7 Hardest Languages To Learn

Want a new challenge to take on? For English speakers, these 7 languages are the most difficult to understand. A successful challenge is enjoyed by some people. We recently gave you a list of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, but maybe you will be drawn to the more challenging choices. To evaluate the six most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, we checked in with language expert Benjamin Davies of our Didactics team. It might take a little longer for them to understand, but they're certainly worth the challenge!

Posted On December 8th, 2020

Mandarin

For English speakers, Mandarin tops the list as the perfect storm of challenges. It is tonal, uses several distinct idioms (popular phrases that do not actually have a direct translation), and subtle homophones, as you would expect from one of the hardest languages in the world (words that sound the same but mean different things). To achieve literacy, it also includes the learning of thousands of characters.

Arabic

Arabic uses its own language, which for English speakers adds a layer of complexity in itself. Although the characters actually function very similarly to our Latin alphabet in the case of Arabic. The Arabic script, however, is read right to left, instead of left to right, which can be a difficulty for speakers of English. It requires a series of unique sounds and a difficult grammatical structure. Depending on the area, it also has a large range of different dialects. Plus, words often do not have their vowels as written, so vowels are simply understood by context-based Arabic speakers. It's not an easy language to understand.

Japanese

In many respects, relative to many other languages, Japanese is simply not as difficult for English speakers to understand. You will begin to decode menus and street signs if you can teach yourself Katakana and Hiragana, the two basic Japanese alphabets (well, abugidas, if you're feeling fancy!). And when you do, what you can find is that a large number of loanwords from English and the Romance languages are used by Japanese. It's not sound, and much of the grammar is pretty easy to pick up in the grand scheme of things.

Hungarian

If that's up to your alley, Hungarian has lots of fun complications. Second, it is agglutinative, indicating that prefixes and suffixes are attached to words instead of providing individual prepositions. Which means that in a single, very long verb, much of a sentence can be articulated. Hungarian, megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért, is a common example of this and I'm going to go ahead and let you google it. There are also a lovely 26 cases in the language, making it a tad grammatically difficult.

Korean

Ok, the good news is that Korean is not tonal, so that's a help, and it's pretty easy to pick up Hangul, the primary alphabet. The bad news is that agglutinative Korean is (prefixes and suffixes replace prepositions, making some words unreasonably long). Depending on the formality of the case, it also has a whopping seven stages of expression and has unfamiliar grammar rules for us Anglophones. According to catalogues from the Defense Language Institute (where CIA spies go to study languages!), it takes an English learner about 26 weeks on average to achieve proficiency.

Finnish

Finnish has a reputation, and with good reason, for being a difficult language to learn. Nouns have 15 distinct cases, although they only have three in English: subjective, objective, possessive. The language is in the family of Finno-Ugric languages, but it doesn't have any impact on Latin or German to help you infer what it means. The one thing that makes things a little simpler is that it is written in the same alphabet as English, the way it sounds.

Basque

Basque is the indigenous language of the Basque Country, between the northeastern part of Spain and the south-western part of France. Almost 27 per cent of the Basque territory's total population speaks the language.