The easiest way to learn a language is to be born and grow up in a particular community where it is spoken. However, this has not stopped people from picking up other languages alien to their native land or country.
However, there are certain languages in the world that pose a great challenge for people, especially English speakers, to learn. Here are 20 of them:
1. Finnish
Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Nouns have 15 different cases, while English has only three: subjective, objective, possessive.
2. Russian
There are some definite roadblocks to becoming flu
ent in Russian, among them being that spelling isn’t always straightforward, it’s full of vowel sounds unfamiliar to the average English speaker, and it requires learning an entirely new alphabet to master.
3. Vietnamese
Unusual grammar, difficult pronunciation, and six different tones make Vietnamese a challenge for English speakers. Expect to spend around 1,100 hours in class to attain speaking and reading proficiency, according to the Foreign Service Institute.
4. Mongolian
The trickiest part of Mongolian is the pronunciation. Once you’ve got that down, the grammar’s not so hard, as long as you know Finnish, and the alphabet’s a breeze, assuming you can read Russian. If you don’t meet those two criteria, though, it is a very challenging language to master.
5. Hungarian
Hungarian is a member of the same small language family as Finnis
h, so the average English speaker won’t be finding much familiarity in its vocabulary. It also has 18 cases and 14 vowels, which makes saying things right particularly difficult.
6. Thai
It isn’t the grammar that will bog you down when you’re trying to learn Thai, it’s the writing and the pronunciation, which has five different tones and long and short vowel sounds.
7. Icelandic
Words in this language can be very long and deciphering how to pronounce them can defy intuition. It’s frequently listed as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
8. Estonian
Estonian is the third and final language in that tricky class with Hun
garian and Finnish on this list, and it’s packed with a whopping 14 noun cases. In addition to that, consonants and vowels have three distinct lengths: short, long, and overly long.
9. Georgian
Georgian has its own writing system that no other language uses. And a lot of the letters look surprisingly similar. For example, ვ, კ, პ, ჰ, ყ, ფ, გ, and ც are all different letters that you might have a hard time distinguishing between if you’re new to the game.
10. Czech
Each letter in Czech only has one pronunciation ever. Also, Čtvrtek means Thursday, and mastering the way each of those sounds works together is going to take you a while.
11. Albanian
Albanian’s 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to m
aster this language is going to be a wild ride. In addition, the grammar is filled with exceptions to the rule that you’ll have to remember, too.
12. Turkish
Turkish is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won’t have such a hard time grasping it.
13. Polish
The pronunciation in Polish is what will get you. There are a lot of sounds that simply aren’t present in the English language and require a lot of practice to master.
14. Navajo
Navajo is hard enough to figure out that code talkers in World War II used the language to d
evelop a code for communicating that the Germans wouldn’t be able to track.
15. Greek
The most obvious impediment to learning Greek is the alphabet. The grammar can also be a little tricky, with lots of rules, and gendered nouns. And pronunciation requires some practice because there are sounds that don’t have an equivalent in English.
16. Korean
Being able to speak Korean is quite a challenging task, thanks to grammar that is totally different from English and pronunciation that is laden with difficult-to-master rules.
17. Mandarin
The alphabet is made of very elaborate characters; the language is tonal; there are lots of idi
oms, and the ability to speak the language doesn’t help you read it. Knowing how to read it doesn’t even particularly help learn how to write it. It’s not for the faint of heart.
18. Japanese
The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you with no clues unless you also speak Chinese. The grammar seems like it’s very simple, but Japanese also uses particles, which are markers for parts of speech that do not have an English equivalent.
19. Cantonese
Because of its pictorial writing system, you aren’t going to be able to learn to read phonetically. In addition, because Mandarin is the simplified version of Cantonese and is widely used across mainland China, there simply aren’t as many resources for learning Cantonese.
20. Arabic
To learn Arabic, you have to learn a new alphabet and get used to reading from right to left. A lot of the sounds in
the language are difficult for English speakers to master, and the grammar is packed with irregular verbs.
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