Visakha

Want to learn a new language? The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are generally those languages that use the same Roman alphabet and have a similar grammar structure.

On the other hand, the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers are those with foreign writing systems, tonality, and alien grammar. If you’re an English speaker and you’ve managed to become fluent in any of the 10 languages below, give yourself a pat on the back.

1. Basque

As with many of the languages on this list, the Basque language is agglutinative. This means that words are formed, then altered with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word “lege” means law in Basque, but the sentence “according to the law” wouldn’t be 4 distinct words, but instead would be “legearen arabera.”

Basque also uses case endings in order to indicate relationships between words. For example, the Basque word for “mountain” is “mendi”, but the phrase “to the mountain” is simply “mendira”. Although Basque is extremely challenging for English learners syntactically, it shares the Roman alphabet, and the pronunciation is relatively easy for English speakers.

2. Arabic

Unlike with European languages, English speakers won’t find any similar sounding words in Arabic. To make things more complicated, in Arabic the verb generally comes before the subject and object, and they can be singular, dual, and plural. Just your average present tense verb will have 13 different forms. There are also 2 genders, as well as 3 noun cases.

There are also different dialects of Arabic. While most English leaders will study modern standard Arabic, there are also variations that are as different from modern standard Arabic, as French and Spanish are different from English.

3. Cantonese

Speaking of Hanzi characters, written Chinese is not phonetic. If you’re learning a new European language, or even an exotic phonetic language like Korean, you can at least sound out words you’re not familiar with. In Chinese, the writing system is pictoral, meaning that each character represents a different word. The only way to know the meaning of a character is to have it memorized, all 20,000+ characters.

To make things even more complicated, the exact same character will almost always have multiple meanings, depending on the context. The same sounding word can also have more than one written form, with each written form having a different meaning.

As difficult as the writing system is to grasp, the spoken dialect is perhaps even more complex. Compared to Cantonese, spoken Mandarin Chinese is a breeze to learn. Like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese is a tonal language, which can be extremely confusing for English speakers. The same sound spoken in a different tone can hold a completely different meaning. And unlike Mandarin Chinese which has 4 tones, Cantonese has 8 tones, with each change in pitch and inflection re-shaping a word’s meaning.

4. Finnish

Fortunately, Finnish is a phonetic language and written in the Roman Alphabet, so despite the lack of common vocabulary and alien grammar, at least you’ll be able to sound out the words.

5. Hungarian

In Hungarian grammar, possession, tense, and number are not dictated by word order, but bysuffixes. This makes the sentence structure seemingly flexible, but in reality, extremely similar sentences can take on completely different meanings with slight alterations in the suffixes.

6. Navajo

Virtually everything in Navajo is done exactly the opposite as its done in English. It is a verb-centered language. Even descriptions are given through verbs, and English adjectives have no direct translation in Navajo. Another interesting feature of the language is that it has animacy – ahierarchy of animation determines what verbs a noun will take on. For example, nouns like human and lightning are at the top of the hierarchy, while children and large animals come after, and abstractions are at the very bottom.

7. Mandarin Chinese

Like Cantonese, Mandarin is a tonal language. This means that a simple change in pitch and/or inflection can completely modify the meaning of the same sound. To make spoken Mandarin easier for English speakers, Mandarin can be sounded out using “Pinyin”, a transliteration system that uses the Roman Alphabet to present the language phonetically. It was created by the Chinese government in the 1950s to help standardize the language.

Of course, Pinyin doesn’t make the tonal aspect of the language any easier. The sound Ma” for example can represent 5 distinct words, depending on the tone, or lack thereof. For example:

As far as grammar goes, Mandarin Chinese is actually much easier than most other languages, since there’s no conjugation and words generally only have one grammatical form. However, it also posses unique challenges of its own. For example, Mandarin uses about a dozen adverbs that have no English equivalent.

8. Japanese

Unfortunately, written Japanese is even more difficult than written Chinese. It incorporates the Kanji pictoral characters from Chinese, and also incorporates additional characters that are exclusive to Japanese.

9. Estonian

The many seemingly arbitrary exceptions to Estonian grammar rules also serve to make this language a challenge for English learners.

10. Polish