And the alphabet's a breeze, assuming you can read Russian. The transition to Ukrainian began for some in 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and led forces into the Donbas region, which borders Russia. The Bulgarian writing system uses a Cyrillic alphabet, similar to the Russian alphabet but with some distinct differences. Russia is bombing eastern Ukraine, the population that allegedly [President Vladimir] Putin seeks to defend, he said. Polish. Lets take a look at them in more detail. If youre looking for ease of learning, finding a language with familiar or easy-to-master grammar rules can help you tone down the language difficulty level. Agreements | That's mainly due to their complex . Hardly. 1. It's frequently listed as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers. Where its most commonly spoken: Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, North Africa. Youll notice that many of these languages do not use the Latin alphabet. The tonal language also has four tones, so one word can be pronounced four different ways, while each pronunciation has a different meaning. Gender plays a big part as well. The Russian language is the official language of Russia and is ranked 3rd among the hardest languages to learn. It is easy to make errors in pronunciation and spelling when learning this language. What Is the Hardest Language to Learn for Non-English Speakers? Credit: Greek Reporter. Thats because Czech is a highly complex language. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language spoken mainly in Bulgaria. The hardest languages to learn are those that are very different from your native language in terms of vocabulary, grammar features, pronunciation, and spelling.For an English speaker, the hardest languages generally belong to a different language family (i.e., non-Germanic or non-Indo-European).However, there are also languages in the same family as English that are difficult for other . Grammar is the system that defines how words are formed and put together into sentences. The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you no clues unless you also speak Chinese. Theres no set timeline for how long it takes to learn a language, but language difficulty rankings serve as useful goals posts to guide your journey. All adverbs and adjectives must have the same gender. Plus, it doesnt even take that long to get used to the new alphabet, as its pretty straightforward! 4. Learn how to pronounce these everyday words that don't always sound the way they're spelled. Although both Bulgarian and Macedonian have been recognized Category IV languages in terms of difficulty for English speakers, they are relatively easy to learn compared to other Slavic languages. However, if youre up for a challenge, these are the 25 hardest languages to learn. Russias invasion was particularly traumatic for eastern Ukrainians, Arel said, because this terrible war of aggression is waged mostly in the east. Vietnamese is also difficult for Hindi speakers due to its sentence structure and tones, though its writing system is easier to learn than that of either Japanese or Mandarin because it uses a phonetic alphabet instead of characters. Terms & Conditions | As with learning Russian, becoming fluent will depend highly on the learner. Though German is in the same family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages. Ukrainian was enshrined as the only national language in the constitution in 1991, the year Ukraine became independent, but the law was not enforced nor did it change daily life. Or Thai, which contains an alphabet comprised of a staggering 44 consonants and 32 different vowels? 1. Because of its pictorial writing system, you aren't going to be able to learn to read phonetically. Polish is undoubtedly one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers due to its complex grammar and pronunciation. In order to become fully proficient in any Slavic language, you need to invest years of study. There are also various sounds made in the language that dont exist in many other languages. The three Slavic language groups are mutually unintelligible. Polish also has seven different grammatical cases that are affected by gender. When it comes to pronunciation, the real difficulty factor comes into play for tonal languages. Greek. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the 8th most-spoken language in the world. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else . Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Ferlain, who asked Al Jazeera to use her callsign, speaks Ukrainian as her first language. xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain;charset=UTF-8'); Grammar can be a tricky one, even in your native language. The grammar is also loaded with exceptions that require a ton of practice. } else { The verb conjugations can be intimidating, too, with many more variants and combinations to comprehend than other Slavic languages. Slavic languages make a distinction between three main grammatical genders (male, female, neuter), as well as the division of verbs into perfective and imperfective. But even though they know the language, the challenge lies in changing their inner machinations, the way they think, the Zahalskyys said. With Russian, they used the expression back then [in the Soviet Union] of [it being the] language that opens perspectives of life, or a language of perspectives., So the project of making Ukrainian the state language, which began with independence, was the project of making Ukrainian relevant.. You can work at your own pace, or generate a custom plan based on your goals to meet the timeline you have in mind. Another challenge you will come across if you start learning Arabic is a variety of dialects. Certainly, the most intriguing, yet difficult, aspect of learning Georgian is that it has its own writing system, and many of the letters used