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What is the most difficult language in the world. Which language is the most difficult? The best way to learn any language

Of course, it is impossible to say for sure which language is the most difficult. From an everyday point of view, the most difficult language is the one that is least similar in grammar and phonetics to your native one. However, linguists can use certain characteristics to indicate the complexity of a particular language. Let's look at the rating published on the website mylanguages.org

What is the hardest language to learn?

Most non-native languages are difficult. But you must remember that some language may be difficult for you for certain reasons. In the comments after the article you can add your opinion and make your own rating :)

Rating of the ten most difficult languages

The most difficult languages Arabic, Chinese and Japanese are considered. At least, that’s what the Institute of State Diplomatic Service writes. US Department. Also among the most difficult are Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian. This is due to the huge number of cases. Pronunciation is also more difficult in them than even in Asian languages, since the languages of this group have a huge set of completely unpronounceable consonants.

So, the list:

Chinese. There were many reasons to add this language to the list. Chinese is a hieroglyphic language. Each word of the language is indicated by a separate symbol - and not phonetic (sound), so you cannot understand the sound of the word by writing it. The tonal system doesn't help much because Chinese only has four tones. There are also a huge number of homophones in Chinese. For example, the word "shi" is associated with three dozen different morphemes. There is even a poem in classical Chinese that consists of 192 words of Shi spoken in different keys, but still makes sense. You can easily find it on Google :)
Arab. First in difficulty of writing. Many letters have up to four spelling options, depending on their position in the word. Vowels are not included in the letter, but may be indicated. Sounds are complex, but words are even more complex. The verb in Arabic usually comes before the predicate and object. The verb has three numbers, so nouns and verbs must be taught in singular, dual and plural. The present tense has 13 forms. The noun has three cases and two genders. Another problem is dialects. In Morocco, Arabic is as different from Arabic in Egypt and from literary Arabic as French is from Spanish and Latin. (By the way, this is also true for Chinese, but it is in first place anyway)
Tuyuka- the language of the eastern Amazon. Its sound system is not overly complex: simple consonants and a few nasal vowels. But here is agglutination!!! For example, the word "hóabãsiriga" means "I don't know how to write." It has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The classes of nouns (gender) in the languages of the Tuyuca family number from 50 to 140. And the most surprising thing about this language is that you need to use special verb endings that make it clear how the speaker knows what he is talking about. For example, “Diga ape-wi” means “the boy played football (I know because I saw it).” In English we may or may not talk about it, but in Tuyuka these endings are obligatory. Such languages force their speakers to think carefully about how they learned what they are talking about.
Hungarian. Firstly, Hungarian has 35 cases or forms of nouns. This alone puts Hungarian on the list of the most difficult languages to learn. Hungarian has a lot of expressive idioms, a lot of suffixes. The large number of vowels and the way they are pronounced (deep in the throat) make this language difficult to pronounce. You will need more effort to learn and maintain this language at a decent level than many other languages. It must be said that the Hungarian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group and in Europe its relatives (albeit distant) are the Finnish and Estonian languages. And Estonian is also (bingo!) in our ranking :)
Japanese. This language is difficult primarily because the writing is different from the pronunciation. That is, you cannot learn to speak this language by learning to read it - and vice versa. Moreover, there are three different writing systems. The Kanji system uses Chinese characters. Students must learn from 10 to 15 thousand hieroglyphs (cramming, no mnemonic techniques will help). Additionally, written Japanese uses two syllabaries: katakana for loanwords and hiragana for writing suffixes and grammatical particles. The US State Department allocates Japanese students three times as much time as Spanish or French students.
Navajo. This amazing language also claims a place on the list of the most difficult languages. During World War II, the language was used as a code to send messages over the radio (radio operators were bilingual Navajo speakers). The advantage of this method was that information could be encrypted very quickly. The Japanese couldn't figure out this code. Navajo was chosen not only because it is very difficult, but also because there were no published dictionaries or grammars of this language, but there were native speakers of the language. This language does almost everything differently from English. For example, in English, in a verb, we highlight only the third person singular (in the present tense) with a suffix. And in Navajo, all persons are distinguished by prefixes in the verb.
Estonian. Estonian has a very strict case system. Case is a grammatical class that affects the behavior of words in a sentence. Estonian has 12 cases, which is twice as many as many Slavic languages. In addition, there are many exceptions to the rules; many words can mean several different concepts.
Basque is also one of the top ten most difficult languages according to the British Foreign Office. It has 24 cases. It is impossible to associate British with any Indo-European language. It may be the oldest language in Europe. It belongs to agglutinative languages, that is, it uses suffixes, prefixes and infixes to form new words. It is a synthetic language rather than an analytical one. In other words, the language uses case endings to indicate connections between words. It changes not only the ending of the verb, but also the beginning. In addition to the usual moods of Indo-European languages, Basque has some other moods (for example, potential). The language has a complex system of marking the subject, direct and indirect objects - all of which are part of the verb.
Polish. The language has 7 cases, and its grammar has more exceptions than rules. For example, German has 4 cases and they are all logical. Learning Polish cases will require more time and effort to learn (and discover) the logic and rules, and you may have to learn the entire language first. However, for Ukrainians the Polish language is not as scary as for residents of Western Europe, so this is the case when the rating can be adjusted :)
Icelandic very difficult to learn due to its archaic vocabulary and complex grammar. It preserves all the ancient declensions of nouns and verb conjugations. Many Icelandic phonemes do not have exact equivalents in English. You can only learn them by listening to original recordings or talking to Icelanders.

