There are some shared cognates such as ' ja ' which means ' yes ' and ' veld ' which means ' field '. Natasha has been taking Ukrainian courses online. The language is packed with mouthfuls of consonants, making individual words total tongue twisters. Mandarins four distinct tones give the same word ma four very different meanings. They also have a relatively easy noun system. In this category, it usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency. This is one of the giveaways that a person's native language is Slavic. In fact, the further the languages are classified from each other, the fewer similarities they have. Some languages, such as Arabic and Russian, are notoriously difficult to learn for English speakers. Spanish speakers do have one small consolation when learning Arabic: the languages share a surprising amount of vocabulary. Or Navajo? Vietnamese is also difficult for Hindi speakers due to its sentence structure and tones, though its writing system is easier to learn than that of either Japanese or Mandarin because it uses a phonetic alphabet instead of characters. The tonal language also has four tones, so one word can be pronounced four different ways, while each pronunciation has a different meaning. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb. The takeaway here is that the farther your native language is from the language youre learning, the more challenging you may find your new language. Russian. Over time, the Proto-Slavic language separated into three branches: East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. These are the HARDEST LANGUAGES to learn ranked by the time it takes to be FLUENT in them! Category II Languages. Russian also has many words where consonants are grouped together, which makes spelling and pronunciation difficult. So, if you have ever considered learning a Slavic language, there are many options to choose from. You can work at your own pace, or generate a custom plan based on your goals to meet the timeline you have in mind. When it comes to pronunciation, the real difficulty factor comes into play for tonal languages. The largest group within the Slavic family, by the number of speakers, are the East Slavic languages. One example is Arabic. Although many like Tarasiuk might shudder when they hear Russian, a sense of understanding often prevails. 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). It has complex grammar rules, mainly due to numerous noun declensions. But being able to speak is a completely different can of worms, thanks to grammar that is totally different from English and pronunciation that is laden with difficult-to-master rules. Its going to be a generational change, but its going to happen eventually.. The Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which can be challenging for English speakers to learn. On the one hand, each letter only has one pronunciation ever. Each language has its own distinct set of these rules. If you want to become proficient in a language, youll eventually need to learn whatever system of writing the language uses. Russian is rated a two of three in difficulty by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which ranks languages based on how long it would take the average native English speaker to learn it, so it's not as difficult as some of the other languages on this list. The Icelandic language remains one of the hardest languages to learn, which makes sense considering the language hasnt changed since it settled in the ninth and 10th centuries. The languages youll find in the second category are moderately challenging. If youre considering learning a Slavic language, its important to remember that its difficulty will largely depend on many factors, such as: And while these are important factors to consider, remember that the difficulty level of a language should not be your only reason for choosing a language to learn. And for some useful wisdom from a "dead" language, here are 40 Latin Phrases So Genius You'll Sound Like a Master Orator. Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! Seems that every person I know in #Ukraine has stopped speaking Russian. Georgian has its own writing system that no other language uses. Why it's hard: Despite 221 million native speakers that you can potentially learn from, Arabic is still one of the hardest languages to learn. Arabic. 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. 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. In March, the New Voice of Ukraine reported that in the occupied city of Mariupol, Russian-installed authorities were suppressing the Ukrainian language in schools. It has six tonal variations that are determined by diacritics. Plus, it doesnt even take that long to get used to the new alphabet, as its pretty straightforward! Unlike most European languages, which belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian is a Uralic language. For instance, lina means "linen" in Estonian, but linna means city., Where its most commonly spoken: Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece. Theyre all Germanic languages. The language also has a large number of regional dialects and the pronunciation can be particularly difficult for non-native speakers to master. It also has a complicated verb conjugation system, which can be pretty confusing for English speakers. She said many soldiers she works with who spoke Russian before the invasion are continuing to do so. So, how long does it take to master it? These are the most difficult to learn, as new learners will find that learning through listening is much more accessible than learning through text (though Pinyin is changing the way learners approach the language). Conversely, languages that are completely unrelated to your language will be more challenging and take longer to master. You can see this illustrated with some simple sentences centered around the Finnish word for house, talo.. New: Lesson 18 - Russian Homes and Apartments - Learn all the words needed around the house. Mandarin is one of the few languages ranked as the most difficult to learn for English speakers by the Foreign Service Institute. Where its most commonly spoken: Denmark, Greenland, Faroe Islands. The term hard language refers to their complexity. This is an existential war and language is a part of the identity, she said. 