Longread: If you give an hour to read this full article, which took me a week to write from 20 years of language education I promise that you’ll learn something new and fun in every paragraph!
Jump to conclusion: OK, so you have 1 minute before you get off from the bus.
[img: Map showing the maze. Quick jump to finish skipping the questions.]
Ahh, I’m glad you stayed and chose for the interesting route. So first:
Why take my word?
Answer: Don’t! There is no objective answer to this question. Why my answer could be helpful: I’ve worked in the area of language education for over a decade and I’m learning over 10 languages and know much about dozens of other languages’ syntax (related to grammar), semantics (to meaning), structure, phonetics and phonology (to sound), lexicon (to words) and more.
OK, so I know that you are an English speaker. But to answer what the most difficult language is to learn, it still depends on a number of factors, all evolving around the subject, being you, or whomever the language learner is. Of course I can already give away that many linguists, language educators and learners will think of Chinese, Polish, Turkish and Russian as difficult languages to learn. But the answer is by definition not objective. It depends on the learner’s personal circumstances as well as the target language characteristics.
A learner may find a language difficult or easy depending on her or his
- existing language knowledge
- eagerness and need to learn the target language
- ability to see patterns inside that language and relative to other ones
- natural ability and acquired skill set to deal with the below language specific characteristics
Relative difficulty of its
- words
- grammar
- sounding
- writing system
- dialects
Let’s look at an example sentence translated into 50 languages will also show you the differences and similarities between languages and their families.
Do you speak (Indo-)European?
I’m not even considering of learning Scottish (Celtic) And even Farsi (Iranian) and Hindi. I could learn Swedish, Norwegian and Danish in the same amount of time. Still, going back centuries or sometimes millennia, those languages spoken from Iceland to India and from Portugal to Vladivostok have a common root language. You can still see that in numbers, words of kinship, animals, nature and other basic common words in Indo-European languages. If you don’t know Arabic writing, these Farsi words probably look very strange to you: other mâdar مادر ,پدر ,برادر ,خواهر If you romanize these Persian kinship terms, perhaps you can see some familiarity between mâdar, pedar, barâdar and khâhar as they use in Iran and Latin mater, pater, frater & soror.
Take a look at the following two similar sentences in English that I made up.
Can you detect the difference?
To kick-start with the utmost gripping truth to me: almost 6 out of 10 words in the English speech/tongue that someone understands have a Latin root, often from (Anglo-)French and sometimes from Italian, Spanish or Portuguese. 26 out of a hundred have a Germanic root. Hence, that kinship means that those speeches will help you in your tongue learning. Looking at the next utterance below, can you see and find what is else from this one here?
Germanic words saying the same thing as below wording
Commencing rapidly with the most interesting fact to me personally, 60 percent of vocabulary you comprehend originates from Latin, frequently an (Anglo-)French source, occasionally of Italian, Spanish or Portuguese decent. Consequently, that relation signifies certain Romance languages aid you in language studies. Viewing the previous phrase, is it possible for you to perceive and detect the differences?
phrasing of Latin root that signify the same as previous sentence
For those of you who want to learn Germanic languages such as German, Frisian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faeroer, Luxembourgish, Afrikaans, Limburgish and many other other regional languages, English word knowledge helps!
The persons interested in acquiring Spanish, French, Italian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, and numerous additional (regional) Romance languages and dialects that originated in Southern-Europe and globalized since colonial times, the English vocabulary benefits and assists you!
Amazing, isnt’t it? There is a whole table of words in English showing the Germanic and Latin version.
Difficulty of Romance language
Are Romance words difficult to learn?
So if you have a high command of English and you wish to pack your bags, and travel to the sun? Don’t bring your dictionary, because you’ll recognize many words in languages such as French, Catalan, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese. Bon voyage! Visiteu Barcelona! Comprendes español? Bere una birra & veja o oceano no Brasil!
Is grammar difficult to learn in Romance languages?
