10 hardest languages to learn for english speakers

7/28/2019 10 Hardest Languages to Learn for English Speakers

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10 Hardest Languages To Learn For

English Speakers byStaff WritersWant to learn a new language? Theeasiest languages for English speakers to learnare 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 writingsystems, tonality, and alien grammar. If youre an English speaker and youve managed to become fluent

in any of the 10 languages below, give yourself a pat on the back.

1. Basque

Basque (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A study by theBritish Foreign Officefound that Basque was the hardest language to learn for Englishspeakers. A dialect of the Basque people in Spain, the Basque language carries no syntactic parallels to

Englishdespite having evolved in a region surrounded by Romance languages like Spanish and French.

As with many of the languages on this list, the Basque language is agglutinative. This means that wordsare formed, then altered with prefixes and suffixes. Forexample, the word lege means law in Basque,

but the sentence according to the law wouldnt be 4 distinct words, but instead would be legearenarabera.

Basque also uses case endings in order to indicate relationships between words. For example, the Basqueword 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 thepronunciation is relatively easy for English speakers.
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2. Arabic

Arabic (Photo credit: Nasir Nasrallah)

Arabic is another one of the hardest languages to learnsome would even argue its the hardest. The first

challenge for English readers learning Arabic is the script, which looks extremely foreign to anyone raisedon the roman Alphabet. Many of the letters in Arabic have 4 different forms, and vowels are not includedin writing.

Unlike with European languages, English speakers wont find any similar sounding words in Arabic. Tomake 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 aredifferent from English.


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3. Cantonese

Cantonese signs in Hong Kong (Photo credit: niiku23)

Cantonese is a Chinese dialect spoken in the Canton region of China (including Hong Kong). It shares itswritten form with Mandarin Chineseor perhaps more accuratelyit actually has no written form of its

own and borrows the Mandarin writing system. However, the way Cantonese is spoken will differ than theway it is written using Hanzi characters.

Speaking of Hanzi characters, written Chinese is not phonetic. If youre learning a new Europeanlanguage,or even an exotic phonetic language like Korean, you can at least sound out words youre not familiarwith. 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 atonal 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 MandarinChinese which has 4 tones,Cantonese has 8 tones, with each change in pitch and inflection re-shaping a words meaning.


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4. Finnish

Finnish sign (Photo credit: Martin Terber)

Finnish has no Germanic or Latin influence, making its vocabulary completely alien to English speakers.

Finnish grammar is also infamous for its difficulty. With 15 noun cases, sometimes justsmall differences can result in a huge difference in meaning. For example, talotta means without a

house in Finnish, while talolta means from a house.Fortunately, Finnish is a phonetic language and written in the Roman Alphabet, so despite the lack ofcommon vocabulary and alien grammar, at least youll be able to sound out the words.

5. Hungarian

Hungarian keyboard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


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Hungarian is in the same Finno-Ugric language family as Finnish. Although Hungarian does use the

Roman alphabet, the pronunciation is significantly different from English. For one, it has vowel soundsthat are completely alien to English speakers (,,,,,,,,), as well as consonant clusters that will get

your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).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)

Not that youre going to try learning Navajo anytime soon, but if you did, youd be in for quite a challenge.

Navajo is so unique that it was used during World War II as the basis for an unbreakable code used by the

Americans in the Pacific War against the Japanese. By creating a code based on the Navajo language andusing trained bilingual Navajo code-talkers, the Americans were able to create a code that was never

broken by the Japanese.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 animacya hierarchy ofanimation 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.


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7. Mandarin Chinese

Old Mandarin Chinese caligraphy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In discussing Cantonese, we already discussed the complexity of written Chinese. The lack of phoneticsmake it a hostile language to the learner.Like Cantonese, Mandarin is a tonal language. This means that a simple change in pitch and/or inflectioncan 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 doesnt make the tonal aspect of the language any easier. The sound Ma forexample can

represent 5 distinct words, depending on the tone, or lack thereof. For example:

1. M, said with a high and level tone, means mother.2. M, said in a rising tone, means hemp.3. m, said in a tone that dips low and then rises back up, means horse.4. M, said in a dropping tone, means to scold.5. 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

theres no conjugation and words generally only have one grammatical form. However, it also possesunique challenges of its own. For example, Mandarin uses about a dozen adverbs that have no English

equivalent.


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8. Japanese

12 century emaki scroll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unlike Mandarin Chinese, Japanese is actually extremely easy to pronounce for English speakers. The

simple combinations of vowels and consonants used to make-up Japanese pronunciation is very easy for anative English speaker to grasp.

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)

Estonian has a rigid case system. In case you forgot, a case system is where words inflect depending ontheir grammatical function in a sentence. And with 14 cases, thats a lot to keep in mind.

The many seemingly arbitrary exceptions to Estonian grammar rules also serve to make this language a

challenge for English learners.


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10. Polish

Polish sign (Photo credit: James Burke)

Like Estonian, the Polish grammatical system makes use of cases. Its also seems sometimes that Polish

grammar actually has more exceptions than it has rules. While for example, a language like Germanhas 4cases where proper usage can be deducted based on logical rules, the 7 cases in Polish often seemed to be

used arbitrarily, rather than being based on a higher level rule. You simply have to be aware of each new

usage through practice and study.

10 hardest languages to learn for english speakers

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