So you want to learn another language. Maybe you want to travel, to expand your knowledge, or just prepare yourself for the day when the Feds track you down and you have to flee the country. Learning a new language can be a fun, enlightening and rewarding thing to do, provided you follow one easy step: avoid the languages on this list.
1.Japanese
According to the Foreign Service Institute, part of the US Department of State, Japanese is the hardest language in the world for English speakers to learn. So put aside the anime and start learning Spanish or something.
Like Chinese, Japanese has a character-based alphabet. In order to read a Japanese newspaper with a good degree of understanding, you’ll have to memorize about 2000 of the little bastards.
That’s less than Chinese, at least, right? Well, except that to make up for that fact, Japanese also has two different alphabets, each with forty-six characters in them each. They’ll make you learn both of them before you can even start to think about characters. Oh, also keep in mind that the way each character sounds changes according to whether it’s on its own, in a word in front of another character, in a word behind another character, which character it’s next to, and sometimes just for the hell of it.
But that’s not even what makes Japanese difficult. It’s the goddamn grammar. Not only are there more than fifty ways to modify a verb in Japanese (in English there’s three), the adjectives are modified too. So in the English sentence “I was not sad”, the past tense is contained in ‘was’ and the negative in ‘not’. In Japanese, the same sentence (kanashikunakatta) only needs one word because the past tense and the negative form are contained in the adjective. So you need to learn eight billion conjugations even when you’re avoiding verbs.