Some people struggle with the English language as it can be quite challenging and made up of many parts. Even so, English is not one of the hardest languages to learn. This is why English speakers are struggling even more to learn other languages.
But if you love a good challenge, here is a list of the 8 hardest languages to learn:
1) Mandarin
Did you know? Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world! But since Mandarin is a tonal language, it may be difficult for English speakers to master the language. When speaking in Mandarin, you can have a completely different meaning of a word just by changing your tone. That is apart from the thousands of characters, complex systems, and homophones that made Mandarin one of the hardest languages to learn in the world.
2) Icelandic
The Icelandic language is hard to learn because there are only less than 400,000 native speakers that can help you with this language. While it has not changed since it settled in the ninth and tenth centuries, new meaning is continuously added to old words.
3) Japanese
Pictures: Google
The first thing that you need to know is that the Japanese language has three independent writing systems which are hiragana, katakana, and kanji. You also need to learn thousands of different characters in the mentioned writing systems before you can actually start to write. But somehow, the Japanese language is easier to learn compared to Mandarin!
4) Hungarian
Most of the languages come from the Indo-European language root but Hungarian is excluded. Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language with 26 different cases where words are formed in an isolated manner. This language is totally different from how English speakers normally structure words. For example, ‘with my (female) friend’, is translated into ‘barátnőmmel’.
5) Korean
Korean is another isolated language and it does not appear to be related to any other language. It has seven different speech levels that depend on the formality, complex grammar, and its own alphabet. Basically, the Korean language is not like other languages you may have heard of.
6) Arabic
There are over 221 million native speakers of Arabic languages but it is still one of the hardest languages to learn. First, vowels are not included in the writing. Not only that but Arabic letters are also written in four different forms depending on where they are placed in a word. Last but not least, there are many different kind of Arab dialects making it very hard to learn.
7) Finnish
Pictures: Google
Finnish may look and sound like English but the complexity is similar to Hungarian where it is a Finno-Ugric language. The struggle to learn this language doesn’t end when you’ve gotten the hang of it, as modern Finnish speakers have their own way of expressing emotions. It is totally different from the traditional translation!
8) Polish
There are two main factors why Polish is very hard to learn. First, the pronunciation. The basic greeting such as ‘hello’ is translated into ‘cześć’. Now, before you think it’s easy, know that the ‘c’ and ‘s’ are pronounced completely different than in the English language. Next, the Polish language has seven different grammatical cases that are divided by gender, and seventeen different cases for numbers. This means, there are seventeen different ways to say the number ‘ten’ itself.
Sources: Jumpspeak, Taleninstituut Nederland
