What is the most difficult language to learn?

Reposted for r/language_learning since I posted this in r/redscarepod in a moment of weakness.<br><br>Here is what I have been told by polyglots and people fluent in one or more language of their choice:<br><br>Chinese (Mandarin): the problem is the tones. Arabic speakers said to me it is so hard to learn Chinese because of their own native accent getting in the way of Chinese pitch. I read somewhere that Chinese people can’t speak Chinese properly until age 5 and that is because little kids can’t differentiate between tones. <br><br>Portuguese: Brazilians are easy to understand but Europeans are hard to understand to the general Portuguese speaker. Reason? Tones. <br><br>Swahili: apparently a lot of Europeans pick it up easily but Americans find it hard to learn. Has some Arabic roots too. No tones but there was no consensus on why it is so hard but a polyglot told me it’s actually hard. <br><br>Korean: some people find it easy to learn but a lot of people say Korean is tough because of irregularities. There are 20 consonants and 21 vowels and some vowels have different pronunciations depending on the word. <br><br>Arabic: native speakers have told me it is so hard to learn because of the totally different grammar system. Obviously everything (including numbers) is written right to left which is inconvenient in today’s world, especially when everything is in English left to right. I have been told that it is incredibly hard to learn modern standard Arabic, most Arabs cannot speak it fluently. <br><br>Japanese: I was expecting Japanese to be higher on the list but it is so hard to learn because we don’t have the sounds of Japanese in English and vice versa. Apparently a lot of Americans pick up Japanese easily and a lot of Europeans can’t learn it to save their life. I believe there is tones as well. <br>Native speakers have told me that Japanese has many many ways of saying the same thing depending on the context, and there are many honorifics. <br><br>Greek: apparently the grammar is tough because it’s totally different from English grammar. <br><br>Russian: a lot of Americans have told me that Russian is hard to learn. Apparently there are six different ways of conjugating adjectives and apparently verb aspects are hard to understand. Native speakers have told me it is hard to learn because of the intonation of the word depending on the situation. <br>Apparently Russians have a hard time understanding other Slavic languages but they find German and English easy. <br><br>Spanish: I’ve been told it’s hard to learn because of different accents, there is no consistency in pronunciation apparently. <br><br>German: the native speakers I asked told me that it is so hard to learn because of the cases and the speaking is so fast it’s hard to learn. Apparently a lot of English speakers can’t say the German U sound. <br><br>Italian: native speakers told me that the speaking is so fast it’s hard to learn. Apparently a lot of languages including English are so slow compared to Italian. There is a lot of dialects as well. <br><br>Romanian: I’ve been told it’s hard to learn because of the grammar. Apparently there is no verb to be and a lot of the language is confusing. <br><br>Hebrew: apparently it is so hard to learn because of the grammar. No verb to be. I’ve been told that the letters are so different and it’s written right to left which is inconvenient. <br><br>French: I’ve been told it’s so hard to learn because of the accents. Apparently there are six different accents which are all hard to learn. Apparently a lot of English speakers can’t pronounce the French U and the French R. <br><br>So there you have it!!