19: The Hardest Language in the World (Isn’t the One You Think…)

What makes some languages harder to learn than others? In this episode, we attempt to entangle the objective factors - as to why a language is complex - from the subjective ones. We also dedicate a section to talking about our experiences with those languages which we traditionally think are the most difficult to master. Show Notes Foreign Service Institute Language Rankings (https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) (Foreign Language Training) Can We Measure Language Difficulty by the Numbers? (https://towardsdatascience.com/can-we-measure-language-difficulty-by-the-numbers-3d591396934c) (Ofer Tirosh, TowardsScience) Rank of Language Difficulty (https://ai.glossika.com/blog/rank-of-language-difficulty) (Michael Campbell, Glossika Blog) What is the Hardest Language to Learn? (https://blog.thelinguist.com/the-hardest-language-to-learn-2/) (Steve Kaufmann, The Linguist Blog) Past tense ending in Turkish: ‑mış (https://www.turkishtextbook.com/beginner-mis-forms/) (TurkishTexbook) 13 Russian Verbs of Motion to Move Your Learning Forward (https://www.fluentu.com/blog/russian/russian-verbs-of-motion/) (Kelly Virginia Phelan, FluentU) Chinese Classifiers: What Are They And How To Use Them (https://chineseedge.com/chinese-classifiers-what-are-they-and-how-to-use-them/) ( Angie, ChineseEdge) Japanese Formal & Informal Speech (https://www.wyzant.com/blog/formal-vs-informal-speech-in-japanese/) (Lydia Thron, Wyzant) Conjugation of The Verb To Eat in Japanese (https://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=食べる) (JapaneseVerbConjugator)