Today I received a text message from my old Slovak tutor in Zilina. It read:

Hi, I just wanted to tell you that there was a research of almost 8000 languages in Berlin. The easiest was Spanish and the most difficult Slovak.

You can imagine my joy/despair from reading this! I felt joy because of the validation it gave me: "I'm not crazy, this language is freaking hard!!!" But I also felt despair: "Great. I'm trying to learn the hardest language ever. Yeah. That's going to happen."

Anyways, upon further research I found this:

On September 27th a linguistic consortium in Paris has come up with following results:

the easiest languages to learn:

10. mongolese

09. aramaic

08. greek

07. norwegian

06. italian

05. romanian

04. croatian

03. bulgarian

02. english

01. the easiest language in the world spoken by more than 300 million people is spanish

the most difficult languages: (linguists examined complexity of grammar, syntax, historical development, pronunciation, orthography, letter styles, signs, etc.)

10. german

09. french

08. chinese

07. japanese

06. korean

05. persian

04. arabic

03. finnish

02. hungarian

01. the most difficult language is Slovak

The most difficult is grammar structure. Slovak language is the only one with seven grammar cases (nominativ, genitiv, dativ, accusativ, local, instrumental, vocativ), exquisite words, soft and hard "i", declension of adjectives and verbs, in other words almost each and every word in this language is being declinated. There are many other characteristics which are not found in other world languages. It is said, or estimated, that it takes about 12 years to learn it completely, but the linguists say, that there is no one on this earth who can speak this language perfectly knowing all the grammar rules.

So, this new nugget of information comes to me at the perfect time. Today I start studying Slovak again. I've been on a break for the past few weeks due to moving, but tonight it all begins again.

Bring.
It.
On.