This is a question you can resolve with some degree of certainty when talking about a single language. All of our peers in this apartment complex, they are all above 60. In contrast to the similarities between the Romance languages listed above, German and Mandarintwo languages of different families with entirely unique writing systemscouldnt be more linguistically distant. 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. Plus, Polish often likes to break its own grammatical rules, which makes it slightly unpredictable while learning. Slavic languages make a distinction between three main grammatical genders (male, female, neuter), as well as the division of verbs into perfective and imperfective. Chinese speakers around the world: 1.2 billion native speakers . Though German is in the same family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages. For English-speaking students, the hardest foreign languages to learn include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. Most major writing systems generally fit into one of these categories: The easiest writing systems you can learn are ones of the same type and that use the same letters or characters as your native language, while the hardest writing systems to learn are different types altogether. I knew Ukrainian well but the hardest thing was to stop thinking in Russian. It's a famously difficult language for English speakers to learn, with complex grammar and pronunciation. This makes Russian actually far easier to learn than many have been led to believe! For now, it is not clear exactly how many Russian-speaking Ukrainians have switched but Dominique Arel, an associate professor of political science and chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa, said the trend greatly accelerated after the war started. You know that friend you have that speaks three languages fluentlyeffortlessly even? And for words you should cut out of your vocabulary right this second, check out Stop Using These Phrases to Sound Instantly Smarter. In 2022, the entire country witnessed the war and all the crimes the Russians committed. Gender plays a big part as well. There are also various sounds made in the language that dont exist in many other languages. Most experts believe that to become truly fluent in Russian that is thinking and speaking in Russian requires 7-10 years of study. Todd Bridges and Gary Coleman played brothers. For English terms you need to finally perfect, here are 23 Words You Need to Stop Mispronouncing. And because its placed at the very end of the sentence, you cant understand the meaning of whats being said until the sentence is finished. To understand it, you must recognize the pitch of a tone in relation to the context of the world and overall sentence. Across Ukraine, reports suggest that many of the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainians who identified as Russian speakers in March 2022 are actively choosing to distance themselves from the language of their aggressor. It has 7 declension cases for nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. 1. Often, one word in Hungarian equals a whole sentence. Mandarin, for example, has a logosyllabic writing system in which characters match distinct syllables in each word. Furthermore, learning a new language enhances your worldview, improves nonverbal communication, helps you multitask and aids in your brain adapting and responding to new circumstances. All adverbs and adjectives must have the same gender. Albanian nouns have both a case and a number, requiring the learner to memorize each noun. The tonal language also has four tones, so one word can be pronounced four different ways, while each pronunciation has a different meaning. The Greek language is very difficult for English speakers to learn, but the effort required to learn the language is worth it. However, its universally acknowledged that Slavic languages dont belong to the easiest languages to learn, especially for English speakers. It has complex grammar rules, mainly due to numerous noun declensions. Boasting a whopping 300 million speakers, Russian is one of the more popular languages globally. Maybe its PTSD, but we react negatively to the media in Russian, she said. The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you no clues unless you also speak Chinese. The verb carries the most weight in Turkish. Some languages, such as Arabic and Russian, are notoriously difficult to learn for English speakers. It made people rethink what language they wanted to speak and I started hearing Ukrainian literally everywhere, said Tarasiuk, a front-end designer who had to put her career on hold because of the persistent blackouts caused by Russian attacks. Knowing language difficulty will also help you come up with a realistic timeline for learning. Phonetically English is quite remote from Russian, and features insane amount of vowels, along with fricatives and aspirated consona. The term "Slavic" is a catch-all adjective for all languages in the group, and it is typically used to describe anything common to all or most Slavic languages. Abugidas: These generally use letters to represent consonant-vowel combinations. Generally speaking, difference equals difficulty when it comes to learning a new language. This means that, rather than containing individual prepositions, prefixes and suffixes are added onto words. Thai is a tonal language. Hungarian is an agglutinative language. Abjads: These generally use letters to represent only consonants, while vowels are absent and must be inferred by the reader. One example is Thai. navigator.sendBeacon('https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', payload); 