As an English speaker, some languages will be more challenging for you to learn while they are accessible to other kinds of speakers. According to the old world language families, one can comprehend why some languages may be more similar than the rest. Therefore when learning new languages, it is necessary to note that some will be harder than the rest,
This article discusses the most complex languages to learn as an English speaker.
Mandarin
It has around 1.2 billion speakers and is most commonly found in china. However, this language may prove rugged for English speakers to learn because it is a tonal language. Meaning, simply altering your tone may change the meaning of a word altogether. Add to it hundreds of characters, complicated systems, and richness in homophones, and you have one of the world’s most difficult languages to master.
Icelandic
It has around 330 000 native speakers, and they are primarily found in Iceland. This language, however, is one of the oldest and has not changed since the ninth century. However, it keeps giving new meaning to old words. It also doesn’t help that only about 400,000 native speakers are available to study and practice with.
Japanese
It has around 122 million native speakers commonly found in Japan. This language is hard to learn because there are three different writing systems in Japanese. These include hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Japanese students must first master thousands of distinct characters in these writing systems before they can begin writing. It is, nevertheless, less challenging to learn than Mandarin.
Hungarian
It has around 1300 native speakers, and a large number will be found in Hungary. This dialect s hard to comprehend because it is formed differently from other languages. The Indo-European language family is the source of the majority of languages. Hungarian, on the other hand, is a Finno-Ugric language in which words are created separately. To put it another way, that’s not the way English speakers typically construct words or phrases. ‘for instance, With my [female] buddy,’ for example, is combined to to ‘barátnommel.’
Korean
It has 66.3 native speakers highly based in South Korea. Korean is another isolated language not associated with any other root of the family of languages. Additionally, there are seven different levels of Korean dialect, based on the formality of which natural speakers switch back and forth.
Polish
It has 46 million natives, majorly based in Poland. The reason this dialect is complex for English speakers to comprehend is due to two main reasons. First and foremost, the pronunciation. For novice learners, some words are pronounced entirely differently than in English. For instance saying hello in polish is czesc and the c and s are pronounced differently. Another difference is that Poles have 7 distinct gender-affected grammatical contexts and 17 different numerical instances. For instance, ‘ten’ can be pronounces in seventeen differen ways.Therefore, making pierogies is one thing, but knowing the country’s language that produces them is another.
