Is Icelandic one of the hardest languages to learn?

I am headed to Iceland this Thursday and I when I started telling people that I was going there...some were saying that Icelandic is the hardest language to learn. I always thought it would be Chinese, Japanese and Finnish. Any insight?

Asked by sevenzeroseven 55 months ago Similar questions: Icelandic hardest languages learn Education & Reference > Languages.

Similar questions: Icelandic hardest languages learn.

Icelandic is considered a Category II language for English speakers - difficult but not exceptionally so. The Foreign Service Institute of the Department (FSI) of State has sorted non-English languages into three categories based on the average time it takes an English speaker to acheive general proficiency/fluency in the language. Icelandic is a Category II language, which indicates it is moderately difficult.

For reference, a few other languages in the categories:Category I (least difficult): French, Italian, Spanish, SwedishCategory II: Greek, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Finnish (which is one of the more difficult Category II languages)Category III (most difficult): Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Sources: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html .

It depends on your native language When someone says "language X is the hardest language to learn", the statement is invariably subjective, biased, and impossible to verify empirically. For example, you mention that you think Chinese would be a difficult language to learn. No doubt this is because of the tonal system.

But to someone who’s spoken a tonal language all their lives, languages like English or Spanish, where tonality is used exclusively to suggest feeling and emotion, are very difficult to learn, and speakers have difficulty eliminating the concept of a particular tone tied to each word. Icelandic might be considered difficult because of its inflectional system. Icelandic is a North Germanic language (and so if you know German, Swedish, Norwegian, or even English you will see some similarities), but has retained much of the original Germanic grammatical structure.

Nouns are conjugated into four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative, which are used to determine the noun’s role in a sentence (roughly, though not strictly: subject, object, possessor, and indirect object/benefactor). English still retains some noun case, though only in the pronouns (he is nominative, him accusative, and his, roughly, genitive). Like any inflected language, many of Icelandic’s noun case roles vary depending on the associated verb, and Icelandic has many examples of "quirky case": i.e.

, verbs that mark particular arguments like subject or object with a particular case, regardless of that case’s "normal" use. However, because of Icelandic’s case system, though word order is generally subject-verb-object (as in English), syntax is very flexible. Like most other Indo-European languages, Icelandic has a rich set of verbal morphology: that is, like French or Spanish, verbs are modified for tense, person, number, and in Icelandic, also for mood (active, passive, and medial).

This is an ancient Indo-European pattern, much more extensive and recognizable in languages like Attic Greek or Sanskrit, and it has only barely survived into English, with little oddities like the present third person plural /-s/ morpheme (I/you/they walk; but he/she/it walks). Icelandic phonology - the sound system - is not far from its Germanic relatives, and with a few exceptions should not be hard for English speakers to learn. There is (as in Chinese) a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated stops, rather than English’s (aspirated) voiceless and voiced, but much of the pronunciation should come naturally to English speakers.

The palatal phones would probably be a bit tougher, though nowhere near as difficult as, say, a native English speaker learning the Cantonese tone system. Finally, to address your issue of "difficult" languages such as Chinese (not really a single language but several related languages using a similar writing system), Japanese, and Finnish, much of this depends on one’s own perspective. Chinese and Japanese, like Engilsh, rely heavily on word order to communicate meaning and dependencies.

For example, in the sentence ’the dog chased the cat’, we know the cat is the chaser and the dog the chasee becasue of the word order. ’The cat chased the dog’ has another meaning altogether. Chinese and Japanese, like Engilsh, rely on the order of words in a sentence to denote grammatical roles (like chaser/chasee in my example).

However, both Chinese and Japanese are topic-comment languages, rather than subject-object, and so this can be confusing for first-time language learners. That is, it is more "important" to note the topic of a sentence rather than the subject of the verb, and the particularities of Chinese and Japanese word order reflect this, pushing sentence topic up to the beginning of the sentence. Finnish, on the other hand, is much like Icelandic, although even more heavily inflected.

Word order is not so important, as there are markers placed on words for grammatical relations. So the sentence ’the dog chased the cat’ and ’the cat chased the dog’ may well be equivalent, depending on the affixes on the words ’dog’ and ’cat’. Depending on one’s background, tastes, and learning styles, it is probable that one system would be easier to learn than another, although which one varies person to person.

Sources: Wikipedia, my own linguistic training Martsen's Recommendations Icelandic: Grammar, Text and Glossary Amazon List Price: $30.00 Used from: $16.12 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 11 reviews) .

Martsen means voice, not mood ("that is, like French or Spanish, verbs are modified for tense, person, number, and in Icelandic, also for mood (active, passive, and medial"). I can't say whether or not that's true for Icelandic but the middle voice was mainly a feature of older, classical languages like Classical/Koine Greek, though remnants of it persist even in our language in very common/simple instances, e.g. , "he is dead" (the action isn't being done to him but yet he's the recipient of the state of being dead, and so it's neither active nor passive but instead middle voice). Mood instead refers to indicative, subjunctive, and imperative, denoting what sense is meant by what's said, although the subjunctive mood's application and occurrence varies by language.

English does still possess remnants of its former 4 cases which it had in its Old English stage, most noticeably the genitive 's and s', which make up 2 of the 8 inflectional endings existing in Modern English. Icelandic also hangs onto the Dual, which was also something one could see in Ancient Greek and I believe Sanksrit as well, though I'm not sure about that (not in Latin though, damnit ;( ). The Dual is simply an additional way of demarcating number as opposed to just singular and plural.

Lastly, true that Chinese is an analytic and HEAVILY word-order dependent language, but not so for Japanese (Japanese is agglutinating as is Hungarian). One comment I've heard again and again from people I know who've taken Japanese is that even native speakers of Japanese can get away with HORRIFIC grammar and it's seen as commonplace. Conclusion: Don't rely on Wikipedia.

And yes, I'm a prick. :D .

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