And to summarize, we must say that even the most complex language can be made native if you do not learn it, but immerse yourself in the language environment. This is exactly the approach we use in our studio. Come to us and let the most difficult languages become your friends and helpers!

There are about five thousand languages in the world. Even within the same country, the population can use several languages, in addition to the state one. Each language is a whole system of signs, letters and sounds, which is formed during the entire history of the people. This is not to say that there are languages that are very easy to learn. It is more difficult for us in Russia to learn the Korean language than, for example, for the Chinese. The same can be said about which language is the most difficult in the world. It is very difficult to determine one among them. However, it is possible to create a rating. It will consist of several language systems that are considered the most difficult in the world to learn.

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10. Finnish

The Finnish language is in tenth place, but this does not mean that it is easy. Its simplicity lies only in which, unlike the Russian language, the words in it are written exactly the same way as we hear them. But in terms of the number of case endings in words, Finnish is one of the record holders - there are 15 cases in the language. It also has such a feature as different standards for the colloquial and literary versions. The literary standard is used in the media, education and politics, while the colloquial standard is used in the work environment, interpersonal communication and some types of more informal media, such as radio and TV.

The alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, but with features in writing and pronunciation, which make it difficult to learn.

9. Icelandic

The biggest challenge when trying to learn this language system comes from spoken language. Due to the fact that there has been no historical European influence, the language has remained virtually unchanged since its origins, and only the native Icelanders can pronounce the words correctly.

When new words appear in Iceland, they are often simply copied and pronounced with their own peculiarities . And some Icelandic words in other language groups they have long gone out of use.

8. Hungarian

For those learning Hungarian, Finnish may seem simple. In Hungary, words have as many as 35 cases, and the pronunciation of vowels is distinguished by a long and drawn-out sound. Another feature - this is the richness of the language phraseological units and speech patterns understandable only to Hungarians. Even a literal translation is sometimes powerless when trying to understand what the Hungarian meant. And in the Hungarian language there are separate signs for writing words of foreign origin, which are not used in non-borrowed words.

The easiest thing about learning Hungarian is that Hungarians do not use the present tense, only the past and future.

7. Basque

Some part population of modern and France speaks Basque. There are about a million of its speakers, which is not so little. But even among speakers, several distinct dialects can be distinguished. This system is isolated from other language groups and is considered one of the most difficult in the world.

