Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

9. Some Languages Are Just Too Hard
It doesn’t matter what language they’re trying to learn—some people will
always claim it’s the hardest language in the world. I’ve heard it for every
single language I’ve ever taken on, except Esperanto.
There is no “hardest” language. It’s all biased opinions from proud
natives who have no idea what it’s like to learn that language as a second
language, or from other learners who have learned it slowly and may feel
their egos challenged if you try to learn it more quickly than they did.
Discouragement is always for their benefit, not yours, and frankly, they
have no idea what they are talking about.
When I publicly announced on my blog that I was going to learn
Chinese, a lot of Westerners who had learned Chinese tried to discourage
me (though never in person, and never did a native speaker do so). They
went out of their way to repeat over and over again that all my previous
experience was irrelevant because I was now learning the “hardest language
in the world.”
What I found, though, was that most of them had almost exclusively
learned only Chinese. They had little to no experience with other languages.
Many of them said European languages like French and Spanish were very

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easy, even though many learners and native speakers with much more
experience in these languages disagreed. Also, it turned out Chinese wasn’t
that bad after all, and I explain why in detail in chapter 6.
Nobody wins in this comparison game. If you aren’t learning other
languages, then forget them and focus on the one you’re truly passionate
about. Think about the many reasons you want to learn a language, and
dismiss outright any unhelpful discouragement about its difficulty.
A good attitude will get you far, no matter what language you’re
learning.