by Schuyler » Thu Jan 18, 2024 3:23 pm
Well. I've only made any real progress in two languages so far, so I can't say I have enough of a sample size to properly judge the difficulty, but here goes. I'm an (American) English native. I've been learning German for a bit over 16 years and consider myself around B2. I can generally understand it and write without too much effort unless it's an unfamiliar topic like sports or something. My speaking is pretty bad still, but I'm bad at speaking in general and also haven't practiced since finishing school, so. *shrug*
And I started Polish in September 2022, learned some basic stuff in the first couple weeks before falling out of the habit for ~6 months and picking it back up for real in March/April. I'd say I'm probably like A1.5 at this point, relatively comfortable with the grammar but still with far too small a vocabulary to really make use of it yet without constantly having to look stuff up and having no idea if what I'm saying is how people actually talk. But the Poles I've tried talking with so far seem to understand me fine and swear I write very well, so I guess I must not be doing too badly, lol.
So which one is harder? Honestly, I don't know if I would say either has been especially hard for me. With German, I had the advantage of learning in school for several years before I even thought to seriously pursue learning it on my own, so I had structured lessons with a teacher and was able to establish a solid foundation to expand on later. Once I started on my own, all I really needed to focus on was listening practice, vocabulary building, and just generally refining what I'd already learned.
And with Polish, I'm learning completely on my own just with textbooks, Youtube/videos, and social media, but now I have the advantage of having learned German first. If you understand what's going on with German grammar, then Polish grammar is fairly straightforward: more complicated (eg. 7 cases instead of German's 4 and masculine nouns subdivide into animate/inanimate in singular and person/non-person in plural) but for the most part it's just kind of more of the same stuff. The only parts that feel new to me and a bit tough right now to get the hang of are the verb aspects and the much more flexible word order. Not to mention there are a lot of German loanwords in Polish as well as similar phrases and structures, so that's pretty nice. ^^ My speaking skills are still non-existent and pronunciation is way harder than German, but eh, I'll work on that when I need to. For the sake of my sanity speaking simply isn't the priority for me at the moment.
So I think I'd say aside from pronunciation, German was a little harder for me because it was my first foreign language and my first time working with concepts that English either doesn't have or barely uses, like cases, grammatical gender, and conjugation. But I'd expect Polish to be much tougher as a second language for a native English speaker since there's a lot more to keep track of and you don't have the benefit of all the shared Germanic roots between English and German -- some people legit say it's the hardest language for English speakers to learn, and while I personally think that's objectively an exaggeration (well, as objective as you can get when it comes to language learning), I can certainly agree it's not the easiest.
Besides those two, I also started learning Russian some 8-9 years ago. I didn't get very far with it before deciding I wasn't ready yet to shift focus to a third language and wanted to work on my German some more first, but I don't remember finding the start especially difficult and probably would have gone back to it for my 3rd language as planned if I hadn't accidentally fallen in love with Polish in the meantime. xD
I've also very briefly dabbled in French, Spanish, Irish, and Mandarin at different points over the years, but not enough to use them at all or really judge how hard they are. But I think of those, if I were to study them further, I'd expect Mandarin to be the hardest for me because while the grammar is very simple (which is not a positive for me because I'm weird like that, but at least it's easy, lol), the writing system would be an absolute nightmare for my very writing-orientated brain to adapt to. Even Russian throws my processing off quite a bit with the written language, and that's just a different alphabet. Which I DO know how to read, but not how to get my brain to process effectively. 😅
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