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What Is The Hardest Language To Learn?

188
Posted April 30, 2011 by admin in Infographics

People often ask, “What is the hardest language to learn?”. Though after some research, they will find that the answer is a complicated one. This is because the answer is largely subjective (opinion) and also depends on what your native language is.

Your Native Language

While no language is simple to learn, those that are more closely related to your native language are certainly going to be easier to learn than ones that are not.

Learning a completely different and exotic writing system can also be a big challenge, though that does not necessarily make a language more difficult. Grammar and sentence structure can often play a larger role in difficulty.

The Most Difficult Language

Since it’s impossible to say with certainty that there is a language that qualifies as “most difficult”, we’ve provided a handy infographic below that will give you a general idea of difficulty of the most common languages.

The statistics and rankings included in the infographic below are provided by the the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State and are intended for native English speakers.

Photo credit and Infographic source


188 Comments

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  1.  
    coyote
    May 5, 2011 at 3:51 pm

    I am not sure how you exactly define “proficiency”.
    I am from Croatia and am a native speaker of Croatian, a very similar language to Serbian which is mentioned in your list, and I can tell you that I have never, ever heard any foreigner who was “proficient” in Croatian or Serbian languages! It doesn’t matter how long they learn it, or if they live here, or whatever. Foreigners are constantly making grammatical errors. On several occasions I’ve listened to foreign professors from foreign universities who teach Serbian and Croatian languages, and guess what – they were making grammatical errors during interviews too. (not so many though, but still…)
    Please don’t think that I want to say that my language is something special. I heard that Finnish is also practically impossible to master.
    The only way to be perfectly bilingual (or multilingual) is to learn the languages when you are a child, preferably under the age of 3.
    I apologize for my errors. English is not my native language.

    Reply



    •  
      Steve
      May 23, 2011 at 4:49 am

      What errors?! Your English is better than virtually every native speaker.

      I don’t think anyone should apologise for their English, no matter how poor, when the majority of native English speakers from the UK, US and Australia (etc) can barely speak any other language.

      Reply



      •  
        ME
        March 5, 2012 at 11:59 pm

        That is the beauty of language,language evolves, If you went around talking like Shakespeare people would think you were crazy,even though in Shakespeare’s time talking like we do now would seem crazy. language is like a tree,you have the base,but everyone has their own little way of speaking it. The whole point of language is for communication,and easy sharing of ideas with others. There really is no TRUE way of speaking a language as long as the idea is understood. “I aint gonna vote for dat candidate” “I am not going to vote for that particular candidate.” both mean the exact same thing, but yet they are different,one is viewed as grammatically correct, while the other is viewed as slang. There is really no difference. Words evolve over time,and different pronunciations arise. That to me is the beauty of language.

        Reply



        •  
          Renee
          August 23, 2012 at 9:06 am

          Well said.

          Reply



      •  
        Thu
        January 8, 2013 at 3:32 am

        I have never heard kindness from any other foreigners that I have met. English is my second language and I have worked with English natives for a long time but most of them think those cannot speak English correctly are stupid. :(

        Anyway, their insults inspire me to improve my English and try to learn other languages as well.

        Reply



    •  
      lester
      June 6, 2011 at 8:26 am

      Proficiency is not the same as perfection or mastery, it simply implies that you are able in some degree to understand a language and make yourself understood. Your assertion that you’ve never met a foreigner proficient in your language shows that you’re probably patriotic, as is very common in your part of Europe, not that foreigners aren’t able to be proficient in your language.

      Reply



    •  
      Nelly
      February 5, 2012 at 6:51 am

      I’m a Serbian and I completely agree with you! Also more than half of people in Serbia(Croatia,Bosnia, etc.) can’t speak own language properly,’cause of grammar rules. Maybe sounds strange but it’s a fact! Also many people think it’s easy to write Serbian,’cause there is one sound for one letter, but trust me it’s not there are many rules. So once again, many Serbians (Croatians,Bosnians, etc.) have trouble with it.

      Reply



    •  
      OLA
      March 2, 2012 at 5:25 pm

      Some languages are harder than sign language of the deaf and dumb.

      Reply



      •  
        Lozay
        January 6, 2013 at 2:04 pm

        Ok first, it is extremely rude to call deaf/hard of hearing people “deaf and dumb” because they’re probably very smart by the fact that they can sign and write (if not speak) English. And yes, some languages are probably harder than certain sign languages but ASL isn’t easy either. ASL is totally unrelated to English; it has a different syntax. You also speak as if there is only one sign language, there is not a universal sign language out there; there are hundreds of different sign languages.

        Reply



        •  
          Col
          January 10, 2013 at 5:25 pm

          Dumb means Unable to speak, so those that are dumb (i.e. unable to speak), would use sign language. One example is the Dumb Friends League. It’s not a shelter for stupid animals, it’s a shelter for animals… who can’t speak.