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. If you were to go to Lviv right now [considered the heart of the Ukrainian-speaking part of the country] and walk into a caf there and start speaking in Russian, the waiter or waitress will change to speaking with you in Russian, Zahalskyy said. Country with the greatest number of speakers: Egypt. Ferlain, who asked Al Jazeera to use her callsign, speaks Ukrainian as her first language. Mandarin, by contrast, has little to no inflection. How to Order Food in French (with Example 102 Essential Spanish Phrases for Traveling. And for some useful wisdom from a "dead" language, here are 40 Latin Phrases So Genius You'll Sound Like a Master Orator. Polish is undoubtedly one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers due to its complex grammar and pronunciation. In other words, a native speaker of an East Slavic language is unlikely to understand a West Slavic language. Polish. So, how long does it take to master it? Turkish is filled with extremely long verbs. You can see this illustrated with some simple sentences centered around the Finnish word for house, talo.. Moscow says the Russian-speaking population there was being persecuted by Ukraine, a claim denied by Kyiv as well as many Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the Donbas. The very subtle language features minute changes in sound and context as well. 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. It has six tonal variations that are determined by diacritics. It's frequently listed as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers. Where its most commonly spoken: North Korea, South Korea. 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). Russian also has many words where consonants are grouped together, which makes spelling and pronunciation difficult. It might not be a romance language, but there are still a lot of pretty words to love. A major reason why is that Finnish has so many different noun cases and verb conjugations that can shape words depending on their context. Haitian Creole. Hardly. Estonian is packed with a whopping 14 noun cases. The closer a language is related to yours, the easier it will be to learn. If you emphasize the second ("su-KA"), then you have "vinegar." This makes them especially hard to learn for English speakers. We'll start by looking at the characteristics of Slavic languages, then we'll look at: Slavic languages are spoken by nearly 300 million people around the world and cover a vast geographical area. Hnz is hard enough that it's typical for Mandarin learners to learn a different writing system first, called pinyin. This list of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn comes from data gathered by the US State Department. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb. Where its most commonly spoken: China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. Thats German for ice skating. German is often preceded by its hard-to-master accent and enthusiastically long vocabulary. Moreover, each language has its own letters that have developed to denote particular phonetic phenomena. A lot of the sounds in the language are difficult for English speakers to master, and the grammar is packed with irregular verbs. Right now, she teaches, writes, and creates content from the Dominican Republic. 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. These complex grammatical structures that dont exist in the English language, combined with a challenging pronunciation, make Czech one of the hardest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers. The language is also known for having very confusing conjugations. Most Slavic languages implement an extensive system of cases in which the endings of nouns (declination), adjectives, and prepositions change depending on the case. She is a polyglot and a digital nomad. Russian speakers could also request Russian versions of other documents, such as marriage certificates. Trying to learn a language that uses different grammar rules could mean retraining your brain to think of words and sentences in brand new ways. She said many soldiers she works with who spoke Russian before the invasion are continuing to do so. Official forms such as those in doctors offices, particularly in Russian-speaking areas, largely came in both Russian and Ukrainian. xhr.send(payload); As with learning Russian, becoming fluent will depend highly on the learner. Data Privacy and Security, The Complete List of Language Difficulty Rankings, Get the complete list of languages ranked by difficulty, Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish: The Must-Know Differences. Category 3: Hebrew, Hindi, Persian Farsi, Russian . Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. But did you know that there are more than 10 different Slavic languages? They also have a relatively easy noun system. For English speakers, an additional concern is the three gendered nouns. Furthermore, it requires learning the Greek alphabet, which is not a requirement for the majority of European languages. Take a look at the word suka. If you emphasize the first syllable ("SU-ka"), then youre saying "vomit." If you're looking for official statistics, the Defense Language Institute (where they teach members of the CIA foreign languages) has organized languages into four categories, the 1st Category being the easiest, and the 4th Category being the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. Knowing how high a barrier youre up against will help you not get discouraged when you run into obstacles, as well as savor the progress you make. Where its most commonly spoken: Bulgaria. Between Japanese and Mandarin, Mandarin presents more of a challenge because its a tonal language, which means the pronunciation and tonal inflection of a word can change its meaning. Farsi also reads from right to left. Part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese can also be difficult to speak due to its foreign pronunciations to English speakers. 