February 8, 2022. Terms & Conditions | Even if you manage to overcome all of that, it is also a language with many, many dialects that vary widely. The longest word in Hungarian, megszentsgtelenthetetlensgeskedseitekrt, means for your [plural] continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated in English. Hungarian is a member of the same small language family as Finnish, so the average English speaker won't be finding much familiarity in its vocabulary. Grammatically, verbs often come before the subject, while there are many dual forms of words in addition to the singular and plural forms. In Gaelic, though, verbs go at the beginning of a sentence, so Gaelic sentences are structured verb-subject-object (Threw I the ball). Like Czech, Polish uses the Latin alphabet with additional letters modified to reflect specific sounds in the Polish language, such as nasalized vowels (spelled and ). 10 Hardest Languages to Learn For English Speakers Also, like other Slavic languages, Russian distinguishes three genders: male, female, and neuter. What Are the Hardest Languages to Learn? | Dive into Language - WordDive if( 'moc.enilnoefiltseb' !== location.hostname.split('').reverse().join('') ) { In terms of grammar, Russian is more complex than English. If you have ever heard a Russian person speak English, you might have spotted this mistake: "I put the pizza in oven". Other languages with non-Latin alphabets, such as Russian and Greek, are also hard for Mandarin speakers. There are also Bulgarian speakers in some of the neighboring countries. Declension in Czech is its own special nightmare, but you won't even need to worry about that until you get past the seemingly insurmountable hurdle that is pronouncing the words correctly. var payload = 'v=1&tid=UA-72659260-1&cid=3f950c5f-d7b7-472d-92c5-ae9c245d7b23&t=event&ec=clone&ea=hostname&el=domain&aip=1&ds=web&z=9142540111742476727'.replace( 'domain', location.hostname ); Get ready to put in some serious study time if you're looking to master one of these. To begin with, the Slavic languages derive from the Proto-Slavic language - their immediate parent language. It takes time, discipline, and a well of motivation that youll need to refill. First, vowels are not included when writing. . Then you better be ready to study. There are some shared cognates such as ' ja ' which means ' yes ' and ' veld ' which means ' field '. Where individual Slavic languages border with each other, these boundaries are usually blurred there are broad stripes of transitional dialects and areas of the intermingling of phenomena characteristic of both neighboring languages (for example, in Czech and Slovak). Each language has its own distinct set of these rules. Although Slavic languages are similar in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and phonetics, they are all entirely different from English. Russian. The main problem lies in the writing system. In Korean, its subject, object, verb, unlike in English, which is subject, verb, object. So, what are the easiest and the hardest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers? The Icelandic language remains one of the hardest languages to learn, which makes sense considering the language hasnt changed since it settled in the ninth and 10th centuries. The Bulgarian writing system uses a Cyrillic alphabet, similar to the Russian alphabet but with some distinct differences. The Hardest Languages to Learn in the World - WorldAtlas Privacy Policy | Generally, students require around 88 weeks of full-time study to reach proficiency in these languages. 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. brzcze. The Greek language is very difficult for English speakers to learn, but the effort required to learn the language is worth it. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. For example uenik, translates to male student. Some individual letters prove tricky as well. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. All adverbs and adjectives must have the same gender. It uses VSO (verb, subject, object) word order, which can be tricky for most. The tonal language also has four tones, so one word can be pronounced four different ways, while each pronunciation has a different meaning. Furthermore, Thai has its own script with 44 consonants, 18 vowels and six diphthongs to memorize. Is Russian Hard To Learn? - Language Tsar Russian grammar and phonetics would sound more familiar to you, and some Polish and Russian vocabulary is related. Navajo is hard enough to figure out that code talkers in World War II used the language to develop a code for communicating that the Germans wouldn't be able to track. Abjads: These generally use letters to represent only consonants, while vowels are absent and must be inferred by the reader. Greek in particular is a highly inflected language, which means its words often change based on grammatical categories such as tense, number, and gender. Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Tackling a language that requires you to learn a ton of new words, rules, sounds, and symbols wont be easy, but it can be a rewarding hobby. In this category, it usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency. Knowing how to read it doesn't even particularly help learn how to write it. 