How hard is it to learn the language that you have selected from the list of hardest languages to learn is depending on how many languages you are already fluent in?
The Old World Language Families, also known as the origins of languages, reveal where various languages diverged. Now you may be able to see why languages such as German, Italian, or French have similarities with Spanish.
What makes Korean similar to languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, etc. Therefore, native Korean speakers will have a different hardest language to learn than native English speakers.
Today, we will focus only on the hardest languages for English speakers to learn (hint: they fall into separate language branches). There is also a blog post about the hardest languages to learn for English speakers which is worth checking out.
- Polish
It’s hard to learn the language of a country whose pierogies you love, but speaking the language of the country where those pierogies are made is infuriating.
Two main factors are contributing to the complexity of the Polish language. An explanation of how to pronounce it. It can be difficult for new learners to even say ‘hello’ (czesc) because the ‘c’ and ‘s’ are pronounced entirely differently.
The Poles also have seven different grammatical cases influenced by gender, as well as seventeen different numbers. In total, there are seventeen ways of saying ‘ten’.
- Finnish
According to the author J. R. R. Tolkien, the Elvish language is derived from the Finnish language. Similarly, they take grammatical complexity to another level in Finno-Ugric languages such as Hungarian. You’ll soon discover that modern Finnish speakers have a different way of expressing emotions than traditional translators once you’ve mastered translating Finnish to English!
- Arabic
Arabic is still one of the hardest languages to learn despite having 221 million native speakers that you can potentially learn from. Writing does not include vowels. For further confusion, the Arabic alphabet is composed of four forms that are determined by the position of the word.
- Korean
Another language that is difficult to learn is which is not a language family language. I’ll tell you one more thing. There are seven levels of formality in Korean, and native speakers switch between them based on formality.
- Hungarian
There are a lot of languages that originate from the Indo-European language family, which makes it difficult. There are only a few Finno-Ugric languages where words are formed in an isolated manner, such as Hungarian. The structure of words and sentences is different from what English speakers typically use.
- Japanese
As of this writing, however, Japan has three independent systems of writing: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Learners of Japanese need to become acquainted with the thousands of different characters used in each writing system before they can start writing. Despite this, it is far easier to learn than Mandarin!
- Icelandic
Icelandic continues to add new meaning to old words even though the language hasn’t changed since its settlement in the ninth and tenth centuries. You’re also not helped by the fact that there are less than 400,000 native speakers who can provide input and practice.
- Mandarin
Even though English is the most spoken language in the world, it is not without challenges. The tonal nature of Mandarin allows you to create completely different meanings for the same word by simply changing your tone. You are left with a language that is one of the hardest to learn on earth because there are thousands of characters, complex systems, and rich homophones.