Languages are a huge part of our daily lives. Learning and communicating in another language opens up a world of opportunity. However, learning is not always easy and we often have to work at it for years before we become fluent. But, there are some languages that are much harder to learn than others. See also, learn English.
This article will look at the hardest languages to learn for speakers of other languages. It will discuss the reasons why some languages are difficult to learn and what makes them so challenging.
In recent years, AI has proved its versatility. Now, it is the time for the other side of the coin. In this article, we have compiled a list of hardest languages to learn for native speakers. We have also added a few general tips to help you get started with these languages quickly and efficiently.
There are many ways to learn a new language. Some people learn to speak fluently and then move on to learning other languages. Others may choose to stay in one country and try to learn the local language. And some people may choose a combination of the two. But whatever your approach, it’s likely that you need to study each day in order to pick up what you want out of a new language. See, speaking English.
The Hardest Languages To Learn For English Speakers
1. Mandarin Chinese
This language is spoken by over 1 billion people and it would take you tens of thousands of hours to learn casually. That’s a lot longer than it takes most other languages like French, Spanish or Italian (most statistics put the latter at around 1000 hours).
2. Arabic
This language is spoken by some 250 million people and it would take you over 5000 hours to learn casually. This means that there’s an even better chance of moving on to another language after studying Arabic than there is learning Mandarin Chinese!
3. Polish
Poznań is one of the smallest cities in Poland and it also throws up some difficult learning challenges. It would be impossible to learn how to communicate with locals without knowing this language well, so it might save you time if you could make yourself fluent beforehand. Problem is that Polish lacks an official alphabet or standard word phonetics for foreign words making pronunciation a big issue (there are various nuances of course).
4. Russian
An estimated 160 million people speak Russian and it would take you at least 10,000 hours to get fluent in this language. Of course, Russian is very different sounding to English, but you’ll have no trouble understanding the accent. And once you become fluent in this language it could save you time when learning your next programming languages such as C++ or Java (the old-school code repositories like SourceForge before they were bought out didn’t even list translations into other languages!).
5. Turkish
At last, this brings us to Turkey which doesn’t even have a Monopoly board game manufactured in English, but there are 240 million people who can communicate with you. And if you don’t want to learn Turkish it may well be possible that someone abroad knows the language and will help make yourself fluent enough for beginning learning more languages using Rosetta Stone or similar software!
Afrikaans Italian Japanese Polish Russian Spanish Urdu Vietnamese
And of course: Traditional Chinese (Mandarin)
6. Danish
Danish is spoken by 3.9 million people which means it would take you about 5000 hours to become fluent in Danish, or roughly 1 day for a non-native speaker of English.
Obviously, anyone who has read the comment history on this blog will likely guess that learning Danish could be beneficial if you’re already sick of all these “basic” languages… Of course, I was always interested in finding out what difficult languages there were so we can now get down to the nitty-gritty:
Currently, there are 160,000 places on earth where you can hear Danish. So at best you could travel and learn it for 3 years non-stop. Of course, a native speaker would be able to read any written language but wouldn’t necessarily speak them fluently – sometimes they’ll even attempt the impossible by making some unusual sentence structures easier so that someone who is not exactly fluent will be understood better.
Of course, I know it may sound ridiculous to attempt learning any language which is only spoken by 2.7% of the world’s population, but if you really want or need a real challenge perhaps Danish will be right up your alley! Of course 10-20 hours a day could just as easily be spent on anything else (just ask my wife) and there are plenty of other languages that require even more time such as Italian where less than 1% of the world’s population can speak.
Of course, I give Danish less than a 1% chance in achieving fluency, so if you really want to do it then try it! But don’t be upset that your language learning efforts are going to waste if you realize after 4-5 years and 6555 hours of study that now everyday for 2-3 minutes is all about collecting posts. Studying Scandinavian Languages (Danish) would be the path of least resistance (and thoughtlessness).
As a final note, here are some other languages that are even harder to get along with: Dutch, Indonesian, Japanese and Hungarian. There’s even one more language that I heard only 400 people can speak – so Dutch, Indonesian, Japanese and Hungarian rated worse than this last one. You May Like listening to English is a skill.