10 Hardest Languages To Learn For English Speakers (2023)

FAQs

What is the hardest language for English speakers to learn? ›

One of Top 10 Hardest Languages To Learn – Arabic

The most challenging language from the top 10 hardest languages to learn for an English speaker is Arabic. It has an entirely foreign alphabet. Moreover, the individuals find it challenging to get along with the script and direction of reading.

Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

The most mutually intelligible pair is Spanish and Portuguese. In some cases, TV stations don't even translate between the two languages, instead assuming that Spanish-speaking audiences would understand Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking audiences would understand Spanish.

What is the 11th hardest language to learn? ›

#11 Korean

Yes, it has an odd-looking script that resembles a game of Tetris. But it's actually one of the most perfect writing systems ever devised. You can learn it in only a few hours, making reading and writing Korean very easy.

Writing: It is the most difficult of the four language skills. It requires a command over vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. When children graduate to writing short paragraphs, it also involves establishing links among different sentences. All these help in creating meaning.

Spoken by over a billion people, Mandarin Chinese is unanimously considered to be the most difficult language in the world to master, especially for those whose native languages use the Latin writing system, like English, Spanish, French, German, and all other European languages.

Kawishana is the rarest language in the world.

The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.

According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.

What is the 8th hardest language to learn? ›

Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ( listen)) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.

1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

2. Sanskrit – 1500 BC (circa. 3500 years old) With its oldest texts dating back to around 1500 BCE, Sanskrit is probably the second oldest language in the world still being used today.

English gets the bulk of its vocabulary from French and other Romance languages, it is true. But the most common words are all Germanic, and English phonology is Germanic. English is closely related to Dutch, and even more closely to Frisian. If you want to get a feel for how English sounds, listen to Dutch or Frisian.

Spanish is by far the most popular second language in the United States, with more than 41 million people — 12 times more than the other most common second languages — speaking Spanish at home. Hispanics are the largest minority group in the United States.

Korean includes many words of Chinese origin, and borrows words from English and other languages as well. Still, it's a stretch to say that Korean has the most words of any language in the world because one of its dictionaries has over a million headwords.

Chinese (Cantonese/Mandarin): Mandarin is the official language for China. Both Cantonese and Mandarin share similar writing systems, and it is insanely different from the English one. Every word has to be memorized separately because you cannot spell out words in these languages.

The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.

The grammar rules in Russian are very complex and have numerous exceptions. In addition, many learners struggle with the pronunciation – the stress in words is largely unpredictable and not marked in writing, while there are multiple homonyms.

What is the least hardest language? ›

Spanish may be the #1 easiest language to learn. Not only does Spanish share the same alphabet – with the sole addition of ñ – but it's also phonetic. That makes figuring out new vocabulary easy, since the spelling tells you how to pronounce it.

The Russian language is easier when you look at their writing style. On the basis of Sounds: There are more sounds in the Korean language as compared to the Russian language.

The English language is widely regarded as one of the most difficult to master. Because of its unpredictable spelling and challenging to learn grammar, it is challenging for both learners and native speakers.

The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.

The Chinese language has a unique structure and pronunciation system that is vastly different from English. Chinese is made up of tens of thousands of characters, each with its own meaning, and often multiple pronunciations. This makes the language extremely difficult to learn, especially for non-native speakers.

What are the Romance languages? The Romance languages are a group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

Mandarin is unanimously considered the most difficult language to master and is spoken by over a billion people in the world.

Of all the European languages a native English speaker can learn, Russian is among the most difficult. The Germanic and Romance languages have a lot of the same core because they both have roots in Latin. Russian is from a completely different language branch called the Slavonic branch, which includes Czech and Polish.

What is the closest foreign language to English? ›

Closest Major Language: Dutch

Like Frisian and English, Dutch is another West Germanic language that developed from Proto-Germanic. Because of this, Dutch possesses many words and phrases similar to English and has a similar grammatical structure.

Greek is ranked as the richest language in the world ...

Except for Frisian, Dutch is linguistically the closest language to English, with both languages being part of the West Germanic linguistic family. This means many Dutch words are cognates with English (meaning they share the same linguistic roots), giving them similar spelling and pronunciation.

Category IV includes the most challenging European languages for English speakers to pick up. Here you'll find Slavic and Baltic languages such as Polish, Croatian, and Latvian, as well as Greek, Turkish, and Icelandic. This category also includes Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian.

Many Russian speakers have difficulty pronouncing the English consonant sounds /w/, /v/, /r/ & 'th'. Russian has a quarter of the vowels that English does so many English vowels are challenging. Word stress is often flatter and more even than an English native speaker.

The Ukrainian language is easier to learn than Russian, as Russian has more complex grammar. Learning Ukrainian also makes it easier to learn other Eastern European languages, as it is closer to Czech, Slovak, and Polish. Whereas, if you learn Russian, you can understand fewer languages naturally.

The United States and India have the most total English speakers, with 306 million and 265 million, respectively. These are followed by Pakistan (104 million), the United Kingdom (68 million), and Nigeria (60 million). As of 2022, there were about 373 million native speakers of English.

The Inner Circle — The smallest circle, this section includes countries in which English is the native language of the majority of the population: mainly the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and much of Canada.

It is believed that there are around 230 million native speakers in the United States, making it the largest English-speaking country, while the United Kingdom has approximately 60 million native speakers.