Language represents complex system signs, which includes sounds and words, and for each nation it is unique and inimitable. Any language has its own characteristics, so to learn one of them, you need to try very hard - there are no simple and easy languages. We present to you the most difficult languages to learn, but which you can still master.
10. Icelandic
Icelandic is the most difficult to pronounce. It is considered the most ancient, and many linguistic units are used only by the native inhabitants of Iceland. No one except native speakers can convey the truly unique sound of words: phonetics contains sounds that, as they say, can break your tongue when pronounced.
9. Finnish
How about 15 cases and several hundred finite forms of the verb? But hot Finnish guys learn this at school. The only thing that makes a language simpler is the exact correspondence of the spelling of a word to its phonetics, that is, both we write and pronounce. Interestingly, Finnish does not have a future tense, but there are several forms of the past tense.
8. Navajo
Navajo is an Indian tribe. In the Second World War this language was specially taught to American soldiers, who used it to transmit codes. In Navajo, verb forms are formed and modified by persons through the addition of prefixes, and in addition to vowels and consonants, there are special 4 tones: rising and falling, high and low. Navajo is gradually forgotten by young Indians: there are no dictionaries, and young people are gradually switching to English.
7. Hungarian
If you can crack 15 cases of Finnish like nuts, then try to master 35 cases of Hungarian and very long and drawn-out vowels. If this doesn’t seem enough, then here’s a countless number of suffixes and the same number of stable expressions unique to Hungarian. To somehow facilitate the study, there are only 2 forms of time for you: past and future.
6. Eskimo
The present tense of the verb alone in the Eskimo language has 63 forms, and each noun has more than 200 case forms, which are formed by changing the ending of the word, prefix and suffix. The Eskimo language, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most difficult sign system, is very figurative: for example, we simply say “Internet,” but an Eskimo will say “travel through layers.”
This is one of the official Dagestan languages, which is also noted in the Book of Records. It has 46 cases and not a single preposition. Postpositions are used instead. The Tabasaran language has 3 dialects. In general, the language includes many borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Azerbaijani and Russian.
Basque is spoken by a few residents of the south of France and the north of Spain. In dictionaries you can count approximately half a million words and dialects. The Basque language was also used by cunning American intelligence officers who participated in World War II, transmitting secret information to headquarters.
3. Russian
Yes, yes, our native language is in third place in terms of difficulty to learn. The main difficulty for foreigners in studying our “great and mighty” is the emphasis. For example, in French the stress always falls on the last syllable, but in ours the stress can be placed absolutely anywhere in the word. Sometimes the meaning of the word itself depends on which syllable is stressed, for example, Organ and organ. The Russian language is very rich in synonyms: one lexical unit can have several dozen synonyms. By the way, a huge variety of fonts have been developed for our language, and you can see the 25 best of them.
2. Arabic
One letter Arabic may have 4 spelling options, depending on its location in the word. This language does not lowercase letters, and the rules prohibit breaking words by hyphenation. The most important thing is that vowel sounds are not displayed when writing, and words are written from right to left. Almost all languages of the world have two numbers: singular and plural, but in Arabic there is a third number - dual. Here, each word has its own special pronunciation, and there are none that are pronounced the same. This is due to the fact that each individual sound has 4 tones, and its pronunciation is affected by the place it occupies in the word.
1. Chinese
We all know that in writing the Chinese use hieroglyphs, of which there are more than 87 thousand, and how they are written is incredibly important: the meaning of the word will depend on the degree of pressure and the length of any stroke. Moreover, one “letter” of a hieroglyph can denote a separate word, or even a whole sentence, and the graphic symbol does not carry a phonetic load.
The most expensive private houses and mansions in the world
8 most beautiful views sports
Learning a new language is exciting and helps develop memory and flexibility of thinking. However, it cannot be called easy. And it can become even more difficult if you intend to master one of the most difficult languages in the world. Indeed, in this case it will be necessary to take into account not only the laws of the functioning of words and sentences, but also cultural characteristics native speakers.
We present the top 10 most difficult languages in the world that can make even an experienced linguist shiver. It is based on the study of specialized linguistic resources, as well as language records from the Guinness Book of Records.
Spelling and grammar are two areas that will present a lot of challenges to a Polish language learner. Polish words are loaded with consonants, making them difficult to pronounce and write. For example, szczęście means "happiness" and bezwzględny means "merciless".
Polish grammar has seven cases in the noun declension system. Plus there is one more - vocative. As one linguist put it: “It’s like German on steroids.”
