FYI: Which language is the hardest to learn?

Non-Cantonese-speaking residents of Hong Kong reckon they have it pretty tough when they try to master the language of their adopted home. With nine tones and about 3,000 (traditional) characters necessary to read a newspaper or have a chat with a taxi driver, it's certainly one of the world's more daunting dialects.

But it's not the most difficult language out there, according to experts.

Crowning one language the world's undisputed toughest is impossible since the challenge presented depends on the learner's aptitude and linguistic background - a native French speaker will find Spanish relatively easy while Japanese tend to be faster learners of Chinese and Korean since the three tongues share written roots. However, there have been a few attempts to categorise languages by difficulty on a global scale.

One of the most respected was a 1970s study by the Defence Language Institute in California, which prepared military minds for combat and espionage missions requiring a degree of local language proficiency. The institute grouped key languages based on how many hours of instruction it would take an English-speaking student with 'average' aptitude to gain a reasonable degree of fluency. Group 1, the easiest, is dominated by European tongues such as Dutch, French and Portuguese, which apparently require 480 hours of lessons. Languages in the mid-tier include Thai, Hebrew and Farsi. Only four languages were deemed tough enough to make it into the top group - Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which require more than 1,000 hours of study to use with any competence.

The hardest languages have a few things in common, such as individual scripts and the fact they evolved out of non-western cultural traditions. But some of these languages are more taxing than others. Chinese, for example, could be viewed as relatively easy because of its lack of irregular verbs or plural noun forms. Richard Brecht, a linguist at the National Foreign Language Centre, in the US, has named Japanese as the most formidable language for learners to tackle. Firstly, there are three different writing systems to deal with, including kanji - 10,000 to 15,000 characters borrowed from the Chinese language. Brecht also points out Japan's rather rigid customs render many of the more standard techniques of language instruction useless - greetings, for example, can't be taught in any detail until the student has a good grasp of the hierarchy defining Japanese society and the different honorifics used.

History seems to bear Brecht's thesis out; some scholars of the second world war believe the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was a result of Japan belligerently 'rejecting' the Potsdam Declaration. The term the Japanese used as a reply was mokusatsu, translated as 'no comment'.

A recent list of words voted the world's most difficult to translate doesn't contain many Japanese terms. Ilunga, used by Africa's Bantu people to describe a person who can forgive or tolerate any abuse twice before reacting, and shlimazl, a Yiddish word for a chronically unfortunate soul, topped the list.