" and "closed" vowels as in
Portuguese.
Here is an example of a word that can be difficult to pronounce:

križišče – crossroads

However, Slovene has the past perfect that is the same as the English
tense, lost in the rest of Slavic. In addition, via contact with German
and Italian, many Germanic and Romance loans have gone in. If you
know some German and have some knowledge of another Slavic
language, Slovene is not overwhelmingly difficult.
Some people worry that Slovene might go extinct in the near future,
as it is spoken by only 2 million people. However, even this small
language has 356,881 headwords in an online dictionary. So it is clear
that Slovene has plenty enough vocabulary to deal with the modern
world.
Slovene is easier than Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech or
Slovak.
Slovenian gets a 4 rating, very hard.

Baltic

Eastern Baltic

Lithuanian, an archaic Indo-European Baltic tongue, is extremely

difficult to learn. There are many dialects, which is interesting for
such a small country, and the grammar is very difficult, with many
rules. There is grammatical gender for nouns, and in addition, even
numerals have gender in all cases. The language is heavily inflectional
such that you can almost speak without using prepositions.
A single verb has 16 participial forms, and that is just using masculine
gender for the participles. You can also add feminine forms to that
verb. There are two main genders or giminės, masculine and
feminine, but there is also neutral gender (bevardė giminė), which
has three different forms. Verbs further decline via number (singular,
dual and plural) and six different cases. There are five classes of
verbs and six modes of declension for nouns (linksniai). However,
Lithuanian verb tense is quite regular. You only need to remember
infinitive, 3rd person present and 3rd person past, and after that, all
of the conjugations are regular.

Here is an example of the Lithuanian verb:

Eiti - to go. Ei is the verb root, and ti is in infinitival suffix.

Verbs decline according to:

Person and number

1st singular einu I go

3rd dual einava we two go
1st plural einame we go

The four tenses

2nd pl. past Ėjote you (guys) went

2 sing. imperfect eidavote you used to go
2 sing. indicative einate you go
2 sing. future eisite you will go

They also change according to something called "participants." The

participant paradigm has three tenses and all three genders.
Participants are further divided into direct and indirect.
Regular direct participant (3 tenses, 3 genders)

Male

Ėjęs while he himself went

einąs while he himself is going
eisiąs while he himself will be going

Female

Ėjusi while she herself went

Neuter
buvo einama while it itself went
einama while it itself was going
bus einama while it itself will be going

Regular indirect participant (3 tenses, 3 genders)

Male

past eidytas one that was forced to go

present eidomas one that is being forced to go
future bus eidomas one that will be forced to go

Semi-participant (no tenses, 2 genders)

Male

eidamas while going himself

Female

eidama while going herself

Active participant (2 tenses, no genders)

past Ėjus while going (in the past)

present einant while going now

2nd infinitive or budinys (no tenses)

eite in a way of going

Plusquamperfect (be + regular participants)

Paradigm

indicative būti to have been gone

present yra has been gone
past buvo had been gone
imperfect būdavo used to have been gone
future bus will have been gone

past 3pl buvo ėję they had been gone

Additional moods

Imperative (all persons)

Eik! Go!
Eikime! Let's go!
Teeina/Lai eina! Let him/her go!

Subjunctive (all persons)

eičiau I would go
eitum thou wouldst go

In addition, while most verb marking is done via suffixes, Lithuanian

can make aspect via both suffixes and prefixes, bizarrely enough
(Arkadiev 2011).
Determining whether a noun is masculine or feminine is easier than in
German where you often have to memorize which noun takes which
gender. Lithuanian is similar to Spanish in that the ending will often
give you a hint about which gender the noun takes.
Here is an example of the sort of convolutions you have to go through
to attach the adjective good to a noun.

geras - good

Masculine Feminine

Singular Plural Singular Plural

Nominative geras geri gera geros
Genitive gero gerų geros gerų
Dative geram geriems gerai geroms
Accusative gerą gerus gerą geras
Instrumental geru gerais gera geromis
Locative gerame geruose geroje gerose

