Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
15 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers - ranked
Frisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ...
As we've seen, then, English is pretty challenging. But it's not the only contender for the World's Most Difficult Language. Other notoriously tricky languages include Finnish, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin.
4. Hungarian. Spoken by over 13 million worldwide, Hungarian is unlike many other European languages, including English. Hungarian grammar rules are difficult.
First off, the script used to write Hindi, Devanagari, is considered particularly hard to get a hang of. The script is also what's called an abugida, meaning that the individual characters represent a consonant and vowel combination, rather than a single vowel or consonant.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
After the Hungarian grammar, the Finnish language has the most challenging grammar. It sounds and looks a bit similar to English because of its pronunciation and lettering. But the grammar makes it far more complicated than the English language.
The languages that takes the number 1 place in our list and therefore, the most spoken first language in the world is, by far, Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is only one of the many Chinese dialects spoken in China. However, it is officially considered the Official Language of the People's Republic of China.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages. This means they are similar to English culturally and/or linguistically.
Most English language learners will find it challenging to learn English verb tenses, phrasal verbs, articles, spelling, pronunciation, and idioms. This is because these are features of English that are very different from most other languages in the world, or which simply require a lot of memorization.
Naturally, homophones exist in other languages as well, but in Japanese, it's far more common. The second factor apart from homophones, where things literally sound the same, is that the syllables and consonant combinations are so few that it's hard to recall vocabulary when they sound so similar.
The Russian language is easier when you look at their writing style. On the basis of Sounds: There are more sounds in the Korean language as compared to the Russian language.
