Osama bin Laden on Top of the World

Repost from the old site. Dated but fascinating stuff.

Where is Osama bin Laden, and where has he been hiding ever since he fled Tora Bora in December 2001? There are many theories about where he hides. One theory is that he has been and is hiding in Pakistan.

I do not speak of the region encompassing North and South Waziristan, where bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri have long been rumored to be. Nor do we include Peshawar, which seems too busy to hide him, although he probably stayed there in January and February 2002, being carefully hidden by members of Pakistan’s major fundamentalist parties who now rule the area.

Nor do we even speak here of the Bajaur Tribal Agency or the adjacent Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, where this blog has long suspected that bin Laden may be, and where he has definitely been hiding off and on since then. For instance, Pakistani President Musharaff said in mid-September 2006 that Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in Bajaur, Kunar and Nuristan.

On September 28, 2006, Pakistani sources said that a new Ayman al-Zawahiri tape was circulating but had not yet been released. They said it had been recorded around the border between Bajaur and Kunar. On October 31, 2006, Pakistani intelligence said they think that they have Zawahiri “boxed in” in a 40-mile square area bordered by the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, and they hope to capture him in a few months.

There is also evidence that bin Laden is in that area. For instance, Osama reportedly attended a wedding of a daughter in or near Bari Kot in Kunar Province in 2002. In September 2003, according to a Newsweek article on September 8, bin Laden was said to be hiding north of the Pech River Valley in Kunar.

The source in the article was an interview with an Afghan whose daughter was married to an Algerian member of Bin Laden’s “praetorian guard”. The Algerian occasionally came down from his hideout to visit his wife.

Bajaur is thought to be Al Qaeda’s “winter hideout”. Zawahiri has surely been in Bajaur, first at Damadola, where he was nearly killed by an airstrike that missed him by mere hours, and in Chinagai, where a rumored Zawahiri visit resulted in a recent US-Pakistani strike that killed 80 madrassa students.

Afghans captured at a safe house in Bajaur in May 2005 reported that the house was regularly visited in February and March 2005 by a masked man with a large bodyguard contingent whom they suspected to be Zawahiri. I have been unable to pinpoint the town in Bajaur where the safe house was.

We are not talking about those areas in this post.

Instead, we are talking about a region in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province ranging from the Dir District north of Bajaur and adjacent to northern Kunar Province in Afghanistan, up into the Chitral District through Lowarai Pass along the Chitral Valley, past Drosh, and up to and beyond Chitral, the old hippie and trekker heaven across from Nuristan Province in Afghanistan.

From the Chitral Valley, we move east of Drosh and back into the Dir District to the Kumrat Valley in Dir Kohistan, part of a larger area called Kohistan. From Chitral, we move north up to Tirich Mir, a 25,000 ft. peak that soars to the skies. From there, we move west to Salim Shah, near the Dorah Pass on the border of Pakistan and the Afghan provinces of Nuristan and Badakhsan.

From that point, we move east along the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan first to Darkot, near 15,000 foot Darkot Pass, and then further east, out of the Chitral District and the NWFP into the Ghizar District in Kashmir, to an extremely remote town called Chillinji, near the Chillinji Pass, a 17,358 foot pass near where Afghanistan, Pakistan and China all come together.

Some places around here, especially north, northwest and west of Chillinji have just recently been explored by modern explorers, who were shocked to find almost no maps or trip reports available when they planned their trips.

From Chillinji, we move a ways east, out of the Hindu Kush and into the Karokoram Mountains, into the Gilgit District to just south of the Chinese border in the Hunza.

Along the way, we will check out some breathtaking photos of the region.

This blog has already reported on this possibility in a prior post, which focused somewhat on Chitral but also investigated reports that bin Laden was seen at an Al Qaeda training camp in the Minteke Pass region on the border of Pakistan and China in 2002. That post included spectacular photos of Chitral and many other photos of the Karokoram Mountains and the Hunza area, which encompasses the Mingteke region.

Lending possible credence to theory that Bin Laden is in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, at least in the Summer, when most of the reports have placed him there, is a theory that the CIA is operating on the seasonal movements of Al Qaeda’s top leadership.

The theory is that the leadership moves between a number of safe houses at lower elevations in the winter (in areas that are pretty much snowed in) and then moves to caves at very high elevations in the Summer when the lower elevations they had been staying in become accessible.

If you think about it, the best place to hide in the region in the warmer months is as high up as possible. A recent ABC news investigative report video segment placed bin Laden between the Khyber Pass and Chitral along the Afghan-Pakistan border. That video also noted the seasonal movements described above (works only in Internet Explorer – shame on ABC!)

This very nice and easy-to-read map is a good guide to at least part of this post. The red circle is the approximate location of Damadola , where a US Predator tried to kill Ayman Al-Zawahiri (Al Qaeda’s Number 2 man) when he was visiting in-laws on January 13, 2006. (Zawahiri married a woman from the Damadola area in 2001.) The missile only missed the Al Qaeda leader by hours and killed Al Qaeda’s top explosive expert.

Abu Marwan Al-Suri, Al Qaeda’s money man, was killed on April 20, 2006 between Khar (not on the map), capital of Bajaur, and the Afghan border. That would also be in about the location of the red circle on the map.

Dargai on the map is where the Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber attacked a Pakistani base recently, killing 45 recruits, in a revenge attack for the US Predator attack on the Al Qaeda training camp/madrassa in Chinagai (not shown, but located by the bend in the road east of Mian Kalai on the map) on October 30, 2006, killing 80 madrassa students. That attack may also have been based on a rumored visit by Zawahiri.

Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, the so-called Number 3 man in Al Qaeda, was arrested in May 2005 in Mardan on the map. Dir, Drosh and Chitral on the map are discussed in this post. The town of Tal on the map is located in the Kumrat Valley, discussed in the post.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri are also often said to be hiding in the Afghan province of Nuristan around Kamdesh on the map. Bin Laden appeared at a wedding for a daughter in 2002 in Barikot on the map in the Afghan Province of Kunar in 2002.

Tirich Mir, Darkot and Chillinji Pass are off the map to the north and northeast.

We begin our journey in Dir, where Frontline (a US Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, program) reported that Osama bin Laden was seen only three weeks before they visited on August 30, 2002 to make the special In Search of Bin Laden. During Frontline’s visit to Dir, they described it as totally hostile. Bin Laden had also been seen in Chitral just weeks prior to the Dir sighting. At the time, Zawahiri was thought to be operating out of Chitral.

Later, in March 2003, we have a report from the Iranian News Agency that an FBI team (actually CIA) was in Chitral in order to intercept a planned meeting between bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of Hizb-Islami, an Afghan radical Islamist group, who had just thrown his hat in with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In truth, there were extensive searches in Chitral in February-March 2003 involving both CIA and Pakistani forces. The two-person CIA team (male and female) cruised the district in an SUV, but found nothing. Parties were reportedly coming across the border from Nuristan for the meeting.

Abu Khabaib, an Arab explosives master, has been spotted several times in the Chitral Mountains. He has worked with Sheik Ahmed Salim, an Al Qaeda operative who has given money and fighters to Lashakr-e-Jhangvi, a Pakistani extremist organization that is primarily dedicated to waging horrible terrorist attacks (often large-scale attacks) on Pakistan’s Shia population.

Al Qaeda released a videotape in September 2003 showing bin Laden and Zawahiri picking their way down a very steep and high-elevation forested mountain. The trees in the videotape are reportedly peculiar to the Chitral region.

The Chitral District has a population that is 65% Sunni, 35% Shia Muslim and a tiny percentage of non-Muslim Kalash, who practice a pre-Islamic native religion with overtones of animism.

This obscure blog feels that bin Laden is hiding between Dir and Chitral in the Chitral Valley, which would put him around Drosh on the map. A description of the Frontline crew’s visit to Drosh on September 1, 2002, with a nice photo, is here.

Moving on up the Chitral Valley past Drosh, we come to Chitral, where hippies migrated in the 1960′s and 1970′s for its legendary hashish. Even back then, it was very difficult to get in, as all entry to foreigners was banned, and you could only get in with an invite from a resident.

When Frontline traveled through the Lowarai Pass between Dir and Drosh, they looked in the guestbook and noted that only two Americans had been there since 9-11, a period of almost a year. The soldier manning the post joked and said that one of the two Americans was a spy.

Stomach-churning switchbacks on the road to Lowarai Pass. This terrible road is one of the best roads in this part of Pakistan. The Phalura people live here. Their language is related to the Kohistanis 40 miles to the west; the Phalura apparently moved to this area from Kohistan several centuries ago for unknown reasons. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were apparently in this area in July and August 2002. Are they there now?

The people around the pass speak a Dardic language with 8,600 speakers called Phalura, that is related to Shina (Shina is described at the end of the post). In some villages, the language appears to be dying in favor of the more widely spoken Khowar but in others it is still vibrant .

The people here are Sunnis. A linguist in Sweden, Hendrik Lilgendren, is working on a grammar of the language, a much-needed addition to our knowledge of these poorly documented languages of Northern Pakistan.

Chitral is now a trekking capital for intrepid visitors all over the world, but it is still a great place to hide. There are tourists in the summertime, but in the winter, Lowarai Pass, its window to the world, is generally snowed in. Air access to Chitral is meager at best, and the electricity and Internet go out all the time. In 2006, perhaps ominously, Pakistan closed the entire Chitral region to tourists due to “security reasons”.

The local governor has reportedly forbidden intelligence officers from searching the area and local politicians have been protesting, perhaps a bit too much, that bin Laden is nowhere in the area. Fundamentalist Islam is big even in Chitral, where the local Islamist party in summer 2006 protested women having their own stalls in the market.

In late August 2006, Al Qaeda authority Peter Bergen said US intelligence was starting to focus on Chitral as a possible hideout for bin Laden. This conclusion was based on an analysis of the trees in Al Qaeda videotapes and the length of time it seems to take to deliver Al Qaeda tapes after they have been made (about 3 weeks).

Another interview with Bergen for a CNN program called “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden” aired in September 2006 elaborates along the same lines, and says that Chitral is considered “inaccessible” and that US forces are banned from the area at any rate.