The noun system in general of Lithuanian is probably more

complicated even than the complex Russian noun system. Lithuanian
is possibly more irregular and may have more declensions than even
Polish. Learners often feel that the grammar is illogical.
Furthermore, while it does not have lexical tone per se, it does have
pitch accent - there are three different pitches or degrees (laipsniai),
which sound like tones but are not tones. Stress is hardly predictable
and nearly needs to be learned word by word. It's almost impossible
for foreigners to get the accent right, and the accents tend to move
around a lot across words during declension/conjugation such that the
rules are opaque if they exist at all. It was formerly thought to be
nearly random, but it has now been found that Lithuanian stress
actually falls into four paradigms, so there is a system there after all.
You cannot really forget about lexical tone when learning Lithuanian,
as stress is as fundamental to Lithuanian as tone is to Mandarin.
Often you need a dictionary to figure out where the accent should be
on a word. Lithuanian pronunciation is also difficult. For example, look
at rimti (to get calm) and rimti (serious - plural, masculine,
nominative). There is a short i sound that is the same in both words,
but the only difference is where the stress or pitch accent goes.
Consonants undergo some complicated changes due to palatalization.
Lithuanian has soft and hard (palatalized and nonpalatalized)
consonants as in Russian.

Try these words and phrases:

šalna
šąla šiandien
ačiū už skanią vakarienę
pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis
ūkis
malūnas
čežėti šiauduose

Or this paragraph:

Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo
gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už
dėmesį.

Lithuanian is an archaic IE language that has preserved a lot of forms

that the others have lost.
In spite of all of that, picking up the basics of Lithuanian may be
easier than it seems, and while foreigners usually never get the pitch-
accent down, the actual rules are fairly sensible. Nevertheless, many
learners never figure out these rules and to them, there seem to be
no rules for pitch accent.
Learning Lithuanian is similar to learning Latin. If you've been able to
learn Latin, Lithuanian should not be too hard. Also, Lithuanian is very
phonetic; words are pronounced how they are spelled.
Some languages that are similar to English, like Norwegian and
Dutch, can be learned to a certain extent simply by learning words
and ignoring grammar. I know Spanish and have been able to learn a
fair amount of Portuguese, French and Italian without learning a bit of
grammar in any of them.
Lithuanian won't work that way because due to case, base words
change form all the time, so it will seem like you are always running
into new words, when it fact it's the same base word declining in
various case forms. There's no shortcut with Latin and Lithuanian. You
need to learn the case grammar first, or little of it will make sense.
Some say that Lithuanian is even harder to learn than the hardest
Slavic languages like Polish and Czech. It may be true.
Lithuanian gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Latvian is another Baltic language that is somewhat similar to

Lithuanian. It's also hard to learn. Try this:

Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti

sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu.

Latvian and Lithuanian are definitely harder to learn than Russian.

They both have aspects like in Russian but have more cases than
Russian, plus a lot more irregular verbs. Latvian, like Lithuanian, has
a tremendous amount of inflection. The long vowels can be hard to
pronounce.
Latvian is easier to learn than Lithuanian. The grammar is easier to
figure out and the phonological system is much easier. Also, Latvian
has lost many archaic IE features that Lithuanian has retained.
Latvian has regular stress, always on the first syllable, as opposed to
Lithuanian's truly insane stress system. Latvian has fewer noun
declensions, and fewer difficult consonant clusters.
Latvian gets a 4 rating, very hard.

References
Arkadiev, Peter. 2011. On the Aspectual Uses of the Prefix Be- in
Lithuanian. Baltic Linguistics 2:37-78.
Seymour, Philip H. K.; Aro, Mikko; Erskine, Jane M. and the COST
Action A8 Network. 2003. Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European
Orthographies. British Journal of Psychology 94:143–174.