10 hardest languages to learn for English speakers

hardest-languages-for-English-speakers

 

10 hardest languages to learn for English speakers

 

What are the hardest languages to learn for English speakers and why are they the hardest? Find out in this article.

 

Chinese
Be it Mandarin or Cantonese both are as hard to learn for an English speaker. Although the writing system is very beautiful and the ideograms are like art, the language requires memorizing more than a thousand unique characters. There are two sets of the writing system – traditional and simplified – both are used in different countries.

 

Arabic
Vowels are not included in writing and some letters have 4 different written forms depending on their position in a word. It is written from left to right which can be a big difficulty. The language also has many different dialects depending on the country of its origin. Arabic vocabulary is very rich so there are a lot of words to learn.

 

Japanese
Japanese also has a writing system, which derives from Chinese, it consists of two syllabaries – hiragana and katakana, logograms (kanji) and requires the knowledge of romaji (Latin script). Japanese also has different grammar rules for example the word order is different from English.

 

Korean
Like in Japanese the grammar is different, especially the sentence structure, verb conjugations and syntax. Korean is spoken rather quickly and Koreans drop a lot of sounds when speaking. In writing Korean relies a lot on Chinese characters.

 

Finnish
The vocabulary has no resemblance to English whatsoever. Grammar is very difficult – with nouns having 15 cases and there are six types of verbs . One Finnish word can have a lot of different meanings. In addition the words are long and can be very hard to pronounce.

 

Polish
There are a lot of grammar rules and even more exceptions from them. There are seven cases of nouns and the verbs are conjugated. The pronunciation is quite hard and there are additional letters in the alphabet.

 

Hungarian
Like in Polish, Hungarian has additional letters in the alphabet like unique vowels and clusters of consonants, which make it hard to pronounce. The word order isn’t very important because tense, number and possession are indicated by suffixes instead.

 

Serbian
Serbian uses either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, but if you really want to learn the language you should know both. There are additional letters which will be hard to pronounce for English speakers.

 

Estonian
The vocabulary doesn’t relate to any other language, as in the case of Finnish. There is actually some resemblance to Finish but, there are a lot of false friends. There are 14 cases and the grammar is very different from the English one.

 

Russian
It is written in Cyrillic alphabet. Russian has two separate sounds for the majority of vowels and consonants. There are two dialects – northern and southern. Categorizing this language as a hard one  for English speakers comes mainly from the different alphabet and problem with pronunciation as there are many sounds in Russian, which do not occur in English.

 

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