Learning of the Most Difficult World Languages

Be people ever so many, their impressions of learning foreign languages will be so various. Everyone faces difficulties – sometimes it's almost unsolvable grammatical puzzles, and sometimes it's longstanding work on pronunciation or skills similar to drawing, that Oriental languages require. The proverb “We write Liverpool and we read Manchester” in its own way illustrates the essence of these problems, even if it refers to the most widely spoken language – English.

All of these difficulties make learning of any language a unique process, and your own difficulty rating may vary. However, according to estimates of the US Foreign Service Institute, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese are considered the most difficult languages to master. At the same time, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian should not be left unmentioned, which are famous for their complex pronunciation and abundance of cases.

Chinese. Chinese learners soon discover that its system is fundamentally differs from most European languages. Written Chinese is more similar to the art of drawing, where each word is a separate drawing and each sentence is a whole picture. Each hieroglyph symbolizes a word, but does not give an idea of its pronunciation. Chinese is also based on tone: a word can have different meanings depending on which tone is used upon pronunciation. Add a huge number of homophones, and you’ll get a real art of learning Chinese!

Arabic. The main test in learning Arabic is its writing system. The same letter can be written in four different ways, depending on its position in the word. In addition, there are no vowels in the written text. Arabic, which is different from most European languages, does not offer the learner much in common with other languages being studied. The verb number system includes singular, plural and dual, and the present tense has 13 forms. However, one of the biggest barriers to Arabic mastery is its dialects, which can be quite different from each other, as say French, Latin, and Spanish.

Tuyuca is a language of the depths of the Amazonian region. Its main test is agglutination. For example, the word “hóabãsiriga” means “I don't know how to write this.” In this language, there are two translations of the word “we” – inclusive and exclusive. The number of nouns belonging to a certain class (gender) in Tuyuca varies from 50 to 140. The most surprising thing is that this language always has a verb ending, indicating the source of speaker's information. For example, “Diga ape-wi” means “the boy was playing football (I saw it myself).” In Tuyuca, such endings are obligatory, so its speakers always remember where the information comes from!

Hungarian. The first thing that catches the eye is the 35 cases or noun forms in Hungarian. This already makes Hungarian one of the most difficult languages to mastery. Hungarian has many expressive idioms and suffixes. In addition, the number of vowels and the specificity of their pronunciation (deep in the throat) make this language difficult to pronounce. Maintaining the Hungarian language at a decent level requires significant efforts.

Japanese. The main difficulty of Japanese is that pronunciation is different from writing. This means that you cannot learn to speak Japanese based on reading alone, and vice versa. Moreover, there are three different writing systems. The kanji system uses Chinese characters and it is necessary to memorize from 10 to 15 thousand characters (requiring routine work and mnemonic devices will not help here). In addition, Japanese includes two syllabaries: katakana (for transcribing foreign words) and hiragana (for writing suffixes and grammatical particles). In some countries, Japanese students are given three times as much time as those studying basic European languages.

Navajo. This language is surprisingly complex, so we won't go into details of its structure. Let’s only note that, for example, unlike English, where we mark the third person singular in the present tense with the help of a suffix, in Navajo all grammatical persons differ from each other by verbal prefixes.

During World War II, this language has been used to transmit radio messages as a cipher (radio operators, who transmitted these messages, were bilingual Navajo speakers). The advantage of this method is that the Navajo can easily encrypt the message. The Japanese were never able to decipher this code. Navajo has been chosen not only because of its incredible complexity, but also because at that time there were no dictionaries or grammar references for this language, but there were native speakers.

Estonian. Estonian has a very strict case system. Case is a grammatical category determining forms of all words in a sentence. There are twice as many cases in Estonian than in Russian – 14. In addition, this language has many exceptions to the rules, and many words can denote several different concepts.

Basque. Basque has 24 cases. Probably it is the oldest language in Europe. It belongs to agglutinative languages, that is, complex and new words are formed in it with the help of suffixes, prefixes, infixes. Therefore, it can be attributed to synthetic languages. In other words, case endings are used to express connections between words. Moreover, not only the endings, but also verbal beginnings change. In addition to the usual Indo-European moods, Basque has some other moods (e.g., potential). The notation system for the subject, direct and indirect objects in this language is complex – they are all part of the verb.

Icelandic. Icelandic has a very complex grammar and archaic vocabulary making it difficult to mastery. All noun declensions and verb conjugations in it have remained practically unchanged for many centuries. The phonemes in Icelandic are so complex that they can only be mastered by direct talking to native speakers or by constant listening to audio recordings of the original speech.

Polish. There are seven cases in Polish, and grammar exceptions take up more space than rules. In German, for example, there are only four cases, and it is clear how they work. But to learn Polish cases, it will take much more time and effort to master the logic and rules, because it is impossible to understand their system right away. Probably only after mastering the whole language, it will be possible to understand the system. In addition, the sounds in Polish are quite complex. Therefore, if you are going to communicate with the Poles in their language, be careful about your pronunciation, otherwise you won’t be understood!

That's it! Now friends, if you're going to master one of the above-mentioned languages, you know what you're up against!

It is important to remember that a language that is very different from your native language will seem much more difficult for you. And the sooner you understand and assimilate the logic of its structure, the sooner you will notice that language study becomes easier and easier.