But the good news is that Polish uses the Latin alphabet, so the letters will be familiar to those who are familiar with the English language.
It has a reputation for being a difficult language to learn, and for good reason. The nouns in it have 15 cases. Finnish is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, so it doesn't have any Latin or German influence to help you guess what a word means. In theory, the pronunciation of Finnish words is quite straightforward, but they do have long vowels and consonants.
And if you are intrigued by a place with such a complex language, then we recommend visiting Helsinki, recognized as one of the.
The language is so obscure and unusual that the U.S. Air Force called up Navajo code talkers during World War II. They used their native language to communicate by telephone and walkie-talkie. If you are interested in the history of these code talkers, we recommend watching John Woo's 2002 film Windtalkers.
The Navajo language has only 4 vowel sounds, but many consonants. Moreover, in one word there can be either only hissing consonants or only whistling consonants. This is called "consonant harmony".
In addition to all the complexities, the Navajo language has sounds that have no equivalent in European languages.
The Thai language is not complicated by its grammar, but by its pronunciation, which has five different tones, as well as long and short vowel sounds. The Thai alphabet has a staggering 44 consonant letters, 28 vowel forms and 4 diacritic to indicate tones.
The Thai alphabet does not use letters from the Latin alphabet. It comes from the Khmer alphabet and has a distinctive rounded appearance. Moreover, unlike the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, in the Thai language there is no difference between lowercase and in capital letters. Sentences are separated from each other by a space.
Still not impressed? Then here's another fact for you: the Thai language has several registers of speech.
- Street or colloquial - it is spoken with friends.
- Elegant or formal, it is used to talk to strangers.
- Rhetorical - for public speaking.
- Religious - used to address clergy.
- Royal - to discuss actions or address the royal family. The royal family is held in the highest regard in Thailand, and there is a very big difference between royal and colloquial speaking styles.
The Eskimo language, which is included in the Guinness Book of Records, probably refers to the Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Those who decide to learn the language of the “children of the frost” (as Jack London called the Eskimos) will have to learn sixty-three forms of the present tense. But these are still flowers. And berries are 252 endings (inflections) for simple nouns.
Eskimo speakers think figuratively. And this imagery is clearly demonstrated by the word “ikiaqqivik”. It translates as “travel through layers” and refers to the Internet.
Learning the language of the Chippewa (Ojibwe) Indian people living in the United States will bring real pleasure to those who like to “burn with the verb.” After all, it has about 6 thousand verb forms.
The Chippewa language has no single standardization because it exists as a chain of interrelated local varieties, usually called dialects. However, a couple of words are known to every lover of stories about cowboys and Indians - these are “wigwam” and “totem”.
Due to its complexity, the Chippewa language was included in the Guinness Book of Records.
This endangered language is spoken by the Haida people living in America and Canada.
The complexity of this language (listed in the Guinness Book of Records) is due to the fact that it has seventy prefixes. The Haida language once had more than 30 different dialects. Today, only three of them remain. The tone system used depends on the dialect.
The Haida language is amazingly detailed and varied. For example, there are approximately 50 in various ways describe how someone falls, depending on how they landed and what caused the fall.
This is the hardest one state languages Dagestan. A significant difficulty for those who decide to study the Tabasaran language is the cases of nouns. There are, according to various estimates, from 44 to 52.
Add to this ten more parts of speech, among which there are no prepositions (postpositions took their place) and three dialects, and you will understand why Tabasaran is included in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult languages in the world.
There are dozens of varieties of Arabic, which are usually classified by region or country. Moreover, these varieties can differ radically from each other. So the first step is to choose the dialect you want to learn, but that's the easy part.
Arabic is a language with a non-Latin alphabet. Its 28 letters are easier to understand than thousands of Chinese characters, but it still takes some getting used to. new system writing - from right to left.
What makes reading and writing Arabic especially difficult for beginners is the elimination of most vowels in words. There are also features of spoken Arabic that make it difficult to learn. Some of the sounds used are simply unfamiliar to Russian-speaking people.
1. Chinese Mandarin
When asked what is the most complex language in the world, many linguists and the Guinness Book of Records give the answer: “Chinese.” We are talking about the Northern Chinese language (also known as Putonghua, also known as Mandarin in Western literature), which includes Chinese dialects that are close to each other. They are spoken by the population of most of Northern and Western China.
Mandarin Chinese is a real challenge for polyglots for a number of reasons:
- First of all, China's writing system is extremely complex for people accustomed to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet. People learning Chinese have to memorize a lot of characters that look like complex pictures. Moreover, hieroglyphs are not words, but concepts.