Note this recent article from September 2006, though, that notes that since January 2006, a special US bin Laden task force called Task Force 145 is now allowed to go into Pakistan without permission to hunt bin Laden.

Chitral, where as recently as August 2006, US intelligence felt that Osama bin Laden was hiding. A CIA team rented a home here to search for him until they were chased out in Spring 2006. Some think he was living a quiet, paranoid life here in a home with only a few other people. He would hardly ever go out, and his visitors would be very tightly regulated. He may have spent his day listening to radio, watching the news and surfing the net, since he is a news junkie.

A US intelligence official was quoted as saying that bin Laden was thought to be living not in a cave but in a house in Chitral, possibly with a family, and with a small bodyguard team of maybe only a couple of guards. Bergen felt that bin Laden spendt his days on the Internet, watching CNN and listening to BBC radio. He may access the net through a device called an HF modem that connects users to the net via radio waves.

Pakistani officials protest that Chitralis do not like bin Laden due to ethnic and religious differences, so it is unlikely that he is in the area. A tiny CIA (reports say it was FBI, but CIA here is always referred to as FBI, in order not to inflame Pakistani sensibilities) team rented a home in Chitral in Winter 2005 under the cover of being investors trying to bring business to the area.

By Spring 2006, local politicians found out about them, and were raising a fuss about them after their location was revealed by a local politician, but by that time, they were already gone.

There is another report, this one from June 17, 2005, from ABC’s Brian Ross. In this case, a group of Arabs came down from Nuristan to a small market town in the Chitral District and loaded up on large quantities of supplies, including wheat and flour. Then they headed back to Afghanistan. I do not know what town in Chitral they came to. It seems probable that this group was connected to the Al Qaeda leadership.

People in Chitral mostly speak Khowar, a Dardic language with 240,000 speakers that is distantly related to Hindu and Persian and more closely to Punjabi, Kashmiri and Sindhi. You can see the tremendous differences between it and Pashto, Hindi, and even Nuristani in this lexical chart. Note the occasional cognate though, such as “eye”.

About 15-20 % of speakers are literate in the language. Nevertheless, Khowar, I am happy to say, is being well-developed as a literary language.

Adding weight to the theory that bin Laden may be or may have been in Chitral is a recent report from ABC News that more foreigners have been seen lately in the Waziristan and Bajaur Agencies of FATA, and in the Dir and Chitral Districts of NWFP. In all of these areas (including Chitral), the Taliban have been openly recruiting for jihad in Afghanistan.

The heightened presence of foreigners and open recruiting is apparently due to recent peace deals between the Pakistani government and jihadis in North and South Waziristan that essentially handed over power there to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Moving north of Chitral, this article from around the same time, late August 2006, says bin Laden was thought to be hiding north of Chitral, around the towering Tirich Mir Mountain, a soaring peak that rises to 25,289 feet. No source was given, but Western intelligence agencies are usually the sources of these tidbits.

Tirich Mir Mountain, where in August 2006, US intelligence sources suspected Osama bin Laden may be hiding.

A nice webpage on this mountain, with some spectacular pictures, is here.

The Chitral River near Tirch Mir, north of Chitral. This river cuts a wide swath through the canyons here. Good luck getting across it.

You were wondering how you get across the Chitral River in this area? Like this. As you can see, motor vehicles cannot cross here and typically pack animals cannot either.

There are plenty of caves around there too, sympathetic tribesmen, a ban on US forces operating in the area, and few to no roads. Another great place to hide.

Goats on the road near Tirich Mir, north of Chitral. Is that a paved road? Amazing.

On a map, Tirich Mir can be seen in the far northwest corner of Pakistan, north of Chitral and south and west of the border with Afghanistan.

Kuragh Ridge, near Tirich Mir north of Chitral. An intelligence report in August 2006 placed Osama bin Laden here.

A road in the Yarkuhn Valley, about 1/2 way between Tirich Mir and Darkot. This is the best road in the area!

The area circled shows the location of various areas discussed in this post, including Chitral, Tirich Mir, Drosh, Dir, Salim Shah, Dorah Pass, Garam Chasma, the Kuragh Ridge and the Kumrat Valley.

Moving east, a report by ABC’s Brian Ross from May 24, 2006 (6 months ago) said that Pakistani officials had received reports that Al Qaeda’s top leadership was in the Kumrat Valley of Dir Kohistan, 40 miles inside Pakistan. They had reportedly moved there from Chitral.

Kohistan, where the Al Qaeda leadership was thought to have moved to from Chitral in summer 2006. The trees and terrain here do resemble that seen on a videotape of bin Laden and Zawahiri in 2003, I must admit. This photo also looks very much like Nuristan Province in Afghanistan, where the leadership has also long been rumored to be hiding. It also reminds me of Idaho in the US Northwest.

The Pakistanis felt that the bin Laden’s entourage had recently moved down from the high peaks near the Afghan-Pakistan border to Kohistan.

Stunning Kohistan. This photo looks like the Caucasus Mountains on Russia’s southern border. What a great place to hide! Why not hang a Welcome Al Qaeda sign?

The Kumrat Valley is identified on the map above by the town of Tal, which is located in the valley.

A nice web page on Kohistan is here . Kohistan (population 2 million ) is one of the most isolated and deprived areas in Pakistan, and the illiteracy rate ranges from 94-98%!

A dwelling, or series of dwellings, on a terraced field in Kohistan. Crops do not grow well in this region at all, with poor weather and rocky soils being major factors.

There are 5 doctors per million population in Kohistan – or 1 doctor for every 200,000 people.

Harsh winters in stunning Kohistan add to the isolation of this region.

The people in the Kumrat Valley speak a language called Kalami, which has 40,000 speakers. In this area, the Thal dialect of Kalami is spoken. This dialect has around 90% similarity with most of the other Kalami dialects. Most men also speak Pashto.

This link has an excellent description of the people and language of this region (pdf). Since the creation of an alphabet in 1995, Kalami is now a written language with an Indo-Arabic script similar to Urdu. Three books have now been published in Kalami by the Kalam Cultural Society. Links to two of those books are here and here. Some stunning photos of the Kalam area can be seen here.

The Kalamis are similar in many ways to the Kohistanis of Afghanistan. They are all strict Hanafite Sunni Muslims.

As you can see, the natives here in Kohistan are not particularly friendly. “Who are you looking for? Osama who? Never seen him.” Afghan Nuristanis often have similar hostile expressions towards visitors.

As with the Kohistanis in Afghanistan, almost all men are armed at all times in order to defend themselves against their numerous enemies, since most of them are engaged in continuous feuds with other Kalamis, usually revolving around women and honor.

A Pakistani official recently stated that Kohistan is the most lawless area of all Pakistan, and Dir Kohistan was the most lawless part of Kohistan. Feuds kill about one person every two weeks in the Tal Region.

The strict Sunni Muslims here in are all armed, all the time, and ready to fight. That and they don’t like strangers, especially nosy infidels. For bin Laden, Kohistan is paradise.

Kohistani women are treated terribly in Kohistan, as they are in Afghanistan. Kohistani women are treated even worse than Pashtun women, which is pretty bad!

This region is extremely inaccessible. There are only two roads in the entirety of Pakistani Kohistan, and those are pretty bad.

A typical “road” in Kohistan. Inaccessible by any motor vehicles; you need to access places like this either on foot or by donkey. Nuristan in Afghanistan has similar terrain and a similar “road” system. The first road in Nuristan was reportedly built in 1979.

Most travel here is on foot or by mule on narrow rocky trails.

Bridges are often narrow hanging bridges over raging, torrential rivers tearing through soaring canyons. The bridges are so narrow and rickety that often pack animals will refuse to cross them, rendering much of the area inaccessible even by mule!

That is called a bridge in Kohistan – a log over a raging torrent of a river plunging down a skyscraper canyon. If you hide here, no motorized vehicle can get to you. Search teams must come by mule or on foot and you will be warned far in advance.

These same conditions regarding roads and bridges also apply to Nuristan, and similarly limit access to that Afghan province and make it an excellent place to hide.

That’s barely even a trail. This is what passes for a road here in Kohistan. An enemy army here is confined to mules or boots. This is the terrain US forces have to deal with in Kunar and Nuristan in Afghanistan. Have fun!

As you can see, this is an excellent place to hide! US forces are not allowed here and Pakistani forces cannot access most of the region via motorized vehicles.

A typical hanging bridge in Kohistan. Nuristan in Afghanistan has many similar bridges that often look remarkably like this one.

Pakistani troops would be limited to pack animals, and in many cases, they would just have to abandon the animals and go on foot.

Often, pack animals simply refuse to cross these Kohistan foot bridges over raging alpine rivers. Surely, anything with four wheels is useless here. The bridges and scenery in Afghanistan’s Nuristan are quite similar.

The people here are notoriously hard to govern, and early observers reported that this area was inhabited by “ anarchists” who opposed all outside authority. The terrain here is spectacular, with plunging canyons, soaring peaks, raging rivers, lush meadows and deep evergreen forests.

Lush forests and soaring peaks in this photo of Kohistan look like the Sierra Nevada near my home. The forests here are still intact, unlike those in much of the region.

The forests here are vast and the deforestation level is still low, unlike Nuristan and Kunar.

Spectacular scenery in Kohistan as a smaller tributary meets a larger river amidst soaring, impenetrable forests. This could be Alaska, Western Canada (British Colombia) or Norway.

There is also a very healthy wildlife population in Kohistan, including rare animals. Large carnivores, often rare elsewhere in the region, are abundant. Brown and Black Bears, leopards and snow leopards and wolves roam the wild forests.

Kohistan is a paradise for wildlife, even rare predatory mammals that are barely holding their own elsewhere. Can you imagine Al Qaeda’s most wanted hiding here? This photo looks like the Rocky Mountains in Canada.

What few roads and trails existed prior to 1992 have now been wiped out after terrible floods raged through Kohistan in that year, destroying roads, trails, bridges and structures.

There are a few roads in Kohistan, if you can call that a road! This is transportation at its finest in this region.

Most of the area has still not yet been rebuilt.

Floods raged through these canyons in Kohistan 14 years ago, devastating an already deprived area and isolating it even further.

The people grow a few crops here, but only 4% of the land is cultivated and most crops do not grow well.