The alphabet consists of 22 letters, the stress in a word can be either singular or multiple - on several syllables, depending on the length of the word. There are more than 20 cases, with the help of which words are connected with each other.

6. Polish

What this language is famous for is the number of exceptions to absolutely any rule. This applies to grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Not everyone can learn them all during the learning process. Sounds like Polish resembles Russian, but only at first glance. It seems that words that are familiar to us can mean completely opposite things.

To understand written Polish, you must first learn spoken language and understand what the Poles are talking about.

5. Eskimo

The language of these northern peoples It is even listed in the Guinness Book of Records for the most complex alphabet. Verbs in Eskimo have as many as 63 forms and this is only in the present tense. Only the carrier can deal with them.

In the Eskimo language there is such a concept - inflections. These are different forms of endings after the root, with the help of which a new word is formed. So in this language system there are 252 such inflections for the singular noun.

4. Tuyuka

It is spoken by small peoples, living along the banks of the Amazon River. Tuyuk has few sounds, but they are used to construct entire sentences. That is, a person, by uttering just a couple of sounds, can tell a whole story! Even the gender of a noun changes with the help of sounds. And each noun differs in gender: masculine, feminine and neuter. According to linguists, there are about 130 genders in the Tuyuki grammar.

The simplest forms in a Tuyuki sentence they look something like this: instead of saying the phrase “the girl is going to the river,” they say “the girl is going to the river, and I say this because I saw her going there.”

3. Russian

The biggest difficulty in learning Russian for foreigners is the stress in words. According to the students, they are located chaotically and are completely independent of either the part of speech or the time. What else is difficult for foreigners to understand:

The list of reasons why Russian can be included in the “Top Most Difficult Languages in the World” rating can be continued for a very long time. But to us, our native language does not seem so difficult.

2. Arabic

Everyone is familiar with such a feature of the Arabic language as writing text from left to right. But that's not all the complexity. One character in the alphabet of Arab countries can be written in four different ways. When writing, you need to move words to a new line completely, without dividing the word into 2 parts.

The writing system is complicated by the fact that, in addition to the plural and singular, there is a dual number.

There are also phonetic difficulties: when pronouncing, it is important to choose one of the four tones for each sound, otherwise the meaning of the word may be completely different from what you originally intended. In Arabic, no two words sound the same, unlike Russian words, for example, “onion” and “meadow”.

1. Chinese

Most linguists believe this the most difficult language. Among the main difficulties in studying it are:

Hieroglyphs. Their writing will baffle anyone who tries to copy them for the first time. Each hieroglyph is a word. It follows that their number reaches almost 90 thousand pieces.
Tones. Like Arabic, Chinese has 4 tones for every sound, and their correctness directly affects the meaning of what you say.

Many students choose to study Chinese only because it is different from all other existing language systems in the world. Competent Chinese translators are in great demand and there are not many of them.

These are just 10 examples of language systems that considered the most difficult languages in the world. The rating can easily be expanded with a couple dozen more interesting and unique dialects, adverbs and languages. Our planet is multifaceted, and the people living on it express their thoughts in a variety of ways.

Learning foreign languages is an important, exciting, but difficult activity. Nevertheless, some people turn it into a hobby, practically “collecting” mastered foreign languages. Why do they do this, what difficulties accompany this process, as well as what is the rating of the most problematic and sophisticated languages of the world - you will learn all this from the article.

Why do people love to learn languages?

It would seem that this is such a difficult, time-consuming activity that requires enormous motivation and concentration. Why do people voluntarily agree to learn a foreign language, and more than one, and often do it with pleasure? And there are those who do not stop at one or two languages, but increase the number of languages mastered to four, five or more. What is so exciting and necessary about this?

In general, the motives that motivate people to learn languages can be divided into two categories:

for pleasure;
to achieve the goal.