You might want to pack a grammar book though. If you’re more of a sun than a syntax admirer, feel happy to have been born in this (or end of the last) millennium since the romance languages, being altered modern versions of different kinds of regional and vulgar Latin have lost many of the much more difficult Latin case system, freedom of word order and sentence constructions that would make modern words say… superfluous. Most people consider English relatively easy to learn as a second language and often say the same about Spanish, Italian. Eih, what appened to French and Portuguese?
Is the sound difficult to learn in Romance languages?
French and Portuguese, especially as spoken in Portugual (and regional languages such as Sicilian) often sound very different than they’re written in. One should note that there is no objective ‘right writing’, right? But many learners perceive the pronunciation of the following sentence in Spanish and Italian as more logical than the French or Portuguese ones.
Is writing in Romance languages difficult?
Apart from the aforementioned sound-spelling difference, and written in the same alphabet, only a few new letters need to be learned.
Are dialects difficult to recognize in Romance languages?
By definition other dialects sound different than the generally accepted standardized version. Linguists don’t value Parisian French over that of other regions (except for some Parisian linguists perhaps), but educators popularly offer the most accepted version of a language in a a specific country. (Frequently, the dialect of the economic, political and/or cultural powerful central area dominates surrounding and peripheral regions.)
So if you learned Spanish at school in Europe, it probably sounds much like speakers in Salamanca or maybe Madrid, everyone else will understand your accent and you’ll probably understand most Spanish speaking regions throughout Spain, although in Andalusian they can’t always be bothered to pronounce the word endings. Generally most learners have no problems understanding Spanish accents in Latin-America, although most countries enriched the language with national words and expressions.
Italian dialects vary tremendously, but all speak a general version of Italian.
Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Polish and Arabic are examples of difficult languages.
quoting many people
If your native language is English or let’s say that your knowledge is ‘limited’ to European languages and your desire is to learn Chinese, Arabic or Turkish. It would be safe to assume that building vocabulary in any of those languages might cost you lots of extra time. For how much should you block your agenda? Double or triple it to be on the safe side, compared to learning other European languages.
Are ‘Asian’ languages difficult?
Just a little FYI for those referring to Asian languages: there is no correct generalizasian as Asian, except for the continent on which 60% of us world citizens reside. Linguistically (therefore) it’s complex. But since most people say America when referring to just the USA, England or Great-Britain when referring to the UK, in their turn to Europe when referring to Europe minus Britain. Or Holland when referring to the Netherlands, people say Asian when referring to a ill defined number of countries with completely different cultures and… languages. So find your way through the more accepted division among linguists when discussing the difficulties of languages from Asia’s extreme points Turkish to Japanese and from Russian the Arctic to Central Malayo Polynesian languages spoken on Pamana (not Panama) Island. Over 2,000 languages are spoken throughout Asia. The 15 major languages spoken in Asia: Chinese, Hindi, English (!), Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Punjabi, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Telugu and Tamil.
Chinese language group
Are Chinese words difficult to learn?
Is Chinese grammar difficult to learn?
As difficult as the new words, sounds and characters may be, Chinese grammar is pretty easy, funnily enough.
Verbs don’t conjugate
No Pluralization
Tenses are just formed by adding the appropriate word of time.
Chinese welcomed me to the world of tones!
If you don’t know any tonal language, like myself before I started to learn Chinese, it’s pretty difficult to distinguish between the famous four different meanings of ma in Mandarin. To illustrate that, I tried to find this ridiculous example, that would ridicule you. And possibly your mom:
| Pinyin | Chinese Character | Meaning | Sound Clip |
| mā | 媽 (trad) / 妈 (simp) | mother | audio |
| má | 麻 | hemp | audio |
| mǎ | 馬 / 马 | horse | audio |
| mà | 罵 / 骂 | scold | audio |
Theoretically, you could form a sentence like: 妈 麻 马 骂 吗.” It means something like “Mom is bothered /hemped by the horse’s scolding”. You might not use it at a daily base, but it shows you all five different tones and meanings.
