Thats because their grammatical structure is slightly less complex than in other Slavic languages, mainly because they dont use cases. Whether for gaining a deeper cultural understanding of a country or for the simple necessity of co-existing and even performing business, multilingual speakers put themselves at the forefront of new possibilities. Agreements | Japanese requires a large amount of study to learn because its writing system includes three different scripts, and the language includes different vocabulary and grammatical forms to use based on social context. Most English speakers have cited the language as the hardest language to learn in the world. This is because native speakers can offer valuable insights on the nuances of the language, including slang and idiomatic expressions. All Rights Reserved. A professional translator, she now works as a cultural and language liaison for the Rubizh brigade, a part of the national armed forces engaged in fighting around Bakhmut. Finally, theres Finnish, which has a broad reputation for being a difficult language to learn. Though German is in the same family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages. The grammar can also be a little tricky, with some unusual conjugations, lots of rules, and gendered nouns. You can see this illustrated with some simple sentences centered around the Finnish word for house, talo.. Russian. This can be done by adding a prefix or suffix or modifying the word. I would even say, it's the most difficult language I have ever faced, maybe if you disregard Asian non-alphabetic writing systems. We would say "I put the pizza in THE oven". It consists of some extinct languages, including Thracian, Illyrian and Dacian, while also featuring some grammar rules and vocabulary from Greek and Latin. If you have ever heard a Russian person speak English, you might have spotted this mistake: "I put the pizza in oven". The archaic language is made up of extremely long words, while the specific syllables are pronounced entirely differently from typical English syllables. Part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese can also be difficult to speak due to its foreign pronunciations to English speakers. One example is the Japanese writing system hiragana. For instance, in Italian, sentences are structured subject-verb-object (such as I threw the ball). Chinese (Mandarin) The hardest language for English speakers to learn is Mandarin Chinese. Whats more, Polish words often contain many consonants in a row, which makes them hard to pronounce for English speakers (and non-Slavic speakers in general). Even a lot of authors that wrote their books in Russian or singers or poets that wrote in Russian have decided to stop spreading the language of the aggressor, added Ferlain. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the 8th most-spoken language in the world. Another doozy is the 17 different cases for numbers, meaning there are 17 different ways to say one number. Meanwhile, the written version of Hindi, which is written in Devanagari script, lacks certain phonetic markings that would help learners better comprehend how to pronounce words. >> Dive right in: Get the complete list of languages ranked by difficulty. Where its most commonly spoken: Thailand. It made people rethink what language they wanted to speak and I started hearing Ukrainian literally everywhere, said Tarasiuk, a front-end designer who had to put her career on hold because of the persistent blackouts caused by Russian attacks. Russian also has many words where consonants are grouped together, which makes spelling and pronunciation difficult. In this post, well take a look at the easiest and hardest languages to learn, the factors that determine language difficulty, and a complete ranking of the worlds most widely spoken languagesincluding how long it takes to learn each language. Turkish is filled with extremely long verbs. Part of what makes it one of the easiest Slavic languages to learn for English speakers is its simple vocabulary, which makes it pretty simple to speak and comprehend. Pronunciation makes Danish one of the most difficult languages to learn. This is a question you can resolve with some degree of certainty when talking about a single language. From Chinese sentence structure to memorizing foreign symbols, this language demands the most out of beginners. The term hard language refers to their complexity. The ability to speak multiple languages puts you steps ahead of singular speakers. In Polish, words are loaded with consonants which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce, for example, szczcie means "happiness" and bezwzgldny means "ruthless.". Learn how to pronounce these everyday words that don't always sound the way they're spelled. Like a pack of wolves or a tank of gas, books in Mandarin requires the word bn to indicate a unit of five books. But, said Arel, the legislation affected education as it essentially eliminates Russian from high schools. Mandarins four distinct tones give the same word ma four very different meanings. In Spanish, its la flor, and in Italian, its il fiore. Coincidence? Now, at 63 and living in the capital, Kyiv, Zahalskyy and his wife Natasha are in the midst of the difficult but voluntary transition making the Ukrainian language their own. 3. Where its most commonly spoken: Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, North Africa. As an English speaker, youll encounter three types of writing systems: Languages that fall in the first category are often the easiest languages to learn. Dont let their place on this list deter you from diving right in, thoughweve built courses to help you learn quickly and effectively! And in the territories Moscow has occupied since 2014, it has swiftly moved to restore the primacy of Russian culture and language. For instance, Arabic has complex grammar and a different alphabet . Furthermore, it requires learning the Greek alphabet, which is not a requirement for the majority of European languages. The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which can be challenging for English speakers to learn. But to translate that same statement into Mandarin, youll need a measure word. And yet, that one word is mind-blowingly long. Arabic . After 2022, the number of those who identify as Russian-speaking has probably decreased. In the wars early days, their apartment block was hit twice by artillery fire from the nearby town of Bucha, where Russians are accused of many atrocities. The Cyrillic alphabet that Russian uses can be especially confusing for Chinese learners because it has letters that look similar to English letters, but are pronounced completely differently. The verb carries the most weight in Turkish. It's not for the faint of heart. And a lot of the letters look surprisingly similar. Arabic is a complex language with rich grammar and syntax. It takes approximately 24-30 weeks (600-750 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. Greek. Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish: The Must-Know Differences. After that are 50 merely "hard" Category-3 languages, including Czech, Hindi, Russian, and Thai. For instance, its 15 grammatical cases mean that even the slightest change in the end of a word can alter its meaning. On the flip side, you may be looking for a language thats as easy to learn as possible, and being able to judge which languages are most similar to your own will help you find one. comparison of Czech with Russian and German, The grammar, pronunciation, and general structure of a language, The alphabet (as mentioned in the article, some Slavic languages use the Cyliric alphabet, which means more things to learn). Macedonian is the language spoken in Macedonia, which used to be part of the former Yugoslavia. Editor's note: You can use our free language tool to make your own vocabulary lists, and record your own phrases. Korean and Arabic may not be as hard, but theyre still challenging. 6. Russian. Then you better be ready to study. For more on the Czech language, see this comparison of Czech with Russian and German. In addition, consonants and vowels are made up of three specific lengths: short, long and overly long. Born in 1960 in what was then the Soviet Union, Zahalskyy hails from the largely Russian-speaking Ukrainian city of Kherson. If you're looking for official statistics, the Defense Language Institute (where they teach members of the CIA foreign languages) has organized languages into four categories, the 1st Category being the easiest, and the 4th Category being the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. A major reason why is that Finnish has so many different noun cases and verb conjugations that can shape words depending on their context. Grammatically, verbs often come before the subject, while there are many dual forms of words in addition to the singular and plural forms. Maria Stambler, a Russia-American bilingual speaker, who used to teach English, explained: "Words and phrases like `Tina Turner' and `happy birthday' are hard to pronounce because Russians . If youre looking for ease of learning, finding a language with familiar or easy-to-master grammar rules can help you tone down the language difficulty level. So far, she has traveled to 28 countries and lived in 4. Even the easiest languages typically take a few hundred hours of practice to become proficient, while harder languages can take thousands of hours. Finally, the South Slavic languages are Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian (Serbian and Croatian can be considered as two separate languages or as one language with two different dialects). On the other hand, Polish doesnt distinguish as many tenses as English does - theres only past, present, and future combined with a perfective and imperfective verb aspect. 500 Hours Need to learn complete Swedish. But the fun doesn't stop there. Despite being the most widely spoken native language in the world, Mandarin Chinese tops the list of the toughest languages to learn. Along with natives and Spanish language learners, there are more than 572 million Spanish speakers worldwide. English is taught in Chinese schools, so most Mandarin speakers are familiar with English and the Latin script that makes up the English alphabet. document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', function() { The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you no clues unless you also speak Chinese. Seems that every person I know in #Ukraine has stopped speaking Russian. Even if you manage to overcome all of that, it is also a language with many, many dialects that vary widely. For many, switching from Russian to the Ukrainian language is an act of resistance as the war continues to devastate lives and cities. When it comes to pronunciation, the real difficulty factor comes into play for tonal languages. It means that an average person takes up to 600 hours, or about 24 weeks . Someone who speaks German, someone who speaks Farsi, and someone who speaks Vietnamese will likely have massive differences in what languages they find easy or hard to pick up, because the native languages theyre starting with are so dissimilar from one another. According to Arel, any identification with Russian culture, including the Russian language, is untenable right now. Russian: 144: 7: Vietnamese: 69: 8: Turkish: 51: 9: Polish: 40: 10: Thai: 21: 11: Serbian: 16: 12: Hebrew: 5: . But did you know that there are more than 10 different Slavic languages? Thats because Czech is a highly complex language. It doesnt bother with the difference between I was running, I had been running, etc. Most of the cities that have been reduced to rubble, such as Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Mykolaiv and Bakhmut, were largely Russian-speaking, Arel said. Russian is the most widely spoken Slavic language, with 155 million native Russian speakers. This system of honorific speech is called keigo. Do Not Sell My Information | How to Order Food in French (with Example 102 Essential Spanish Phrases for Traveling. Factors such as grammar rules, syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation can make some languages more difficult to learn than others. Hindi uses an abugida, which is different from the English alphabet and from hnz, a Chinese script that uses characters to represent entire words and concepts. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb. But once you do, you can pronounce almost all Russian words quite accurately. . Also, some of its letters are tricky to pronounce, and Korean has its own version of honorific speech that requires specific forms of words depending on social context. This makes Russian actually far easier to learn than many have been led to believe! Thai is a tonal language. Hungarian is a member of the same small language family as Finnish, so the average English speaker won't be finding much familiarity in its vocabulary. Very different! This is one of the giveaways that a person's native language is Slavic. Boasting a whopping 300 million speakers, Russian is one of the more popular languages globally. It has an incredible 14 noun cases and grammar packed with exceptions. It is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won't have such a hard time grasping it. There are three different genders for nouns and various grammar rules unfamiliar to English speakers. Generally, students require around 88 weeks of full-time study to reach proficiency in these languages. In 2022, the entire country witnessed the war and all the crimes the Russians committed. Modern Greek is maybe the easiest language to learn that uses a different alphabet.
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