Rank the difficulty of the Duolingo languages! :)

Here is a list of them (not in order of difficulty)

Spanish French German Japanese Italian Portugese Dutch Irish Danish Swedish Turkish Esperanto Norwegian Ukrainian Russian Polish Welsh Hebrew Vietnamese Hungarian Greek Swahili Romanian

July 25, 2017

28 Comments

FieryCat

1790

July 25, 2017

DragonPolyglot

There's a few things that are misleading about the graph. Firstly, Hebrew is hard for the same reasons Arabic is hard (not written with vowels and fewer words that resemble English ones) but it's somehow ranked as medium. I would like them to explain why. Secondly, Korean has actually been ditching Chinese characters lately to the point where you might only see them in names or on TV. They use Hangul 98% of the time otherwise. Third, how the heck did Finnish get a medium ranking?!Finnish and it's cousins Estonian and Hungarian are notorious for heavy agglutination. And Vietnamese?! Did they even notice the six tones and compound word deal? I mean, I get why Thai is medium but... that's still kinda pushing it. I feel as if this graph is relying mostly on the script types and didn't do any actual research on the grammar.

Where's Esperanto???

1.- Hebrew
2.- Japanese
3.- Hungarian
4.- Polish
5.- High Valyrian
6.- Vietnamese
7.- Swahili
8.- Irish
9.-Guaraní (Jopará)
10.- Turkish
11.- Russian
12.- Ukranian
13.- Dutch
14.- Welsh
15.- Greek
16.- Norwegian
17.- French
18.- Danish
19.- Portuguese
20.- Swedish
21.- Italian
22.- Romanian
23.- Catalan
24.- German
25.- English
26.- Esperanto
27.- Spanish (Native)

N°1 is the most difficult and N°27 is the easiest.

July 25, 2017

SamuelCristea

You forgot Romanian...

July 25, 2017

DragonPolyglot

Of the languages Duolingo offers across the platforms....

Hardest: Irish, Welsh, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Guaraní

Sort of hard: Greek, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese, Turkish, High Valyrian

Not too hard but very demanding: Esperanto, Swahili, Dutch, German, French, English, Romanian

Pretty easy: Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian

July 25, 2017

iwc2ufan

1910

I find it fascinating you included Guaraní among your hardest. I have actually found it very easy considering how different it is from anything else I have studied. I would consider it not too hard, but very demanding just due to so much of the vocab sharing no roots with languages I know already other than Spanish borrowings.

I fully agree with Irish, Welsh, Hebrew, Vietnamese, and Hungarian being the hardest though. I really gave Welsh a go, but it just never gelled for me. I found it so hard to find patterns compared to other languages I've studied.

July 26, 2017

Qiunnn

Swahili was pretty easy, the grammar is regular and so easy to understand, single verb sentences can be made into one word with no actual conjugation, person + tense + verb e.g. ninalala, ni - i, na - present tense, lala -sleeping. The only thing that is that vocabulary is pretty far off a lot of languages especially English ( quite a few loan words though ) so it could be kind of hard for you to memorize but do able with hard work :)

July 26, 2017