Terminus wrote
You seem too modest. Or maybe it's just You're an quasi-anarchist, aren't ya?
Argumentum ad personam huh? ;-)
Anarchists can be right too (sometimes anyway).
But to be serious - I agree 100% with anonymus replier (the one with the long essay) on your link-page.
It all depends on what kind of difficulty we are talking about - grammar, pronounciation, pragmatic rules of use (like Japanese politeness forms).
But notice please, that both parts in the discussion (Bryan and Anonymous) tend to call their mother tongues for most difficult. At least this is true of Bryan whose mother tongue is Polish while the Anonymous is more cautious. He writes that "one time German was considered to be the most difficult". I am almost sure that "one time" refers to the fervently nationalistic period in Germany's history from XIX century to 1945.
Now let us look at some of the examples which were "one time" intended to support the extraordinary difficulty of German:
complex tense system, a difficult orthography and punctuation, a hard case system and three genders which you simply cannot guess : das Mädchen (the girl) should be feminine but is neutrum Polish and Japanese have tense systems which are at least as difficult as in German. Some African languages has much more difficult one.
Case system in caucasian, Inuit and ugro-finnish languages is much more complicated which the anonymous says himself. Polish and other slavonic languages have three genders as well as does Italian. And there is exactly the same problem with the noun "dziewczę" (little girl) in Polish as with "maedchen" in German. Like in German there is no rule to explain genders of nouns referring to things and states, but also animals - why is a squirrel "wiewiórka"
she but a cat (kot) -
he? By the way - in Russian cat (koshka) is
she.
Bryan cites free word order in Polish as a proof of higher level of difficulty. He writes:
You can make sentences as you preffer But is it really so free? Is there really no difference between:
a) W klasie dzieci uczy nauczyciel
(in calssroom children teaches teacher
and
b) Nauczyciel uczy dzieci w klasie ?
(teacher teaches children in classroom)
Each of them has different focus, which can be seen if you try to make questions to which they can be answers:
a) Who teaches the children in the classroom?
b) Where does the teaches teaches children?
Of course the focus can change if you place stress differently while pronouncing sentences. I have just chosed the most probable interpretations.
But this apparently free sentence order is not something peculiar to Polish. It is quite normal in languages with developed case system.
To end this "speach" I can present a simple statistical proof showing how untrustworthy is any declaration which states that "this and this language is the most difficult in the world".
There are several hundreds languages on this Earth not counting 3-4 thousands dialects. A language genius can learn up to 20 languages (vide Schliemann).
So even being able to speak 20 languages you can not make this statement in a reliable way.
Therefore my strong suspicion, that all such believes are (mis)guided by person's patriotic or other emotional inclinations.
QED
As for English language: I think personally, that it has difficult pronounciation, but much easier than Chinese and Danish (I am speaking only the last one). The grammar is much easier than Polish which is my mother tongue. What I think is difficult is the tremendously rich vocabulary (which can only be compared with Chinese, Turkish and Arabic), and plentiness of idioms, but it is exactly what I like most in this language.
Why do many foreigners find Polish so much more difficult than English? My suspicion is, that they simply lack motivation to learn it. Each time I meet people from other countries who have had really important reasons to learn Polish, I am impressed with their high level of language command.
As for English - it is not difficult to find good motivation - f.ex. to be able to surf the Internet and play computer games ;-) which makes this language specially appealing to children and young people.
And for children there is no such thing like difficult language.
Just think, that in ancient Rom even two years old could speak Latin! ;-)
Greetings