NewStats: 3,261,627 , 8,174,549 topics. Date: Thursday, 29 May 2025 at 08:06 PM 2r5ef

Hello nairalanders,i m new here.i hv thinking abt the most difficult language to learn how to speak both in nigeria and overseas'.Personally,i think in nigeria,the hardest language to learn is calabar,and overseas' it spanish.What u guys opinion abt this

outside if nigeria i think chinese is a very hard language to learn

Interesting question. As somewhat of a hobby linguist in my opinion I think it depends so much on where you are coming from, as in what language you learned from childhood. I'm from the USA and grew up speaking English. I studied Spanish in school and found it to be very easy. It's pretty structured and nearly every letter has only one pronunciation unlike English. I've studied a little bit of Classical Greek, Russian and French as well. They are also very structured, especially Russian (which I love) but French is much harder to speak from my perspective. From my a westerner's point of view the tonal languages (the various Chinese dialects, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.) are the hardest to learn because they incorporate something into the language that I never grew up with - specifically the tones. I'm guessing that I'd probably have a hard time with the middle eastern and African languages as well since they also have sounds that are completely foreign to me - sounds my mouth is not at all used to making! My brother lives in Taiwan and has learned to speak Mandarin quite well but it has been a big challenge for him. The other thing to consider is how is your ear? Some people have a very good ear for languages and others do not. I when I studied French. My teacher was impressed with my ability to form sounds so that I sounded like a native French speaking person. I have a musical background so I knew I'd pick things like that up pretty easily. But I also people in my language classes that just didn't hear what was being said and could not replicate the sounds. I taught computers to Russian students here for a few years and some of them had a very hard time hearing certain English sounds and struggled quite a bit with English while others could clearly hear and mimic our sounds. I'm curious why you are asking this. Are you trying to figure out a language you can learn? For me it depends entirely on whether or not I like the richness of a language and how it sounds. I love the sound of Russian and its complexity. I think I like French for the challenge of the accent. I saw some Brazilian movies a few years ago and fell in love with the sound of Portuguese. It's beautiful.

Saw in some documentary years ago that that title goes to Icelandic but I think any of the San languages (the one with the clicks would be a tall order to learn).

BTW, @OP there is no such language as Calabar, Efik is the language spoken in Calabar.