10 Dec hardest languages to learn
With so much time on our hands during lockdown, many of us have entertained the idea of learning a foreign language. Finnish has 15 grammatical cases and each verb can have 200 possible endings given all the endings! First, Korean follows a SOV word order, so you’ll have to get used to ending the sentence with the verb. This can be both a blessing and a curse, as Portuguese is known for having lots of “false friends,” words that sound similar but mean something different. As a Germanic language, Norwegian and English share tons of cognates (like welcome). Some English speakers complain about their articles, , which have to be memorized for every case, as well as the extra vowels. Compared to modern languages, Basque is extraordinarily different. Korean also has some difficult pronunciation, such as the double G, double P, double J and double K, which can be challenging to say fluidly. Like English, Polish isn’t too consistent with phonetics either, so the same sound could be spelled in several ways. Romanian is also consistently phonetic, so words are pronounced as they’re spelled. , which depending on the inflection can mean mother, horse, scold or hemp. So, for a simple sentence like “I am going,” Swahili speakers would say “nina-kwenda”: ni is I, na is present tense and kwenda means “to go.”. Of course, Romanian has Slavic influences and sounds a bit like Italian with a Russian twist! Thankfully, C is static yet weakly enforced as compared to the other languages. Music and movies can be motivating as well! Arabic is just about as linguistically and culturally distant from English as you can get. The good news? While Spanish grammar is distinct from English, it’s simpler and has some basic overlap. Speaking and Writing: Very Difficult German also has consistent verb tenses and only one present and past verb, which is a big help. All you need is -är to form verbs for everybody. Or differences in word order, number of verb tenses or other topics? Each category is scored between 0-5, with 0 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest. Japanese may not be a tonal language, but it’s one of the hardest languages to learn. But given its similarities to English, German is one of the easiest languages. On the plus side, the Korean alphabet hangul is easy to learn. Let’s get linguistic! – a close relative of Dutch. – but it’s also phonetic. Practice makes practice! First, Hindi uses an SOV (subject object verb) word order and has new sounds for English speakers, including dha and hka. Numerous Persian words have even been incorporated into English, including bazaar, candy, caravan, checkmate and kiosk. However, other features make it one of the hardest languages to learn. While you may consider how long it will take to learn the language and how useful it will be for you, the best predictor for language learning success is being excited about it (and maintaining that excitement over the long-term). Not only are there thousands of cognates, but also similarities in the grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Indo-European languages. Your language goals will be different depending on whether you want to travel and speak with locals, converse in depth with a native friend, or read literature in that language. But there’s no doubt that this sing-song language is within your reach. A common example is the days of the week: Mandag (Monday), Tirsdag (Tuesday) and Onsdag (Wednesday). In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland, throwing TV reporters in turmoil. Velkommen to Norwegian! What’s the toughest language in the world for English speakers? For example, the word happiness in Polish is szczęście, which has six syllables. Does the language belong to the same family? The Korean language is spoken by approximately 80 million people around the globe making it the largest language isolate in the world (an isolate language is a language with no close relatives). estimates a whopping 2,200 hours to learn Arabic! You got this! Hungarians are the worst in foreign languages in the EU, and it's because for a Hungarian to learn foreign languages is about as hard as to learn Hungarian for a foreigner Disclaimer: while probably being one of the most difficult official languages in Europe, it's nowhere near the most difficult counting the countless isolated languages Mandarin is a Chinese language that is often referred to as the most difficult to learn. 1 Arabic – Arabia – Hardest Language in the World Arabic is considered among the most difficult languages to learn, especially for English speakers. However, other features make it one of the hardest languages to learn. Hindi is highly phonetic, which means it’s spelled the way it sounds – score! Korean is one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers because of some key grammatical and pronunciation rules. Zamenhof, in his quest for a universal language. Are vocabulary words easily identifiable? iamraincrystal.squidoo.com. As a Scandinavian language, it’s similar to Norwegian and Swedish, but with a few twists. and how useful it will be for you, the best predictor for language learning success is being excited about it (and maintaining that excitement over the long-term). Spoken solely in Basque Country, Basque is an intriguing language. To achieve his goal, he made Esperanto have predictable and phonetic spelling. Not only are there thousands of cognates, but also similarities in the grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Persian, which you may known by the dialect names Farsi (Iran), Dari (Afghanistan) and Tajik (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), is