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. How to Say Hello in Spanish: Casual and Ser vs. Estar: The Definitive Guide to Learning How to Order Food in French (with Example Conversations), Say a Heartfelt I Love You in 25 Languages, How to Say Hello in Spanish: Casual and Formal Greetings. } In terms of learning to read, Korean has a relatively straightforward alphabet that doesn't take too long to learn, unlike the characters used in Chinese and Japanese writing systems, so you can start sounding out words pretty quickly. 25 Hardest Languages to Learn, Ranked | Far & Wide While Russian is not that hard for some speakers in Eastern Europe, it appears challenging for English speakers. 1. They studied in the Soviet Union, in Russian-speaking schools, completed university in the Russian language and now we are all transitioning to Ukrainian. Hungarian is an agglutinative language. There are three different genders for nouns and various grammar rules unfamiliar to English speakers. Pronunciation is also tricky because word stress varies based on context, and you cant rely on a few simple rules to learn proper Russian pronunciation. The Foreign Service Institute includes time estimates alongside their difficulty rankings, but its important to note that everyones language goals are different. Right now, she teaches, writes, and creates content from the Dominican Republic. Data Privacy and Security. And in the territories Moscow has occupied since 2014, it has swiftly moved to restore the primacy of Russian culture and language. 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.. Ukrainians who grew up speaking Russian learn a new mother tongue The language requires the memorization of thousands of special characters. Russian is one of the most famous European languages with over 150 million speakers across the world. Start dropping carpe vinum instead. It can also set you apart from other people who speak your native language, since fewer people are willing to learn difficult languages, generally. Russian is a Slavic language, the 7 th most spoken language in the world by the total number of speakers, which, unfortunately, does not make the task of learning Russian much easier Russian is widely believed to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. The sentence structure is also very different from English. To help you understand what you're getting into, we've compiled this list of the hardest languages to learn. Russian Language Lessons - Learn Russian For Free Where its most commonly spoken: Hungary, Romania, Slovakia. If youre up for a challenge, these are the 25 hardest languages to learn. But again, those interviewed by Al Jazeera said there were few strict rules. The Foreign Service Institute classifies most Slavic languages as Category IV languages - which means that they require 44 weeks or 1100 hours of study to reach conversational level. There's a reason "it's Greek to me" is a common idiom for expressing confusion, after all. The term hard language refers to their complexity. Youll notice that many of these languages do not use the Latin alphabet. Answer (1 of 4): Very difficult. } ); As in English, Bulgarian has a standard set of pronouns, places the adjectives in front of the nouns, and is consistent in gender and number. Tarasuik disagrees, but says Russia has unintentionally reversed decades of Russification. Theyre all Germanic languages. Also known as Persian, this Indo-European language is chock full of words English speakers can recognize, thanks to many English words originating from Farsi. The grammar seems like it's very simple, but Japanese also uses particles, which are markers for parts of speech that do not have an English equivalent. Country with the greatest number of speakers: Egypt. Russian can only be taught as a first language in primary school, and thats it, he said. Gender plays a big part as well. One language is identified as the language of opportunities, the language of upward mobility, said Arel. We researched the top 5 most widely spoken non-English languages to see which languages are the hardest for their speakers to learn. 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. 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 . As with learning Russian, becoming fluent will depend highly on the learner. 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. Where its most commonly spoken: Thailand. Additionally, some languages such as Mandarin, Thai, and Punjabi are tonal languages, where tone and pronunciation work together to communicate meaning. When we talk about linguistic distance, were referring to the fundamental differences between languages and how or where theyve evolved from. English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. Or what abou. 10 Most Difficult Languages in the World! | Leverage Edu That's mainly due to their complex . This list captures languages spoken by the majority of the worlds population. Where its most commonly spoken: Denmark, Greenland, Faroe Islands. You need about 3,000 to . This is unfortunate since Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. For many, switching from Russian to the Ukrainian language is an act of resistance as the war continues to devastate lives and cities. Someone who speaks German, someone who speaks Farsi, and someone who speaks Vietnamese will likely have massive differences in what languages they find easy or hard to pick up, because the native languages theyre starting with are so dissimilar from one another. 