To help you understand what you're getting into, we've compiled this list of the hardest languages to learn. Although many like Tarasiuk might shudder when they hear Russian, a sense of understanding often prevails. 1. Polish is undoubtedly one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers due to its complex grammar and pronunciation. Although Slavic languages are similar in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and phonetics, they are all entirely different from English. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language spoken mainly in Bulgaria. A languages grammar also determines the order of words in sentences. Ukrainian was enshrined as the only national language in the constitution in 1991, the year Ukraine became independent, but the law was not enforced nor did it change daily life. Where its most commonly spoken: Iran, Afghanistan. >> Dive right in: Get the complete list of languages ranked by difficulty. In Polish, words are loaded with consonants which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce, for example, szczcie means "happiness" and bezwzgldny means "ruthless.". These are the most difficult to learn, as new learners will find that learning through listening is much more accessible than learning through text (though Pinyin is changing the way learners approach the language). What are the hardest languages to learn for English speakers? Mandarin, by contrast, has little to no inflection. Includes lists of 100 common names. Quora - A place to share knowledge and better understand the world Arabic. One example is Arabic. Youll need to learn an entirely new alphabet, and memorize their corresponding letter sounds. Credit: Greek Reporter. In 1989, for example, while about 40 percent of the Donbas population identified as ethnically Russian, more than 60 percent considered Russian as their mother tongue. What Are the Hardest Languages to Learn? | Dive into Language - WordDive There are also Bulgarian speakers in some of the neighboring countries. According to the first census conducted in Ukraine in 2001, about 14.3 million Ukrainian people, or 29 percent of the population, spoke Russian as a first language. The main phonetic similarity between all Slavic languages is the presence of phonemic palatalization, known as softening. The three Slavic language groups are mutually unintelligible. Pronouncing Czech words is a nightmare for English speakers. Its synthetic nature gives rise to a complex system of declension and conjugation. However, theres no way of accurately guessing the gender of the noun. Whether for gaining a deeper cultural understanding of a country or for the simple necessity of co-existing and even performing business, multilingual speakers put themselves at the forefront of new possibilities. Around 4,000 Spanish words, including naranja (orange) and taza (cup), are derived from Arabic words. From Chinese sentence structure to memorizing foreign symbols, this language demands the most out of beginners. English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. The Japanese writing system actually has three different scripts to learn (two are syllabaries and one is a logographic script, similar to Chinese characters). The verb carries the most weight in Turkish. Benefits of Chatting with Native Spanish Speakers. With over 70 years of experience teaching languages to US government employees, theyve compiled a comprehensive and widely accepted list of language rankings. The Hardest Languages in the World to Learn Best Life The grammar is also loaded with exceptions that require a ton of practice. Theyre all Germanic languages. First of all, there are many resources available online to learn Russian, and its also taught in many languages schools. Albanian's 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to master this language is going to be a wild ride. Another difficult language is Russian. A very serious shift has occurred in the consciousness of many people, said Zahalskyy, a landlord who used to own a pharmacy business. The main problem lies in the writing system. There is nothing natural about the way a language develops, Arel told Al Jazeera. And its hard for them, but they understand the significance of their choice., Al Jazeera Centre for Public Liberties & Human Rights. But again, those interviewed by Al Jazeera said there were few strict rules. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the 8th most-spoken language in the world. The way theyre used directs the meaning of the world as well. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else . With four cases and three genders assigned to their words, as well as many letters unfamiliar to English speakers, Icelandic is no walk in the park to learn. The ability to speak multiple languages puts you steps ahead of singular speakers. But he doubts the measure is too divisive because parents in the eastern and southern Ukrainian regions want to send their kids to Ukrainian school anyway. 