The 5 most difficult languages ​​to master

The 5 most difficult languages ​​to master

43% of the world’s population is bilingual, but only 13% is trilingual. Research shows that speaking more than two languages ​​has many benefits, including career opportunities and dementia prevention.

Whichever language you choose, you will benefit from all of them equally. However, not all languages ​​are equally difficult to learn.

Maybe you are a polyglot looking for new challenges (nice job!). Or maybe you’re just curious about which languages ​​deserve an extra dose of respect.

1.Hindi

Hindi is one of the official languages ​​of India. There are around 422 million Hindi speakers in the world.

One of the main reasons Hindi is one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn is because of its script. The script used to write Hindi is called Devanagari. Each character represents a combination of consonants and vowels, unlike in English where each character refers to a letter.

English speakers generally have difficulties with this changeover. Also, written Hindi has no phonetic marks to help readers pronounce words.

2. Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is spoken in various parts of the world including Mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan.

Mandarin is a tonal language. Basically, this means that the tone of your voice affects the meaning of the word. In English you can say in almost any tone and it always means the same thing. Not so tangerine!

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone that students should master. But that is not all.

Mandarin is widely recognized as the most difficult language to learn due to the thousands of Chinese characters and numbers to memorize. It’s also a lot of words that sound the same but mean different things (like there and they).Plus, there are also so many idioms that have no direct translation to try to get a grip on.

3. Finnish

You may be surprised to see a European language on this list of most difficult languages. Though there are a few difficult Nordic languages, Finnish is the most difficult one of them all.

Though it does have similar vocabulary and grammar to Swedish and Norwegian, experts say it will take up to 1100 hours of learning to communicate in Finnish. Compare that to 575 hours for the other two Norse languages ​​mentioned.

4. Arabic

Did you know that Arabic is an official or recognized minority language in no fewer than 31 countries in the Middle East and Africa? If you are looking for a language to learn that will help you communicate around the world, then this is the one.

So what makes it so difficult? It’s not tonal. But it has its own script (not the A-Z alphabet that English speakers are used to).

The good news is that Arabic characters are somewhat similar to our Latin alphabet. But the Arabic script is read from right to left. This can make learning difficult for English speakers.

In addition, the Arabic language has many unique sounds that go well beyond the range of sounds we use in English words. Not to mention that there is also a wide variety of dialects that change depending on the region you travel to.

5. Russian

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, making it one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn.

English speakers recognize some letters but not all! Russian students will quickly learn that while some letters sound familiar, they sound very different in Russian. For example, the letter “B” in Russian makes the sound “V”.

Grammatically, Russian is a difficult language to learn. He has six cases. Each has its own goal and answers specific questions.

There are many ways to form sentences in Russian. Therefore, cases are useful for understanding who or what is the subject and object of a sentence.

For an English speaker, one of the most difficult things about Russian is a large group of bodies that stick together without vowels. This makes learning the pronunciation and spelling of words difficult.