For me as a Pole it’s:
Declination, especially noun declination with 7 cases. Especially considering that some cases are different if we’re declinating animate or inanimate objects.
Spelling, because of ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż and the prev. mentioned declination. Some are spelled differently than they’re pronounced, like znęcanie or bullying, pronounced znen-ca-nie. Or sikawka, or fire pump, pronounced si-kaw-ka.
Conjugation, even inanimate objects have genders. And every animate object has different persons, especially if we’re talking about humans. Throw in singular and plural forms, suffixes, tenses and you’ve got a lingual mess.
Pronunciation is hard because some words are pronounced differently than they’re spelled (see: spelling).
The thing we missed is the environment’s influence, whole families can spell or pronounce some words wrong. Plus in the modern language there are lots of English words, often transformed and distorted to be easier to pronounce and here we get to the ever expanding school and studental dialects, companies’ dictionaries, and errors.
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The hardest part is probably the difference between *i* and *y*. They have exactly the same sound in spoken Czech, but there are many rules which one to use in written texts.
I’ve been involved in numerous language exchanges. The most frequent complaints are about the spelling that makes no sense, the nasal vowels, and how “*French people don’t speak like French is written!!”.* Special mention to differentiating *y* and *en* and knowing when to use them properly.
We do almost everything with suffixes. Tenses, genitive, declination… There’s a lot to learn. Also, the suffixes change depending on which other vowels are in a word. For example, kedi is a cat. Plural of kedi is kedi-ler, because the vowel i has to be followed by a suffix with the vowel e. Soru, is a question. Plural of soru is soru-lar, because u is followed by a suffix with a. It’s called the vowel harmony.
The syntax is very strict and different to English.
We have different ways of making noun compounds. You need to know which one to use.
We have two different past tenses, for things that one has witnessed and those that one has heard of (evidentiality) you need to use the right one, or the meaning of the sentence will change.
Pronunciation is a bit hard. We have letters like ö, ü, ç, ș, ğ, ı.
And so on… I think it’s basically very dissimilar to languages that many people are accustomed to.
There are loads of rules in English, but we only apply them sometimes. We also have a lot of words that sound the same but are spelt differently and then other that sound different but are spelt the same.
E.g. Two, to, too and live, live
We’ve stolen a lot of words from other languages which is probably why the rules are so messed up, but I’m by no means an expert!
English – definitely the spelling. The grammar is pretty easy compared to most languages from what I can tell. But the spelling is stupid. A lot of time in primary school was spent doing spelling tests, just list of words. Something that presumably isn’t necessary in some languages.
I think it’s the fact that our grammar is very complex and full of irregularities. One huge problem is that examples of complexity and irregularity show up even in basic sentences.
“My name is Joe and I like pizza” is probably the sentence you want to learn during your first Italian class.
Guess what, welcome to grammar hell, motherfucker. How about “I call myself Joe and pizza is pleasing to me” as it’s phrased in Italian.
I think for Dutch it is the Pronunciation and Vowels.
A lot of people think Dutch is easy because they know both English and a bit of German, but to actually sound proper Dutch it is extremely difficult. Even people living here for years sound a bit foreign.
I’d say case declension too, especially with articles. You got three grammatical genders, with at first seemingly no rules, and then four cases, plus plural. That’s in theory 16 different articles. But the articles used are often the same for different genders and cases, so it’s only six different words for sixteen possible applications.
I love my native language, but I also agree that it can be hard to learn.