7 Most Difficult Languages to learn in the World

Learning a new language can be a challenge. Some languages are easy to learn while others are quite difficult. The difficulty level varies for each individual speaker based on similarity to their native language and easy phonetics.

The following are 7 of the most difficult languages to learn.

1.    Chinese (Mandarin)

This language is mostly spoken in Northern and Southwestern China. Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. Around 1.3 billion are native Chinese speakers out of which 909 million speak Mandarin. English speakers specifically find Mandarin extremely hard to learn. One of the reasons behind this is that it is a tonal language. Each sound in Mandarin has four different pronunciations. There are a lot of homophones which makes it even more difficult to learn this language. It is also enriched with idioms and aphorisms because of the long Chinese history.

2.    Arabic

Arabic is spoken throughout the Middle East along with northern and northeast Africa. It has around 315 million native speakers. This language is a Central Semitic language. It originates from the iron age and since then been developed into the lingua franca of the Arabic world.

Most Arabic letters are written in four different forms depending on their placement in a word. Vowels are not included in Arabic writing making it even harder to learn. This language also has various dialects depending on the geographical area of its usage.

3.    Japanese

Japanese is mostly spoken in Japan and has almost 128 million native speakers. It is an East Asian language and is not among the easy languages to learn. Thousands of characters have to be learned before any Japanese can be written. There are three different writing systems as well. Each of these systems has a different alphabet.

4.    Korean

The Korean language is spoken by 80 million native speakers mostly in North and South Korea. This makes it the largest single language family in the world. This means that this language is not a descendant from another language. While being the national language of South and North Korea, Korean is also the official language of two Chinese autonomous prefectures.

Structurally, Korean is quite different from all other languages. For describing an action in Korean language, the subject goes first and object comes after that. The sentence then ends with the action. The different sentence structure makes Korean a very difficult language to learn.

5.    Hungarian

Hungarian has some of the hardest grammar rules. However, it still has 15 million native speakers. Hungarian grammar is based on the case system where there are 18 noun cases which dictate how words are to be combined and modified.

Suffixes dictate possession and tense rather than word order. Hungarian also has several vowels and consonants which are tricky to learn.

6.    Finnish

Finnish grammar shares the same difficulty level as Hungarian. It is spoken in Finland and has 6 million native speakers. Even if the pronunciation and lettering of Finnish language are similar to English, the grammar adds into the difficulty.

The 15 grammatical cases in Finnish make matters worse as the smallest change at the end of a word can change its meaning significantly. Case endings are used by adding to word stems as suffixes. These are then used to express the same things which are expressed in English by prepositions.

7.    Xhosa

Xhosa is mostly spoken in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe while having about 8 million native speakers. It is one of the African languages that uses click consonants. Xhosa has 18 clicks that are articulated in three difference places including the back of the teeth, the side of the mouth, and the roof of the mouth.

This language has a massive record of phonemes which is why this is a unique language. Xhosa also has more than 100 consonants including clicks. It also has two tones, high and low.