The first group includes a passion for foreign languages as a hobby, as well as the purposeful study of the culture of another country. Knowing the language, you can better understand the mentality of the people, their values and humor.

The second group includes the study of foreign languages for the purpose of emigration, improving professional status, communication and travel.

In general, we can say that people learn other languages for pleasure and benefit. Now let's talk about the difficulties that accompany this activity.

What is the difficulty of learning foreign languages?

For each case, the difficulties will be different. Let's list the most significant ones.

1.There is a big difference between your native language and a foreign one. So each person has their own hardest languages to learn. For example, most Dutch people find it easier to learn German or English than Russian or Serbian. Not to mention the languages of the peoples of Africa or Oceania. By the way, speakers of Slavic languages will have no less problems with the latter. But the reason is still the same - significant differences

2.Lack of a unified grammar. For example, it will not be easy for a native English speaker to master cases, conjugations and other forms in German, French, Estonian, Russian, etc. The difficulty of learning a language is also affected by the presence of exceptions and variations in it, which make it difficult to understand the general logic of the language.

3.Selected aspects: pronunciation, writing. For example, if the oral side of the Chinese language is not difficult to master, then you will have to tinker with the written side, namely, learn a huge number of hieroglyphs. The same can be said about the Japanese language, where there are three forms of writing, as well as various speech cliches, similar in meaning, but used in different situations. The English language, despite the simplicity of its grammatical structure, has complicated reading rules with many exceptions.

A few words about the great and mighty

Almost all of us have heard this maxim: “The Russian language is the most difficult.” And we, as schoolchildren, were proud that he was our family. But is it true that Russian is the most difficult language to learn?

As can be understood from the above, the complexity depends on a number of circumstances, among which the most prominent are the individual characteristics of the student. In other words, the Russian language is difficult to master for those people whose native language differs significantly in grammatical structure, pronunciation and writing.

The most difficult of the European and Slavic

The languages of the peoples of the Earth are so different from each other and have their own characteristics that it is possible to determine the most complex language in the world only within one or another large group. Another important factor is the individuality of the student - his abilities and native language.

Thus, among the European and Slavic languages the most difficult are considered to be:

Estonian, Polish, Hungarian, Icelandic - in terms of grammar;
Greek, Russian - in terms of graphics and spelling.
English, Polish, Hungarian, Georgian - in terms of pronunciation.

The most difficult of the Eastern and Asian

If your native language is Slavic or European, then you will experience the most difficulties in learning Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean. And all because their writing, pronunciation or grammatical structure are significantly different from the one to which other peoples are accustomed.

Arabic may not be the most difficult language in the world, but it has nevertheless been found that its writing requires more effort than reading Latin, Cyrillic, or even hieroglyphs. And the large number of hieroglyphic icons - 87 thousand - is the main obstacle to learning Chinese. The other listed languages are characterized by difficulties in pronunciation and a larger number of grammatical classes: genders, cases, persons, conjugations, tense forms, etc.

Rating of the most difficult languages

As you can already understand, compiling such a list is not an easy task. After all, the difficulty of learning a particular language for a foreigner lies in what language this person has as his native language, as well as what languages he already speaks and what his individual abilities are.

1. The most difficult language in the world is Basque, spoken by people living in southwestern France and northern Spain. It is characterized by an extremely complex grammatical structure and low prevalence, which made it possible to use the Basque language for encryption during the Second World War.

2. Tuyuca is the language of the small peoples of Brazil and Colombia. Its grammatical structure is quite complex, and the same can be said about spelling.

3. The Eskimo language has 252 noun endings, as well as 63 present tense forms of verbs. This is quite enough to make you suffer from studying it.

4. The language of the African Suaya tribe has no genders, verbs or nouns, but its grammar contains 15 forms of past and future tenses. In the lexicon you can find 108 different words for the color yellow, but not a single one for water.

