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.
English – the most popular language in the world
English is the easiest language in the world. It's also one of the most popular languages in the world.
Is it really the hardest language? 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.
Korean is one of the easiest Asian language to learn :
Korean is one of the easiest Asian languages to learn. Furthermore, the Korean alphabet is made up of 14 consonants and is known as Hangul. Likewise, Korean has ten vowels with symbols that you will combine into syllable blocks for usages.
Arabic is usually considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, topped by only a few languages like Japanese in terms of difficulty. Plus, it's even harder (or so they say) if you are a native speaker of English or a romance language.
If you compare both languages, you will notice that both of them are equally challenging. The Korean language's writing systems are hard to learn, whereas the Japanese alphabet is complex to understand. 40 Alphabets, which makes creating and understanding sentences easier. Easier as the writing system is more simple.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
The Netherlands has emerged as the nation with the highest English language proficiency, according to the EF English Proficiency Index, with a score of 72. It is ahead of five other northern European nations at the top of the chart.
The 15 weakest-scoring countries, in order of strongest to weakest, were Iran, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, El Salvador, Oman, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Kuwait, Cameroon, Libya, Iraq and Laos.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.
The English language is widely regarded as one of the most difficult to master. Because of its unpredictable spelling and challenging to learn grammar, it is challenging for both learners and native speakers.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
Local Names for Mandarin
Mandarin is the term used through much of the Western world, but the Chinese themselves refer to the language as 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), 国语 (guó yǔ), or 華语 (huá yǔ). 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) literally means “common language” and is the term used in mainland China.
But just be warned, yeah the Korean alphabet is easy, but the rest of the language is not. Arabic and Korean are roughly equal in overall terms of difficulty. They both have difficult grammar, but Korean has difficult pronunciation system, while Arabic has a difficult writing system.
The FSI puts Korean as a Category V language. Which means, it's one of the hardest languages to master. They estimate 2200 hours of study before you can reach fluency in Korean. Or 88 weeks of extremely intense study.
How long does it take to learn Korean fluently? It will take about 1200 hours to reach a high intermediate level. You'll need additional practice, so you may want to double that number to 2400 hours to get towards fluency. That would be about 23 hours of study per week for two years.
Anime is a form of Japanese animation whose origins go back before the 1920s. Later, before and during World War II, many organizations for artists and cartoonists were established.
Russian is allegedly one of the most complex languages to learn; its Cyrillic alphabet is enough to scare you away. In fact, the Foreign Service Institute classifies it as a category-four language. But don't let that intimidate you. Learning the Russian language is far from impossible.