In Thai, as I remember from a trip, the tones make it equally difficult to distinguish in meaning for someone who was only familiar with (Indo-) European languages. I noticed that in Dutch we do have two ways to pronounce the word voorkomen: voorkómen (to prevent) and vóórkomen (to exist, stand before court). If you learn Swedish or Italian you’ll notice some tones, but not comparable to the 4-7 tones in Mandarin or six tones in Cantonese.
Are Chinese characters difficult to learn?
To language speakers from non-character writing systems, most characters look similar and like a bunch of unrelated strokes. As a learner myself still many new characters look like Chinese to me. But knowing that characters are built up from a radical and a after covering the first 100 characters or so, you start to recognize those recurring elements when learning new words.
Looking at the character for mother: 妈 (in simplified) and 媽 (in traditional writing). It is pronounced as mā (first tone). The left part 女 or in pinyin nǚ is a semantic component similar to a morpheme called a radical, in other words a part that shows the meaning of the word, in this case meaning “female”. The right part 马 (simplified) or 馬 (traditional) or in pinyin mǎ (third tone) means “horse” and in case of human mothers, is not related to the meaning of the word. It is a phonetic component, so a part that indicates what it should sound like, like letters. (in this case the tone is different). In that way many Chinese characters are built up. Generally, beginners tend to struggle with that when learning their first characters and often learn pinyin first, the writing system used based on the Roman ABC. Intermediate learners will recognize more components from existing characters when acquiring new ones.
The Chinese character 聽 means 'to listen (actively)'. Constructed out of these 5 elements it is complex and beautiful. Perhaps picturing the separate elements or even a story might help the learner's minds to remember a character. Knowing the characters for the four body parts already, this wonderfully constructed character will become easier to remember!
Are Chinese dialects difficult to recognize?
a
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or as the Chinese language. There are many Chinese dialects. And considering the huge size of the country and its population, including the diffuse diaspora, or spread of its people, it’s not strange if you compare that to dialects in your own language.
Is Turkish difficult to learn?
Words in Turkish and other Turkic languages
As a suffix language, words in a text may appear as words, but they’re not. Hah! Gotcha! You might use spaces to separate words like ‘his great mother’ but that’s such a non-Ottoman thing to do! Look at this ‘word’ for instance:
Without going too linguistically on you, this is a lexeme, not a word.
Turkish grammar – good luck with that one!
a
Sounding
a
Writing system
a
Dialect
a
Conclusion
So yes, Turkish is difficult. From any non-Turkic perspective.
Are Slavic languages difficult?
Even Polish and Russian, which are generally considered as very hard, you’ll still be able to recognize hundreds of common words as the West, East and South Slavic sub branches of the larger European language family visibly share a common root.
Are Slavic words difficult to learn?
a
Is Slavic grammar difficult to learn?
a
Is the Slavic sound difficult to learn?
a
Are Slavic writing systems difficult to learn?
a
Are Slavic dialects difficult to recognize?
a
a
Personal factors
Let’s deal with that subjective factor now: your need and desire to learn that specific language. But I hear you think: hey, how is that related to languages? Well, would you feel motivated? Picture yourself learning Spanish, Chinese, Arabic or Swedish. Throughout my professional and personal life I’ve seen people learning a language because they:
- Need to obtain a certain level or pass a specific language exam in order to show the result or certificate to
- be admitted to university or some other sort of education
- add it to their CV, LinkedIn or need it for a specific job
- obtain a permanent residence status in a certain country
And although I’ve also prepared for tests at school mostly -if not only- to pass it and move on to the next, I’d wish for anyone of us to do it for a more intrinsic motivation and to actually improve the language skills that they really desire to use during their studies, at work or with their loved one(s), or just for fun (as a hobby or challenge).
If you are able to connect the daily struggles acquiring skills in your target language to your final need that improves your life in some way, then it will be easier.