5. The language of the Nivkhs (a small people living on Northern Sakhalin) is notable for its special counting system, which changes depending on what items are being counted. There are a total of 26 methods that anyone who decides to learn this rare language will have to master.

6. The Chippewa Indian Tribe boasts a native language containing 6,000 verb forms - a world record.

7. The Abaza language (belongs to the languages of the peoples of the Caucasus, is one of the official languages in Karachay-Cherkessia) is distinguished by such complex phonetics that it is almost impossible for a person for whom it is not native to master it.

What's the best way to learn any language?

Even the most difficult language in the world can be mastered if you approach this process purposefully and consciously. Create a lesson plan that includes goals for the day, week, month, and then follow it. It will take a lot of patience and constant practice.

In the case of common European and Slavic languages, watching videos with foreign subtitles helps a lot: this way you will not only hear pronunciation samples, but also learn to understand speech. Another valuable source when learning languages is communication in them.

Conclusion

Surely you have already realized that there is no one answer to the question of which foreign language is the most difficult. Each has its own nuances: be it pronunciation, graphic system, rules of grammar and spelling, lexical features, and so on. Whether a language is complex or simple - the answer often lies in the personality of the person studying it.

There is a myth that the Russian language is one of the most difficult in the world. However, in order to write a short summary about yourself in English, you will need a couple of months of training, but if you repeat this trick with Polish or Hungarian, you will have to master them for almost a year. So what is the most difficult language in the world? Today we will remember the 10 most difficult of all.

We have compiled our list from 10 to 1, where 10th place is the easiest of the difficult ones, the place belongs to the most difficult language to learn.

We present you the list in descending order: Icelandic, Polish, Basque, Estonian, Navajo, Japanese, Hungarian, Tuyuca, Arabic, Chinese. Today we will talk about three of them.

The most difficult language in the world, 10th place

The simplest of the complex languages was Icelandic, which retained words from ancient times. At least in Europe no one uses them anymore.

It is impossible to thoroughly learn this language without communicating with its native speakers, since transcription is not capable of conveying the sounds that Icelanders use.

To make it completely clear to you what we just wrote about, just try to pronounce this word: Eyjafjallajökull. This is the name of one of them. Do you want to learn this language?

The most difficult language in the world, 5th place

There are three types: hieroglyphs, katakana and hiragana. And even in the very manner of writing, the Japanese distinguished themselves - they write from right to left, in a column. Local students are especially unlucky, because in order to receive a higher education diploma, you need to know 15,000 hieroglyphs.

The most difficult language in the world: 1st place

Chinese is rightfully in first place in terms of complexity, but this does not prevent it from being considered the most common on the planet.

This language contains 87,000 hieroglyphs, although you can communicate knowing only 800, and someone who knows 3,000 hieroglyphs can read newspapers.

The problem is that the Chinese language has more than 10 dialects, and writing can be either columnar or horizontal, in European style.

Today you learned about the most complex languages of the world, the list of which would be incomplete without some Slavic dialect. Unfortunately or fortunately, this turned out to be not Russian, but Polish. It turns out that his grammar has not so many rules as exceptions to them.

The most difficult people - Polish

Our advice to those who want to learn Polish thoroughly: start with simple spoken language, and only when you master it will you be able to understand the logic of the grammar. Let's say there are 7 cases in this language, and you can only understand how they are used in practice.

The alphabet consists of 32 letters, but many of them are pronounced in two or three ways, differently. This is especially interesting when Poles pronounce the letter “l” as “v”.

Therefore, we especially try to protect you from trying to understand Polish only from familiar words. In this country, our Russian words can have a completely different meaning.

If you don’t want to rack your brains over complex languages, study European ones. They say that the brains of polyglots are much better developed, that their thinking and abilities are more advanced, but the main thing is not while you are learning foreign words and pronunciation features.

Start with English, and then maybe you’ll get to Chinese.

