Which language is harder Polish or Russian?

Both are very interesting languages and I have friends that speak both, I was just wondering which one is harder, and maybe which one is more worth learning?

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Polish Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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10 Responses to “Which language is harder Polish or Russian?”

  1. sometalhead Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Hardest languages
    1. Basque
    2. Hungarian
    3. Chinese
    4. Polish
    5. Japanese
    6. Russian
    7. German
    8. Korean
    9. English
    10. Swahili

    I have come across this article a while ago and I agree with it

    As so often is the case, the answer to this question lies partly in the eye of the beholder. For somebody from Spain learning Portuguese doesn’t present too many difficulties and lots of learners from the Netherlands find it quite easy to master the English language. As a matter of fact, different language families as well as cultural issues lead to a different approach of learners towards different languages. Due to the similar or identical characters of Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese can easily understand written Chinese. Interestingly, grasping the Chinese pronunciation has turned out to be more of a challenge for Japanese learners. All this shows, that there are many different aspects that need to be taken into account in order to pass a reasonable judgment on the matter. As English is the nearest thing to a world language there are lots of tools and textbooks that facilitate acquisition of the language, by contrast, this is not true for minor languages spoken by a smaller group of people.

    While the common consensus tends to describe Chinese and Russian to be among the most challenging languages, a survey conducted by the British government has shown that this is not necessarily true. According to their results, which are based on interviews with diplomatic staff around the world, they found that on the list of the most difficult languages Basque is the top dog, followed by Hungarian with dozens of word cases. Surprisingly, among the interviewees Chinese was not considered to be hard to learn.

    Russian is the easier language to learn and it is also more useful to know since Russia is a much bigger country, has more people and is more powerful. I would definitely recommend for you to learn Russian. It is the 8th most spoken language with 160,000,000 native speakers while Polish is not on the top 10 list

  2. Grace Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Polish!

  3. Stephanie Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    It’s harder to unerstand Polish, but it is hard to learn Russian.

  4. Maia Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Depends on what your first language is.

    Maia

  5. ANDY C Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Both languages are very similar. Many words change with pronunciation. I think that polish would be easier to learn. Polish is more common in the west.

  6. neoncolors!! Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Russian

  7. ellakolesnikova Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Russian is more complex

  8. Esma Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    One thing that my linguistics teacher in college impressed upon us that there are no "hard" or "easy" languages; there are simply brains that are wired to acquire languages easily and brains that are not. He is not saying anything about intelligence, mind you. He is simply saying that people’s brains are wired differently.

    The only exception, he said, was when you are learning a language that is structurally similar to your own as opposed to one that is structurally different from you own. For instance, German is set up like English is, while French is not. Because of this, people who speak English often find German easier to pick up than French. They do not have to "rewire" their brains to a new grammatical system.

    I would say, though, that Russian is probably more worthwhile to know. This is simply because there are more native Russian speakers than native Polish speakers! (They are both beautiful languages, though! And, from what I understand, once you pick up one it is easier to pick up the other as they are similar in structure.)

  9. Bozena Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    I think Polish but Russian is similar

  10. xHurtx Says:
    July 16th, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Definetly Russian.. they have the cyrillic alphabet which makes it harder to learn.

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