All languages are not equal. Some are easiest, but some of the popular foreign languages are difficult languages to acquire. But what are they?
Let’s dive into the seven hardest but also rewarding tongues to learn.
Learning a new language is an enthralling adventure. The globalization of business has resulted in the need for specialized foreign language specialists across the globe.
Although studying a different language is always fun, not all languages are similar in terms of language complexity.
Language difficulty depends on multiple factors, including Native or related Languages, methodology, convolution, interest, and available resources.
According to Ethnologue, there are currently 7,111 known living languages worldwide. The precise number varies, but it is simply overwhelming.
Some are difficult languages to acquire, whereas many are relatively straightforward. I’ve only considered major ones here, which means no less taught languages.
7 Hardest and Difficult Languages for English Speakers
Do you like challenges? If yes, why not pick a foreign tongue that can open a world of possibilities?
Here, you can explore the seven most difficult languages to learn.
1. Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese language, with over 1 billion native speakers. If you want to learn Chinese, be ready to sacrifice to spend upward of 2,000 hours from whatever time you might have.
Chinese is a tonal language, making it even more challenging for people to learn and convey the different meanings of words according to their tone and pitch.
The ability to speak the Mandarin language doesn’t help you read it, and vice-versa.
Mandarin characters, with infinite intricate hanzi drawings, are pretty hard.
You need to learn at least 2,500 characters to read a newspaper or pass the Intermediate Level 5 of the HSK exam. And up to 5,000 characters to communicate fluently and master Mandarin.
Mandarin is probably one of the most difficult languages in the globe for an English speaker to learn.
Regardless of the language challenge, it’s a feat that is amazingly impressive for those who speak Mandarin fluently.
- Speaking and Writing: Very Difficult
- Grammar: Difficult
- Conclusion: Very Difficult
2. Korean
With the rise of K-pop, K-drama, and K-movies, the Korean language demand has been rising as one of the most popular tongues.
Korean is spoken by roughly 75 million people, mainly in South and North Korea.
Unlike Japanese and Chinese characters, the Korean alphabet (Hangul) is straightforward.
You can start sounding out words and sentences pretty quickly. Despite easy characters to read, Korean is one of the most difficult languages to study.
The Korean language is difficult to understand due to its context, where one sentence can be said in three different ways.
The verbs and syntax can also be conjugated in hundreds of ways, depending on intensity, age, seniority, and mood. Besides, the pronunciation is unique and hard-to-master rules.
- Speaking and Writing: Tough
- Grammar: Very Tough
- Conclusion: Very Tough
3. Japanese
No other popular language sounds—or feels—quite like Japanese.
A Japonic family member and a language isolated, the Japanese enjoy popularity among 125 million speakers. If you’re unsure why to learn Japanese, you can read career options in Japanese.
Japanese grammar is uncomplicated since Nouns have no gender, no articles, and no plural forms; there are only two verb tenses, present and past.
It is moderately simple to pronounce, with only five vowel sounds and uniform phonetic orthography. Like Chinese, Japanese requires that you master thousands of different elaborate characters.
It has a two-syllable system and three independent writing styles (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji), further complicating the learning process.
It also has a highly contextual format that requires different forms depending on the situation’s formality. It is tricky to express yourself in a culture with such strict rules.
Besides, it also has a complex system of honorifics.
Japanese is not for the faint of heart. No surprise, it is considered the super hardest language, as per FSI studies.
- Speaking and Grammar: Difficult
- Writing: Very Difficult
- Conclusion: Very Difficult
4. Russian
Boasting a whopping 300 million speakers, Russian is one of the most popular languages globally.
While Russian is not that hard for some Eastern European speakers, it appears challenging for English speakers. Traveling to that side of the world is beautiful and valuable.
The alphabet looks complicated, and the pronunciation seems impossible in sounding. It doesn’t use Latin but the Russian alphabet in its Cyrillic script form.
Several unique letters like Ю, Я, Ж, Д, Ф, Г, Щ, Э, Б, and Й look difficult for native English speakers. However, the language is phonetic as well. With the right mindset, you can learn Russian and speak it just as other native speakers do.
It is, undoubtedly, not an easy language.
However, as long as you are motivated enough, studying isn’t that challenging either.
Despite its complexity, Learning the Russian language might be worth the extra effort to acquire.
- Speaking and Writing: Difficult
- Grammar: Very Difficult
- Conclusion: Difficult
5. Arabic
Arabic is spoken by over 400 million people in more than 20 countries, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa.
Arabic is a widespread but equally tricky language.
While the letters are fewer than Chinese and Japanese, they also look intimidating. Plus, there are only three sounds in Arabic that are not present in English.
The Arabic cursive script includes 28 letters with three vowels supplementing them. There are 13 verb forms, and the pronunciation is difficult to master.
Plus, there are many Arabic dialects across the region.
