The Hardest Languages for English Speakers to Learn

“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savor their songs.” -Nelson Mandela

A Czech proverb as regards language was once quoted to say that you live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once. While this adage might seem like a fantastic way to encourage someone to learn and speak a new language, the endeavor in doing so may be met with much difficulty. Without a doubt, learning a new language is not easy—considering that it took you a fraction of your early years to learn your mother tongue, and a lifetime to master it, taking up a second language would indeed come with a little difficulty. However, while most languages would claim to be the toughest one to learn, there is a handful few that would surpass most languages in terms of learning difficulty. In fact, learning these languages would really put not only your wits at a test but your resolve as well. But learning these languages could be rewarding as not only will you have a better understanding of a foreign country’s culture and a more worldly and in-depth perspective of the world, but you could potentially land a good paying job in professional translation services as well.

While all languages do come with their own set of difficulties, here are the languages that would push you to the limit. Here are the top languages most difficult but most rewarding to learn:

1.) Mandarin

For a language that is considered as the most spoken language in the world, it would be hard to believe just how difficult learning it could be. However, to a non-native speaker, learning and mastering Mandarin would require a lot of work and dedication. Mandarin is couched within the Chinese language group and what makes it incredibly difficult is its tonal feature which means that every sound in Mandarin’s phonetic transcription system pinyin has four distinct pronunciations. Chinese itself is already a language rife with homophones, idioms, and aphorism—couple that with a phonetic transcription and you would find that learning Mandarin is no walk in the park.

2.) Japanese

To non-speakers and non-writers of the Japanese language, it can be easily confused with Chinese and Korean which would all look like they have the same characters. However, what sets Japanese apart is that you would need to learn and master thousands of characters before you would be able to master and write in Japanese to any great extent. Apart from that, Japanese has three independent writing systems which are the katakana, kanji, and hiragana—which each have a different alphabet.

3.) Hungarian

What makes Hungarian a part of this list is the fact that this language has some of the strictest and most complex grammar rules than any other language. Word order does not dictate and possession, instead, the Hungarian language makes use of suffixes—a characteristic of most European languages. Furthermore, cultural elements within the language make it incredibly difficult to learn.

4.) Arabic

Arabic is a uniquely difficult language to learn as most letters are mainly written in four different forms which would depend on where they would be placed in a word. To top that, vowels are not included when writing which makes translating the language even harder than it already is. Apart from that, Arabic is a host of different dialects—how Arabic sounds in one area would substantially differ from how it is spoken in another area which contributes to its overall difficulty.

5.) Icelandic

Spoken by less than 400,000 people on the island, it would be no wonder that the Icelandic language would develop its own oddities. While certainly not the most difficult language in the world to learn, Icelandic can be extremely complicated. However, one good thing about the Icelandic language is that it has largely remained unchanged since Iceland was settled in the ninth and tenth centuries. The language has not adopted foreign words for new concepts and have instead coined new words to give new meaning to old words. This means the language remains constant and consistent. However, if you want to be fluent, you would need to be in Iceland and make use of the resources available there than learn it remotely.