7 of the Most Difficult Languages to Learn in the World Lets take a look at them in more detail. February 8, 2022. Most Slavic languages implement an extensive system of cases in which the endings of nouns (declination), adjectives, and prepositions change depending on the case. Most Difficult Language To Learn - LearnAdvice.net Where its most commonly spoken: Hungary, Romania, Slovakia. Hungarian. Its the last thing an eager language learner wants to hear, but its also incredibly valuable, making it easier to stay motivated and disciplined. It's highly similar to Slovak - Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible - and slightly similar to Polish. Strengthening your reading and writing skills in that language, then, takes far less time. There are a number of ways that a language can differ from your own. The Slavic languages are also known for their complicated consonant clusters. However, Russian has fewer tenses than English. Grammar is the system that defines how words are formed and put together into sentences. Even a lot of authors that wrote their books in Russian or singers or poets that wrote in Russian have decided to stop spreading the language of the aggressor, added Ferlain. Category 3: Hebrew, Hindi, Persian Farsi, Russian . The language features five tones, some of which are not found in the English language. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian belong to this group. And the alphabet's a breeze, assuming you can read Russian. After 2022, the number of those who identify as Russian-speaking has probably decreased. Easiest languages for English speakers - closely-related languages like Romance language (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Galician, Catalan), and other languages with historical influence in English (Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian). Very different! The Foreign Service Institute includes time estimates alongside their difficulty rankings, but its important to note that everyones language goals are different. Also known as Persian, this Indo-European language is chock full of words English speakers can recognize, thanks to many English words originating from Farsi. 5 Hardest Languages for English Speakers to LearnRanked! Tackling a language that requires you to learn a ton of new words, rules, sounds, and symbols wont be easy, but it can be a rewarding hobby. The Foreign Service Institute is a reliable industry expert here. They studied in the Soviet Union, in Russian-speaking schools, completed university in the Russian language and now we are all transitioning to Ukrainian. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. Finnish. As an English speaker, youll encounter three types of writing systems: Languages that fall in the first category are often the easiest languages to learn. Or Thai, which contains an alphabet comprised of a staggering 44 consonants and 32 different vowels? Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. It has six declension cases, which dont exist in English and can be challenging for English speakers to comprehend. 8 Hardest Languages to Learn In The World (Especially the 6th) - Jumpspeak Even more intimidating is that each of these cases has plural forms to consider! It's beautiful and valuable when you travel to that side of the world. German. Thats because its the most widely spoken one of all Slavic languages. Its just too much for the brain activity to keep on fighting and changing the way you think, so those people have made up their minds to change the way they speak only after the war.. To listen to more examples of Polish pronunciation, refer to the audio recordings provided in the following articles: When it comes to grammar, Polish is quite complex. Pronunciation makes Danish one of the most difficult languages to learn. Most experts believe that to become truly fluent in Russian that is thinking and speaking in Russian requires 7-10 years of study. In Spanish, for example, verbs are conjugated differently depending on the sentences subject. Abugidas: These generally use letters to represent consonant-vowel combinations. Meanwhile, the written version of Hindi, which is written in Devanagari script, lacks certain phonetic markings that would help learners better comprehend how to pronounce words. It takes approximately 36 weeks (900 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. Plus, it doesnt even take that long to get used to the new alphabet, as its pretty straightforward! The languages youll find in the second category are moderately challenging. Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! Another challenge you will come across if you start learning Arabic is a variety of dialects. On the one hand, each letter only has one pronunciation ever. A lot of the sounds in the language are difficult for English speakers to master, and the grammar is packed with irregular verbs. Spanish speakers do have one small consolation when learning Arabic: the languages share a surprising amount of vocabulary. A 2010 study that looked at immigrants to the Netherlands who were learning Dutch found that people who spoke languages with a lot of Dutch cognates such as Swedish, German, and Danish did better on a Dutch language exam compared to people who spoke languages with few Dutch cognates, such as French and Greek. Thats why knowing the difficulty level of a language in relation to your native tongue can be useful. Part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese can also be difficult to speak due to its foreign pronunciations to English speakers. 