Want to learn a new language? The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are generally those languages that use the same Roman alphabet and have a similar grammar structure.
On the other hand, the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers are those with foreign writing systems, tonality, and alien grammar. If you’re an English speaker and you’ve managed to become fluent in any of the 10 languages below, give yourself a pat on the back.
1. Basque
Basque (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As with many of the languages on this list, the Basque language is agglutinative. This means that words are formed, then altered with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word “lege” means law in Basque, but the sentence “according to the law” wouldn’t be 4 distinct words, but instead would be “legearen arabera.”
Basque also uses case endings in order to indicate relationships between words. For example, the Basque word for “mountain” is “mendi”, but the phrase “to the mountain” is simply “mendira”. Although Basque is extremely challenging for English learners syntactically, it shares the Roman alphabet, and the pronunciation is relatively easy for English speakers.
2. Arabic
Arabic (Photo credit: Nasir Nasrallah)
Unlike with European languages, English speakers won’t find any similar sounding words in Arabic. To make things more complicated, in Arabic the verb generally comes before the subject and object, and they can be singular, dual, and plural. Just your average present tense verb will have 13 different forms. There are also 2 genders, as well as 3 noun cases.
There are also different dialects of Arabic. While most English leaders will study modern standard Arabic, there are also variations that are as different from modern standard Arabic, as French and Spanish are different from English.
3. Cantonese
Cantonese signs in Hong Kong (Photo credit: niiku23)
Speaking of Hanzi characters, written Chinese is not phonetic. If you’re learning a new European language, or even an exotic phonetic language like Korean, you can at least sound out words you’re not familiar with. In Chinese, the writing system is pictoral, meaning that each character represents a different word. The only way to know the meaning of a character is to have it memorized, all 20,000+ characters.
To make things even more complicated, the exact same character will almost always have multiple meanings, depending on the context. The same sounding word can also have more than one written form, with each written form having a different meaning.
As difficult as the writing system is to grasp, the spoken dialect is perhaps even more complex. Compared to Cantonese, spoken Mandarin Chinese is a breeze to learn. Like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese is a tonal language, which can be extremely confusing for English speakers. The same sound spoken in a different tone can hold a completely different meaning. And unlike Mandarin Chinese which has 4 tones, Cantonese has 8 tones, with each change in pitch and inflection re-shaping a word’s meaning.
4. Finnish
Finnish sign (Photo credit: Martin Terber)
Fortunately, Finnish is a phonetic language and written in the Roman Alphabet, so despite the lack of common vocabulary and alien grammar, at least you’ll be able to sound out the words.
5. Hungarian
Hungarian keyboard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In Hungarian grammar, possession, tense, and number are not dictated by word order, but by suffixes. This makes the sentence structure seemingly flexible, but in reality, extremely similar sentences can take on completely different meanings with slight alterations in the suffixes.
6. Navajo
A collection of Navajo signs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Virtually everything in Navajo is done exactly the opposite as its done in English. It is a verb-centered language. Even descriptions are given through verbs, and English adjectives have no direct translation in Navajo. Another interesting feature of the language is that it has animacy – a hierarchy of animation determines what verbs a noun will take on. For example, nouns like human and lightning are at the top of the hierarchy, while children and large animals come after, and abstractions are at the very bottom.
7. Mandarin Chinese
Old Mandarin Chinese caligraphy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Like Cantonese, Mandarin is a tonal language. This means that a simple change in pitch and/or inflection can completely modify the meaning of the same sound. To make spoken Mandarin easier for English speakers, Mandarin can be sounded out using “Pinyin”, a transliteration system that uses the Roman Alphabet to present the language phonetically. It was created by the Chinese government in the 1950s to help standardize the language.
Of course, Pinyin doesn’t make the tonal aspect of the language any easier. The sound Ma” for example can represent 5 distinct words, depending on the tone, or lack thereof. For example:
- “Mā”, said with a high and level tone, means mother.
- “Má”, said in a rising tone, means hemp.
- “mǎ”, said in a tone that dips low and then rises back up, means horse.
- “Mà”, said in a dropping tone, means to scold.
- “Ma”, said in a flat, neutral tone, is used at the end of a sentence to indicate that a question is being asked.
As far as grammar goes, Mandarin Chinese is actually much easier than most other languages, since there’s no conjugation and words generally only have one grammatical form. However, it also posses unique challenges of its own. For example, Mandarin uses about a dozen adverbs that have no English equivalent.