- More lightweight system writing (pinyin) simplifies the writing of hieroglyphs. But this is just another system that those who want to read and write Chinese will have to learn.
- Writing is not the only difficult part of learning Mandarin. The tonal nature of language is also very important. Chinese Mandarin has four tones, so one word can be pronounced with four different ways, and each pronunciation has a different meaning. For example, the word ma can mean "mother", "horse", interrogative particle or "swear" - depending on the tone in which you say it.
However, for many Chinese (and other foreigners) it is just as difficult to learn Russian as it is for a Russian to learn Chinese.
When it comes to learning a foreign language, its difficulty largely depends on how different it is from the languages you are already fluent in. However, any of the languages mentioned in this list can be learned without special labor. The main thing is to make a lesson plan and find good teacher(ideally a native speaker). In addition, in learning a language, as in any other activity, motivation plays a huge role. Lack of interest will make any language incredibly difficult, no matter your native language and the differences between it and what you are studying.
German is 2.5 times more difficult than English. Italian and Spanish are 1.8 times more difficult than English. French is twice as difficult as English. This If we're talking about about the average level(Intermediate). If we are talking about the Advanced level, then German is 1.5 times more difficult than English. Italian, Spanish, French are 1.4 times more difficult than English. because English has a lot of exceptions, which are important if you want elegance. and are secondary for practical purposes. I'm speaking from personal experience— I taught myself these languages. and I teach three foreign languages.
voices from the audience:« what are you saying? my godmother in Italy learned Italian in six months! but he has been living in England for almost two years and cannot learn English". The word “learned” has very different meanings different people. The more often a person uses the words “ fluently, perfectly, learned“, the more likely it is that he himself does not know him and judges him from the words of his godfathers, neighbors and friends. or by the way the words are read - the most popular criterion, by the way. But the easiest way to read words in Russian is that we both write and read. but does this mean that in other respects Russian is the easiest?
German has 4 cases and 3 genders, which are reflected by changing endings, stricter word order, separable prefixes: “ I was just about to call you. - Ich habe gerade vorge habt, dich anzu rufen". verbatim: " I'm just ready to call you«. ge And t show elapsed time. zu is an analogue of the English infinitive particle to. their verbs have personal endings. " ich arbeite, du arbeitest, er arbeitet... - I work, you work, he works...»
Italian, Spanish, French have feminine and masculine gender, just as many irregular verbs. their verbs have personal endings. " io lavoro, tu lavori, lui lavora... - I work, you work, he works...“and there are even more times. there are four more tenses that show the desirability or subjectivity of an opinion. " E'
di Milano. — He is from Milan. Credo сhe sia di Milano. — I believe that he is from Milan«.
these three languages are full short phrases and words, which makes them difficult for self-study on the spot. for example, what in English sounds like “he has” and in German “er hat” for Italians is simply “ha” (read “a”). The English “he is” is the Italian “e”. “it is” is also “e” among Italians. There is among the Italians c’e’ (read “che”). I’ll tell you more about learning languages by immersion in the next post.
Chinese. Their grammar is simpler than English. but almost half! all phrases -
special patterns, that is, thought is triggered in a very strange way for us, for example
My mother bought this bread. -> “This is where my mother buys bread from”.
I didn't learn hieroglyphs. There are textbooks with Latin words written down, for example:
Ta kan de bao shi "Renmin ribao". — He is reading from the newspaper “Zhenmin Ribao”.
Wo gei ni jieshao zuo zhongguo fan de fangfa. — I’ll introduce you to making Chinese food the way (I can).
Although written in Latin, their words have many superscripts.
Each vowel has 4 types of reading: descending, rising, plateau, springboard.
for example, the word “ma”, therefore, they mean 4 completely different things.
When I had conversations with the Chinese, they very often asked questions because of this.
When I taught, there was no Skype yet. and to practice Chinese, I went to their hostel,
I knocked on a dozen rooms. and finally found people willing to barter: my Russian into their Chinese.
The beauty of German and Chinese in the way they form new words.
The Germans have a much more developed system of prefixes than the Russians.
for example, by the way gehen - to go 31 prefixes are added and very different words are obtained.
it follows that if we know 20 important verb roots and 20 common prefixes,
then we thus know 20 x 20 = 400 words. Cool!
In English, various scientific terms are taken from Latin. in German they take their root,
add their prefix and we have an advanced word.
It is interesting to find out which language is more difficult to learn - Spanish, English or some other. Russian is considered one of the most difficult languages, and English is the most common.