Some are mutually intelligible, meaning that the Arabic language spoken in Saudi Arabia or UAE differs from that spoken in Egypt or Sudan.
- Speaking, Grammar, Writing: Difficult
- Conclusion: Very Difficult
6. Turkish
Turkish is one of the most popular Turkic languages. Over 80 million people speak Turkish, and most of the speakers live in Turkey.
It is an agglutinative language, which means prefixes and suffixes are attached to words to determine their meaning and indicate the flow of the sentence.
While Turkish uses similar Latin alphabets to French or German, it is totally different in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.
It follows the subject-object-verb structure (SOV) in linguistic typology, like Spanish or French.
Turkish is phonetic, and the pronunciation of each letter is unique. Besides, there are no confusing double constants. To sum up, you speak it the same way as you write it.
Also, Turkish has borrowed over 5,000 words from French alone. Hence, knowing French will benefit you immensely when trying to acquire Turkish vocabulary.
The words, however, can be challenging to remember.
The vowel harmony offers endless possibilities, many words of Arabic and Persian origin, accusative cases, and too many tenses that add to the difficulty of learning the Turkish language.
To add to the misery, bewildering grammar and numerous affixes, which are pretty different from other European languages, make it a little tricky to learn from a language complexity.
- Speaking, Grammar, Writing: Slightly Difficult
- Overall: Somewhat Difficult
7. Persian (Farsi, Dari, Tajik)
Persian is an Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. It is called ‘Farsi’ in Iran, ‘Tajik’ in Tajikistan, and ‘Dari’ in Afghanistan.
The Persian language is a very straightforward type of grammar functionality.
The verbs are ridiculously uncomplicated. The language morphology for the classical and contemporary forms has not changed significantly.
Moreover, there aren’t lots of exceptions. People and objects are referred to in the same way.
There are no cases or articles. Comprehension is manageable because it has essential words from English, Arabic, Turkish, and French.
The pronunciation is a bit difficult for English speakers.
There are two different varieties, a literary form and a conversational style, with distinct features. Persian words with Arabic roots have complicated rules for being transformed differently.
How long does it take to learn Persian?
Mastering the art of speaking Farsi, Dari, or Tajik can take up to two to three years or more, depending on one’s native language.
- Speaking: Moderate
- Grammar: Moderately Easy
- Writing: Difficult
- Conclusion: Slightly Difficult
Final thought
This list is not exhaustive. There are many other difficult languages, such as Cantonese, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Mongolian, Polish, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Thai.
While some languages are easier to learn and adapt to than others, the key to successful language learning is developing the right mindset and strategy.
If you aren’t genuinely motivated, any language would be complex for you to learn. So, which language are you going to learn?
If you wish to ask any questions, leave a comment below.
What makes the Turkish language very hard is that it uses agglutination. So, what seems a three-letter word can become a ten fifteen-letter word depending on the context and grammar e.g süt (milk) > sütlenmemis (not ready to turn into milk). Good luck with that! Another difficulty I encountered while learning TR was that the Turkish language is genderless. You might think this would make life easier but not so…I don’t always understand what is being referred to by the Turkish pronoun “o”, it can be he, she or it! I have been learning Turkish for the last 25 years and I still struggle with this language.
There is one aspect of this language that many linguists are not aware of. The modern Turkish Language is generally purified from the Persian and Arabic words thanks to the language reform that started in the 30s. The Modern Turkish language should not be confused with that of the Ottoman Turkish. The Ottoman Turkish (Osmanlica, the late 15th-early 20th century) was imposed upon the society by the so-called literate e.g. medrese teachers, religious scholars, clerics and the palace. The idea was to introduce and embrace the Islamic traditions that were authentic to Persia and Arabic Peninsula. However, the Turkish society was culturally different to their neighbours and they were resilient. They kept their old non-Islamic Tengri beliefs and customs to a degree and their language somewhat intact. So, Modern Turkish is actually not that modern if you think about it. Its roots are thousands of years old and it never mingles well with other languages:- the Ottomans tried but failed with Osmanlica. Today, the modern Turkish usually borrows vocabulary from English, although the preference is producing an authentic equivalent for any new vocabulary. In this regard, this language gives its users limitless options thanks to its rich affixes and flexibility.
What about Malayalam?
It is one of the complex languages like Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, etc. As per FSI studies, most Indian languages come under Category III difficulty.
I have been studying Mandarin for 3 years. I agree that it is challenging to learn how to pronounce, but the grammar is really simple. Japanese instead. It is much easier to speak it, but the grammar is really hard.
I totally agree this. As a native Chinese speaker, I have to admit that even English grammar has given me a lot of pressure. We don’t have to change the verbs for any reason. Also, no need to add anything to nouns when there are more than one of them. In short, although Chinese characters ARE HARD, words don’t change. They won’t change like Slavic language etc.