6. Korean and Arabic may not be as hard, but theyre still challenging. Grammatically, verbs often come before the subject, while there are many dual forms of words in addition to the singular and plural forms. In 2022, the entire country witnessed the war and all the crimes the Russians committed. One example is French. - instead, Russians affix endings and use inflection to indicate the same kinds of tenses and action. Human speech as a whole uses over 800 phonemes, which are the individual sounds that act as the building blocks of spoken language. The 6 Hardest Languages For English Speakers To Learn - Babbel Magazine This is because native speakers can offer valuable insights on the nuances of the language, including slang and idiomatic expressions. xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain;charset=UTF-8'); Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. Generally speaking, difference equals difficulty when it comes to learning a new language. At first, we thought we needed to know our national language, but with the start of this full-scale war, the feeling changed from I have to to I want to, Zahalskyy told Al Jazeera by phone. Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn, so it's logical why it is the second-largest language worldwide.. Russian. And pronunciation requires some practice because there are sounds that don't have an equivalent in English. Russian Language Lessons - Learn Russian For Free How To Learn Spanish and Chatting with Native Speakers navigator.sendBeacon('https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', payload); if( 'moc.enilnoefiltseb' !== location.hostname.split('').reverse().join('') ) { There are some shared cognates such as ' ja ' which means ' yes ' and ' veld ' which means ' field '. Arabics writing system has several features that can confuse learners, including leaving out most vowels, writing from right to left, and letters changing shape depending on their position in a word. The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which can be challenging for English speakers to learn. Hungarian is an agglutinative language. First, vowels are not included when writing. This is the result of it being an agglutinative language, in which prefixes and suffixes are attached to words to determine meaning and direction. So, what are the easiest and the hardest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers? Some friends in Central Asia are also trying to avoid it. And because its placed at the very end of the sentence, you cant understand the meaning of whats being said until the sentence is finished. Towards the end of 2022, Ukrainian forces wrested back the city of Kherson, while most of the rest of the region remained in Russian hands. If you emphasize the second ("su-KA"), then you have "vinegar." The verb conjugations can be intimidating, too, with many more variants and combinations to comprehend than other Slavic languages. They are very closely related to English, so many of the same grammar rules and similar vocabulary apply. It also has a complicated verb conjugation system, which can be pretty confusing for English speakers. For instance, in Italian, sentences are structured subject-verb-object (such as I threw the ball). What are the Hardest Languages to Learn? | Mango Languages Despite the fact that Greek roots are found throughout the English language, Greek is among the hardest languages for English speakers to learn, according to . There's a tongue-in-cheek book titled "Learn Greek in 25 years," but you'll be surprised at how . To understand it, you must recognize the pitch of a tone in relation to the context of the world and overall sentence. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. This system of honorific speech is called keigo. For English terms you need to finally perfect, here are 23 Words You Need to Stop Mispronouncing. . Thats German for ice skating. German is often preceded by its hard-to-master accent and enthusiastically long vocabulary. New: Russian Names - Learn the history of Russian names. Russian. On the other hand, tvrtek means Thursday, and mastering the way each of those sounds works together is going to take you a while. xhr.send(payload); You can see this illustrated with some simple sentences centered around the Finnish word for house, talo.. And switching to Ukrainian is one way to fight back. Whether for gaining a deeper cultural understanding of a country or for the simple necessity of co-existing and even performing business, multilingual speakers put themselves at the forefront of new possibilities. Mandarins four distinct tones give the same word ma four very different meanings. Answer (1 of 4): Very difficult. 11 Hardest Languages To Learn - StoryLearning The time estimates here reflect how long it would take the average person to reach a Level 3 proficiency level, which is pretty fluent by most standards. Mandarin Chinese. So, verbs are usually given in the first person of the singular form. This Slavic language consists of two scripts (Cyrillic and Latin), seven tenses and a consonant (R) that is also sometimes a vowel. . Furthermore, Thai has its own script with 44 consonants, 18 vowels and six diphthongs to memorize. Someone who speaks German, someone who speaks Farsi, and someone who speaks Vietnamese will likely have massive differences in what languages they find easy or hard to pick up, because the native languages theyre starting with are so dissimilar from one another. If you think picking up a little French or Spanish in your spare time is difficult, then you should know the kind of work you're getting into learning some other languages from around the world. Youll notice that many of these languages do not use the Latin alphabet. We have also become interested in Ukrainian history, Ukrainian culture before, there was a large gap, he said. Yeah. Furthermore, learning a new language enhances your worldview, improves nonverbal communication, helps you multitask and aids in your brain adapting and responding to new circumstances. Maybe its PTSD, but we react negatively to the media in Russian, she said.