Hardest Language to Learn

As I said before, the language that you find hardest to learn may not be the same for anyone else due to different base languages. For example, someone who knows to read and write Hindi will find any other language that follows the Devanagari script to be a relatively easy language to learn, while suddenly trying to learn Afrikaans will help him conclude that it is most certainly the hardest language to learn in the world. Still, this article will attempt to give details on some of the hardest languages to learn in the world and why people think so. Hopefully, by the end of the article, we will be confidently able to conclude on what language is the hardest to learn in the world.

Chinese Language - Mandarin
Most surveys claim that Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. Yet, many people find Chinese language to be really hard to learn for various reasons. These reasons are as follows:

• It has a different and unique writing system that requires a learner to first learn it and then get on with the language.
• Every word is a different symbol and there are no phonetic cues that one can take some clues from.
• The language tone is also difficult when someone's trying to learn speaking it.

Language of Finland - Finnish
With so few native people who speak the language, one would have thought that there will be even fewer people learning it. Yet, Finnish is one of the toppers in the list of hardest languages to learn for its extremely complicated grammar and "endless noun cases". Finnish language may seem like a surprise entrant on the hardest language to learn list, but many people do claim that it is difficult to grasp. Cantonese, that is based on Chinese is also a really difficult to learn language because unlike Chinese (that has 4 tones), it actually has 8.

Language of Iceland - Icelandic
I always wonder why people make efforts to learn languages that do not have any international significance whatsoever, just for the adrenaline of learning something new and difficult. But I guess that's why I am where I am, and these people are teaching at international universities (with high pay packages and even higher perks)! Icelandic hits a spot on the hardest language to learn in the world list because of its primitive vocabulary and complex grammar. This language is even listed as one of the hardest language to learn for English-speaking people. Know more about the top languages to learn.

Egyptian Dialect of Arabic
Arabic figures as one of the hardest languages to learn because of the simple fact that it makes people do something they are entirely unaccustomed to doing. This language requires people to learn to read and write in the opposite direction, i.e. from right to left and not the routine left to right. Whenever anyone faces the prospect of doing something that is a complete antithesis of what they generally do, their minds automatically close on the subject a little. But still, even after accounting for that, Arabic can still be categorized as a difficult to learn language for its guttural sounds and unique annunciations.

Language of Hungary - Hungarian
There is a book titled 'How to learn any language' by Harry Faber that speaks of about 35 different languages. The author, like many others, claims that Hungarian is indeed the toughest language to learn in the world. Some of the many reasons that support this claim are as follows:

• It is an independent language that cannot be traced back to any origin. This means that there is no round about easy way to learn it, like as I stated in the beginning with Hindi and any other language that uses the same base of Sanskrit.
• The language is unique in the sense that it has all the tree genders, masculine, feminine and neuter with about 7 different verb conjugations.
• The language is not linked to any base set of languages, so there is normally no concrete similarity between it and any other language that you might already know.

My Personal View - Sanskrit
Personally I believe that Sanskrit is the hardest language to learn in the world. I have been trying for years and am yet to become fluent in it (to my father's great disappointment). I support my claim that Sanskrit is the hardest language to learn in the world with the following points:

• Sanskrit is not just a language to be spoken, it is a language that needs to be felt. It requires the use of different tones, basal notes and even clarity. In fact, clarity of the words spoken (i.e. the right pronunciation) is the base pillar of the language.
• Sanskrit does not have any backing. By that I mean that particular pronunciations (for example ksh) in the language are not even found in any others, because of which most people unused to speaking it find themselves saying altered pronunciations.
• Most important of all, Sanskrit does not have word bifurcations, that is a sentence is written together with sometimes there being no space between two words. It falls on the reader and indeed the learner to split the monstrous sentences into smaller words and pronounce them properly with the required spacing.

Anyway, apart from these languages, there are many other languages that are considered as the hardest language to learn. Russian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Tamil, Latin, Mongolian and Tagalog are a few of them. In fact, there are people who believe English to be the most difficult language to learn. That seals it then, we have arrived at a conclusion. There is no concrete language that can be tagged as the hardest language to learn, for it all depends on what your original language is and your ability to grasp new things.