8. Japanese
12 century emaki scroll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Unfortunately, written Japanese is even more difficult than written Chinese. It incorporates the Kanji pictoral characters from Chinese, and also incorporates additional characters that are exclusive to Japanese.
9. Estonian
Estonian grammar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The many seemingly arbitrary exceptions to Estonian grammar rules also serve to make this language a challenge for English learners.
10. Polish
Polish sign (Photo credit: James Burke)
This polish sign has many mistakes, but not too bad ones, somebody used wrong letters in some words.
What? No Portuguese? What, you think portuguese is easier that those ones? You better find out. Just because whe use the same alphabet don’t think that makes any difference.
This is a very good list, however I’m not sure if the Arabic language is truly that difficult. Yes, it looks very intimidating at first glance — but in my experience it is a very logic language. You can learn the alphabet and pronunciation without too much trouble — unlike, say, Mandarin, which involves ridiculous amounts of memorization!
ACTUALLY, in Estonian language there are not 12 but 14 cases…
Estonian, related to Finnish and Hungarian, has 14 cases.
There are 14 cases in the Estonian language. By the by.
As a born and raised Estonian, I was taught there are 14 cases, not 12 as this article claims. Also the Estonian grammar book on a picture is in German – with other languages you have displayed the language look as it is – ie Finnish, but you have failed to show real Estonian. Perhaps next picture from Wikipedia would have been better to reflect the real language
or ie http://estonianlanguage.blogspot.com/2010/04/estonian-locative-cases.html
they changed it
Now it has estonian 
There’s 14 cases in estonian… and the picture illustrating esonian language is all in german:) Homework, guys!
Hehe, Estonian is SO complicated that it has been simplified here: 12 instead of 14 cases (I wonder which ones were the hard core ones that were left out?) and a German text instead of an Estonian (well, there are a lot of imported German words, true)
There’s actually 14 cases in Estonian language, not 12.
The photo of estonian language is wrong, its in old german language. I should know, i am estonian who speaks also german
It seems to be such a difficult language, that its hard to find even a right estonian text
In the photo of the Finnish language: it is a sign of a veterinarian, first in Finnish and on the second line the same in Swedish, which the second official language in Finland used in coastal areas as the town of Porvoo (just East of Helsinki) where the sign is from. Borgå is the Swedish name of this town, so there is actually only one word in Finnish, if not counting the name of the town.
Oh, one more thing, estonian language has 14cases http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eesti_keele_grammatika
Note: Estonian language has 14 cases (not 12) and the image above attributed to Estonian is actually in German and written in Gothic (alphabet that no-one uses today).
This is what Estonian looks like (and probably would make elves envy):
- Ma pole kellegi poolel, sest keegi pole minu poolel.
- Üle oja mäele, läbi oru jõele.
Just to be exact, Estonian language has 14 cases – having witnessed a few foreginers and also native Engish speakers learning the language I can at least say that even if the grammatics is difficult at times, the vocabulary and pronounciation are just a matter of being interested and practice pracice practice.
Thanks for the correction Kadi, as the many Estonians dropping by have made clear, it was an error on our part =).
Hopefully your words are encouraging for anyone trying to pick up the language. Definitely, the most important factor in learning any foreign language is ultimately practice, practice, practice.
Despite that – it is amazing how quickly native English-speakers, who live in Estonia learn the Estonian language. These are people of great nations who have such an attitude towards culture of small-size nations. Thank you for this honour !
Two slight corrections.
1. Estonian has 14 cases, not 12.
2. The book cover beside the entry about Estonian is in 17th century German, not Estonian.
Um, the example photo for Estonian is some old germanic language one, not a syllable of Estonian. Sheesh!
3 Fenno-Ugric languages- Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian- among the 10 most difficult ones. That says something..
Please check your facts. First of all, I’m pretty sure you mean RomanIC languages, not RomanCE languages. Secondly, as a native Estonian speaker – we have 14 cases and the picture you are using to illustrate Estonian is not in Estonian at all but more like in old German. Yes, German was spoken in Estonia at certain periods in history, but our language is nothing like that.
Actually, RomanCE languages is the more commonly used term in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages.
However, thanks for the other corrections!
I was working in Paris, and some times I did read a Finnish language newspaper in my office. Opposite of me worked one fellow from Scotland. He heard, that if you can pronounce the Finnish alphabets the Finnis way, you can read the Finnish text. With little training he managed to read the Finnish newspaper headlines to me so, that I did understand them. He did not understood, what he had read. Case proven. Finnish phonetic language.
