which language is the hardest to learn?

english

i think there is no harder language to learn, anyone can learn any language, it takes will power , time and patience.

For everyone? Probably a language isolate like Basque...

Any answer to this question depends really heavily on what your native language is. If you speak French, then Italian will be easier than say, Korean, but if you speak Korean, then Japanese will be far easier than, well, French.

armenian

Icelandic

中文(chinese)
since the spoken system and writing system is two different kinds of things
also there are so many idioms that you need to remember
i am a chinese people

It really depends what language is your first.

ENGLISH SPEAKER:
They say that if you are a native english speaker. The top five hardest languages to learn which require on an average 88 weeks are. The Forgein Institute considers Japanese the hardest of this group. Also the writing, reading and speaking apply in the learning of these languages.
-Arabic
-Cantonese
-Mandarin
-Japanese
-Korean

For some reason, english native speaker find Spanish an easy language to learn, as well as German.

Check out more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_difficult_language_to_learn

Hope this helps!

To me i find the English language the worlds hardest largely due to the fact it follows a different word order pattern than most languages. As a native Russian speaker who also speaks French, German, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian, becoming accustomed with the Latin alphabet from the Russian and Ukrainian cyrillic alphabet has been no challenge but English is made harder by no accents on the word which in a majorty of languages indicate how the word is pronounced and also a non phonetic pronounciation - For example "Phone" phonetically would be spelt as "fone."

Since I will just suppose you are from America, I'd say something very complicated and unlike regular ABC's that we have. Something like Japanese, Chinese, Laotian, Thai, etc.

EDIT: French is very easy to learn, almost as easy as Spanish.

It's a matter of opinion, and I'd say English is the hardest to learn, with our slang and accents, different phrases can be hard to comprehend if you don't speak english. It's just something to think about.

Written Chinese is very complicated and the tonal system in Mandarin is extremely difficult. But Mandarin has an extremely simple grammar. No prepositions, no tenses, no complicated cases or complex subjunctive or other forms. Spoken Chinese is far simpler than any Indo-European language.
Written Chinese is a different story.

Japanese

Every language has its own difficulties. Actually, every language is difficult to learn, because it's really hard to become a native speaker!

E.g Chinese: difficult alphabet --> easy grammar
French: easy alphabeth, easy to learn words --> difficult grammar

It depends also if your mother tongue is an Indo-European language, you will have more difficulties learning Arab, Swahili, Japanese,...

Another thing is that is different for every person. My native language is Dutch, I've learned German, English and French at school. Even though Dutch has more common with German and English, I found it harder to learn those languages, than French, while the other students had difficulties with French.

learn to read? speak (like a native, or just get by), learn to write, understand others?

for whom? Some people find a language easier to learn because it is more closely related to their native language. Others, actually find it easier to learn one rather different (less confusing, I suppose).

And I'm assuming your mean speaking, not the writing system?

Chinese, Arabic and Greek

chinese and english