What are the hardest languages to learn?

When people think of hard languages to learn, they often consider Mandarin Chinese to be the hardest language. Sure, the written system of Mandarin Chinese does contain over 50,000 individual characters, each with their own individual meaning, and sure, the pronounciation and tones make no sense to foreigners at first, but Mandarin Chinese does have certain aspects to it that makes it easier than other languages people consider easy. For example, Mandarin Chinese doesn't have complex verb conjugations and verb tenses like Spanish, French or other romance languages. It has no genders unlike in Romance languages and in certain Germanic languages like Dutch or German. It has no case system unlike in Russian or Polish, and no definite articles as well. Now, I'm not saying that languages like Russian or Polish are easy, but this is just to show you how some aspects of learning Mandarin Chinese are relatively simple.

Let's look at another language that people consider to be difficult: Russian. Russian grammar makes no sense to non slavic language speakers as it has 6 cases, as well as a imperfective and perfective tense, as well as a complicated system of prefixes that can drastically change the meaning of a verb. These aspects of Russian show Russian to be a complex language, but easy aspects exist in Russian too. For example, the words are written how they are pronounced unlike in English, where words are not written how they are pronounced, and letters can change pronounciations often randomly. Also Russian does not have definite articles, and it doesn't have complex conjugations like how Romance lanugages have preterite, imperfect, plurperfect, subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive, and much more. This goes to show how certain languages that people consider hard have other aspects of it that are relatively simple.

I've talked a lot about how languages that are typically considered hard by native English speakers have relatively simple concepts as well, but I also want to talk about why English speakers consider languages like Spanish, French, or Dutch easier, even though some of them also have difficult grammatical concepts as well. Like how Spanish has complex verb conjugations, and how the pronounciation of Dutch may be complicated for some.

The answer is that these languages are more related to English and have more similar features to English than Arabic or Mandarin Chinese would. Around 29% of English words come from French, and another 29% comes from Latin, meaning that English shares a lot of common words with romance languages like French and Spanish. Also, since English is a Germanic language, it contains similar features and vocabulary to languages like Dutch and German as well. Thus, making these kinds of languages easy for speakers of English

Other hand, speakers of Russian would find languages like Ukrainian and Bulgarian to be easier due to them being Slavic languages, and speakers of Mandarin Chinese would have an easier time learning Cantonese and Wu Chinese due to them being closely related languages. What I am trying to say here is that, people tend to perceive closely related languages to their own native language as easier, it depends on what their native language is.

So what is the answer to the question that I had asked at the beginning of this post? Well, I think there is no easy language. Because every language has its hard aspects to it, and you still have to dedicate much of your time in order to become fluent in the language, no matter how similar it is to your native language, and no matter how similar the grammar structure or no matter how easy it may seem to be.