“consonant clusters that will get your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).”
Almost each of these consonant clusters occur in English, only their letters are “completely alien to English speakers”.
Hungarian is Finno-Ugric.
They make completely different sounds in Hungarian than they do in English.
Chinese characters used in China are called hanzi. The characters used in Japan are called kanji. As though most of the people understand what kanji means in this context I found it a bit funny to say that Cantonese is written in kanji. Kanjis are orignally from China, so they are originally hanzi.
Hehe, “asko” means “a lot” in basque.
Basque, a dialect??? Of what exactly? It’s the only remaining pre-Indoeuropean (and therefore unrelated to Indoeuropean languages) language in Europe. Language, not dialect. The Basque Country spills into both Spain and France, and as such Basque is spoken in France as well, which the article fails to mention.
The Finno-Ugric languages are post-Indoeuropean, and therefore also unrelated to the majority of the European languages which are Indoeuropean (Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, etc).
Yes, while the border between dialect and language may be hard to determine sometimes, in this case there is no doubt at all that Basque is a language.
I am a Finn. In Finland we lear English even as a child. Finnish TV sends program with the original languages and adds texts to screen. Clever. Its easy for Finns to lean languagaes.
you know that this sign was not written by Polish native speaker and has a lot of mistakes? :p its very funny for us, Poles, but according to main aim of the text it reveals your luck of research…
I can only say that the Polish sign must have been written by someone who shouldn’t be in the sign-making business! Random lower-case letters in the middle of a word, spelling errors, spaces in the middle of a word.
That’s not to say that the language doesn’t deserve a spot on this list – anglophones really struggle
Namaste from India… I mean regards.
Wonderful to be be here..
वसुधैव कुटुमबकम् .. In Sanskrit .. It says .. World is our home.. It is oldest language we speak .. Right from Vedas.. Vedas that had all knowledges
While I admit Hungarian is a really difficult langauge to learn (and I’m a born Hungarian) there are some misunderstanding in the article.
The consonant clusters, raised as examples, are not actaully clusters. Hungarian uses letter-clusters to write down some sounds.
So:
sz is pronounced like in “sit”
zs is pronounced like the last phoneme in “camouflage”
dzs is pronounced like the “j” in “Joe”
ly is pronounced like the “y” in “you”
cs is pronounced like in “itch”
and so on… If you really examine Hungarian you will realise that we actually don’t reallylike to knot our tongues with difficult to pronounce consonant clusters, like German or even English does sometimes.
And the vowels: we use the same sounds like every other European langauges just write the differently.
Another proposed correction:
Kanji are used in Japanese, I’m pretty sure by kanji, reference is made to hanzi.
Kanji: ” are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi)[1] that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名), katakana (カタカナ, 片仮名), Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
hanzi: “Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese (where they may be called hanzi[2] 汉字/漢字 “Han character”) and Japanese (kanji)”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanzi
why is my comment still waiting moderation? other posts posted after mine already show…
I’m a Finnish speaker, but learned Swedish, English and German at my high school.
Just to let you know that your example of Finnish language is partially correct; the first line is Finnish language, the second line is Swedish language, which also is our official language, although only about 8% speaks that.
Further more about Finnish… We also have short and long consonants and wovels which make a difference. For example tULi means fire, tUULi means wind and tULLi means customs. Easy as that
As a native Finnish speaker I would like to note that there are a lot of words in Finnish borrowed from Germanic and Latin languages. Sometimes only the time gap has made them not so easy to recognize. And learning the numbers is maybe the easiest in the world.
PS. An English-spoken person may find it a bit confusing that the first names in Finland are short and some basic rules are not the same as in English. For instance my name is typical Finnish male name eventhough it is short and ends with a letter A.
Thanks for an interesting read.
I’d also like to point out couple of things:
1. In Hungarian there is a typo “Finno-Uric” -> “Finno-Ugric”.
2. In Finnish picture the first row is Finnish and the second row is Swedish.
And then an opinion:
Finnish and Japanese pronunciation are close to each other but English differs a lot from both of them. For this reason many native English speakers talking in Japanese sounds very wrong to my ear. I don’t know how Japanese feel about this though.
The second line in finnish sign is swedish, not finnish, as Finland is officially bilingual nation. Though there are even more official minority languages in Finland also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland
Thank you for your interesting article. I’m a native Finnsh speaker. I can convince you that I’m struggling every day with my English. The text in your Finnish language section is not only Finnish, the lower line is Swedish, which should be realatively easy to understand for an English speaker.I bet she/he could easily figure out a word veterinär. It is so close to an English word veterinary. Thus the example given in that photo is not exactly correct.
