Top Five Most Difficult Languages to Learn

Among a large number of languages spoken in the world, there is some that are considered as hardest to learn. The difficulty can be due to their grammatical rules, difficult vocabulary or non-phonetic writing. Listed below are the top five most difficult languages to learn.

1.  Arabic

Arabic is considered the most difficult language to learn. The biggest hurdle in Arabic learning is grammar. Only a few of the Arabic words have any correspondence with European languages. Arabic language has three levels of plurality i.e. singular, dual and plural. Similarly, most Arabic letters have four different forms conditional on their location in the word. Moreover, written Arabic uses just a few vowels, which can be extremely difficult for the learners.

2. Chinese

The official language of China is taking second spot on the list of top five most difficult languages to learn. The most difficult aspect of the Chinese language is that it is a tonal language, in which meaning changes with change in the tone of a word. Also, countless characters and an intricate writing system make learning Chinese a tough task.

3. Japanese

Japanese is also somewhat similar to the Chinese and it also uses a character system to symbolize different words. Particularly, it has almost 10,000-15,000 characters. The learner find it tough to learn all those characters since there is no clear way to use memorization techniques like mnemonics. Moreover, three diverse writing systems and two syllable systems make Japanese language hard enough to learn.

4. Polish

It is the official language of Poland and is written in the standard Polish alphabet which has great resemblance with the Latin script. Like other members of its family, Polish too, shares some Latin vocabulary and grammar. There are three tenses, two numbers (singular and plural), and three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). The feature which makes the Polish language difficult to learn is its use of seven noun cases to define the usage of noun in a sentence. Polish is also spoken in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Lithuania as a second language.

5. Finnish

Finnish, one of the certified languages of Finland, is derived from the Proto-Finnic language and belongs to the Uralic language family. Vowel harmony is the most distinguishing feature of this language, which divides the vowels into two contrasting classes in such way that vowels from opposite classes can’t be used in a single word. Another interesting feature of Finnish is consonant gradation, in which stop consonants (such as p, t, k) are changed before closed syllables (e.g., p is replaced by v, pp by p). These two features of Finnish are intricate enough to secure a place for it in the list of top five most difficult languages to learn.

 

Top Five Most Difficult Languages to Learn