Which is the most difficult language to learn?

Which is the most difficult language to learn?

First off, the great news: there is no such thing as an intrinsically difficult language.  There are some obvious pieces of evidence for this.  Children in any language environment, whether learning English or Mandarin or Quecha, pick up and develop fluency in their native language at the same age and at the same rate.  Moreover, languages are there so that people can communicate rather than create unnecessary barriers.  When children learn a language, they do have the same difficulty with the bits that adult academic learners find difficult.  For instance, an English three-year-old could quite easily come out with “but I have been waiting ages for my turn, haven’t I?”, whereas European learners of with the present perfect continuous (have been …ing) and tags (haven’t I).  The difficulty comes with the interference between your native language and the one you are trying to learn; the more dissimilar the language you’re learning is, the likelier that you will find it more difficult – although there are other factors.

What factors make a language difficult?

Differences in pronunciation can make a language difficult.  Every language has a set of phonemes – individual units of sound that can change words – that are recombined to make words.  Some languages make sound distinctions that others don’t, and it’s difficult to hear that there even is a difference.  For example, French learners of English will may just hear “th” as a form of an “s” or “z” sound as opposed to a separate phoneme.  English learners will struggle with the tones of Asian languages, such as Mandarin, where meaning changes completely depending whether you say a word with a rising or falling tone and “ma” quickly changes from “mother” to “horse”.

Grammar can also be a stumbling block.  If the new language forms sentences and words in a very different way to your own, it can take a lot of getting used to, even if you understand the rules.  For example, many languages make little use of pronouns (I, they, he etc) and put the same meaning on a verb ending instead, so you need to be on top of your verb endings.

Writing the language is also an extra factor of difficulty.  There are just 26 letters in the Roman alphabet as used in English, but there are more than 50,000 Chinese characters, of which people will typically know 8,000 – quite an extra learning load.  Japanese in effect uses a mixture of scripts: kanji symbols derived from Chinese, and syllabic kana.  Even if a language uses an alphabet you’re used to, there can still be challenges.  Whereas Spanish is pretty faithful in its spelling rules, English spelling is often very unpredicatable from the sound of the word – a difficulty for learners.  French has many letters which are silent or only pronounced in certain circumstances.  A language bristling with accented characters and  unfamilar letter combinations, such as Hungaria, makes for an offputting appearance.

What language do you start with?

If you already speak English, most people find languages closely related to English to be the ones requiring least study to become proficient.  The USA’s Foreign Service Institute has come up with reasoned and careful ranking and puts for instance Dutch and Danish on this list.  Although these two languages don’t bear much resemblance to English at first glance, a short amount of study reveals that many of the most basic everyday words to be similar (brod/brød = bread, hand/hånd = hand) and that many grammatical structures are similar (god, bedre, bedste – good, better, best).  Languages such as French, historically not so closely related, shoot up the list as a huge amount of vocabulary is similar to English (gouvernement = government).  So, a language with similar grammar or lots of cognates is likely to be easier.  The FSI has languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Arabic as the most difficult.  They need knowledge of a new writing system and have a completely different grammar and vocabulary to English.

Your path as a learner

You may experience that a language starts off easily enough and then difficulties start to accumulate.  For instance, European learners of English often make a respectable start before hitting a wall of all our different verb tenses and confusing negative forms, for example.  English learners of German often hear of its reputation for difficulty, and are pleasantly surprised by its easy spelling and pronunciation and memorable basic vocabulary, before hitting difficulties with word order and case endings, and then with it becoming easier again.  Or perhaps a language will just “click” with you or enthuse you more!

Lingua Learn UK

How do we fit in?  We have a great range of options for virtual language learning whether in private classes, in groups or for business, for adults, kids and teens.  All our instructors are native speakers, all university graduates and all qualified and experienced teachers.

About your blogger

Hello, I’m Tim – head of Lingua Learn UK.  I have been involved in languages teaching for over thirty years, principally in French, German and Spanish.  At Lingua Learn UK, I co-ordinate native speaker teachers of 14 languages, all university graduates and qualified teachers like me.