Rain in Kohistan, with snow on the ground. The climate here is extremely wet, with lots of snow in winters and plenty of rain the rest of the year.

They also increasingly engage in forestry and especially the gathering of medicinal herbs for sale, of which there are around 70 types growing here.

The gorgeous forests of Kohistan. By examining the trees in an Al Qaeda video from 2003, the CIA thinks it is pinning down where bin Laden is located. This photo could be of the Black Forest in Germany, the US’ Washington state and Canada’s province of British Colombia in the Pacific Northwest, Chile’s Patagonia, or Russia’s endless Siberian forests.

For the most part, residents subsist on animal husbandry. They obtain milk, meat, cheese, wool and hides from these animals.

Residents in Kohistan graze animals on the gorgeous alpine meadows here. This looks like the Alps.

In recent years, quite a bit of tourism has come to the Kalam area, but I don’t know how they are getting around unless they are trekkers.

Moving even further to the north and off the map above, in this fascinating Christian Science Monitor article by Scott Baldouf on August 9, 2002, Al Qaeda Massing For New Fight, Ayman Zawahiri was said to be holding sway at a new base constructed by Al Qaeda in the town of Shah Silim (map).

A village near Garam Chasma, which is close to Shah Salim, where Al Qaeda reportedly had a large base in 2002. Look at those craggy, forbidding peaks.

This obscure report notes that in August 2002, echoing Baldouf’s article, bin Laden and Zawahiri traveled to Dir and Shah Salim to solidify their alliance with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the Hezb-i-Islami. It also lists in fascinating detail all of bin Laden’s known movements and activities from November 2001 to August 2004.

The road along the Lutko River from Chitral to the Dorah Pass is actually accessible by jeep. This is near Shah Salim.

Shah Salim is located about 30 miles northwest of Chitral on the Afghan-Pakistan border near where Pakistan meets the Afghan provinces of Badakhshan and Nuristan.

Spectacular footage and forbidding terrain near Garam Chasma, close to the Shah Salim Al Qaeda base. The people here are speak a language called Yidga.

On a map, it is located between the town of Darband and 14,940 foot Dorah Pass, only a few miles from the Afghan border. This pass played an important role in the war, as this was an important supply route form Pakistan to Afghanistan that the Soviets were never able to shut off.

The Afghan side of Dorah Pass, the famous route used by the mujaheddin in the Soviet War. The people in this area used to be mostly Munjis, but most of the Munjis left to Pakistan with the war. It’s not known if they have returned or not yet.

This is an extremely wild, remote and inaccessible region. There are hardly any roads and much of the access is by foot or horse. In 2001, the area was experiencing a terrible humanitarian crisis. Most of the people here speak Yidga (6,145 speakers) and are Ismaili Shia Muslims. Yidga is a Pamir language. The Pamir languages are Indo-Iranian languages related to Persian and Pashto, but fairly distantly.

Across the border in Afghanistan, people speak another Pamir language called Munji that is somewhat closely related to Yidga (about as close as English and Dutch). Most Munjis fled Afghanistan and settled in Pakistan during the Soviet War.

A fascinating Australian Medical Journal article in 2002 reported on the experience of a doctor, Robert Simpson, working with MSF (Doctors Without Borders) in the region in 1999, albeit 60 miles north of Salim Shah in the Badakhshan town of Baharak (map here). This article gives you an idea of what things are probably like in Salim Shah.

The living conditions in this region are simply appalling. This is a region where there are no roads, no communications, no water, no power, and basically, no government, along with a population engaged in constant warring and feuding.

On Dr. Simpson’s trip to the Wakhan Corridor, his Afghan guides decided to go fishing – with explosives!

Results of fishing with explosives in the Wakhan Corridor.

50% of the children in Badakhshan are malnourished and many women die in childbirth.

A variety of terrible diseases regularly ravage large sectors of the population, and cures or even treatments are typically nonexistent. Three people were stoned to death while he was there. For Afghanistan as a whole, infant and maternal mortality figures are amongst the worst on Earth (Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate is exceeded only by Sierra Leone) and life expectancy is a mere 45 years.

In Baharak, all of those figures are worse, if you can imagine that. The linked article includes disgusting photos of Afghans afflicted with the bizarre and terrible illnesses that ravage this region.

Moving further along the Wakhan Corridor, an area even poorer and more devastated than the rest of Badakhshan, if you can believe that, we note that on August 17, 2006 bin Laden and Zawahiri were reportedly in the Pakistani town of Darkot, on the border between Pakistan and the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.

Another precarious bridge, this time near Darkot and the Wakhan Corridor. People are using yaks to cross this bridge.

The article suggested that the leadership had just moved out of Chitral to the Wakhan Corridor.

Crossing Darkot Pass on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remind you of Tora Bora and Al Qaeda’s escape through similar snowfields and peaks? Yes, it does.

Darkot Pass, another view, where the Al Qaeda leadership was reportedly hiding out in August 2006.

On a map, Darkot is north of Mir Wali and slightly northwest of the 21,407 ft. Daspar Mountain. It is located on the edge of the Wakhan Corridor on the Afghan border.

Trekkers riding yaks near Darkot. The preferred way to travel here is by yak! The Al Qaeda leadership was said to be here in summer 2006.

The entire Wakhan Corridor is at least 9000 feet high and the climate is very harsh. There is only 1 clinic in the entire corridor and it is 20 days’ donkey ride away from the furthest villages in the corridor. There is absolutely no infrastructure whatsoever here.

A very large percentage of the population is using opium here, possibly because it is about the only “medicine” available.

Dr. Simpson in an opium field in Badakhshan.

The vast majority of the population also appears to be depressed. None of the children are immunized against anything.

On Simpson’s visit, he reported that in one village, the last foreigner had passed through 20 years ago. In another, an entire village of 300 had been devastated by a klebsiella bacterial infection, probably spread by poor sanitation. At one point, there were hardly any villagers strong enough to even fetch water for the rest. The outbreak could easily have killed the whole village.

Dr. Simpson traveling along the Wakhan Corridor. The health and general living conditions here are truly horrible. This photo looks like the Andes.

A similar report, this one from a month earlier, noted that Pakistani authorities had, on July 19, 2006, ordered the entire part of Pakistan bordering the Wakhan Corridor evacuated due to reports that bin Laden and Zawahiri were in the area of the Chillinji (or Chilinji) Pass.

A raging, muddy, torrential, flooding river near Darkot. The wild, nearly unknown lands near Chillinji look similar. This entire area was evacuated in summer 2006 after reports that bin Laden and Zawahiri were hiding somewhere here. I would expect to see an Abominable Snowman in a place like this. This photo actually looks like Patagonia in Chile.

The town of Chillinji is about 34 miles west of Darkot. It is across the border of the Chitral District, beyond the tail of the Hindu Kush, into an obscure range called the Hindu Raj, and into the Ghizar District of Kashmir at the headwaters of the Ishkuman River.

A village near Darkot, one of the highest villages in the area. The terrain around Chillinji is very similar. The first modern expedition to Chillinji only explored this area in the 1990′s.

This 17,549 ft. pass is the 5th highest pass in the Hindu Kush. A report places the Al Qaeda leadership in Chillinji about 1 month before they were seen in Darkot.

The Darkot Glacier, viewed from the West. Take your breath away.

Chillinji is 30 miles east of Darkot and also borders the Wakhan Corridor.

Herding yaks near Darkot in terrain reminiscent of Tibet. Was the Al Qaeda leadership here in summer 2006?

The area has two advantages for Al Qaeda – US forces are not permitted there, and the proximity to China means that bombing by US air power is probably not an option due to the fact that a diplomatic row may ensue over US planes bombing targets so close to Chinese territory.

A precarious bridge over a raging, muddy torrent bashing away at an apparent glacier near Darkot. Tell me how a modern army travels through this terrain?

There were 100′s of tourists in the area at the time, mostly trekkers, and all were reportedly evacuated. The report was confirmed by Western intelligence in Islamabad.

The linked report above goes on to speculate about a Chinese connection to Al Qaeda, either governmental, or (more likely) via East Turkestan separatists, who are long known to be allied with Al Qaeda through attending courses at Al Qaeda’s training camps under the Taliban’s rule.

We seem to have come full circle here. Soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, US Special Forces were hunting bin Laden in the very same Wakhan Corridor. At the time, the theory was that the top AQ leadership was hiding in caves in the corridor in a cave complex that was supposedly built by the Russians.

This complex very high in the mountains was supposedly so high-tech that it was heated. Special Forces were using thermal sensors in the winter to look for a possible heated shelter in this area. Nothing ever turned up, and no one has ever conclusively shown that this supposed base even exists.

Close to Darkot. The peaks in the background look like the Himalayas. You see Osama anywhere around here? Neither do I.

I was unable to find pictures of the Chilinji area that were not copyrighted, and we typically don’t run copyrighted photos on this blog.

Those interested in some truly spectacular photos of the Chillinji/Darkot Pass area are urged to check out the site of photographer Steve Razzetti. Once inside, click on the slide show marked Hindu Kush. Most of the photos are of the area around Chillinji and Darkot. The Chilinji area looks quite a bit like the Darkot photos in this post.

Near Darkot, the soaring peaks bring to mind the Matterhorn in the Alps or Everest in the Himalayas.

Our final stop along this voyage will be a place called Murkushi ( map), a town located 4 1/2 miles south of the Chinese border where China, Pakistan and Afghanistan all come together.

A breathtaking photo of the area near Murkushi, with a typical barely passable bridge and cascading gorge. This area is impassible by motor vehicles and often even pack animals because they are afraid of these bridges. Hence, the only access is by foot.

Murkushi is located south of Kilik Pass and west of Mintaka Pass. Both passes are at 15,449 feet.

The incredible view of Kilik Pass. Kilik Pass is only about 5 miles north of the supposed Al Qaeda training camp at Murkushi.

Mintaka Pass, about 5 miles east of Murkushi, the site of a reported Al Qaeda training camp. Photo is from the Pakistani side. The pass is about 15,500 feet.

The stunning view, looking from Kilik Pass southeast to Mintaka Pass on the Chinese-Pakistani border. This area is so close to China that it is de facto controlled by the Chinese. Furthermore, the proximity to China means that US jets cannot bomb here for fear of setting off a world crisis with the Chinese.