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. On the one hand, each letter only has one pronunciation ever. 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. Prepositions behave similarly to English, and questions have many question words that are simple enough to remember. For instance, in Italian, sentences are structured subject-verb-object (such as I threw the ball). Youll need to learn an entirely new alphabet, and memorize their corresponding letter sounds. Arabic . Another challenge you will come across if you start learning Arabic is a variety of dialects. In Gaelic, though, verbs go at the beginning of a sentence, so Gaelic sentences are structured verb-subject-object (Threw I the ball). The tones in Mandarin make it a challenge for English speakers, but Cantonese has twice as many tones as Mandarineight in total. Also, Arabic has several sounds that must be pronounced back in the throat, sounds that dont occur in spoken Mandarin. Japanese is often considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers due to its complex writing system, which includes three scripts: hiragana, katakana, and . Beginning language learners may want to start with an easier language, such as Spanish, German or Italian. With over 7,000 languages spoken across the globe, its difficult to rank them all. Editor's note: You can use our free language tool to make your own vocabulary lists, and record your own phrases. In terms of grammar, a lexical and grammatical similarity exists between Bulgarian and Macedonian. There are plenty of resources that can tell you the hardest languages to learn if you speak English. But being able to speak is a completely different can of worms, thanks to grammar that is totally different from English and pronunciation that is laden with difficult-to-master rules. Most English speakers have cited the language as the hardest language to learn in the world. xhr.open('POST', 'https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', true); Mandarin and Japanese are liable to give Hindi speakers a lot of trouble, in large part because they both involve learning completely new systems of writing. Because of its pictorial writing system, you aren't going to be able to learn to read phonetically. It has six declension cases, which dont exist in English and can be challenging for English speakers to comprehend. Its synthetic nature gives rise to a complex system of declension and conjugation. When we talk about linguistic distance, were referring to the fundamental differences between languages and how or where theyve evolved from. 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 ). Theyre all Germanic languages. Even a lot of authors that wrote their books in Russian or singers or poets that wrote in Russian have decided to stop spreading the language of the aggressor, added Ferlain. Mandarin Chinese. Privacy Policy | Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Whats more, Polish words often contain many consonants in a row, which makes them hard to pronounce for English speakers (and non-Slavic speakers in general). For more trivia and language facts sent right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. . Modern Greek is maybe the easiest language to learn that uses a different alphabet. Unlike other Slavic languages, Bulgarian has no case system. Ukrainian was enshrined as the only national language in the constitution in 1991, the year Ukraine became independent, but the law was not enforced nor did it change daily life. Thus, Russian . . The West Slavic languages include Polish, Czech, and Slovak. Even then, it's very likely that you will make mistakes in pronunciation and word order. Category II Languages. For English sayings you didn't realize were offensive, check out 7 Common Phrases That You Didn't Know Have Racist Origins. if( navigator.sendBeacon ) { 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. There is nothing natural about the way a language develops, Arel told Al Jazeera. The language requires the memorization of thousands of special characters. There are 30 letters in the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet. Mandarin is tough to learn because its a tonal language and uses a logographic script, hnz. A Finno-Ugric language, Finnish features a complicated verb conjugation, case system, consonant gradation and clitics. Chinese (Mandarin) The hardest language for English speakers to learn is Mandarin Chinese. Greek in particular is a highly inflected language, which means its words often change based on grammatical categories such as tense, number, and gender. Unusual grammar, difficult pronunciation, and six different tones make Vietnamese a challenge for English speakers. And while mastering a German accent can be tricky, most speakers will understand what youre saying through the missteps. Whether for gaining a deeper cultural understanding of a country or for the simple necessity of co-existing and even performing business, multilingual speakers put themselves at the forefront of new possibilities. For instance, the letter is similar to SH (shampoo, shower, shop). Get the most out of this nighttime activity. The trickiest part of Mongolian is the pronunciation. For example uenik, translates to male student. Some individual letters prove tricky as well. Seems that every person I know in #Ukraine has stopped speaking Russian. If you want to become proficient in a language, youll eventually need to learn whatever system of writing the language uses. This is unfortunate since Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. Agreements | But, said Arel, the legislation affected education as it essentially eliminates Russian from high schools. Every aspect of learning Mandarin is difficult. These languages take up to 600 hours to master. Russian. From Russia to Poland, you can find people speaking Slavic languages. The hardest languages for you to learn will depend on the languages you currently speak, particularly your native languages. Whenever you think of Slavic languages, the first language that comes to your mind is probably Russian. It can also set you apart from other people who speak your native language, since fewer people are willing to learn difficult languages, generally. It's not for the faint of heart. What if youre starting from one of the other thousands of languages on Earth, though? No matter the difficulty level of your new language, Rosetta Stone makes learning easy, effective, and fun. Chinese , Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic are some of the most difficult languages to learn. The Slavic languages are also known for their complicated consonant clusters. Russian is the most widely spoken Slavic language, with 155 million native Russian speakers. } else { Known as keigo, how you say a word depends on the formality of a situation. Whether for gaining a deeper cultural understanding of a country or for the simple necessity of co-existing and even performing business, multilingual speakers put themselves at the forefront of new possibilities. This system of honorific speech is called keigo. They are very closely related to English, so many of the same grammar rules and similar vocabulary apply. Where its most commonly spoken: Republic of Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo. Its also ranked as one of the easier languages to master, as youll see in the list below. All Rights Reserved. According to Arel, any identification with Russian culture, including the Russian language, is untenable right now. Hungarian. Albanian's 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to master this language is going to be a wild ride. For more on the Czech language, see this comparison of Czech with Russian and German. Russian. German and English belong to the same Germanic language family, so their linguistic closeness wins out. It is always a state project.. Although many like Tarasiuk might shudder when they hear Russian, a sense of understanding often prevails. 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 four key ways that determine language learning difficulty are: Languages can be grouped into language families based on how they developed and common ancestor languages. These languages, which include Vietnamese and Mandarin, require correct pronunciation and inflection to create meaning for each word. Another intriguing yet foreign concept to many English speakers, for instance, is the emphasis on respectful speech. If you don't meet those two criteria, though, it is a very challenging language to master. So, if you learn a certain dialect, there's a chance you might not be able to understand the locals from another region. These endings are used to express the same things propositions do in English. What Level Of Difficulty Is Mandarin. The language is packed with mouthfuls of consonants, making individual words total tongue twisters. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else . But again, those interviewed by Al Jazeera said there were few strict rules. comparison of Czech with Russian and German, The grammar, pronunciation, and general structure of a language, The alphabet (as mentioned in the article, some Slavic languages use the Cyliric alphabet, which means more things to learn). February 8, 2022. Where its most commonly spoken: Greece, Cyprus. There's a tongue-in-cheek book titled "Learn Greek in 25 years," but you'll be surprised at how . The term hard language refers to their complexity. The Bulgarian writing system uses a Cyrillic alphabet, similar to the Russian alphabet but with some distinct differences. It is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won't have such a hard time grasping it. They'll be very aware if there's no shade. Indeed, Slavic languages (unlike Romance languages) often appear on the lists of the hardest languages to learn. However, it remains one of the most challenging languages to learn due to its unique alphabet and script that differ from many western languages. Very different! These are "super-hard languages" that are "exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" to learn, including Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. chrzszcz or English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. It goes without saying that the more time you spend practicing something, the better you will become at it. 1. 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.. The invasion Russia launched on February 24 last year, which started the biggest war in Europe since 1945, is seen by many Ukrainians as an attempt to wipe them out and their culture, language and way of life. To be able to read and write, you have to learn thousands of characters. Here's a look at the top 10 hardest languages to learn: While you may be able to get by in non-tonal languages while making pronunciation mistakes, tonal languages demand more care. And in the territories Moscow has occupied since 2014, it has swiftly moved to restore the primacy of Russian culture and language.
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