          Reply



          •  
            DasMes
            February 28, 2013 at 2:56 pm

            You are wrong, the deaf people aren’t dumb at all, they can speak, i know many friends which are deaf and they can speak, but yeah it sounds sometimes really weird or funny but u can understand them.
            The sign language really are interesting and amazing language. I myself am deaf and master the Swedish language well as like the native does with pronouncing and spell. All I have met said that they didn’t even notice or understood that fact i am deaf:

            (sorry for bad English)

            Reply



    •  
      bill
      June 17, 2012 at 10:23 am

      When I was in China several Chinese told me of a Canadian, famous in China, who as an adult has learned to speak better Chinese than most educated native speakers. That is some feat, as Chinese is rightly in your “hard” category on this site.
      But some Chinese people also told me that Japanese is the hardest language, because it uses three different writing systems.

      Reply



    •  
      Gavin
      November 28, 2012 at 10:34 pm

      @Coyote
      I can tell you right now, your English is better than 1/3 of actual U.S. residents, structurally and grammatically. For example, look at my post. I’m sure I messed up a few commas here and there.

      Reply



    •  
      Jasmine
      December 12, 2012 at 4:05 am

      Your English sounds perfect to me (a native speaker of American English!)

      Reply



    •  
      Maggie
      March 7, 2013 at 9:33 pm

      “Please don’t think that I want to say that my language is something special.”

      It may not be what you want to say, but it is certainly what you are implying. It always amuses me when people want to think that their particular language is next to impossible for a foreigner to learn.

      Your written English is good, but I wonder how good you sound when you speak it.

      Reply



  2.  
    Missteigne
    May 8, 2011 at 3:23 am

    Hello I’am French and I saw a error. There is much more than 67 millions people with native french langage. The chart forgot the people living in Canada,Belgium,Swiss Africa who’s mother tongue is french to. French is the 10th language in the world (with non native speakers).

    I appolagize if my english is bad.

    Reply



    •  
      Francois
      May 18, 2011 at 3:30 pm

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

      Reply



      •  
        Aliahan
        March 11, 2013 at 6:53 pm

        But:
        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
        French is estimated to have 110 million native speakers, and 190 million more who speak a second language.

        So, Wikipedia is not a reliable source because it contradict itself.

        Reply



  3.  
    Birgit Schultz
    May 8, 2011 at 6:10 pm

    I can’t believe it – you left out German!

    Reply



    •  
      Steve
      May 23, 2011 at 4:50 am

      Because almost no one speaks it ;)

      Reply



      •  
        Grendel
        June 3, 2011 at 8:44 am

        100 million people is not much, granted… but still ;-)

        Reply



        •  
          coco
          June 9, 2011 at 11:20 pm

          cuz German is super uber-hard!

          Reply



          •  
            Chris B
            June 14, 2011 at 9:39 am

            On the contrary, English is even more closely related to German than it is to the other languages in the ‘easy’ section.

            Reply



          •  
            Trevor
            November 3, 2011 at 8:12 pm

            German isn’t that hard, and Afrikaans is actually closer to English than German is. It was left out probably because in the original chart where this information was taken from, German was listed in a category with Swahili for languages that are pretty much right between easy and medium.

            Reply



          •  
            one
            January 16, 2012 at 3:21 pm

            not harder than arabic

            Reply



          •  
            Etal
            June 24, 2012 at 6:56 am

            Can you give a link to the original?

            Reply



      •  
        Evan
        August 13, 2011 at 6:53 pm

        You are being sarcastic right? 100 million native speakers… Can’t believe you forgot German lol.

        Reply



  4.  
    Zaza
    May 9, 2011 at 11:05 am

    I think you forgot the best and most unique and hardest one the Hungarian language.

    Reply



    •  
      Moonlightrunner
      June 3, 2011 at 12:55 am

      …which is related to Finnish so it belongs to the medium group.

      Reply



      •  
        Jamie
        June 14, 2011 at 6:18 pm

        thats wrong…..Hungerian is one of the few languages that is unrelated to another one.

        Reply



        •  
          milK
          June 20, 2011 at 7:53 am

          It’s not wrong nor right since people have been arguing about that for years. Check the wikipedia article somewhere on the bottom “Controversy over origins”. And even if you still disagree there are a lot of words wich are strangely similar to the Finnish ones.

          en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language

          That said I found it a very difficult language to learn.

          Reply



          •  
            someone
            December 11, 2011 at 7:54 pm

            you are forgetting wikipedia can be edited by anyone who has a computer. it is not accurate in the slightest because everything could be made up.

            and by the by their are a very small hand full of languages that were conjured up wi

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