According to the Baldouf article, by August 2002, Al Qaeda had set up a large base here.

A great and hard to find photo of the area right around Murkushi. Al Qaeda supposedly had a large base here in Summer 2002.

Afghan spies, pretending to be Islamists, reportedly penetrated the Murkushi and Shah Salim bases in 2002. The Murkushi area, though in Pakistani territory, is reportedly under de facto Chinese control.

Afghan intelligence concluded that the Murkushi base may be being controlled by the Chinese government, a theory the Machiavellian implications of which are presently boggling my mind. I will leave it to the reader to toss that idea around!

The people residing in Darkot, Chillinji and Murkushi are generally Wakhis, an Ismaili Shia Tajik people numbering 50,000 worldwide.

Wakhi women and girls near Darkot. Note the colorful dresses of these Ismaili Shia women. Women here are not under the restrictions of purdah one finds as one goes west towards Chitral.

Wakhi is spoken in Pakistan (9,100 speakers), China (6,000 speakers), Tajikistan (7,000 speakers) and Afghanistan (9,600 speakers). In Afghanistan, it is spoken in the Wakhan Corridor, described above.

Wakhi is related to Iranian and Tajik, but fairly distantly. It is even rather diverse within its Pamir subgroup, as this lexicon shows. Wakhi is now a written language, and 60% of Pakistani speakers can read and write it. There is also a radio program in Wakhi in Pakistan. Most male Wakhis in Pakistan can also speak Urdu.

In other places, especially Afghanistan and Tajikistan (especially), Wakhi appears to be losing ground in favor of Pashto or Tajik. In Pakistan, Wakhis refer to themselves as Tajiks. Tajik nationalists claim that Wakhi is a dialect of Tajik, but a quick look at the lexicon above shows how ludicrous that claim is.

There are also some speakers of Burushaski , an obscure language isolate (not related to any known languages) here, especially in the Hunza around Murkushi. I have studied Burushaski extensively (in particular, the work of John Bengston) and I now feel it is related to Sino-Tibetan, Basque, Ket and the North Caucasian languages like Chechen in a super-family called Dene-Caucasian), although that is a highly controversial theory.

The Bengston book I read back in the 1990′s mostly dealt with Yenisien (the Ket family), some Caucasian languages and Basque, and I felt it was quite convincing.

Khowar and Shina are also spoken in the Yasin and Ishkoman Valleys near Darkot and Chillinji.

River crossing near Darkot. This party had a jeep but they had to abandon it miles back because it was no longer possible to travel by jeep. They switched to donkeys, which they are using to ford this wide, wild river. A mechanized army is useless here; an excellent place to hide.

Shina is a widely-spoken language in northern Pakistan, spoken by 330,000 speakers.

An interesting fact is that in Chillinji, Darkot and Murkushi, the purdah system, whereby women are kept out of sight in public, pretty much vanishes, and girls and women walk freely about and anyone can look at them, whereas in most of Chitral, even in the Ismaili areas, the purdah system prevails.

Wakhi girls near Darkot. Not only do they walk around freely, but you can actually look at them and even take their photos! Gasp! Note the bright outfits and the neat jewelry hanging from them. The girl on the right has very noticeable Asian features.

You may note the focus on languages in this post. I have a Master’s Degree in Linguistics. One of my areas of interest is a controversial one – language death. The decline and extinction of so many of the world’s languages is a complex subject that goes beyond the scope of this post. But those interested may wish to check out this neat paper on language diversity, decline and death in Pakistan (pdf).

It also has a nice list of the 70 languages spoken there, with number of speakers, locations, and in some cases, notes about language shift (a process of language death whereby speakers quit speaking their native language in favor of another, usually more widely spoken language).

More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Indo-European Languages

Caution: This post is very long! It runs to 91 pages on the Web.

We did a post on this earlier, but it looks like we only scratched the surface. There are many of webpages on this topic, and one could read about the subject for a long time, but after a while, things start getting repetitive.

This post is very good. There are more in various places on the Web.

For starters, before we do our own analysis, let’s look at what some other people came up with. This post is very good. They did a survey, and the post describes the results of the survey.

According to the survey, the nine hardest languages to learn overall were Mandarin, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, German and Swedish.

The eight hardest languages to speak (or to pronounce correctly, specifically) were French, Mandarin, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, Arabic, Basque and Hindi.

The nine hardest languages to write were Arabic, Mandarin, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Basque and English.

How does that survey line up with the facts? Surveys are just opinions of L2 learners, and carry variant validity. For starters, let’s throw Swedish off the list altogether, as it actually seems to be a pretty easy language to learn. It’s interesting that some people find it hard, but the weight of the evidence suggests that more folks find it easy than difficult.

Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Russian of course use different alphabets and this is why they were rated as hard to write.

Method. A literature survey, combined with interviews of various L2 language learners was conducted. In addition, 100 years of surveys on the question by language instructors was reviewed. The US military’s School of Languages in Monterey’s ratings system for difficulty of learning various languages was analyzed.

Results were collated in an impressionistic manner along a majority rules line in order to form final opinions. For example, a minority said that Portuguese or Spanish were very hard to learn, but the consensus view was that they were quite easy. In this case, the minority opinion was rejected and the consensus view was adopted. The work received a tremendous amount of criticism after publication, and many changes were made to the text.

Clearly, such a project will necessarily be more impressionistic than scientific. Scientific tests of the relative difficulty of learning different languages will have to await the development of algorithms specifically designed to measure such things. And even then, surely there will be legions of “We can’t prove anything” naysayers, as this is the heyday of the “We can’t prove anything” School of Physics Envy in Linguistics.

One common criticism was that, “In Linguistics, the standard view is that there is no such thing as an easy or difficult language to learn. All languages are equally difficult or easy to learn.” Unless we are talking about children learning an L1 (and even then that’s a dubious assertion) this statement was rejected as simply untrue and exemplar of the sort of soft science (“We can’t prove anything about anything”) mushiness that has overtaken Linguistics in recent years.

Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics have long been nearly ruined by soft science mushiness, and in recent years, soft science “We can’t prove anything” muddleheadedness has overtaken Historical Linguistics in a horrible way. Bizarrely enough, this epidemic of Physics Envy has been clouded, as one might suspect, in claims of rigorous application of the scientific method.

But hard sciences prove things all the time. Whenever a field claims that almost nothing in the field is provable, you’re heading in the realms of Politically Correct soft science Humanities brain mush.

Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was judged according to how hard it would be for a non-English speaker to learn the language. Speaking, reading and writing were all considered.

Ratings. Languages were rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed. Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months-1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months-1 year. Level 3 languages = 1-2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

Conclusion. The soft science, Politically Correct mush-speak from the swamps of Sociolinguistics currently in vogue, “All languages are equally difficult or easy for any adult to learn,” was rejected. The results of this study indicate that languages to indeed differ dramatically in how difficult they are for L2 learners.

Indo-European

Indo-Aryan

Indian languages like Kashmiri, Hindi and especially Sanskrit are  quite hard, and Sanskrit is legendary for its extreme complexity. Sanskrit grammar is very complicated. There are 8 cases. Sinhala is also difficult.

The Hindi script is quite opaque to Westerners, some of whom say that Chinese script is easier. You speak one way if you are talking to a man or a woman, and you also need to take into account whether you as speaker are male or female. Gender is also as prominent as in Spanish; you have to remember whether any given noun is masculine or feminine. In addition, Hindi has many long words.

Sanskrit is legendary for its difficulty. It has script that goes on for long sequences in which many small individual words may be buried. You have to take apart the sequences to find the small words. However, the words are further masked by tone sandhi running everything together. Once you tease the sandhi apart, you have to deal with hundreds of compound characters in the script. Once you do those two things, you are left with eight cases, nine declensions, dual number and other fun things.

Hindi is rated 3, moderately difficult.

Kashmiri and Sinhala are rated 4, extremely difficult.

Sanskrit is rated 5, the most difficult of all.

Iranian

Persian is easier to learn than its reputation, as some say this is a difficult language to learn. In truth, it’s difficulty is only average. On the plus side, Persian has a very simple grammar. It has no grammatical gender, no case, no articles and adjectives never change form. It is a quite easy language to learn at the entry level, but it is much harder to learn at the advanced level, say Sufi poetry, due to difficulty in untangling subtleties of meaning.

Persian only gets a 3 rating as average to moderately difficult.

Romance

French is pretty easy to learn at a simple level, but it’s not easy to get to an advanced level. For instance, the language is full of idioms, many more than your average language, and it’s often hard to figure them out. French has a grammar that is neither simple nor difficult; that, combined with a syntax is pretty straightforward and a Latin alphabet make it pretty easy to learn for most Westerners.

One problem is pronunciation. There are many nasal vowels, similar to Portuguese. The eu, u and all of the nasal vowels can be Hell for the learner. There is also a strange uvular r. The orthography is also difficult, since there are many sounds that are written but no longer pronounced, as in English. Also similar to English, orthography does not line up with pronunciation. For instance, there are 13 different ways to spell the o sound: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö.

In addition, spoken French and written French can be quite different. Spoken French uses words such as fouture and on which you might never see in written French.

The English language, having no Language Committee, at least has an excuse for the frequently irrational nature of its spelling.

The French have no excuse, since they have a committee that is set up in part to keep the language as orthographically irrational as possible. One of their passions is refusing to change the spelling of words even as pronunciation changes, which is the opposite of what occurs in any sane spelling reform. So French is, like English, frozen in time.

Furthermore, to make matters worse, the French are almost as prickly about writing properly as they are about speaking properly, and you know how they are about foreigners mangling their language.

A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than English. Verbs change much more, and it has grammatical gender.

French is one of the toughest languages to learn in the Romance family. A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than Italian in that French children do not learn to write French properly until age 12-13, six years after Italian children.

This is due to the illogical nature of French spelling discussed above such that the spelling of many French words must be memorized as opposed to applying a general sound-symbol correspondence rule. In addition, French uses both acute and grave accents – `´.

French gets a 3 rating for average to moderately difficult.

Italian is said to be easy to learn, especially if you speak a Romance language or English, but learning to order a pizza and really mastering it are two different things. Foreigners usually do not learn Italian at anywhere near a native level.

