[redwitch]

I've had to learn many languages during my life -- German, French, Italian, Russian, Farsi, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portugese, Tagalog, to name some of them. Most I've forgotten about as quickly as I learned them. However, if I'm back in a country, the language does come back albeit I speak as a child would (makes sense since I learned them as a child). Hand's down the 3 hardest languages to learn for me were (1) Russian, (2) English, (3) Mandarin Chinese.

Russian just is missing too many vowels and simply did not trip over my tongue at all. English has a rule for everything and an exception to every rule. Drove me crazy as a child, drives me crazy as an adult. Chinese in any dialect is just a difficult language. I used to have the theory that the Chinese had two tongues, a split tongue or some special bump to be able to speak the way did, especially as rapidly as they did. Not so sure I wasn't wrong.