Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
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.
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.
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.
Some languages are notoriously tricky to learn, like Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. Generally speaking, English is also considered to be a challenging language, though not quite as complex as some. Compared to some languages, English has a large vocabulary, tricky grammar, and challenging pronunciation.
Toki pona is probably the simplest language in the world to learn. Its name derives from the English word “talk” and the Esperanto word “bona”, meaning good, so it literally translates to the language of good.
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.
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.
Mandarin language, also called Northern Chinese, Chinese (Pinyin) Guanhua (“Officials' Language”), or (Wade-Giles romanization) Kuan-hua, the most widely spoken form of Chinese.
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.
Top 10 Hardest Languages To Learn – Finnish
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.
Overall, 72.0% of the population used English only, and 22.3% used a non-English language, compared with 65.5% and 29.5% respectively for Greater Capital Cities. The dominant language used at home, other than English, in Australia was Mandarin, with 2.7% of the population, or 685,268 people using this language at home.
Current data states that there are only 7 remaining speakers of the language. Written records are available, such as a dictionary and several books that show the grammar and syntax of the Dumi language. Dumi is the world's least spoken language and one of the rarest.
Whether your child is learning English, French, or Spanish, all three are among some of the most widely spoken and easiest languages to learn. However, the best way to support your child in their language learning endeavor is to immerse them in the language with bilingual education.
Like Spanish, French is an awesome language for children to learn because they may have more real-life opportunities to practice the language with others and learn from local community organizations. Plus, French is one of the most common languages to teach in American schools, alongside Spanish.
For the entire world, American accent is most universal. British, Scottish, Irish and Australian accents are pretty unfamiliar with all ears of the people around the globe. Irish English is the easiest to understand.
Of all the European languages a native English speaker can learn, Russian is among the most difficult. The Germanic and Romance languages have a lot of the same core because they both have roots in Latin. Russian is from a completely different language branch called the Slavonic branch, which includes Czech and Polish.
The first and most important reason for the spread of English is the British Empire. Before nearly a quarter of the world was colonized by the British Empire, English was spoken only by the British. But when they started to trade, colonize with places like Asia and Africa, they naturally started the spread of English.