For instance, Italian has three types of tenses, simple tenses, compound tenses, and indefinite tenses. There are also various moods that combine to take tense forms – four subjunctive moods, two conditional moods, two gerund moods, two infinite moods, two participle moods and one imperative mood.

There are eight tenses in the indicative mood – recent past, remote pluperfect, recent pluperfect, preterite (remote past), imperfect, present, future, future perfect. There are four tenses in the subjunctive mood – present, imperfect, preterite and pluperfect. There are two tenses in the conditional mood – present and preterite.

There is only one tense in the imperative mood – present. Gerund, participle and infinite moods all take only present and perfect tenses. Altogether, using these mood-tense combinations, any Italian verb can decline in up to 21 different ways.

Italian has many irregular verbs. There are many combinations just to make articles and preposition,s and there are 600 irregular verbs with all sorts of different irregularities. Nevertheless, it is a Romance language, and Romance has gotten rid of most of its irregularity. The Slavic languages are much more irregular than Romance.

Counterintuitively, some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. There are many different ways to say the – il, i, lo, gli , l’ (masculine); la, le, l’ (feminine). Few Italians even write Italian 100% correctly. A problem with Italian is that meaning is inferred via intonation. If you mess up the intonation of your utterance, you’re screwed and will not be understood. However, there is no case in Italian, as in all of Romance.

Italian is still easier to learn than French, for evidence see the research that shows Italian children learning to write Italian properly by age 6, 6-7 years ahead of French children. This is because Italian orthography is quite sensible and coherent, with good sound-symbol correspondence.

Italian is somewhat harder to learn than Spanish or Portuguese but not dramatically so. Italian has more irregularities than those two and has different ways of forming plurals, including two different ways of forming plurals that can mean different things depending on the context. This is a leftover from the peculiarities of the Latin neutral gender.

Italian gets a 3 rating, average to moderately difficult.

Surprisingly enough, Romanian is said to be one of the harder Romance languages to speak or write properly. Even Romanians often get it wrong. One strange thing about Romanian is that the articles are attached to the noun as suffixes. In all the rest of Romance, articles are free words that precede the noun. English: telephone and the telephone; Romanian: telefon and telefonul. Romanian is harder to learn than Spanish or Italian, and possibly harder than French. It has considerable Slavic influence.

Romanian gets a 3 rating as average to moderately hard to learn.

Spanish is often said to be one of the easiest languages to learn, though this is somewhat controversial. Personally, I’ve been learning it off and on since age six and I still have problems, though Spanish speakers say my Spanish is good, but Hispanophones, unlike the French, are generous about these things.

It’s quite logical, though the verbs do decline a lot with tense and number, and there are many irregular verbs, similar to French. Compare English declensions to Spanish declensions of the verb to read.

English

I read
He reads

Spanish

Yo leo
Tu lees
El lee
Nos leemos
Vos leéis
Ellos leen
leí
leeré
leería
leyese
leyésemos
leyéseis
¿leísteis?
leyéremos
leeréis
pudísteis haber leído
hubiéremos ó hubiésemos leído

Nevertheless, Romance grammar is much more regular than, say, Polish, as Romance has junked most of the irregularity. Spanish has the good grace to lack case, spelling is a piece of cake, and words are spoken just as they are written. Nevertheless, Hispanophones say that few foreigners end up speaking like natives.

Rated 1 as easiest of all.

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the unusual vowels such as nasal diphthongs and the strange palatal lateral ʎ, which many English speakers will mistake for an l.

Portuguese gets a 1 rating, easiest of all.

Hellenic

Greek is a difficult language to learn, and it’s rated the second hardest language to learn by language professors. It’s easy to learn to speak simply, but it’s quite hard to get it down like a native. It’s the rare second language learner who attains native competence. Greek grammar is dead simple, but there are problems with writing Greek. Like English, the spelling doesn’t seem to make sense, and you have to memorize many words. Further, there is the unusual alphabet.

Greek gets a 4 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Classic Greek is worse, with a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, a pitch accent system and a truly convoluted system of noun and verb inflection.

Classic Greek gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Germanic

People often say that English is easy to learn, but that is deceptive. For one thing, English has anywhere from 500,000-1 million words (said to be twice as much as any other language – but there are claims that Dutch and Arabic each have 4 million words), the number increases by the day; furthermore, most people don’t understand more than 50,000. Yet they only use 5,000 at most.

Actually, the average American or Brit uses a mere 2,500 words. As we might expect, our cultivated Continentals in Europe, such as Spaniards and French, probably have twice the regular vocabulary of English speakers and far more colloquial expressions.

In addition, verbal phrases or phrasal verbs are a nightmare. In many cases, phrasal verbs can have more than 10 different antagonistic meanings.

Get down and party down – to have fun and party, yet get down on the floor – to lie prone and remain there. Are you down? – are you ready to do something. Pat down – to frisk. Take down – to tackle. Cook down – to reduce the liquid content in a cooked item. Run down - to run over something, to review a list or to attack someone verbally for a long time. Play down – to de-emphasize. Write down – to write on a sheet of paper, but write up – to write in any form, usually a long piece.

Drink up and drink down mean roughly the same thing, as do slip up and slip down. Light up – to torch. Mess up, slip up – to fail.  Cook up – to prepare a meal. Vacuum up – to vacuum. Wash up – to wash. Brush up – to go over a previously learned skill. Bone up – to study hard. Play up – to dramatize. Read up – to read intensively as in studying. Stay up – to not go to bed. Come up – to approach closely, to occur suddenly or to overflow. Patch up – to put together a broken thing or relationship.

Make up – to make amends, to apply cosmetics to one’s face or to invent a story. Burn up – burn completely or to be made very angry, burn down – reduce s.t. to ashes, like a structure. Turn up – to increase volume or to appear suddenly somewhere. Run up – to tally a big bill or approach s.t. quickly. Dry up – to dessicate. Take up - to develop a new skill, to bring something to a higher elevation, to cook something at a high heat to where it is assimilated. Blow up – to explode.

Dress up – to dress oneself in formal attire. Shake up – to upset a paradigm, to upset emotionally. Hit up - to visit someone casually or to ask for a favor or gift, usually small amounts of money. Wake up – to awaken. Stir up – stir rapidly, upset a calm surrounding or scene or upset a paradigm. Cheer up – to elevate one’s mood. Talk up – to try to convince someone of something by discussing it dramatically and intensively.

Chat up – to talk casually with a goal in mind, usually seduction or at least flirtation. Hang up – to place on a hanger or a wall, to end a phone call. Trip up – to stumble mentally over s.t. confusing. Mop up – mop a floor or finish off the remains of an enemy army or finalize a military operation. Clean up – to make an area thoroughly tidy. Pick up – to grasp an object and lift it higher, to seduce someone sexually or to acquire a new skill, usually rapidly.

Put up – to hang, to tolerate, often grudgingly, or to put forward a new image. Tear up – to shred. Ring up – to telephone someone. Cut up – to shred or to make jokes, often of a slapstick variety. Meet up – to meet someone or a group for a get meeting or date of some sort. Start up – to initialize an engine or a program, to open a new business to go back to something that had been terminated previously, often a fight; a recrudescence. Crank up - elevate the volume.

Rev up – to turn the RPM’s higher on a stationary engine. Shoot up – to inject, usually illegal drugs, or to fire many projectiles into a place with a gun. Drum up – to charge someone with wrongdoing, usually criminal, usually by a state actor, usually for false reasons.

Kiss up – to mend a relationship after a fight. Wait up – to ask other parties to wait for someone who is coming in a hurry. Whip up – to cook a meal quickly or for winds to blow wildly. Touch up – to apply the final aspects of a work nearly finished.

Suck up – to ingratiate oneself, often in an obsequious fashion. Stop up – to block the flow of liquids with some object(s). Suit up – to get dressed in a uniform, often for athletics. Pass up - to miss an opportunity, often a good one. Pop up – for s.t. to appear suddenly, often out of nowhere.

Own up – to confess to one’s sins under pressure and reluctantly. Live up – to enjoy life. Lighten up – to reduce the downcast or hostile seriousness of the mood of a person or setting. Knock up – to impregnate. Beat up – to defeat someone thoroughly in a violent physical fight.

Listen up – imperative – to order someone to pay attention, often with threats of aggression if they don’t comply. Man up – to elevate oneself to manly behaviors when one is slacking and behaving in an unmanly fashion. Lock up – to lock securely, often locking various locks, or to imprison, or for an object or computer program to be frozen or jammed and unable to function. Mix up – to confuse, or to disarrange contents in a scattered fashion so that it does not resemble the original.

Measure up – in a competition, for an entity to match the competition. Mark up – to raise the price of s.t. Move up – to elevate the status of a person or entity in competition with other entities- to move up in the world. Hook up – to have a casual sexual encounter or to meet casually for a social encounter, often in a public place; also to connect together a mechanical devise or plug something in.

Hurry up - imperative, usually an order to quit delaying and join the general group or another person in some activity, often when they are leaving to go to another place. Face up – to quit avoiding your problems and meet them head on. End up – to arrive at some destination after a long winding, often convoluted journey either in space or in time. Clear up – for a storm to dissipate, for a rash to go away, for a confusing matter to become understandable.

Close up – to close, also to end business hours for a public business. Cheer up – to change from a downcast mood to a more positive one. Curl up – to rest in a curled body position, either alone or with another being. Crack up – to laugh, often heartily. Back up – to go in reverse, often in a vehicle, or to go back over something previously dealt with that was poorly understood in order to understand it better. Bruise up – to receive multiple bruises, often serious ones.

Break up – to break into various pieces, or to end a relationship, either personal or between entitles, also to split a large entity, like a large company or a state. Build up – to build intensively in an area, such as a town or city, from a previously less well-developed state. Buy up – to buy all or most all of something. Catch up – to reach a person or group that one had lagged behind earlier, or to take care of things, often hobbies, that had been put off by lack of time.

Do up – apply makeup to someone, often elaborately. Dream up – to imagine a creative notion, often an elaborate one. Drive up – to drive towards something, and then stop, or to raise the price of something by buying it intensively. Feel up – to grope someone sexually. Get up – to awaken or rise from a prone position. Give up – to surrender, in war or a contest, or to stop doing something trying or unpleasant that is yielding poor results, or to die, as in give up the ghost.

