The "my language is the hardest" syndrome

[William Camden]

I would have thought Icelandic, with a rather conservative and complex grammatical structure, would be harder than Danish.
Written Danish doesn't strike me as especially difficult for an English speaker at least - it is clearly a Germanic language and I have found obvious loanwords from German also make it more transparent. The spoken language might be a different story but I suspect the world is full of more difficult languages than Danish to learn.

[Elsa Maria]

I often have Danish people express sympathy with me. "Danish is such a hard language to learn!"

I do prefer that over someone being mean to me because I can't understand them

[tarvos]

I would have thought Icelandic, with a rather conservative and complex grammatical structure, would be harder than Danish.
Written Danish doesn't strike me as especially difficult for an English speaker at least - it is clearly a Germanic language and I have found obvious loanwords from German also make it more transparent. The spoken language might be a different story but I suspect the world is full of more difficult languages than Danish to learn.

The orthography is quite straightforward though.

[Brian]

Danish is a Germanic language so it shouldn't be too difficult for people who already have knowledge of other languages in this family (hello English!).

Ok, so some of the sounds are unique but I would bet that it's possible to have less than a complete mastery of these tones and yet still be understood perfectly well by a native Dane.

Just a thought, as a sea-faring nation, Denmark has been trading with other countries for centuries. Surely people mangled each others languages back in the old days, yet business was still conducted.

[Serpent]

The biggest reason people struggle is because orthography doesn't mirror actual pronunciation, like in English, French, or even Dutch.

Captain obvious
The thing is, I did my best to learn through listening. The differences didn't bother me per se - it's just that listening was largely like banging my head against the wall, until I incorporated reading.

[Pekoral]

Danish is a Germanic language so it shouldn't be too difficult for people who already have knowledge of other languages in this family (hello English!).

Ok, so some of the sounds are unique but I would bet that it's possible to have less than a complete mastery of these tones and yet still be understood perfectly well by a native Dane.

Just a thought, as a sea-faring nation, Denmark has been trading with other countries for centuries. Surely people mangled each others languages back in the old days, yet business was still conducted.

To be honest: Swedes and Norwegians prefer to speak English with Danes albeit our languages are 80-90 % transparent. Normally spoken colloquial Danish of Copenhagen is very, very slurred and muddled. I'm sure one can find obscure dialects of Swedish and German that are very hard to understand, but Rikssvenska and Hochdeutsch are both very clear.

Speaking of seafaring I'd say that this problem, if we can call it that, is a fairly new one. The "slurryness" of Danish is because of phonological developments during the 19th century (Iverssen, please correct me if I'm wrong). I also has to do with people adopting colloquial speech for all situations rather than using a more formal variety when speaking with people from other places. Most people were taught to pronounce things as they were written when schools were introduced in the Scandinavian countries in the middle of the 19th century. This had a huge impact on the spoken language due to hypercorrection where several word were totally changed as this "readin pronunciation" leaked into the daily dialect. Nowadays, at least in Sweden, we are taught to read aloud and speak formally in the same way as we do otherwise. Uttalshygien, pronunciation hygiene, was finally abolished in the 80'ies in Sweden and since thence there is no such thing as a "correct way" to speak. I would guess, due to our close relationship, that the situation has been somewhat similar in Denmark.

(Besides, if we go as far back as the 16th century, business was conducted in Low German, Plattdeutsch)

Danish spoken carefully and where intervocal consonants are not elided or softened is very easy to understand, and there are some dialects of Danish that are very easy for Swedes and Norwegians to grasp. Copenhagen, not so much. This is quite funny actually, because Danish and Swedish are closer to each other than Norwegian!

[Monox D. I-Fly]

The whole thing would be laughable, but it is part of a larger trend that I've noticed: namely, almost everyone seems to think that their native language is the hardest on the planet. I've heard that claim made from native speakers of English, French, Russian, Chinese, Farsi/Persian, Danish (just now), and probably other languages that I'm forgetting.

I am an Indonesian, and I proudly say that many people think that Indonesian is the easiest language to learn.

[Adrianslont]

Hi Monox and others! Yes, many people do say Indonesian is easy or the easiest language to learn - but I suspect most of them haven't seriously studied it!

I'm learning Indonesian and I love it but it's not easy for me! As a learner I'm still faced with a mountain of vocabulary to learn and I feel vocabulary is probably the biggest part of learning any language (I'm surprised that idea hasn't really surfaced in this discussion to date). As a native English speaker I get a huge discount when reading French - probably thirty percent of the words look like English. With Indonesian I wouldn't get a five percent discount.

I know why people say it's easy - because there is no conjugating of verbs or declining of nouns and many people find those difficult. But Indonesian has its own grammatical demands with its affixes! Also, Indonesian people are so gracious when you speak their language badly.

Anyway, I note with interest that the Foreign Service Institute agrees with me and ranks Indonesian as more difficult for English speakers than a number of other languages including ....... Danish! They say Indonesian takes 900 hours to learn ie 50% more than a category one language like French, Spanish, Danish etc.

[Monox D. I-Fly]

I'm learning Indonesian and I love it but it's not easy for me! As a learner I'm still faced with a mountain of vocabulary to learn and I feel vocabulary is probably the biggest part of learning any language (I'm surprised that idea hasn't really surfaced in this discussion to date). As a native English speaker I get a huge discount when reading French - probably thirty percent of the words look like English. With Indonesian I wouldn't get a five percent discount.

Well, yes, you didn't get as many English discount as French. However, 90% of Indonesian words are loanwords from various languages anyway, so instead of getting many discounts from one language, you get few discounts from many languages instead.

[Serpent]

Yeah, I deliberately learned the Portuguese and Dutch loans in Indonesian But the ones from Sanskrit and Arabic are harder for westerners