In Dutch as a Foreign Language: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Jeannine van der Linden I am just going to keep beating this drum, I guess. Languages are not inherently more or less difficult to learn: the difficulty involved in learning a language as an adult has generally to do with the native language of the speaker, not the target language itself. Just as no place is the furthest away in the world without reference to where the trip begins, no language is the most difficult. Only monolingual people think this way. Similarly, no skill is inherently more difficult without reference to the learner. I find that people tend to either pick up conversational skills or literary skills easily; few people are strong in both when learning a foreign language. I have myself a bias towards spoken language. If you start with an adult native speaker of English, the most difficult initial problem is learning to hear. There are a number of sounds in Dutch not found in English and the adult native... - Meryn Stol