Hungarian - the Hardest Language in the World! Really?

[@jaroslavoswald7566]

It's funny. During my life whatever country Iam in, they claim that they have the hardest language. Slovaks say it all the time. Czechs also. Polish? Yeah. Try to ask them. They will always proudly say that their language is hardest. I have also heard German to say it and don't even start with Dutch. Try to go to France. Of course they have the hardest language and so have the Italians. It's funny actually. 😀 Now Iam first time hearing that Hungarian is hardest. Iam sure it is and Iam sure you are proud about it. Never been in Asia. But there is no doubt in my mind that they have the hardest language. And of course I forgot to mention Nordic countries. Their language must be the hardest. No doubt about that. I guess that we all just love to be proud about our "hardest" native language.

[@HungarianKiwiNZ]

I've even heard English speakers say English is the hardest - despite second language speakers picking it up pretty fast!

[@jaroslavoswald7566]

@@HungarianKiwiNZ yes. It's funny actually. Iam native slovak. All my life I was taught that Slovak is hardest Slavic language. But the same is taught in Czechia. (about their language). And in Poland. Now there is lot of Ukrainians in our country. I was speaking with one about languages. And guess what he told me. 😀. It's just funny. Even in your comment section there is some Polish guy that proudly claims that polish is the hardest. And I think that the more people from other countries will come to this comment section, the more claims for "the hardest language" we will hear.

[@onesandzeroes]

Not really. Try Polish.

[@HungarianKiwiNZ]

They are both Category III languages. I'm curious as to whether you have tried both? (I have never tried any Slavic languages myself so I cannot compare them.)

[@brendangordon2168]

Polish is Indo-European, and if the English-speaker has studied Latin before, or even German, it becomes significantly easier. Hungarian? Doesn’t help.

[@onesandzeroes]

@@HungarianKiwiNZ I'm a native speaker of Polish. I have also studied Hungarian. Hungarian is an agglutinative language, where individual suffixes are responsible for individual functions, e.g. a suffix for plural followed by a suffix for accusative. It's a lot more structured and logical than Polish, where each case and each number have unpredictable endings and there are lots of exceptions. The pronunciation is also a lot harder in Polish (and that's from a native speaker ;) - just try some of the consonant clusters (Hungarian has hardly any).

[@onesandzeroes]

@@brendangordon2168 I'm not sure about "significantly". It's true that Hungarian has some "weird" features (from the Indo-European standpoint) like post-positions (or sufffixes) instead of prepositions, but I found it relatively easy to switch to. There is some Latin/French (and also German) vocabulary in Polish, but Hungarian has borrowed some, too. So I'm not so entirely sure an English speaker would find Polish easier than Hungarian. Hungarian is a lot more structured and predictable, while the inflectional system of Polish is wild. There are long, compound words in Hungarian, but they work in a very similar fashion to German, so people who have learnt German won't have much issue. And the Hungarian pronunciation should also be considerably easier to cope with. I'm not claiming that Hungarian is easy, because it isn't, but I do think Polish is arguably the most difficult Slavic language, and Slavic languages overall are pretty tough.

[@HungarianKiwiNZ]

Thanks for that. In my next video in this playlist I'll be making the point that for all the length of the words, Hungarian is pretty regular. Hungarian deliberately adds vowels in borrowed words. It hates consonant clusters - and that is one of the few things that throws my Hungarian tandem partner.