To be honest. I’d say that Estonian is like finnish on steroids. Learn finnish, deduct many endings so that different forms sound the same, add irregularities that stemm from the fact that the literary language was made up of different dialects with no regularity in mind and then dip it into some german and russian, pluss it’s own development, pluss the three grade lenth system, sometimes difficult even for Estonians themselves to grasp. I’d say Estonian is more difficult than finnish.
Hungarian language is not “Finno-Uric”. We are not relatives with the Finnish.
Don’t be so ashamed of your northern cousins
We may not know anything about how to ride a horse or eat paprika, but at least we know the correct personal insults for people who should crawl into another persons vagina 
It is a Finno-Hungaric language, even if you like or not ( or Hungaro_Finn )
Other finno-Ungaric languages are Finnish, Estonian, Mordvin..
Hispanics are not related to Moldavians but the languages belong to the same family. You may be right but the argument is not substantial.
I am learning Finnish and I can say that it is more difficult than hungarian and estonian combined! (yes, I know sufficiently good of both languages to claim it)
although I’m loving it!
Some Caucasian languages are extremely complicated and should have been included in this list. They are split-ergative (more complicated syntactically than Basque), feature suffixaufnahme, have huge phoneme inventories with several dozens of consonants, lots of nominal cases, completely unrelated vocabulary to any Indo-European language etc.
Basque is also an ergative language
I agree that some languages are not easy to learn. But they can be learned. The problem lies in the education system: no second or third language is thought still is many of the schools, which is in other countries is not the case. Languages, just like learning to play on a musical instrument, has to be thought at a young age, possibly in preschool. Believe me, it is old wives tales that multiple languages will confuse the child. It won’t. And at that age things don’t seem so difficult even if they are.
With some effort you might find a better sample of Finnish language. The sign in the photo has text in Finnish AND Swedish. (Swedish is definitely not so hard for English speakers to learn.)
Souldn’t it be Finno- Ugric?
I’m so impressed with how nice the Estonian speakers are with the corrections, and while it makes sense they’d recognize the photo under Estonian has German, not their language, the fact that they all know it’s 17th century German is very impressive, to me at least.
The fact that they all write in perfect English is also something most Americans should make note of. I was born and raised in the USA, and I know that most of us are pretty darn lazy about learning a foreign language, then we have that really embarrassing faction of Americans who seem allergic to foreign language. What a sad loss for them. Most of my grandparents came from Norway and I’m currently learning Norwegian, I’ve taken 5 semesters. Learning Norwegian in my late 30′s is an entirely different, and slower, process than learning French as a kid and teenager, however it is a wonderful experience. I love being in a part of the country full of many wonderful people from many parts of the world and speaking wonderful, different languages. No matter how hard the language is, the effort is definitely worth the work, even if one doesn’t end up fluent, it really is all about the journey, not the destination. Kadi is right: practice! Practice! Practice! But that’s the most fun part anyway!
agreed
yes,it is too difficult to learn……
You write a lot of nonsense but, being Hungarian, I will limit myself to trying to correct the most obvious ones in the part about Hungarian.
“Hungarian is in the same Finno-Uric language family as Finnish.”
It’s Finno-Ugric, not Finno-Uric.
“Although Hungarian does use the Roman alphabet, the pronunciation is significantly different from English.”
The pronunciation of what? Of the language? Yes, the pronunciation of a foreign language is “significantly different from English”. What a surprise!
“For one, it has vowel sounds that are completely alien to English speakers (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í), as well as consonant clusters that will get your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).”
1. You mix up the concepts of “sound” and “letter”…
2. Most of the vowels you refer to are quite close to some English vowels. Unless you find “completely alien to English speakers” the vowels at the end of the English words “be” (that is how the Hungarian letter “í” is pronounced) or “hello” (that is roughly how the Hungarian “ó” is pronounced).
3. The consonants you refer to are not clusters at all. Unless the first sounds of the English words “see” (that is how “sz” is pronounced in Hungarian) or “yes” (that is how “ly” is pronounced) or “Jim” (that is how “dzs” is pronounced) “get your tongue tied up into knots”.
“In Hungarian grammar, possession, tense, and number are not dictated by word order, but by suffixes.”
You presumably want to say that possession, tense and number are expressed by suffixes. You may be surprised to learn that possession and number are expressed by suffixes in English as well (cf. Joe and house vs Joe’s house or one apple vs two apples). Is that so difficult?
