Language is the communication system used by a particular community or country. Learning a new language is not an easy task. For English speakers, some languages may appear more difficult than others to speak and understand.
The most difficult languages to learn
Chinese
Chinese is a group of languages spoken by the Chinese people. The most common of them is mandarin, which is the most widely spoken language in the world. English speakers find the language very difficult to learn, mainly because it is a tonal language. Each sound in Mandarin has four distinct pronunciations. To make matters worse, the language is rich in homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings). Moreover, the long and rich Chinese history has enriched the language with idioms and aphorisms. Most English speakers have cited language as the most difficult language to learn in the world.
arabic
The Arabic language is a central Semitic language. It was first spoken in the Iron Age and developed to be the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is spoken by about 422 million people worldwide. In Arabic, most letters are written in four different forms depending on where they are placed in a word. The fact that vowels are not included in the writing further complicates the language. In addition, the language has many different dialects depending on the geographical area in which it is spoken.
Japanese
Japanese is an East Asian language with over 125 million speakers. It is the national language of Japan. The language is made difficult to learn by the fact that thousands of characters have to be learned before they can write in Japanese. Furthermore, the language has three different writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. To complicate matters further, each of these systems has a different alphabet.
Korean
The Korean language is spoken by around 80 million people worldwide, making it the largest linguistic isolation in the world (an isolated language is a language without close relatives). It is the national language of North Korea and South Korea, as well as the official language of two autonomous Chinese prefectures. The linguistic structure of the Korean language is very different from many other languages, including English. For example, when describing an action in Korean, the subject goes first, followed by the object and then the sentence ends with the action. A practical example is a phrase like “I read books” when pronounced in the Korean changes to “The books read”. This change in sentence structure makes it very difficult and sometimes confusing for English speakers.
Hindi
Hindi is a language spoken by around 260 million people worldwide. It is the official language of the Indian government. It is also the official language of Fiji. The Hindi language has ten vowels and consonants 40 and is characterized by bars at the top of the symbols. It is highly phonetic, unlike English. The main difference between English and Hindi is in the sentence structure. A simple order in English is subject-verb-object, while in Hindi it is subject-object-verb.
Why are Asian languages hard to learn?
English speakers find it difficult to learn various languages with Asian languages that prove to be the most difficult to learn. The difficulty is determined by the difference between the characters of writing and the difference in the structure of the sentence. Asian languages have inverted the syntax from English, which means that you must first learn the syntax before learning the language.
The most difficult languages to learn
degree | language | Number of speakers in the world (millions) |
1 | Chinese | 1200 |
2 | arabic | 221 |
3 | Japanese | 122 |
4 | Korean | 66 |
5 | Hindi | 182 |
6 | russian | 144 |
7 | Vietnamese | 69 |
8 | Turkish | 51 |
9 | Polish | 40 |
10 | thai | 21 |
11 | Serbian | 16 |
12 | Jewish | 5 |
13 | finnish | 5 |
14 | Albanian | 5 |
15 | Amharic | 36 |
16 | Armenian | 12 |
17 | Turkish | 88 |
18 | tamil | 70 |
19 | tagalog | 70 |
20 | Croatian | 6 |
21 | Kazakh | 15 |
22 | Macedonian | 3 |
23 | lao | 25 |
24 | Latvian | 2 |
25 | lithuanian | 3 |