Grow up – to attain an age or maturity or to act like a mature person, often imperative. Hold up – to delay, to ask someone ahead of you to wait, often imperative. Keep up – to maintain on a par with the competition without falling behind. Lay up – to be sidelined due to illness or injury for a time. Let up – to ease off of someone or something, for a storm to dissipate, to stop attacking someone or s.t.

Pay up – to pay, usually a debt, often imperative to demand payment of a debt, to pay all of what one owes so you don’t owe anymore. Rise up – for an oppressed group to arouse and fight back against their oppressors. Run up – to spend a lot of money, often foolishly. Show up – to appear somewhere, often unexpectedly. Shut up – to silence, often imperative, fighting words. Sit up – to sit upright.

Speak up – to begin speaking after listening for a while, often imperative, a request for a silent person to say what they wish to say. Take up – to cohabit with someone – She has taken up with him. Think up – to conjure up a plan, often an elaborate or creative one. Throw up - to vomit. Bid up – to raise the price of something, usually at an auction, by calling out higher and higher bids. Be up – to be in a waking state after having slept. “I’ve been up for three hours.”

There are figures of speech and idioms everywhere (some estimate that up to 20% of casual English speech is idiomatic), and it seems impossible to learn them all. In fact, few second language learners get all the idioms down pat.

The spelling is insane and hardly follows any rules at all. The English spelling system in some ways is frozen at about 1500 or so. The pronunciation has changed but the spelling has not. Careful studies have shown that English-speaking children take longer to read than children speaking other languages (Finnish, Greek and various Romance and other Germanic languages) due to the difficulty of the spelling system. Romance languages were easier to read than Germanic ones.

This may be why English speakers are more likely to be diagnosed dyslexic than speakers of other languages. The dyslexia still exists if you speak a language with good sound-symbol correspondence, but it’s covered up so much by the ease of the orthography that it seems invisible and the person can often function well. But for a dyslexic, trying to read English is like walking into a minefield.

The rules governing the use of the indefinite, definite and zero article are opaque and possibly don’t even exist. There are synonyms for almost every word in a sentence, and the various shades of meaning can be difficult to discern. In addition, quite a few words have many different meanings. There are strange situations like read and read, which are pronounced differently and mean two different things.

However, English verbs generally have few forms in their normal paradigm of regular verbs. In this arrangement, there are only five forms of the verb in general use with the overwhelming majority of verbs:

present except 3rd singular steal
3rd person singular  steals
progressive  stealing
past  stole
perfect  stolen

Even a language like Spanish has many more basic forms than that.

There are quite a few dialects – over 100 have been recorded in London alone. Letters can make many different sounds, a consequence of the insane spelling system. English prepositions are notoriously hard, and few second language learners get them down right because they seem to obey no discernible rules.

While English seems simple at first – past tense is easy, little or no case, no grammatical gender, little mood, etc. – that can be quite deceptive. In European countries like Croatia, it’s hard to find a person who speaks English with even close to native speaker competence.

The problem with English is that it’s a mess! There are languages with very easy grammatical rules like Indonesian and languages with very hard grammatical rules like Arabic. English is one of those languages that is a total mess. There are rules, but there are exceptions everywhere and exceptions to the exceptions. Grammatically, it’s disaster area. It’s hard to know where to start.

However, it is often said that English has no grammatical rules. Even native speakers make this comment because that is how English seems due to its highly irregular nature. Most English native speakers, even highly educated ones, can’t name one English grammatical rule. Just to show you that English does have rules though, I will list some of them.

*Indicates an ungrammatical form.

Adjectives appear before the noun in noun phrases. Small dogs barked. *Dogs small barked.

Adjectives are numerically invariant – the small dog, the small dogs, The dog is small. The dogs are small.

Intensifiers appear before both attributive and predicative adjectives. The very small dog barked. *The small very dog barked. The dog was very small. *The dog was small very.

Attributive adjectives can have complements. The dog was scared. The dog was scared of cats. But predicative adjectives cannot. The scared dog barked. *The scared of cats dog barked.

Articles, quantifiers, etc. appear before the adjective (and any
intensifier) in a noun phrase. The very small dog barked. *Very the small dog barked. *Very small the dog barked. Every very small dog barked. *Very every small dog barked. *Very small every dog barked.

Relative clauses appear after the noun in a noun phrase. The dog that barked. *The that barked dog.

The progressive verb form is the bare form with the suffix -ing, even for the most irregular verbs in the language – being, having, doing; *wasing, *aring, *aming.

The infinitive verb form is to followed by the bare form, even for the most irregular verbs in the language – to be, to have, to do; *to was, *to are, *to am.

The imperative verb form is the bare form, even for the most irregular verb in the language. Be! Have! Do! *Was! *Are! *Am!

All 1st person present, 2nd person present, and plural present verb forms are equivalent to the bare form, except for to be.

All past tense verb forms of a given verb are the same regardless of person and number, except for to be.

Question inversion is optional. You are leaving? Are you leaving? But when inversion does occur in a wh-question, a wh-phrase is required to be fronted. You’re seeing what? What are you seeing? *Are you seeing what?

Wh-fronting is required to affect an entire noun phrase, not just the wh-word. You are going to which Italian restaurant? Which Italian restaurant are you going to? *Which are you going to Italian restaurant? *Which Italian are you going to restaurant? *Which restaurant are you going to Italian?

Wh-fronting only happens once, never more. What are you buying from which store? Which store are you buying what from? *What which store are you buying from? *Which store what are you buying from?

The choice of auxiliary verb in compound past sentences does not depend on the choice of main verb. I have eaten. I have arrived. *I am eaten. *I am arrived. cf. French. J’ai mangé. Je suis arrivé.

English can be seen as an inverted pyramid in terms of ease of learning. The basics are easy, but it gets a lot more difficult as you progress in your learning.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, English only gets a 2 rating as moderately easy to average, mostly because it is relatively easy to speak it well enough to be more or less understandable most of the time.

German’s status is controversial. It’s long been considered hard to learn, but many learn it fairly easily. Pronunciation is straightforward, but there are some problems with the müde, the Ach, and the two ch sounds in Geschichte.

Although the first one is really an sch instead of a ch, English speakers lack an sch, so they will just see that as a ch. Further, there are specific rules about when to use the ss (or sz as Germans say) or hard s. The r in German is quite strange, and of common languages, only French has a similar r.

There are six different forms of the depending on the noun case – der , die, das, den, dem and des – but 16 different slots to put the six forms in, and the gender system is irrational. In a more basic sense and similar to Danish, there are three basic forms of the: der, die and das. Each one goes with a particular noun, and it’s not very clear what the rules are.

One problem with German syntax is that the verb, verbs or parts of verbs doesn’t occur until the end of the sentence.

German also has Schachtelsätze, box clauses, which are like clauses piled into other clauses. The syntax is very rigid but at least very regular. In addition, subclauses use SOV word order . German case is also quite regular. The case exceptions can be almost counted on one hand.

An example of German case (and case in general) is here: The leader of the group gives the boy a dog. In German, the sentence is case marked with the four different German cases: Der Führer (nominative) der Gruppe (genitive) gibt dem Jungen (dative) einen Hund (accusative).

There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. Yet female – (das Weib) is neutral, and petticoat is masculine! Any given noun inflects into the four cases and the three genders. Furthermore, the genders change between masculine and feminine in the same noun for no logical reason.

Phonology also changes strangely as the number of the noun changes – Haus – house is singular – Haeuser – houses, is plural with umlaut. But to change the noun to a diminutive, you add -chen – Haueschen, which is singular, yet has the umlaut of the plural.

German also has a vast vocabulary, the fourth largest in the world. This is either positive or negative depending on your viewpoint. Language learners often complain about learning languages with huge vocabularies, but as a native English speaker, I’m happy to speak a language with a million words. There’s a word for just about everything you want to say about anything, and then some!

On the plus side, word formation is quite regular. Pollution is Umweltverschmutzung. It consists, logically, of two words, Umwelt and Verschmutzung, which mean environment and dirtying. In English, you have three words, environment, dirtying and pollution, the third one, the combination of the first two, has no relation to its semantic roots in the first two words.

Nevertheless, this has its problems, since it’s not simple to figure out how the words are stuck together into bigger words, and meanings of morphemes can take years to figure out.

Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.

On the plus side, German is not very inflected, and the inflection that it does take is more regular than many other languages. Furthermore, German orthography is phonetic, and there are no silent letters.

German gets a 3 rating, average to moderately difficult.

Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic.

There are four cases – nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative – as in German, and there are many exceptions to the case rules, or “quirky case,” as it is called. Verbs are modified for tense, person and number, as in many other IE languages (this is almost gone from English).

Icelandic also modifies verbs for voice – active, passive and medial. Furthermore, there are four different kinds of verbs – strong, weak, reduplicating and irregular, with several conjugation categories in each division. Many verbs just have to be memorized.

Icelandic gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.

Faroese gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Norwegian and Swedish are both easy to learn, and Norwegian is sometimes touted as the easiest language on Earth to learn. This is confusing because Danish is described below as a more difficult language to learn, and critics say that Danish and Norwegian are the same, so they should have equal difficulty. But only one Norwegian writing system is almost the same as Danish the Danish writing system.

Danish pronunciation is quite a bit different from Norwegian, and this is where the problems come in.

Nevertheless, Norwegian dialects can be a problem. Foreigners get off the plane having learned a bit of Norwegian and are immediately struck by the strangeness of the multiplicity of dialects, which for the most part are easy for Norwegians to understand, but can be hard for foreigners. There is also the problematic en and et alternation, as discussed with Danish.

Swedish does have the disadvantage of having hundreds of irregular verbs. Swedish also has some difficult phonemes, especially vowels. since Swedish has nine vowels, not including diphthongs. Pronunciation of the ö and å (and sometimes ä, which has different sounds) can be difficult . Words can take either an -en or an -ett ending, and there don’t seem to be any rules about which one to use. The same word can have a number of different meanings.

Swedish can be compared to a tube in terms of ease of learning. The basics are harder to learn than in English, but instead of getting more difficult as one progresses as in English, the difficulty of Swedish stays more or less the same from basics to the most complicated.