“This makes the sentence structure seemingly flexible, but in reality, extremely similar sentences can take on completely different meanings with slight alterations in the suffixes.”
Again, that is like in any other language. You should be careful whether you want to say “Jack’s hit” or “Jack hits”.
If you have so little idea about languages or linguistics, why to write a post about it????
Plus, I’d say the hardest part of the Basque language is certainly not its agglutinative character, but the verb formation.
Am native Arabic, and i believe that Arabic is the hardest language for non-Arabic speakers. specially in grammar, even me i’m not very good with grammar. In old Arabic you should put diacritic for each letter because if you change a diacritic in the same word it gives a very different meaning. For example,
نَفِدَ > means : run out
نَفّذَ > means : execute
نَفَذَ > means : permeate
but you should learn it because it is the oldest language in history and the mother of all languages.
That polish sign doesn’t make sense. Everything is spelled wrong and such
“Hardest” is obviously a difficult thing to quantify. However, I am certain it is more difficult for English speakers to learn Inuvialuktun (Western Canadian Inuit), Uyghur, or Tamil than it is to learn Polish or Arabic.
IMHO, We can try to add Indonesian Language as honorable mention, if we discount scarceness of user and writing system used.
With around 100 dialects available, elements of tonal language (e.g. makan (eat) can be want to eat if ended with increasing tone), different class of formality, different spoken and written language, and “no true grammar” in spoken language, etc, etc, but may be the hardest part to learn is that we Indonesian answer by context, not by word.
e.g.
A: Kamu tidur? (Do You sleep?)
B: Ya, saya tidur. (Yes, I do sleep)
A: Kamu tidak tidur (Don’t You sleep?)
B: Ya, saya tidak tidur. (No, I am not sleeping)
Despite the pronounciation is as easy as German or Japanese Language, The language itself too dependent to pre and subfixes. I don’t think there is a language that cram 4 or more fixes to a noun / verb at once.
e.g.
“Popularitas seseorang diukur dari ketertampakannya di media” (A person popularity can be measured by how visible his / her in media. This translation actually a little bit off connotatively).
In above, ketertampakannya means how visible he is, literally
ke = affected with
ter = non deliberately
tampak (main word) = visible
an = degree of
nya = of him / her
Estonian and Finnish, agree. Also try Lithuanian. Is a language made not of rules, according to their own native speakers, is made of exceptions.
Wow I didn’t know arabic was that hard for english speakers, I’m proud that its my main language
That was a very interesting read! But I gotta say something: you know what’s shocking about Estonians? They are sooo smart, they have 14 cases, they know ancient German and yet they couldn’t be bothered to READ. THE. COMMENTS. Why would they keep commenting the exact same thing that 30 other people have already pointed out? I guess no matter the language, intelligence and wisdom are two separate things.
Japanese isn’t hard because it has different characters than chinese. Actually it has fewer characters, fewer sounds, and its new symbols are syllabes which are a breeze. What makes Japanese HARD is that Chinese is consistent and regular, meanwhile Japanese readings are extremely irregular, just like english pronounciation. That’s it, there is no correlation between a symbol and how it’s pronounced, so each word has to be learned separately; as a result, its alphabet has in practice +50000 “letters” even though it “only” has about +3000 symbols (most of those “letters” use 2-4 symbols).
I’m o happy that i have born in a simple language speaker country. If I can’t understand brazilian portuguese grammar, these ones….
Icelandic? Anyone?
having Classical Arabic & Basque on my list of read & understand, both when over 50, I can only say: not hard at all.
I agree, as a Polish teenager who also speaks English fluently (I grew up in the USA to Polish immigrants – came back to Poland when I was 9)
Our grammar is very hard, but not as hard as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian or something of the type.
Our pronunciation can be hard for somebody who doesn’t speak any other Slavic language, it’s also a bit nasal like French.
I don’t know about the European languages, but I still believe the Asian languages like Mandarin are generally more difficult for English speakers to master.
For Mandarin, there’s no alphabet to fall back on, so the only way is to memorise thousands of characters. Forget memorising; even writing the characters by itself is already a challenge. Then, you’d have to remember the intonations of every character. And of course, you’d have to remember all the meanings of all the combinations of characters. The last bit is notoriously difficult especially if you do not have any sufficient exposure to the language.
