What language would be least and which would be most difficult to learn; Russian, German, Swedish or Norwegian?
Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at
6:01 pm
I am a native English speaker with a very basic background in Japanese and Spanish. I plan to take courses with a private tutor that is a native speaker of which ever language I decide to start with first and possibly a few hours of classroom time every week.
* My intent is to learn to speak and comprehend the new languages only, not read nor write them. Thanks!
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Tagged with: classroom time • languages • native english speaker • native speaker • private tutor
Filed under: Russian Language
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Id say German would be the easiest to learn, and Russian the most difficult, mainly because it has a different alphabet and 7 cases… But it sounds beautiful when you hear it, which German does not… But the last is a personal opinion, I speak 5 languages fluently, including German but not Russian.
different people learn different languages with different levels of ease. the only way for you to know how easy they would be for you is to try them all
Most difficult would be russian as it belongs to a different language group (slavic)
Swedish, German and Norwegian will all be around the same, in fact you could argue that Swedish and Norwegian are just dialects of the same language.
It depends on what level of comprehension you want, German Grammar is probably harder than Norwegian or Swedish, none of that difficult verb at the end stuff to deal with.
I can’t vouch for the other three, but Russian would most likely be the most difficult of the four. It has an entirely different alphabet/system of writing and my friend who was forced to learn it for his Mormon mission thing said it was the hardest language to learn. He was fluent in Japanese, Spanish, and English.
Russian would be the most different as it is a Slavic language. The other three are, like English, Germanic and therefore would sound similar to native English speakers.
I would say Russian. The consonant clusters would be a problem.German ,Swedish and Norwegian are Teutonic languages and are related though sometimes it does not look that way when written or spoken. Read "How to Lewarn Any Language" by Barry Farber. Very good language learning book. He has over 50 years of language learning Experience.
I am the author of Easy Russian for English Speakers audio training
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0029CR6WM?tag=httpwwwintera-21&camp=1406&creative=6394&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B0029CR6WM&adid=01DCM5GVJF9SK9VD07Z6&
And co-producer of Easy English for Busy People (also available from amazon)
First of all, there are incorrect comments from other participants regarding Russian language. Russian is in fact part of European family of languages. Although the actual alphabet is written in Cyrillic, the sound of Russian language is really straight forward and easy for any European. I can say this from experience. I speak both English and Russian fluently.
Regarding Norwegian and Swedish. These languages may be harder to learn not necessarily because of how they are constructed, but simply because these are smaller languages with fewer carriers. There are also limited learning resources and limited literature and trade opportunities in these languages. Consequently, many Norwegians speak fluent English in fact and many Swedes also use English a lot.
So German and Russian are definitely better options from practical point of view. Russian would actually be more useful and easier to learn than German. Russian grammar is similar to German but not as difficult. And Russian sounds more pleasant and easier to pick. Plus acquiring some knowledge of Cyrillic characters adds a bit more fun and expertise to anyone who wishes to know European languages and history. Russian is in fact officially the most widely spoken language in Europe. There are more Russian speakers than German and French combined.
depends on what you mean by ‘to learn’ — speaking like a native? reading? writing? understanding native speakers?
also depends on your situation
If you decide on Norwegian, have a look at my website, below
Hardest for you – Russian
Easiest for you – German
I am 99% sure. ;D
i tend to agree with the responses already here. but i could also guess that Russian might not be hard for you at all because you’ve already learned some Japanese (i’m assuming written Japanese also…).
German is likely to be the easiest for you to reproduce without having to use any special intonation. Swedish, for one, has the "sing-song" quality (called "tone accents") that some people have a hard time reproducing, and that it just doesn’t sound like Swedish without them!
i also recommend reading Barry Farber’s book, not so much for any advice you could use, but it is a fun read of his experiences and learning techniques. i knew Barry personally back in the 90’s and early 00’s, but i’ve been out of touch for a few years…
Well I’m swedish, and I know swedish would be really easy! Since you know english, alot of the swedish vocabulary will be familiar to you, since the languages are related and swedish have been highly influated by english. We also have really simple grammar, much different from the german grammar that conjugates their verbs after first person, second person and all that stuff. Even english conjugates their verbs to a certain degree(am, are, is and so on) but nothing like that in swedish! As someone already have pointed out, the diffucult thing might be the pronounciation. I have never heard any foreigner speak swedish without a heavy accent, even after living in the country for many years. But if you have a teacher who is a native swedish speaker, it will help alot when you try to pronounce it.
My sister is studying german, and she thinks the pronounciation is quite easy, she thinks the grammar is the hardest part. And I have no experience with the russian language, except it sounds kind of difficult, strange pronounciation, and since it’s not realted to english the sentence struture and all that I guess would be quite different(unlike swedish, which has almost the same sentence structure). And then norwegian of course. I understand norwegian perfectly, so if you really learn swedish you will be able to also understand norwegian, it’s kind of like you get a language for free (maybe you will also be able to understand danish, but that’s abit trickier). I think the level of difficulty of swedish and norwegian are almost the same, and more people speak swedish then norwegian (9millions compared to 4millons), so I think swedish might be the better alternative. I hope this answered your question!
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