look incredibly similar. Hungarian. She is a polyglot and a digital nomad. Despite having what is considered the most logical system of writing in the world with an alphabet consisting of just 24 symbols, 10 of which are vowels and 14 consonants the language remains a challenge to learn. This list captures languages spoken by the majority of the worlds population. Plus, Polish often likes to break its own grammatical rules, which makes it slightly unpredictable while learning. Or what abou. With four cases and three genders assigned to their words, as well as many letters unfamiliar to English speakers, Icelandic is no walk in the park to learn. Thats mainly due to their complex grammatical structure and difficult pronunciation. We'll start by looking at the characteristics of Slavic languages, then we'll look at: Slavic languages are spoken by nearly 300 million people around the world and cover a vast geographical area. If you don't meet those two criteria, though, it is a very challenging language to master. To learn Arabic, you have to learn a new alphabet, and get used to reading from right to left. Syllabaries: These use symbols to represent syllables. if( 'moc.enilnoefiltseb' !== location.hostname.split('').reverse().join('') ) { To listen to more examples of Polish pronunciation, refer to the audio recordings provided in the following articles: When it comes to grammar, Polish is quite complex. The Korean language doesnt have an equivalent phoneme. Thats why knowing the difficulty level of a language in relation to your native tongue can be useful. Easiest languages for English speakers - closely-related languages like Romance language (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Galician, Catalan), and other languages with historical influence in English (Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Norwegian). It's beautiful and valuable when you travel to that side of the world. Standard Chinese - 'Mandarin' - is often cited as the most difficult language for English speakers to learn. Whats more, its important to notice that Slavic languages use not one but two main alphabets - Latin and Cyrillic. This is a question you can resolve with some degree of certainty when talking about a single language. For more trivia and language facts sent right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, not everyone who spoke Russian was ethnically Russian; for some Ukrainians and other minority populations such as the Crimean Tatars, Russian was also the first language. And switching to Ukrainian is one way to fight back. On the other hand, tvrtek means Thursday, and mastering the way each of those sounds works together is going to take you a while. Knowing language difficulty will also help you come up with a realistic timeline for learning. The Foreign Service Institute is a reliable industry expert here. It doesnt bother with the difference between I was running, I had been running, etc. While practicing with language learning apps is useful, chatting with Spanish native speakers is crucial if you want to improve your language skills. Russian. Now, at 63 and living in the capital, Kyiv, Zahalskyy and his wife Natasha are in the midst of the difficult but voluntary transition making the Ukrainian language their own. Russian is rated a two of three in difficulty by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which ranks languages based on how long it would take the average native English speaker to learn it, so it's not as difficult as some of the other languages on this list. Part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese can also be difficult to speak due to its foreign pronunciations to English speakers. Additionally, some languages such as Mandarin, Thai, and Punjabi are tonal languages, where tone and pronunciation work together to communicate meaning. Easier, too, to keep your eye on the prizeyour personal language goalsat all times. . Like a pack of wolves or a tank of gas, books in Mandarin requires the word bn to indicate a unit of five books. As an example of cognates, here are the words for a smile in different Romance languages: Cognates can make a language feel familiar. It is also the most geographically widespread language. Data Privacy and Security. The letter b sounds like v, and the letter h sounds like n.. Includes lists of 100 common names. Here's a look at the top 10 hardest languages to learn: Learning a new language is a rewarding experience, but some languages are harder to master than others. For instance, Arabic has complex grammar and a different alphabet . Knowing how to read it doesn't even particularly help learn how to write it. Conversely, languages that are completely unrelated to your language will be more challenging and take longer to master. One example is the Japanese writing system hiragana. Mandarin, for example, has a logosyllabic writing system in which characters match distinct syllables in each word. } Languages that don't use a Latin script, though, tend to give Mandarin speakers the most trouble. In terms of grammar, Russian is more complex than English. Czech and Polish are often considered the most difficult Slavic languages to learn for English speakers. If youre up for a challenge, these are the 25 hardest languages to learn. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb. In this post, well take a look at the easiest and hardest languages to learn, the factors that determine language difficulty, and a complete ranking of the worlds most widely spoken languagesincluding how long it takes to learn each language. Moscow says the Russian-speaking population there was being persecuted by Ukraine, a claim denied by Kyiv as well as many Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the Donbas. However, most languages only use a few dozen of these sounds. Forget carpe diem. Serious about learning Hungarian? Here are the features that the Slavic languages have in common: The general and common grammatical features of all Slavic languages are primarily inflectional morphology with multiple morphemes. Russian is the most widely spoken Slavic language, with 155 million native Russian speakers. Its synthetic nature gives rise to a complex system of declension and conjugation. The language features five tones, some of which are not found in the English language. In Polish, words are loaded with consonants which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce, for example, szczcie means "happiness" and bezwzgldny means "ruthless.". Learning Russian is quite an experience because of the intricate case and gender system, different grammatical rules and novel writing system. It also has a different word order; In Hindi, like Japanese, the word order of basic sentences is subject-object-verb, but in Mandarin its subject-verb-object. The verb carries the most weight in Turkish. For example uenik, translates to male student. Some individual letters prove tricky as well. See for instance this, Whether you already speak or are familiar with any other Slavic language, Availability of learning resources online. Despite the fact that Greek roots are found throughout the English language, Greek is among the hardest languages for English speakers to learn, according to . Here's a look at the top 10 hardest languages to learn: How to Order Food in French (with Example 102 Essential Spanish Phrases for Traveling. The default vowel sound of those letters is changed by using a secondary symbol. The pronunciation is what will get you. If you think picking up a little French or Spanish in your spare time is difficult, then you should know the kind of work you're getting into learning some other languages from around the world. The Greek language is very difficult for English speakers to learn, but the effort required to learn the language is worth it. Thats German for ice skating. German is often preceded by its hard-to-master accent and enthusiastically long vocabulary. It has complex grammar rules, mainly due to numerous noun declensions. There are plenty of resources that can tell you the hardest languages to learn if you speak English. Estimated to be spoken by over 10 million people, Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic. Even then, it's very likely that you will make mistakes in pronunciation and word order. Furthermore, it requires learning the Greek alphabet, which is not a requirement for the majority of European languages. For most people, language learning is deeply fulfilling, fun, and a bit challenging. Unlike most European languages, which belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian is a Uralic language. The pronunciation is also pretty challenging for native English speakers. Russian. Also, some of its letters are tricky to pronounce, and Korean has its own version of honorific speech that requires specific forms of words depending on social context. Russian is one of the most famous European languages with over 150 million speakers across the world. The main phonetic similarity between all Slavic languages is the presence of phonemic palatalization, known as softening. Unusual grammar, difficult pronunciation, and six different tones make Vietnamese a challenge for English speakers. In English, its acceptable to say that you bought five books. So, if you learn a certain dialect, there's a chance you might not be able to understand the locals from another region. If your goals align more with a Level 1 or 2 proficiency, you may be able to learn a language even faster. And its hard for them, but they understand the significance of their choice., Al Jazeera Centre for Public Liberties & Human Rights. An Austronesian language, Tagalog features a complicated grammar and sentence structure that make it hard to learn. According to the first census conducted in Ukraine in 2001, about 14.3 million Ukrainian people, or 29 percent of the population, spoke Russian as a first language. Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. It consists of some extinct languages, including Thracian, Illyrian and Dacian, while also featuring some grammar rules and vocabulary from Greek and Latin. These endings are used to express the same things propositions do in English. Top 20 Most Difficult Languages to Learn. It takes approximately 36 weeks (900 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. Words can also be very long, and deciphering how to pronounce them can defy intuition. Arabic features 28 script letters, is written from right to left and excludes most vowels in words. chrzszcz or Everyone kept speaking Russian, everyone kept watching Russian television, except probably for the Western regions of Ukraine, Zahalskyy told Al Jazeera. Hungarian is an agglutinative language. Born in 1960 in what was then the Soviet Union, Zahalskyy hails from the largely Russian-speaking Ukrainian city of Kherson. In 2019, Kyiv adopted a law to guarantee Ukrainian as a state language, which required Ukrainian to be used in most aspects of public life. Karolina Assi is an English and Polish teacher on iTalki.com. Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. . Their criteria is largely tied to the average length of time it takes a student to learn a language, which well dive into in the next section. And a lot of the letters look surprisingly similar. Strengthening your reading and writing skills in that language, then, takes far less time. Whats the hardest language to learn if English is not your first language? Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! A 2010 study that looked at immigrants to the Netherlands who were learning Dutch found that people who spoke languages with a lot of Dutch cognates such as Swedish, German, and Danish did better on a Dutch language exam compared to people who spoke languages with few Dutch cognates, such as French and Greek. For more on the Czech language, see this comparison of Czech with Russian and German. New: Russian Names - Learn the history of Russian names. According to Arel, any identification with Russian culture, including the Russian language, is untenable right now. Spanish speakers do have one small consolation when learning Arabic: the languages share a surprising amount of vocabulary. The ability to speak multiple languages puts you steps ahead of singular speakers. This list of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn comes from data gathered by the US State Department. Descending from the ancient South Asian language of Sanskrit, Hindi is a phonetic language, but many sounds are foreign to English speakers. Georgian has its own writing system that no other language uses. But once you do, you can pronounce almost all Russian words quite accurately. The language is packed with mouthfuls of consonants, making individual words total tongue twisters. All Rights Reserved. So many of the words sound very similar to each other. When it comes to everyday communication, Russian remains even amid war one of Ukraines two main languages. Most experts believe that to become truly fluent in Russian that is thinking and speaking in Russian requires 7-10 years of study. Part of what makes it one of the easiest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers is its simple vocabulary, which makes it pretty simple to speak and comprehend. These complex grammatical structures that dont exist in the English language, combined with a challenging pronunciation, make Czech one of the hardest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers. It is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won't have such a hard time grasping it. Also, Arabic has several sounds that must be pronounced back in the throat, sounds that dont occur in spoken Mandarin. This makes them especially hard to learn for English speakers. The trickiest part of Mongolian is the pronunciation. I would even say, it's the most difficult language I have ever faced, maybe if you disregard Asian non-alphabetic writing systems. Thus, Russian . For example: One of the most intriguing aspects is that emphasis can completely change the meaning of certain words. From Russia to Poland, you can find people speaking Slavic languages. Its going to be a generational change, but its going to happen eventually.. Though people familiar with Arabic may find Mandarins grammar rules refreshingly simple, learning tones can be a big stumbling block, and Mandarin characters, called hnz, are completely different from the Arabic abjad. Tarasuik disagrees, but says Russia has unintentionally reversed decades of Russification. Have you ever wondered how hard MANDARIN is to learn? First of all, there are many resources available online to learn Russian, and its also taught in many languages schools. To begin with, the Slavic languages derive from the Proto-Slavic language - their immediate parent language. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. Data Privacy and Security, The Complete List of Language Difficulty Rankings, Get the complete list of languages ranked by difficulty, Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish: The Must-Know Differences. It isn't the grammar that will bog you down when you're trying to learn Thai, it's the writing and the pronunciation, which has five different tones and long and short vowel sounds. The time estimates here reflect how long it would take the average person to reach a Level 3 proficiency level, which is pretty fluent by most standards. The takeaway here is that the farther your native language is from the language youre learning, the more challenging you may find your new language. Having originated in the Philippine islands, Tagalog is the first language of most Filipinos. They make decisions faster. - instead, Russians affix endings and use inflection to indicate the same kinds of tenses and action. Compared to the Finno-Ugric languages on the list (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), the seven cases you have to contend with in Polish don't seem too intimidating. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. Estonian is packed with a whopping 14 noun cases. Bestlifeonline.com is part of the Dotdash Meredith Publishing Family. However, theres no way of accurately guessing the gender of the noun. Language difficulty rankings exist so you can set the fluency goal posts at a realistic distance. English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. New: Lesson 17 - The 100 Most Used Words In Russian - The 100 most used words in Russian with a huge number of examples. Even more intimidating is that each of these cases has plural forms to consider! Often, one word in Hungarian equals a whole sentence. With over 70 years of experience teaching languages to US government employees, theyve compiled a comprehensive and widely accepted list of language rankings. Mandarin Chinese. For example, if youre a Brazilian who speaks Portuguese, Russian would probably be a tricky language for you to learn. For instance, lina means "linen" in Estonian, but linna means city., Where its most commonly spoken: Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece. It's helpful if you speak another Slavic language, but otherwise, it's going to be a challenge. The language is in the Finno-Urgic language family, so it doesn't have any Latin or German influence to help you guess what something means. This is the result of it being an agglutinative language, in which prefixes and suffixes are attached to words to determine meaning and direction. It takes approximately 88 weeks (2200 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. For English-speaking students, the hardest foreign languages to learn include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

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