Learning a new language is always a challenge. However, learning some languages can be a more demanding and time-consuming task than others.
In this blog post we’ve put together our own “Top 5” of the languages which are often claimed to be the most difficult to learn for foreigners.
Read more and find out what they are and why they are still worth your time and effort.
#5 French
Depending on your language skills and background, you might find it very easy or almost impossible to learn French. If you already speak some other Romance language (such as Spanish, Italian or Portuguese), learning French is no big deal at all. Otherwise you might struggle with its grammar and pronunciation. The spelling rules are complex too, as in most cases they are based on etymology rather than phonology (i.e. the history of a word rather than its pronunciation).
#4 German
Learning German may be a difficult exercise for a number of reasons. First, it has several varieties of standard German as well as numerous dialects used in various areas in Europe and abroad. These dialects are so different that they are even considered by some linguists to be separate languages altogether! You may have a really hard time trying to understand these dialects if you only know standard German.
Another reason why you may find German difficult is that nouns in German have grammatical gender (feminine, masculine and neuter). Pure common sense does not always work here. Thus, a girl is ‘das Mädchen’ (neuter) and a nose is ‘die Nase’ (feminine). The nouns are also declined depending on the grammatical case, meaning that you’ll have to remember to add various endings.
#3 Russian
Russian is a Slavic language, the 7th 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. This is mostly true, if you have no knowledge of other Slavic languages (e.g. Bulgarian or Czech). The grammar rules in Russian are very complex and have numerous exceptions. In addition, many learners struggle with the pronunciation – the stress in words is largely unpredictable and not marked in writing, while there are multiple homonyms. In the Russian language you also need to distinguish between the so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sounds (consonant phonemes with and without palatal secondary articulation).
The need to learn the Russian alphabet serves as yet another obstacle for many people who would like to learn the language. They might be surprised to know that the Russian alphabet actually takes only about 10 hours to learn.
#2 Japanese
Japanese is an East Asian language. The major difficulty in learning this language is that Japanese has nothing in common with European or Slavic languages. Learners of Japanese are often put off by its writing system, which uses three scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji. This means regular use of thousands of characters. In addition to that, the Japanese language has multiple forms of expressing politeness and formalities.
#1 And the winner is… Finnish!
The Finnish language can “boast” an extremely complicated grammar structure with numerous derivative suffixes, which makes it especially difficult to learn. Students of Finnish have to learn to use multiple modifiers to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, as well as numerals, depending on their roles in the sentence. The spelling is far from easy too, as words often contain double consonants and vowels. Some of the letters of the Latin alphabet (b, c, f, q, w, x, z and å) are not used in Finnish words and are reserved solely for words of non-Finnish origin.
All these aspects may make language learning seem a formidable task. However, having said all that, we also have to say that learning a language is a very rewarding and useful activity. It is easy to make yourself a study schedule too. Overall, depending on your background and native language skills, you might need from 575 to 2,200 hours to achieve proficiency in the language of your choice (according to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State).
The good side of learning a new language is that it has a very positive effect on your career prospects, gives you a deeper understanding of other countries and cultures and breaks ice in communication with the locals. Even a few hours of language learning can make a huge difference in this sense.
If you are still not sure whether or not you can and want to learn any of the languages above, we have great news. With WordDive it is easier than ever to try learning a new language and see if this is the right one for you. You can sign up for our free sample course in just a few clicks on the WordDive website or through the WordDive app for iPhone.
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32 Comments
Finnish language is the hardest one,,, but I like it a lot,,, it is so rich language with words, phrases and grammars,,, I have found out almost everything in Finnish language is beautiful,,, despite of I am mathematician and do not like languages! I am living with abstract idea mostly.
“Japanese has nothing in common with European or Slavic languages”
Slavic languages are European languages. This makes no sense.
Did anyone try to learn Polish ? For me it is obvious that it is more difficult to learn than Russian or Finnish: it has more complicated grammar, pronunciation and spelling than both of them.
Hi Anna! Thanks for your comment. In general, it always depends on your individual background. For example, for people who speak a Slavic language as their mother tongue, it is rather easy to learn Polish. In some ways, Polish grammar can be easier than Finnish grammar. For example, it has much fewer noun cases. Polish grammar is also considerably easier than Russian for people whose first language is written with Latin alphabet, because for Russian you have to learn Cyrillic.
However, Polish is usually up there with the 10 hardest languages to learn (for English speakers). As said in the beginning, it all depends on your individual background. Good luck with your Polish studies! 🙂
I speak Arabic, French,German ,Spanish,Italian and English.
I am an Opera singer with the Met. and I will be singing in a Russian Opera but am struggling to learn the correct pronunciation. Any suggestions?
This is coming rather late, but see if you can pronounce some of the consonants closer to the front of the mouth rather than toward the back like in English. (Compare, for instance, the “l” or “n” sounds in English vs. Russian – in English you would produce these more towards the middle-back of your mouth, whereas in Russian it would be closer to your teeth.) That should help set you up to make the transitions to other sounds easier and more natural. For “soft” consonants, try widening your lips horizontally but leaving only a small gap between them; flattening your tongue against the roof of your mouth can also help get that softer sound. But I guess it’s also a question of which part of the pronunciation you’d like suggestions for.
soooooo not true where is the Arabic language on this list?? it is definitely the hardest and there are no letters used in any language that are like the Arabic language. Plus it is written from the right side to the left side
Hi Peter
We didn’t list all the languages here that would be hard to learn but it would have been impossible for us to mention them all 🙂
I agree arabic is the second hardest language to learn according to sources
That’s true I’m Arabian and most of my friends says that the Arabic language is hard
I certainly agree with this article but if I may add, The difficulty of learning a language is relative to the learner’s native tongue (or tongues), as well as to any other languages that they may already have learned. Defining one language as the most difficult to learn in the world is a tricky concept.You can take a look at what could, arguably, be the hardest language to learn that we’ve listed and detailed: https://www.tomedes.com/translator-hub/hardest-languages-to-learn
I live in iran. Here in schools they teach an obsolete, archaic form of Arabic that was used only in Qur’an. It’s grammar is so complex and difficult and full of rules and exceptions that it’s almost an impractical. You have to literally formulate a simple sentence that you want to say. It was a nightmare for everyone. We would burn our Arabic text books after the final exams :)))
Japanese has some things in common with Latin, which could be regarded as European language, most notably how verbs work and the sentence structure.
You forgot Arabic and Malayalam these are one of the hardest to learn in my opinion
I’ve been learning Japanese for a long time and I will say, it’s very difficult. I could barely consider myself a beginner even after practicing and reviewing every day for months. However, it’s not quite as hard as one would think. Once you know the main alphabets (Hiragana and Katakana) and some basic grammar rules, you can pretty much figure out how the language works on its own. Yet kanji and the politeness forms are some of the hardest aspects of the language to get used to.
The extended vowels of some Asian languages are tough to learn, pronounce and read. eg the Vietnamese Nă Nâ Nê Nô Nư Nơ then add some tones – Nắ Nằ Nẳ Nẵ Nặ and it totals to dozens of vowels beford the combinations start. Whoa! Finnish level difficulty!
German and French shouldn’t be in this list because they not that difficult. Sure they both contain some complexities but they’re nothing compared to other languages.
where is Icelandic ?
Icelandic is without a doubt the hardest language to even understand as someone that has visited there.
You mean pronounciation in Russian? Or rather the intonation – that’s the harder part in Russian, because one has to learn it separately for each vocabulary – so sorry, there is no advice one can make for you in this case, but simply try and learn it!
I wonder how difficult it is for non english people to learn english compared with other languages…
Easy!
I’m an Arab, I barely studied English in school, literally less than the basics. I learned English from watching so much movies and series only!
I’ve tried to learn French for a few months but it didn’t go as smooth as I thought it would be, it kept being weird to my ears, a struggle that I didn’t face with English since it’s literally anywhere and everywhere you go, it’s like your ears are used to it even if u aren’t an English speaker.
I understand why people feel Russian is difficult – first of all, if most things for You are written in the Latin alphabet, then you first of all have to master the Cyrillic script to learn (I learned Russian, and the best students took almost a year to master it, and we were all philologists). It’s true that Finnish has a lot more cases than Polish, and I cannot say anything more because I didn’t learn it. I speak German fluently, too, and I must say – it IS hard due to the various ways all the cases and verbs interact, the pronouns… and the Artikel – the way you bind der, die or das with the capitalised nouns (actually, the fact that nouns are all capitalised makes it a bit easier).
I also speak some Czech, some French and some Serbo-Croatian.
But even if I am natively Polish, there are still languages that I feel are difficult to learn. All the languages that use other scripts – Arabic for instance.
Good luck learning languages everyone!
I am an American that started to learn Russian at age 13 and right now at 28, I can speak Russian without an accent and in Russia, people have stopped noting an accent only 5 years ago. I do still have issues with grammar like confusing if to end a name with е or и and spelling some things, but even native Russians make a lot of spelling errors. That might be because Russian has a huge mix of foreign words spelt in Cyrillic.
Now my Russian friends who moved to the USA and learned English did much better. They started speaking and writing fluently in 3-5 years. I was also surprised that there are many young people in Russia with great English. So judging by my personal observations, English is easier than Russian.
Russian language uses a lot of context. It’s really not enough to know the meaning of words. The wrong intonation and pausing alone can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Example: Казнить! Нельзя помиловать! = Execute! Cannot be pardoned. While: Казнить нельзя! Помиловать.! = Do not execute. Must be pardoned.
All that I changed in the Russian text was that I moved the punctuation and the sentence got the completely opposite meaning.
Congrats on your accentless Russian. If true, this is a real feat indeed. I have never met a non-native speaker who spoke without an accent. No English speaker I know who studied Russian extensively and formally is capable of pronouncing “ы.”
Producing the phonemes of a foreign language require a certain amount of innate skill, good training, attention to detail, and a lot of practice. It can be done even if few folks succeed.
HI, Jessica,
I have studied multiple languages and Russian is no doubt one of the most challenging. Your observations are helpful but I’d like to add to them. Main challenges are:
a) knowing the stress of a give word. Stress is entirely unpredictable. What’s worse, even if you remember the stress of a word, the stress may or may not change when a noun becomes plural, when a noun case changes, when a verb tense changes, etc.
b) you have to learn TWO infinitives for every verb: perfective and imperfective.
c) prepositions are hard to figure out: “в” versus “на”; “от” verses “из” versus “c”, which all mean “from”;
d) different verbs require their noun complements to be in a specific case……you can never predict which case might be required.
e) knowing how to spell/form cases correctly, and then pronounce them with the correct stressed syllable.
Spelling is not particularly difficult….there are a few small challenges, but they are minor compared to those that I’ve listed. Learning the Cyrillic alphabets is also a minor problem…it can be learned quickly.
Your comment about punctuation: I have seen similar comments about English punctuation changing the meaning of the utterance. Both languages share that feature.
All languages are tough to pronounce correctly unless you have an “ear” for language. Russian is different…but really no harder than correctly pronouncing the sounds of French or Spanish or Portuguese.
What Are the Hardest Languages to Learn?
For non-native speakers, the following languages are far more difficult to learn because of the diversity of written script as well as grammar constructs.
Arabic
Mandarin
Thai
Punjabi
Russian
Icelandic
English
where is Cantonese lol, when people are struggling with 4 tones in mandarin, cantonese got 9.
There is no doubt that Finnish is quite difficult. But its spelling system is perhaps the easiest and most regular that I have ever encountered in any language (even easier than Spanish orthography). You can sound out Finnish words (even if you don’t know what they mean) and write down words you hear in Finnish (ditto) within just a few hours ( a few days at most) of studying the language and learning the sound of its alphabet.
Finally I seen someone mentioned about Malayalam. 😂. My mother tongue is Malayalam. It’s the hardest language to learn. Even I don’t know much about it. Complicated Pronounciation and characters. 😵
I grew up speaking Polish & English. I’m currently extending what I didn’t learn . I never learned it fluently, but I’m picking it up quickly and easily.