spoken by 110 million people. In other words, easy-peasy. . The language structure of the Korean language is very different from many other languages, including English. Whether you think a language is easy or hard depends a lot on your native language. The most unusual aspect of Swahili is the lack of verb conjugations. While perhaps not as tricky as Arabic, Persian alphabet doesn’t have letter case (so no capitals), joins words together and has some redundant letters. You won’t find shared roots or cognates here, which means Finnish is a bit of a blank slate. Though right to left, Persian uses Arabic script, as well as four more letters in their alphabet. It is the official language of the government of India. To make matters worse, the language is rich in homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings). (Yay for simplicity!) Finally, Mandarin is known for its many homophones and idioms, which can be culturally distant from English. The first difficult aspect is writing in Japanese. Icelandic has an unusual noun system, with four cases, three genders and two numbers. different inflections of the same sound for different meaning)? Are there new or unique sounds? Take for example the word star, written as. Japanese has not one but three scripts you need to learn. In case you didn’t know, Romanian is a Romance language and linguists say it’s 80% Latin. Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric language family, with Estonian and Hungarian. Pronunciation can also be a little tricky, as some nasal sounds are unique to Portuguese. On the plus side, the Korean alphabet, Mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. There’s a lot of debate about which language is the most difficult to learn. For example, there’s no gendered nouns in Indonesian. Some English speakers complain about their articles en and ett, which have to be memorized for every case, as well as the extra vowels å, ä and ö. PHP. Luckily only 2,000 kanji characters are commonly used, which helps matters. Don’t forget about all the irregular nouns and verbs too (uh-oh). Learn Spanish with Verbalicity: Try for Free. That makes figuring out new vocabulary easy, since the spelling tells you how to pronounce it. To top it off, Japanese takes the top spot as the fastest spoken language in the world! Your language goals will be different depending on whether you want to travel and speak with locals, converse in depth with a native friend, or read literature in that language. Japanese has a reputation for being one of the world’s hardest languages, and for good reason. For example, the word galore in English comes from the Gaelic go leór. bus, train, man, dog etc. Words can also get long and windy because Koreans use suffixes to modify the word. Besides that, however, Hindi has some challenging differences in terms of grammar, pronunciation and writing. The vocabulary is huge. As the official language of South Africa, Afrikaans is – surprise! Number of native speakers: 195,000 (57,000 Scottish, 138,000 Irish). As a Germanic language, Norwegian and English share tons of cognates (like welcome). For English native speakers, this makes Hungarian one of the hardest languages to learn. In addition, the long and rich Chinese history has enriched the language with idioms and aphorisms. Is the script organized differently (i.e. The most common of them is Mandarin which is the most spoken language in the world. Well, it’s an Indo-European language, which means there are some useful cognates between Persian and English. Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. Are there new concepts such as gender? Oh, and it’s definitely got similar sounding words to English. This language isn’t as distant from English as you may think. Some Spanish learners also struggle with the speed. Kanji can be notoriously difficult to master because it’s a character-based system, so you have to memorize how words are written. The sweetest part: there’s no distinct verb endings. While you may consider, how long it will take to learn the language. Luckily, there is some overlap with English, since Ireland and Scotland are neighbors to England. Many learners also consider the ř sound devilishly difficult to say. English speakers have difficulty in learning various languages with Asian languages proving to be the hardest to learn. Pronunciation may require some practice. But its many grammatical cases and dialects make it one of the hardest languages to pick up. Mandarin is a language within the Chinese language group and is actually the most spoken language in the world. in Persian. The good news? Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. Instead. If you’re looking for official statistics, the Defense Language Institute (where they teach members of the CIA foreign languages) has organized languages into four categories, the 1st Category being the easiest, and the 4th Category being the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. Finnish grammar rules are unimaginably crazy for an English speaker. Linguists think it’s one of the oldest languages in the world, which is why it’s a bit old-fashioned. In addition, the language has three different writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. In addition, their writing system, Devanagari script, has 47 characters including 14 vowels and 33 consonants. Learning one of the hardest languages for native English speakers will give your language learning muscles a complete workout, so any languages you choose to learn in the future will seem easier and take you less time to become fluent in. 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