Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language.
The German language is often considered more useful if you're planning on doing some research in Germany or any of the European countries where it's spoken. It's also a great choice if you want to study business or engineering.
Basque. Western Europe's oldest language is Basque. This language is unrelated to any other language on the planet, and its structure is unique.
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.
Finnish is the dark horse of languages found in Europe and one of the hardest worldwide. Though within Europe, Finnish isn't part of the Indo-European languages. You won't find shared roots or cognates here, which means Finnish is a bit of a blank slate. Then there's the grammar.
1. Hallo – “Hello” This is the simplest way to say “hello” in German. It's a friendly, all-purpose greeting that can be used in pretty much any situation, formal or informal.
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.
Languages that are related to English and easy to learn include most Germanic languages (Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and German) and Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian).
The language with the most letters is Khmer (Cambodian), with 74 (including some without any current use).
If “useful” is about the sheer number of people you'll be able to converse with, French beats German easily. There are 267 million French speakers in the world, compared to 155 million German speakers. In terms of career opportunities, French and German are both very in-demand as business languages.
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 best European language to learn is German.
Simply because German is the official language of 3 countries. These are Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Also, many people in Central Europe and Balkan countries learn German. This is because they seek career opportunities and better life in German-speaking countries.
As we've mentioned, the way to say “no” in German is simply to say nein.
Men usually greet women first and wait for them to extend their hand. Close friends may hug to greet and younger people may kiss one another on the cheek. "Guten Tag" (Good day) or “Hallo” (Hello) are the most common verbal greetings used in Germany.
Tschüss – 'Bye' in German
It's short, sweet, and casual and you'll usually hear it used among friends and family. Contrary to popular belief, Germans really like cute words, so they'll also say Tschüss Tschüss, which means “bye bye” or Tschüssi, which is literally a “little goodbye”.
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.
1) Esperanto.
We say “artificial” because it was invented in the late 19th century to become a universal second language, in order to encourage peace and international understanding. Because of that goal, Esperanto has a simple grammar, easy rules and a lot of words that resemble words from other languages.
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.