A. Anyone who has learned another language knows the feeling: You attempt a pleasantry and get a stunned reaction because instead of offering "your daughter a slice of melon, " you 've said, "The mother of your daughter looks like a watermelon. "

The question of which language is hardest to learn has no simple answer, says Sally Magnan, director of the Language Institute at UW-Madison.

Many factors can make a language hard to learn. The 50,000-plus characters in Chinese may take a lifetime to master. Social relationships -- such as knowing who deserves to be addressed with honorifics -- require a deep level of cultural understanding.

The sounds of a language can be a major source of trouble to adult learners, too, Magnan says. Hindi, for example, has four "D " sounds, making it easy to confuse "Boodhi " (meaning old), for "burii " (meaning bad), said Brajesh Samarth, a faculty assistant in the university 's Summer Language Institute.

"Tonal languages," including Chinese and Thai, and some South African languages, signify meaning with tones that rise, fall or remain stable, and tones are a reliable source of difficulty, says Harold Scheub, Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities. "The tonal aspects of the languages are, to me, very challenging. I have so many stories to tell about what happened when I used the wrong tone for a word and caused much glee among those to whom I was speaking. "

Many of these problematic elements appear in languages the U.S. State Department considers "exceptionally difficult for native English speakers ": Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and two Chinese dialects, Cantonese and Mandarin.

-- Produced in cooperation with University Communications

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