A person’s ability to speak languages begins in the earliest period of his development. If a child develops in society and masters the language of his environment, this means that he is, in principle, capable of mastering any other language that is not initially native to him. But what determines how difficult or easy it will be for a particular person to learn a particular language?

Difficulties in learning languages

Scientists have found that in learning a foreign language there are a number of difficulties for a person, both subjective and objective.

With subjective ones, everything is more or less clear, despite the fact that they can be so diverse among different representatives of humanity. First of all, subjective simplicity or complexity in the perception and mastery of a language is determined by the degree of relationship of the language being studied with the native language. The similarity or difference of linguistic categories is also important. For example, a person whose native language is Russian will find it difficult to perceive such features of Russian as declensions and gender of nouns, the category of verb aspect, that is, everything that is absent in the English language. The fact that the Russian language, like English, belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, does not in any way contribute to simplifying its perception by native speakers.
Also, a subjective factor in the comprehension of languages are the individual characteristics of the individual: for example, exceptional visual memory, which allows one to remember the complex spelling of the language being studied on the fly, even despite the fact that the individual’s native language has no similarities with it. Or developed mathematical abilities, which will always give their owner a head start when studying languages of the analytical type, again, regardless of the rules and characteristics of the native language.
But over objective difficulties, battles among linguists are still ongoing. What is considered such difficulties is clear. But on what scale should we evaluate them? There is no consensus today. What should be taken as a universal unit of complexity: the number and variety of vowels or consonants of a language, grammatical structure, plurality of verb forms, or something else? The Hungarian language has 35 cases, but the Eskimo language has 63 present tense forms, so how can you determine which one is more difficult? In other words, how do you measure the complexity of a language?

Gradations of language complexity

American scientists from the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department took the amount of time required to master the basics of a particular language as a unit of complexity, and determined the following gradations of difficulty in learning languages.

The first category includes fairly simple languages that can be mastered in approximately 600 hours of classroom instruction. These are Spanish and Swedish. That is, if you devote two hours a day, 6 times a week, to studying one of the above-mentioned languages, then in a year you can really master it at a fairly high level. Why not?
Icelandic and Russian fell into the next category - more complex languages. It will take at least 1100 hours to master them.
Japanese, Arabic and Chinese are classified as the most difficult languages, as they require 2,200 hours or more to master. Scientists include Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian in this very complex group of languages.

Do you agree with this system of grading the complexity of languages?

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Guinness Book of Records

And here is information about complex languages according to the Guinness Book of Records.

The Chinese language is due to the hieroglyphic writing system, which does not directly correspond to the sound of the words and concepts conveyed by the hieroglyphs. And also because of the system of semantic tones, of which there are 4 in the Chinese language. If you pronounce a certain word in an inappropriate tone, then this word can take on a completely opposite meaning, or even lose its meaning altogether.
The Tabasaran language, which is one of the state languages of Dagestan, has 48 cases of nouns.
The language of the Haida Indians living in North America is recognized as the most complex due to the record number of prefixes (prefixes) - more than 70 of them.
A North American Chippewa Indian language with approximately 6,000 verb forms.
The Eskimo language includes 63 present tense forms and 252 noun endings.

Conclusions of neurophysiologists

Neuroscientists have come to the conclusion that the most complex languages are those that are difficult for the brain to comprehend even for native speakers of such languages. Among such languages, scientists name Chinese and Arabic. An interesting fact is that when using these languages, the mechanisms of both the left and right hemispheres of the brain are activated in the brains of their speakers, while when communicating in all other languages, only one of the brain hemispheres is activated.

Therefore, if you want to effectively develop your brain, start learning Arabic or Chinese. Fortunately, in recent years they have become increasingly in demand on the world stage.

Motivation is everything

No matter how difficult the language you are going to conquer is, it can turn out to be much easier and more interesting for you, provided you have a strong motivation to study it. The result depends only on you, your perseverance and passion. As they say, if there is a desire!

What do you think: what is the most important thing for effective language acquisition and what importance does its complexity or simplicity have?