The pronunciation is thankfully very easy, which perhaps gives Mandarin a less daunting impression since it’s pretty simple to learn to pick up conversational Mandarin. HOWEVER, beyond that, Mandarin is absolute hell. Having been exposed to a bit of Arabic, Japanese and other Chinese dialects like Cantonese, I don’t think any of them matches Mandarin in terms of difficulty of mastering.
AND, this is coming from a Chinese (albeit not from China). I was forced to learn it in school, but sadly I never managed to get the hang of it. As much as I would love to be given another chance to master it, the reality is that I’ll probably never be able to master it given that I’m becoming increasingly disconnected from the language as I grow older.
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Where are Czech and Slovak????
I just hate foreigners. I don’t know why. I just had to share this.
I a an English Speaker and yet I can speak Mandarin Chinese with hints of Cantonese and Japanese. I GOT SWAG THAT’S WHY!!! *smiles*
PAT ON THE BACK PEEPS1 :p i GOT AWESOMENESS!!! WHOA OA!
Actually,to come to think about it, I agree that actually Asian languages are a lot harder than European ones because it does not follow the English Alphabet. My Mandarin Chinese teacher said that even if you write something even a BIT differently,it may mean something else entirely!
Yeah! :0
Can anyone speak Caucasian Avar or Dargin. In Caucasian Avar Vorçami means hello, it is spoken in dagestan.
I’m Polish, and I confirm, it’s an extremely difficult language, with lots and LOTS of different forms for a single word, where nouns and adjectives, even when used in the same case, conjugate differently. Tough pronunciation, a lot of consonant compounds, like trz, szcz, prz, drz, and so on. Confusing spelling, lots of identical sounds written each in a different manner, like rz = ż, ch = h, rules for writing these are complicated and have many exceptions. A nightmare, I’m really glad I was born here, otherwise I would never know it in 100 years
For Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, they both use Hanzi character as their written form. The only difference is that people from Mainland China [including Guangdong province (where people speak Cantonese) but excluding Hong Kong] use simplified Hanzi Characters, while people from Hong Kong use traditional Hanzi Characters (Taiwan also uses traditional Hanzi). Originally, all areas in China use traditional Hanzi, but since the characters formation is more complex, the China government created the simplified version during 1950s – 1960s in order to improve literacy. Since Hong Kong was under British control at the time, the simplified version of Hanzi was not introduced. Therefore, Hong Kong uses traditional Hanzi until today. (No one is borrowing from anybody.) Here is an example. The word “country” is “國” in traditional Hanzi, and “国” in simplified Hanzi. I hope I clear things up. But the article is great otherwise
Any Indian language can be challenging to. Try learning Sanskrit.. Malayalam or Hindi..
Yes indeed, Arabic definitely is the world’s hardest language to learn! Not only proper Arabic but slang Arabic is even harder as most of slang words are not in any dictionary known to a foreigner to Arabic as well as to many Arab speaking people
The hardest language for me to learn was Wolof! (An native language in Senegal)
Actually, talolta means from somewhere near the house.
Hungarian letters are not that difficulz to learn.
S= English Sh
Sz= English S
Cs= Tch
Dzs= J as in Joke
Gy= D in dew
J and ly = Y in yogurt
Zs= French J
hungarian is cool, came out to europe from uralic languages, unreal!
i speak Polish, what is your superpower?
I learned Finnish almost fluently in 9 months. Since then I’ve been teaching Finnish for work experience on and off for a year. The fact that English is my first language was my biggest advantage. There’s no way that Finnish is the 4th most difficult for English speakers. It’s the simplest and most logical language I’ve ever come across.
I’m born in Hong Kong and I speak fluent Cantonese Mandarin and English. I speak French too, but not that fluent. For Cantonese, there is actually 9 tones and the last three tones cannot be prolonged when pronouncing. the 3 tones are grouped to form 入聲. This group does not exist in Mandarin. in my point of view, mandarin sounds much softer and polite than Cantonese does as it has only 4 tone. Thus there is only 3276 combinations of words’ pronunciation while canto has 10620 combinations. However it means when you learn mandarin it will be so much more confusing as the possibility of different characters having same pronunciation will be much higher. Moreover, mandarin is not officially used in china until 1909 when the Qing government officialise it. Canto has been developed into a mature language since 900 AD. If you’re learning Chinese for business, go for mandarin. It’s used as an official language and it is easier. but if you’re learning to understand Chinese culture better or simply for fun, learn Cantonese. It helps you understand ancient written Chinese better, it gives you a chance to learn the beautiful traditional characters and most importantly, over 120 million people are speaking (and writing) canto all over the world.