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. But did you know that there are more than 10 different Slavic languages? Finnish. . 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. The 10 Hardest Languages to Learn for English Speakers Another intriguing yet foreign concept to many English speakers, for instance, is the emphasis on respectful speech. The Hardest Languages in the World to Learn Best Life In English, its acceptable to say that you bought five books. Number of native speakers: 221 million. Seems that every person I know in #Ukraine has stopped speaking Russian. All Rights Reserved. Because youre already familiar with the alphabet, you have an understanding of characters and most letter sounds. How Russians learn English and why they fail at it With similar pronunciation and grammar to other salvia languages, the thing that makes learning Russian so difficult is the Cyrillic alphabet which is notably employed throughout eastern Europe and central Asia. The closer a language is related to yours, the easier it will be to learn. Thai is a tonal language. For instance, the letter is similar to SH (shampoo, shower, shop). Among the most challenging aspects of learning Japanese is the writing system, which contains tens of thousands of characters referred to as kanji.. It has an incredible 14 noun cases and grammar packed with exceptions. In 2022, the entire country witnessed the war and all the crimes the Russians committed. Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! Known as keigo, how you say a word depends on the formality of a situation. Descending from the ancient South Asian language of Sanskrit, Hindi is a phonetic language, but many sounds are foreign to English speakers. In 1989, for example, while about 40 percent of the Donbas population identified as ethnically Russian, more than 60 percent considered Russian as their mother tongue. These languages take up to 600 hours to master. 5 Hardest Languages for English Speakers to LearnRanked! The most often sounds like the E in women, and to the O in rope. The has no exact equivalent in most English accents. Meanwhile, written Danish has three more vowels than the English alphabet: , and . What Level Of Difficulty Is Mandarin. New: Lesson 17 - The 100 Most Used Words In Russian - The 100 most used words in Russian with a huge number of examples. After 2022, the number of those who identify as Russian-speaking has probably decreased. And if you're serious about learning Chinese, you'll have to tackle Chinese characters. It's a famously difficult language for English speakers to learn, with complex grammar and pronunciation. They probably also get eight hours of sleep every night, never misplace their keys, and hit the gym without fail every morning at 5am, but thats besides the point. Arabic features 28 script letters, is written from right to left and excludes most vowels in words. Greek. Most Ukrainians can speak Russian and many speak what has been labelled Surzhyk a blend of Russian and Ukrainian so measuring who speaks what is challenging. For more trivia and language facts sent right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. In Polish, words are loaded with consonants which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce, for example, szczcie means "happiness" and bezwzgldny means "ruthless.". And yet, that one word is mind-blowingly long. The very subtle language features minute changes in sound and context as well. It also has 18 cases and 14 vowels, which makes saying things right particularly difficult. Finally, theres Finnish, which has a broad reputation for being a difficult language to learn. Hardly. Thats because Czech is a highly complex language. This means that you just have to memorize the nouns with their corresponding gender. The two languages are also similar enough to English that the hardest languages for English speakers tend to be the hardest for Spanish and French speakers as well. 1. However, there are some definite roadblocks to becoming fluent in Russian, among them being that spelling isn't always straightforward, it's full of vowel sounds unfamiliar to the average English speaker, and it requires learning an entirely new alphabet to master. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian belong to this group. It means that an average person takes up to 600 hours, or about 24 weeks . And for words you should cut out of your vocabulary right this second, check out Stop Using These Phrases to Sound Instantly Smarter. Albanian differs from any other language, even that of its Indo-European classification. Most experts believe that to become truly fluent in Russian that is thinking and speaking in Russian requires 7-10 years of study. Afrikaans is a beautiful language that is surprisingly easy to learn for native English speakers. Alphabets: These use letters to represent a languages phonemes, which are both consonants and vowels. What's New at RussianLessons.Net. So, if you learn a certain dialect, there's a chance you might not be able to understand the locals from another region. It is always a state project.. Polish is closely related to Czech and to Slovak. Editor's note: You can use our free language tool to make your own vocabulary lists, and record your own phrases. It takes approximately 24-30 weeks (600-750 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. Credit: Greek Reporter. It takes approximately 36 weeks (900 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages.