World’s Hardest Languages to Learn

All languages are not equal.
Some are easier to learn than others, but some of the most popular languages are hard to learn.
What are they, though?

Let’s look at the worlds’s hardest languages to learn but also the most rewarding.

Getting to know a new language is an exciting journey.
Because business is now done all over the world, there is a need for experts in foreign languages all over the world.

Even though learning a new language is always fun, they are not all the same in terms of how hard they are to learn.

The difficulty of a language depends on a number of things, such as whether it is the native language or a related language, the method, the complexity, the interest, and the resources that are available.

Ethnologue says that there are 7,111 known living languages in the world right now.
The exact number varies, but it is still too much to handle. Some languages are hard to learn, while many others are not too hard. I’ve only thought about the big ones here, which means that they are all taught.

5 World’s Hardest Languages to Learn

Do you like challenges?
If so, why not choose a foreign language that can open up a lot of doors?

Here, you can find out about the World’s Hardest Languages to Learn.

Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is the Chinese language that more than 1 billion people speak as their first language.
If you want to learn Chinese, you need to be willing to give up as much as 2,000 hours of your time.

Chinese is a tonal language, which makes it harder to learn and communicate the different meanings of words based on pitch and tone.

You can’t read Mandarin if you know how to speak it, and you can’t speak it if you can’t read it.

Mandarin characters are hard because they have a huge number of complicated hanzi drawings.

To read a single newspaper or pass the Intermediate level 5 HSK test, you need to know at least 2,500 characters.
And up to 5,000 characters to be able to speak and write Mandarin fluently.

Mandarin is probably one of the world’s hardest languages to learn if you speak English. No matter how hard it is to speak Mandarin, it is a very impressive feat for people who speak Mandarin well. If you want to learn a Mandrin Chinese can help you.

• Both speaking and writing are very hard.
• Hard to understand
• Conclusion: Very Hard

Korean

K-pop, K-drama, and K-movies have made Korean one of the most popular languages, so more people want to learn it.

About 75 million people speak Korean, most of them in South and North Korea.

Unlike Chinese and Japanese characters, Korean alphabets (called “Hangul”) are incredibly simple.

You can quickly learn to sound out words and sentences.
Korean is a hard language to learn, even though the characters are easy to read.

The Korean language is hard because one sentence can be said three different ways, depending on the context.

The verbs and syntax can also be used in hundreds of different ways, depending on the person’s age, experience, mood, and level of intensity.
Also, the rules for how to say it are unique and hard to learn. If you’re interested in learning Korean, you can check it out.

• It’s hard to talk and write.
• Grammar: It’s very hard
• Very Hard to sum up

Japanese

There is no other language that sounds or feels like Japanese.

The Japanese are a member of the Japonic family and a language that is spoken by 125 million people.
If you don’t know why you should learn Japanese, you can read about different jobs in Japan.

Nouns in Japanese don’t have genders, articles, or plural forms. There are only two verb tenses: present and past.

With only five vowel sounds and a consistent phonetic writing system, it is not too hard to say.
Like Chinese, Japanese has a lot of complicated characters that you have to learn.

It has a system with two syllables and three different ways to write (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji), which makes it even harder to learn.

It also has a format that depends on the formality of the situation and calls for different forms.
When there are so many rules, it’s hard to say what you want.

Aside from that, it also has a complicated way of showing respect.

Japanese is not for people who are easily scared.
Studies by FSI show that it is the language that is thought to be the hardest of all. Please click here if you are interested in learning Japanese.

• Grammar and speaking: Hard
• Writing: It’s very hard
• Conclusion: Very Hard

Russian

Russian is one of the most spoken languages in the world, with 300 million native speakers. Also world’s hardest languages to learn.

Some people in Eastern Europe don’t find Russian that hard, but it seems hard for people who speak English.
When you go to that side of the world, it’s beautiful and useful.

The alphabet looks hard to learn, and it seems impossible to say the sounds.
It doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. Instead, it uses the Russian alphabet in its Cyrillic script form.

Some letters, like U, A, J, D, F, G, S, E, B, and J, look hard for people who speak English as their first language.
But the language is also based on sounds.
You can learn Russian and speak it just like a native speaker if you have the right attitude.

It’s clear that it’s not an easy language.

But as long as you are motivated enough, studying isn’t that hard either.

Even though the Russian language is hard to learn, it might be worth the extra work to do so. If you’re interested in learning Russian, you can check it out.

• It’s hard to talk and write.
• Very Hard
• Conclusion: It’s hard

Arabic

Arabic is spoken by more than 400 million people, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in more than 20 countries and is a common language that is also hard to learn.

Even though there are less of them than in Chinese and Japanese, the letters look scary.
Also, Arabic only has three sounds that English doesn’t have.

There are 28 letters and three vowels in the Arabic cursive writing system.
There are 13 forms of the verb, and it’s hard to learn how to say them.

The world’s toughest languages to learn.

Also, there are many different kinds of Arabic spoken in the area.

Some are mutually understandable, which means that the Arabic spoken in Egypt or Sudan is different from the Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.

• Speaking, grammar, and writing were all hard.
• Conclusion: Very Hard

Conclusion

This list doesn’t have everything.
There are many other hard languages, like Cantonese, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Mongolian, Polish, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Thai, etc.

Some languages are easier to learn and adapt to than others, but the key to learning a language well is to have the right attitude and plan.

If you don’t want to learn, you’ll find it hard to learn any language.
So, what language will you learn?
Before you start learning a language, check out our offline or online course that will help you learn faster.