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choconutjoe: Pretty much every native speaker masters the rules of grammar at a young age. As is the case with every language.
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Miaghstir: No it isn't. Every native speaker gets a pretty good understanding of the grammar early on, but not mastering it.

French is pretty notorious for having cases of grammar most natives don't understand.
I think you're confusing the actual grammar of a language with the arbitrary, stylistic rules that prescriptive grammarians invent to make themselves look clever.

If there are 'rules of grammar' which native speakers don't understand then those rules are, by definition, not part of the grammar of the language. Anything else is a contradiction.
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Hussar: Chinese - 4 votes
Polish - 2
French - 2
Norwegian - 1
Frisian - 1
Czech - 1
German - 1
Hungarian - 1
Finnish - 1
English - 1
Arabic - 1
Not sure how you counted that but this one "日本語 " said Japanese :)
Japanese is easy to speak, but difficult to write...
I've heard that danish is difficult to master, not because of the grammar, but because of the pronounsuation. We cut off the endings and it is difficult for forreigners to hear the difference between some of the vovels and it might be difficult to hear when words end and begin.
When you write:
Pigen gik ned i kælderen for at hente en flyttekasse
you will say:
Piin gik ned i kældern foorhent ´n flyttkass.
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Jernfuglen: I've heard that danish is difficult to master, not because of the grammar, but because of the pronounsuation. We cut off the endings and it is difficult for forreigners to hear the difference between some of the vovels and it might be difficult to hear when words end and begin.
When you write:
Pigen gik ned i kælderen for at hente en flyttekasse
you will say:
Piin gik ned i kældern foorhent ´n flyttkass.
That is like some linguistic nightmare: French "half of our letters are silent LOL" combined with a Germanic language....good lord.
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Jernfuglen: I've heard that danish is difficult to master, not because of the grammar, but because of the pronounsuation. We cut off the endings and it is difficult for forreigners to hear the difference between some of the vovels and it might be difficult to hear when words end and begin.
When you write:
Pigen gik ned i kælderen for at hente en flyttekasse
you will say:
Piin gik ned i kældern foorhent ´n flyttkass.
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JudasIscariot: That is like some linguistic nightmare: French "half of our letters are silent LOL" combined with a Germanic language....good lord.
Well, if the spelling roules are consistent, you might get the hang of it in the end. I guess that english is like a nightmare when it comes to spelling. You find so many different ways to spell the same sounds, or you use the same letters for different sounds. Who would ever have guessed, that "enough" and "allthough" would sound so differently.
If you go back maybe 30-50 years, dansih pronounciation was much clearer. So I think that old danish movies are easier to understand.
I think polish is one of the most hard ones, also hungarian.
I'd actually say that whatever language you learn first (after your native one) will be the hardest, then whatever's next is far easier. I know the question is more like what language would be rated hardest, but in a way it's more about what's easiest - let me explain...

It's long been understood that learning one additional language makes learning all consequent languages a lot easier as your mind is now "formatted" for inputting new languages. The easiest language to learn is the artificial language Esperanto. A study was done in which one group spent 2 years learning French as their first foreign language. A second group spent 1 year learning Esperanto as their first foreign language and then 1 year learning French. At the end of that 2 year period, the 2nd group were actually better at French than the group that'd spent the whole 2 years learning it.

More specifically to the question, I'd actually say it depends on if you include learning a new alphabet as part of the difficulty. No matter hard something like Polish is, the characters used in writing are largely familiar to anyone else from Europe, Oceania, North and South America and so on. If you want to learn Japanese, the language itself is fairly well structured, if very unintuitive in its sentence structure for English-speaking people, but you have to then learn two "alphabets" of about 28 letters each plus you'll need to know an additional 2000 kanji (Chinese characters) in order to be able to read the average newspaper.
Hmm... no one has mentioned Russian yet? I have never studied it myself, but everyone I know that has studied it and knows it to some degree says it's very hard. Note that I'm from Bulgaria - both Russian and Bulgarian are Slavic.

Russian has 6 cases and you have to change the ending of the noun in countless ways to indicate the case. Most adults (~30+ yrs of age) here can understand spoken Russian very well (it was required to study Russian in school), but when it comes to writing or saying anything in Russian - that's another story. Mainly because of the many cases and declensions. If you get even the slightest bit wrong native speakers won't understand you a lot of the time.
Does teen phone texting count as a language? As a PC user I'm not unaccustomed to abbreviations but many of the texts sent by my daughter leave me speechless.

Dad : So what does T stand for?
Daughter : Well Duh! I thought everybody knew that?
Dad : Guess I'm getting to old for this...
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Egotomb: Does teen phone texting count as a language? As a PC user I'm not unaccustomed to abbreviations but many of the texts sent by my daughter leave me speechless.

Dad : So what does T stand for?
Daughter : Well Duh! I thought everybody knew that?
Dad : Guess I'm getting to old for this...
Only if it involves Cockney Rhyming Slang somehow which is a vernacular I wouldn't mind learning myself :D.
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Egotomb: Does teen phone texting count as a language? As a PC user I'm not unaccustomed to abbreviations but many of the texts sent by my daughter leave me speechless.

Dad : So what does T stand for?
Daughter : Well Duh! I thought everybody knew that?
Dad : Guess I'm getting to old for this...
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JudasIscariot: Only if it involves Cockney Rhyming Slang somehow which is a vernacular I wouldn't mind learning myself :D.
You would have to be "Saddam Hussein" to take on a challenge like that.
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JudasIscariot: Only if it involves Cockney Rhyming Slang somehow which is a vernacular I wouldn't mind learning myself :D.
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Egotomb: You would have to be "Saddam Hussein" to take on a challenge like that.
Saddam hussein = insane i take it?

I never claimed everything was right with my apples and pears. :P
Post edited May 15, 2011 by JudasIscariot
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Egotomb: You would have to be "Saddam Hussein" to take on a challenge like that.
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JudasIscariot: Saddam hussein = insane i take it?

I never claimed everything was right with my apples and pears. :P
You having a bird bath mate? :P

OK I will stop now :D
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JudasIscariot: Saddam hussein = insane i take it?

I never claimed everything was right with my apples and pears. :P
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Egotomb: You having a bird bath mate? :P

OK I will stop now :D
OK you got me there : I can't tell what bird bath is supposed to be :P