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What are the Most Difficult Spoken Languages to Learn?

What are the most difficult languages to learn for english speakers? Do you have a list of the most difficult languages to learn?


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According to the book of Genesis, mankind after The Great Flood generation used to speak one language until they built the Tower of Babel. The city opposes God’s plan for humanity to scatter upon the face of the earth so God decided to confuse their speeches. Biblically speaking, the people behind the Tower of Babel were to blame why we have over 2,650 languages plus over 7,000 dialects in the world.

It’s hard to pick which is the most difficult language to learn. It would also be a question who is the right person to decide if he didn’t study all the languages at all. There are a lot of factors to consider when defining the complexity of a language. Our first language is one determining factor. There are languages structured in a little similar way to the other languages because of the grammatical system or the alphabets used – like Italian, Spanish and Portuguese; Danish, Norwegian and Swedish; and Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Thus, it may be easy for one to learn the language closer to his mother tongue.

Other factors that would practically be an influence in the art of language learning include the learning environment, the effectiveness of training materials and the level of one’s enthusiasm. There are also several others who just have that natural flair in learning new languages, whether or not it is technically connected from their first language.

Language experts said that languages which use characters with some sort of diacritics and other hard-to-decipher markings, like that of Chinese and Korean, are not necessarily the difficult ones. Not even languages with the complex system of punctuation like that of German and Russian make it to the most difficult. It also doesn’t mean that if a language is dominant and widely spoken, it is the easiest one to learn. English can be difficult because it has a lot of irregular verbs; it has words that could mean a lot of things and words that are pronounced differently. Hungarian, having 35 forms of nouns, would sound nerve-racking already, but it’s only close to the most difficult.

Based on the study by the British Foreign Office, out of the thousands of languages the most difficult to learn is the Basque language. It is spoken in regions of Spain and France. What makes it hard to learn is the fact that it’s agglutinative –it is characterized by the use of prefixes, infixes and suffixes to form another word. Unlike English, you can’t just change the end of the verb you can also change the beginning. There is more to learn about this language. Learning this may or may not make a difference but it’s all up to you if you’re up for the language challenge.
Oct 18th, 2012 at 11:59 PM
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