Is English difficult?
Very often we hear about the question of the difficulty of learning English. It must be admitted that English is far from the most difficult language in the world. When comparing it with Polish, Chinese, Arabic or Russian, it is easy.Why is it so difficult for Russian-speaking people to master the English language? This is due to the fact that Russian is an inflectional language, that is, words can be placed in a sentence in any way you like, while in English each word is in its specific place.
Some words are known to us due to the fact that they are used in Russian, as borrowed from English. These are words such as elevator, rails, manager, finish, as well as jeans, content, and so on. In addition to such words, there are international words that sound the same in many languages. These are the words satellite, microscope, republic, police, etc.
If you believe the conclusions that British researchers once made, English is the most positive and simple language in comparison with other world languages.
The skeleton of every language, as we know, is grammar. From a grammatical point of view, English is one of the most logical and simple European languages. Due to the fact that there are practically no personal endings in English, it can be classified as an analytical language. Due to the lack of personal endings, it has a wide structure of grammatical tenses.
The main thing when studying is to understand that knowledge of times does not mean knowledge of the language. Many people become afraid of the times, which prevents them from continuing their study.
The real difficulty in learning English is the numerous prepositions. They have to be taught for a long time and conscientiously, they have noticeable semantic separating functions, prepositions are used very actively in the language.
However, learning a language of any complexity will require you to spend both time and effort. It is impossible to learn any language both well and quickly. By the way, according to the site, the longest word in the world is in English language. You can read more about the longest words in the world.
Difficult Russian language
All those who have decided to study Russian report considerable difficulties. Comparing Russian with other languages, we can confidently say that it has features that are absent in many other languages. The most common thing that confuses people in Russian is the order of words in a sentence, this is due to the fact that it is not fixed. So, words can come in completely different sequences, the most important thing is that the meaning and logic of what is said does not change. 
The difficulty in learning the Russian language by foreigners is caused by the case declension. Another difficulty is the very long spelling of some words. What also causes difficulties is that Russian has a considerable number of rules and an even greater number of exceptions to them. This language is difficult not only for foreigners, but also for ordinary students for whom it is native.
Is Spanish difficult?
There is often a question about the complexity of the Spanish language, as it is taught in universities and schools in many countries. Being a Romance language, this language is similar to Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and French. They have a lot common features. This melodic language is not considered difficult to learn. 
If you compare Spanish grammar with Russian grammar, it is simpler. To master it, with persistent practice, even one month is enough. In the same month, it is quite possible to learn a thousand words. This will be enough for simple communication.
It is believed that learning Spanish is much easier for native speakers Indo-European language, for example, Russian or Icelandic. When communicating with Spanish speakers, it is difficult to get used to the fact that they pronounce consonants unclearly. Having mastered elementary grammar and having some vocabulary, it is often recommended to start communicating with a Spanish speaker, which will significantly speed up learning Spanish.
The most difficult foreign language in the world
Studying any foreign language, many myths should not be taken into account. We often hear that a language must be learned from early childhood. There is also a myth that the teacher must be a native speaker of the language being studied. Another myth is that you need to learn a language in the country where it is the state language. 
It is known that, according to conservative estimates, there are no less than forty thousand languages and dialects in the world. The eastern groups of languages are considered one of the most complex. Both Arabic script and hieroglyphs cause problems when studying. However, it is impossible to say unequivocally which language is the most difficult. This is influenced by several factors, including the degree of difficulty depending on what language is native to the person who has started learning a foreign language.
Neurophysiologists report that the most difficult language to master is the one that is difficult for the brain of the native speaker to perceive. They call the most difficult languages Chinese and Arabic.
We can confidently say that the Russian language, which is very difficult for most, is easier to learn by Czechs and Ukrainians, but for the Japanese it can be too difficult. If we talk about the complexity of the language, assessing its writing, then the most complex languages are considered to be Chinese, as well as Japanese and Korean.
Many agree that the Basque language is the hardest, since it is not connected and does not resemble any known language, this applies not only to living languages, but also to dead ones. Its carriers are approximately six hundred sixty thousand people. Basque has an extremely complex word structure. Scientists conclude that it arose even before the appearance of the Indo-European language group. The conclusion is that no matter what language a person is native to, it will be extremely difficult for him to master Basque. Eskimo, Chippewa, Tabasaran and Haida are also recognized as the most difficult languages.
Subscribe to our channel in Yandex.Zen
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 were especially unlucky, because in order to get a diploma higher education, you need to know 15,000 hieroglyphs.
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 Chinese language There are 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.