But learning to speak Swedish is easy enough compared to other languages. Where Swedish gets difficult is learning how to write it, since the spelling seems illogical, like in English.

Swedish and Norwegian get 1 ratings, very easy to learn.

Danish is a harder language to learn than one might think. It’s not that hard to read or even write, but it’s quite hard to speak. However, like English, Danish has a non-phonetic orthography, so this can be problematic.

For one, there are a huge number of dialects. Denmark is a group of cool to cold islands (depending on the season) with a freezing cold ocean in between them. People generally stayed on their islands and didn’t move around much. Each island has its own dialect, and the dialects can be quite baffling for second language learners. There are eight major dialects, and countless minor ones subsumed under them.

In addition, there are d words where the d is silent and other d words where it is pronounced, and though the rules are straightforward, it’s often hard for foreigners. The d in hund is silent, for instance.

There are three strange vowels that are not in English, represented by the letters æ, ø and å. Two of them (one each) are also present in Swedish and Icelandic, but most foreigners have problems with them.

One advantage of all of the Scandinavian languages is that their basic vocabulary is fairly limited. This is in contrast to Chinese, where you have to learn a lot of vocabulary just to converse at a basic level.

As with Maltese and Gaelic, there is little correlation between how a Danish word is written and how it is pronounced. Pronunciation of Danish is difficult. Speech is very fast and comes out in a continuous stream that elides entire words. Vowels in the middle and at the end of words are seldom expressed.

There are nine vowel characters, and each one can be pronounced in five or six different ways. There is also a strange phonetic element called a stød, which is a very short pause slightly before the vowel(s) in a word. This element is very hard for foreigners to get right. Just about any word has at least four meanings, and can serve as noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

Suggesting that Danish may be harder to learn than Swedish or Norwegian, it’s said that Danish children speak later than Swedish or Norwegian children. One study comparing Danish children to Croatian tots found that the Croat children had learned over twice as many words by 15 months as the Danes. According to the study:

The University of Southern Denmark study shows that at 15 months, the average Danish toddler has mastered just 80 words, whereas a Croatian tot of the same age has a vocabulary of up to 200 terms.

[...] According to the study, the primary reason Danish children lag behind in language comprehension is because single words are difficult to extract from Danish’s slurring together of words in sentences. Danish is also one of the languages with the most vowel sounds, which leads to a ‘mushier’ pronunciation of words in everyday conversation.

Danish gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Dutch is harder to learn than English due to the large number of rules used in both speaking and writing. The Dutch say that few foreigners learn to speak Dutch well. Part of the problem is that some words have no meaning at all in isolation (meaning is only derived via a phrase or sentence). Word order is somewhat difficult, as foreigners often seem to get the relatively lax Dutch rules about word order wrong in long sentences.

Dutch gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Celtic

Any Gaelic language is tough. Irish students take Irish for 13 years, and some take French for five years. These students typically know French better than Irish. There are inflections for the inflections of the inflections, a convoluted aspiration system, and no words for yes or no. The system of initial consonant mutation is quite baffling.

Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are also very hard to learn, although Welsh has no case compared to Irish’s two cases. And Welsh has a mere five irregular verbs. The Byrthonic languages like Welsh and Breton are easier to learn than Gaelic languages like Irish and Scots Gaelic. One reason is because Welsh is written with a logical, phonetic alphabet. Welsh is also simpler grammar-wise, but things like initial consonant mutations can still seem pretty confusing and are difficult for the non-Celtic speaker to master and understand.

Both Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are written with non-phonetic spelling that is even more convoluted and irrational than English. This archaic spelling is in drastic need of revision and it makes learners not want to learn the language. For instance, in Scots Gaelic, the word for taxi is tacsaidh, although the word is pronounced the same as the English word. There are simply too many unnecessary letters for too few sounds.

Celtic languages are harder to learn than German or Russian.

Scottish Gaelic and and Irish get 5 ratings, hardest of all. Welsh gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Armenian

An  obscure branch of Indo-European, Armenian, is very hard to learn. Armenian is a difficult language in terms of grammar and phonetics, not to mention the very odd alphabet.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Albanian

Albanian is another obscure branch of Indo-European. Similarly to Gaelic, Albanian is even harder to learn than either German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavic

Czech and Slovak are notoriously hard to learn; in fact, all Slavic languages are. Language professors rate the Slavic languages the third hardest to learn on Earth. Czech is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hardest language to learn.

It’s sometimes said that even Czechs never learn to speak their language correctly, and there is actually some truth to that. They spend nine years in school studying Czech grammar, but some rules are learned only at university. Immigrants never seem to learn Czech well.

Czech is full of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. It is said that there are more exceptions than there are rules.

Czech has seven cases in singular and seven more cases in plural for nouns, for a total of 59 different “modes” of declension. There are also words that swing back and forth between “modes.” Adjectives and pronouns also have seven cases in the singular and plural. There are lots of exceptions, too.

There are six genders, three in the singular and three in the plural.  Verbs also decline. When you put all that together, each noun can decline in 59 different ways. Further, these 59 different types of nouns each have 14 different forms depending on case.

The verbs have both perfective and imperfective and have 45 different conjugation patterns.

Truth is that almost every word in the language is subject to declension.

One of the problems with Czech is that not only nouns but also verbs take gender, but they only do so in the past tense. In addition, Czech has a complicated aspect system that is often quite irregular and simply must be memorized to be learned. This conjugation is fairly regular:

viděl continuous past – he saw
uviděl punctual – once he suddenly saw
vídával repetitive – he used to see (somebody/something) repeatedly

Others are less regular:

jedl continuous – he ate
snědl, ujedl, pojedl, dojedl – he ate it all up
ujedl has the slightly different meaning of he ate a bit of it
pojedl has the slightly different meaning of he finished eating
jídával repetitive – he used to eat repeatedly

As with other Slavic languages like Russian, it has the added problem of fairly loose word order. In addition, there are significant differences between casual and formal speech.

Slovak is said to be even harder than Czech, but that’s a tough call. These two languages are the only ones with seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, instrumental and vocative). There is also a hard and soft i which is hard to figure out.

The suffixes on nouns and verbs change all the time in strange ways. It’s also full of words that don’t seem to have vowels. There are some difficult consonants such as š, č, ť, ž, ľ, ď, dz, dž, ĺ and ŕ.

Some say that Slovak is even harder than Polish, but, it’s probably a toss-up between Czech/Slovak and Polish.

Czech and Slovak both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Polish is similar to Czech and Slovak in having words that seem to have no vowels, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels. That’s not so obviously the case with Czech. Nevertheless, try these sentences: Strč prst skrz krk or Mlž pln skvrn zlvh. Or these: Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.

I and y, s and z, je and ě alternate at the ends of some words, but the rules governing when to do this, if they exist, don’t seem sensible. The letters ř and ť are very hard to pronounce, and the ř exists in no other language. There are nasal vowels as in Portuguese. The ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, sz, cz, dz, dź, dż sounds are hard for foreigners to make. There are sounds that it is even hard for native speakers to make, as they require a lot tongue movements.

Polish written to spoken pronunciation makes little sense, as in English – h and ch are one sound, and ó, u and ł are one sound. Polish orthography, while being regular, is very complex.

Further, native speakers speak so fast it’s hard for non-natives to understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Listening comprehension is made difficult by all of the sh and ch like sounds. Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to hearing their language mangled by second-language learners. Therefore, foreigners’ Polish will seldom be understood.

Polish grammar is much more difficult than Russian grammar.

Polish has seven cases, and case declension is very irregular, unlike German. It also has seven genders, five in the singular and two in the plural. The genders of nouns cause the adjectives modifying them to inflect differently.

Noun
matka   mother (female gender)
ojciec  father (male gender)
dziecko child (neuter gender)

Modifying Adjective
brzydki - ugly

Singular
brzydka matka    ugly mother
brzydki ojciec  ugly father
brzydkie dziecko ugly child

Plural
brzydkie matki   ugly mothers
brzydcy ojcowie  ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci  ugly children

Gender even effects verbs.

I ate (female speaker) – Ja zjadłam
I ate (male speaker) – Ja zjadłem
I killed – zabiłem/zabiłam
We killed – zabiliśmy/zabiłyśmy
They killed – zabili/zabiły

There are two different forms of the verb kill depending on whether the 1st person singular and plural and 2nd person plural killers are males or females.

kupować - to buy

Singular  Simple Past         Imperfect
I (f.)    kupiłam             kupowałam
I (m.)    kupiłem             kupowałem
you (f.)  kupiłaś             kupowałaś
you (m.)  kupiłeś             kupowałeś
he        kupił               kupował
she       kupiła              kupowała
it        kupiło              kupowało

we (f.)   kupiłyśmy           kupowałyśmy
we (m.)   kupiliśmy           kupowaliśmy
you (f.)  kupiłyście          kupowałyścieyou
you (m.)  kupiliście          kupowaliście
they (f.) kupiły              kupowały
they (m.) kupili              kupowali

The verb above forms an incredible 28 different forms in the perfect and imperfect past tense alone.

In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look at some words:

hat – kapelusz
computer – komputer
dog – pies
student – uczen

All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate and student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently.

I see a new hat – Widze nowy kapelusz
I see a new student – Widze nowego ucznia .

Notice how the now- form changed.

For instance, English has one word for the genitive case of the 1st person singular – my. In Polish, depending on the context, you can have the following 11 forms, and actually there are even more than 11:

mój
moje
moja
moją
mojego
mojemu
mojej
moim
moi
moich
moimi

English has one word for the number 2 – two. Polish has 21 words for two (however, only 5-6 of them are in common use):

dwa
dwaj
dwie
dwoje
dwóch
dwom
dwóm
dwu
dwoma
dwiema
dwojga
dwojgu
dwójką
dwójkę
dwójki
dwójce
dwójko
dwojgiem
dwójkach
dwójek
dwója
dwójkami

Polish, like Hungarian and Finnish, can also have very long word. For instance, pięćsetdwadzieściajedenmiliardówdwieścieczterdzieścisiedemmiloionów-trzystaosiemdzisiątpięćtysięcyczterystadziewięćdziesięciopięcioletni is a word in Polish (There is no dash in the word – I was just dividing the line).

A single noun can change in many ways and take many different forms. Compare przyjaciel – friend

                          singular       plural
who is my friend          przyjaciel    przyjaciele
who is not my friend      przyjaciela  przyjaciół
friend who I give s.t. to przyjacielowi  przyjaciołom
friend who I see          przyjaciela  przyjaciół
friend who I go with      z przyajcielem z przyjaciółmi
friend who I dream of     o przyjacielu  o przyjaciołach
Oh my friend!             Przyajcielu!   Przyjaciele!

There are 12 different forms of the noun friend above.

Polish has perfective and imperfective verbs, but that is the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just being conjugated differently. The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish: widziec and zobaczyc . Widziałem – I saw (repeatedly in the past, like I saw the sun come up every morning). Zobaczyłem – I saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

This is not a tense difference – the very verbs themselves are different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to learn two different verbs.

In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the same way – note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you can’t be doing something at this precise moment and at the same time have just finished doing it. 95% of verbs have these maddening dual forms, but for 5% of verbs that lack a perfective version, you only have one form.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones, whether you have two or 1000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many phones you have: two, three or four telefony, but five telefonów. Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands: four ręce, but five rąk.

It’s often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least eight tenses:

Indicative – grac – to play.
Present – gram – I play
Past – gralem – I played
Conditional – gralbym – I would play
Future – będę grać – I will play
Continuous future – będę grał – I will be playing
Perfective future – bogram – Implies you will finish the action – I will have played
Perfective conditional – pogralbym – I would have played

There is also an aspectual distinction made when referring to the past. Different forms are used based on whether or not the action has been completed.

In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a sentence. You can use up to five negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence: Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedzia – Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Whereas in English we use one word for go no matter what mode of transportation we are using to get from one place to another, in Polish, you use different verbs if you are going by foot, by car, by plane, by boat or by other means of transportation.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing in Polish. In English, you can say Ann has a cat, but you can’t mix the words up and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat five different ways:

Ania ma kota
Kota ma Ania
Ma Ania kota
Kota Ania ma
Ma kota Ania.

The first one is the most common, but the other five can certainly be used.

A major problem with Polish grammar is that it is not regular at all. There are probably more exceptions than there are rules. Even more importantly, what rules there are so complex and numerous that it is hard to figure them all out.

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish children do not reach this milestone until age 16. Even adult Poles make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly. However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language (though a few hate it), and even take pride in its difficult nature.

On the positive side, in Polish, the stress is fixed, there are no short or long vowels or vowel harmony, there are no tones and it uses a Latin alphabet.

Polish gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

It’s controversial whether Bulgarian is an easy or hard language to learn, but the truth is it probably has average difficulty. Though it is close to Russian, there are Russians who have been living there for 20 years and still can’t understand it well. It has few cases compared to the rest of Slavic – only three, but no Western Slavic language is easy to learn.

Mood is very complicated. There are different ways to say the same idea depending on how you know of the event. If you know about it historically, you mark the sentence with a particular mood. If you doubt the event, you mark with another mood.

If you know it historically but doubt it, you use yet another mood. And there are more than that. These forms are rare in world languages. One is Yamana, a Patagonian language that has only one speaker left. Bulgarian is probably the easiest Slavic language to learn.

Bulgarian gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Slovenian is also a very hard language to learn, probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has three number distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It’s the only European language that has retained the dual. In addition, there are six cases. There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but five of them are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

   Singular Dual       Plural 

1. Sin      Sina       Sini
2. Sina     Sinov      Sinov
3. Sinu     Sinovoma   Sinovom
4. Sina     Sinova     Sinove
5. O sinu   O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom  Z sinovoma Z sini

There are seven different ways that nouns decline depending on gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules.

Slovenian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions. There 15 different types of declensions: seven tenses, three genders, three moods and two aspects. Whereas English has one word for the number 2 – two, Serbo-Croatian has 17 words.

Case abbreviations below:
N = NAV – nominative, accusative, vocative
G = Genitive
D = Dative
L =Locative
I = Instrumental

Masculine inanimate gender
N dva
G dvaju
D L I dvama

Feminine gender
N dve
G dveju
D L I dvema

Mixed gender
N dvoje
G dvoga
D L I dvoma

Masculine animate gender
N dvojica
G dvojice
D L dvojici
I dvojicom

“Twosome”
N dvojka
G dvojke
D L dvojci
I dvojkom

The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imperfective and perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from the other, it seems irregular. This is the hardest part of Serbo-Croatian grammar, and foreigners not familiar with other Slavic tongues usually never get it right.

As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing. Pronouns are so rarely used that some learners are surprised that they exist, since pronimalization is marked on the verb as person and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary, similar to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent – low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. It’s not the same as tone, but it’s similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in English, is unmarked.

And when the word conjugates or declines, the pitch accent jumps around in the word to another syllable and even changes its type in unpredictable ways. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.

However, Serbo-Croatian does benefit from a phonetic orthography. The “hard” ch sound is written č, while the “soft” ch sound is written ć.

Serbo-Croatian is probably not quite as hard as Polish, but it’s harder than Russian.

Serbo-Croatian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

People are divided on the difficulty of Russian, but language teachers say it’s one of the hardest to learn. Even after a couple of years of study, some learners find it hard to speak even a simple sentence correctly.

It has seven cases, but the grammar is fairly easy for a Slavic language. The problem comes with the variability in pronunciation. The adjectives and endings can be difficult. In addition, Russian has gender and lots of declinations. The adjectives change form if the nouns they describe have different endings. Adjectives also take case somehow. Verbs have different forms depending on the pronouns that precede them.

Word order is pretty free. For instance, you can say I love you by saying I love you, You love I, Love you I, I you love, Love I you and You I love.

Pronunciation is strange, with one vowel that is between an ü and i. Many consonants are quite strange, and every consonant has a palatalized counterpart, which will be difficult to speakers whose languages lack phonemic palatalized consonants. Stress is quite difficult in Russian since it seems arbitrary and does not appear to follow obvious rules: дóма – at home, but домá – buildings. One problem is that accent, generally not written out, changes the way the vowel is pronounced.

Like German, Russian builds morphemes into larger words. Again like German, this is worse than it sounds since the rules are not so obvious.  In addition, there is the strange Cyrillic alphabet, which is nevertheless easier than Arabic or Chinese. Russian also uses prepositions to combine with verbs to form the nightmare of phrasal verbs, but whereas English puts the preposition after the verb, Russian puts it in front of the verb.

On the plus side, while Russian grammar has what seems like an avalanche of rules, those rules have few exceptions.

Russian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Baltic

Lithuanian, an archaic Indo-European Baltic tongue, is extremely difficult to learn. There are many dialects, which is interesting for such a small country, and the grammar is very difficult, with many rules. There is grammatical gender for nouns, and in addition, even numerals have gender in all cases. The language is heavily inflectional such that you can almost speak without using prepositions.

A single verb has 13 participial forms, and that is just using masculine gender for the participles. You can also add feminine forms to that verb. There ae two main genders or giminės, masculine and feminine, but there is also neutral gender (bevardė giminė), which has three different forms. There are five classes of verbs and six modes of declension for nouns (linksniai). However, Lithuanian tense is quite regular. You only need to remember infinitive, 3rd person present and 3rd person past, and after that, all of the conjugations are regular.

There are two genders, but telling them apart is easier than in German where you often have to memorize which noun takes which gender. Lithuanian is similar to Spanish in that the ending will often give you a hint about which gender the noun takes.

Here is an example of the sort of convolutions you have to go through to attach the adjective good to a noun.

geras - good

             Masculine          Feminine

             Singular  Plural   Singular  Plural
Nominative   geras     geri     gera      geros
Genitive     gero      gerų     geros     gerų
Dative       geram     geriems  gerai     geroms
Accusative   gerą      gerus    gerą      geras
Instrumental geru      gerais   gera      geromis
Locative     gerame    geruose  geroje    gerose

Furthermore, while it does not have lexical tone per se, it does have pitch accent – there are three different pitches or degrees (laipsniai), which sound like tones but are not tones. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get the accent right, and the accents tend to move around a lot across words during declension/conjugation such that the rules are opaque if they exist at all. Often you need a dictionary to figure out where the accent should be on a word. Lithuanian pronunciation is also difficult. For example, look at rimti (to get calm) and rimti (serious: plural, masculine, nominative). There is a short i sound that is the same in both words, but the only difference is where the stress or pitch accent goes.

Try these words and phrases: šalna, šąla šiandien, ačiū už skanią vakarienę, pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis , ūkis, malūnas, čežėti šiauduose.

Or this paragraph: Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už dėmesį .

Lithuanian is an archaic IE language that has preserved a lot of forms that the others have lost.

In spite of all of that, picking up the basics of Lithuanian may be easier than it seems, and while foreigners usually never get the pitch-accent down, the actual rules are fairly sensible. All in all, Lithuanian may not be as difficult as it appears at first. Also, Lithuanian is very phonetic, words are pronounced how they are spelled.

Learning Lithuanian is similar to learning Latin. If you’ve been able to learn Latin, Lithuanian should not be too hard. Some languages that are similar to English, like Norwegian and Dutch, can be learned to a certain extent simply by learning words and ignoring grammar. I know Spanish and have been able to learn a fair amount of Portuguese, French and Italian without learning a bit of grammar in any of them.

Lithuanian won’t work that way because due to case, base words change form all the time, so it will seem like you are always running into new words, when it fact it’s the same base word declining in various case forms. There’s no shortcut with Latin and Lithuanian. You need to learn the case grammar first, or little of it will make sense.

Lithuanian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Latvian is another Baltic language that is somewhat similar to Lithuanian. It’s also hard to learn. Try this: Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu. Latvian and Lithuanian are definitely harder to learn than Russian. They both have aspects like in Russian but have more cases than Russian, plus a lot more irregular verbs.

Some say that the Baltic languages are even harder to learn than the hardest Slavic languages like Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croatian, but I’m not sure if that’s true, especially for Polish.

Latvian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

References

Seymour, Philip H. K., Aro, Mikko, Erskine, Jane M. and the COST Action A8 Network. 2003. Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European Orthographies. British Journal of Psychology 94:143–174.