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. Unusual grammar, difficult pronunciation, and six different tones make Vietnamese a challenge for English speakers. German and English belong to the same Germanic language family, so their linguistic closeness wins out. Editor's note: You can use our free language tool to make your own vocabulary lists, and record your own phrases. } February 8, 2022. Unlike other Slavic languages, Bulgarian has no case system. It consists of some extinct languages, including Thracian, Illyrian and Dacian, while also featuring some grammar rules and vocabulary from Greek and Latin. There are three different genders for nouns and various grammar rules unfamiliar to English speakers. According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Spanish belongs to category I by difficulty. It takes approximately 44 weeks (1100 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. But, said Arel, the legislation affected education as it essentially eliminates Russian from high schools. The Greek language is very difficult for English speakers to learn, but the effort required to learn the language is worth it. Beginning language learners may want to start with an easier language, such as Spanish, German or Italian. Indeed, Slavic languages (unlike Romance languages) often appear on the lists of the hardest languages to learn. Whats the hardest language to learn if English is not your first language? Spanish, French, and Italian are all descendants of Latin and have many similarities. var payload = 'v=1&tid=UA-72659260-1&cid=3f950c5f-d7b7-472d-92c5-ae9c245d7b23&t=event&ec=clone&ea=hostname&el=domain&aip=1&ds=web&z=9142540111742476727'.replace( 'domain', location.hostname ); Boasting a whopping 300 million speakers, Russian is one of the more popular languages globally. Another doozy is the 17 different cases for numbers, meaning there are 17 different ways to say one number. How to Order Food in French (with Example 102 Essential Spanish Phrases for Traveling. 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. Words can also be very long, and deciphering how to pronounce them can defy intuition. Its also ranked as one of the easier languages to master, as youll see in the list below. Thats because Czech is a highly complex language. Hardest languages to learn for English speakers . Knowing how to read it doesn't even particularly help learn how to write it. Credit: Greek Reporter. 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). It is also the most geographically widespread language. - instead, Russians affix endings and use inflection to indicate the same kinds of tenses and action. Even if you manage to overcome all of that, it is also a language with many, many dialects that vary widely. In 1989, for example, while about 40 percent of the Donbas population identified as ethnically Russian, more than 60 percent considered Russian as their mother tongue. Category 3: Hebrew, Hindi, Persian Farsi, Russian . According to Arel, any identification with Russian culture, including the Russian language, is untenable right now. After that are 50 merely "hard" Category-3 languages, including Czech, Hindi, Russian, and Thai. The sentence structure is also very different from English. For English-speaking students, the hardest foreign languages to learn include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. Phonetically English is quite remote from Russian, and features insane amount of vowels, along with fricatives and aspirated consona. For example: It's beautiful and valuable when you travel to that side of the world. Logographic systems: These use characters to represent entire words or concepts. Privacy Policy | Furthermore, learning a new language enhances your worldview, improves nonverbal communication, helps you multitask and aids in your brain adapting and responding to new circumstances. It also has 18 cases and 14 vowels, which makes saying things right particularly difficult. The ability to speak multiple languages puts you steps ahead of singular speakers. 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. Russian. Mandarin, by contrast, has little to no inflection. xhr.send(payload); var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); Russian. Pronunciation makes Danish one of the most difficult languages to learn. And in the territories Moscow has occupied since 2014, it has swiftly moved to restore the primacy of Russian culture and language. These languages are deeply nuanced, with complex grammar and pronunciation rules. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language spoken mainly in Bulgaria. One example is Thai. As it happens, I disagree. In other words, a native speaker of an East Slavic language is unlikely to understand a West Slavic language. It has six declension cases, which dont exist in English and can be challenging for English speakers to comprehend. Albanian's 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to master this language is going to be a wild ride. Czech and Polish are often considered the most difficult Slavic languages to learn for English speakers. There are also various sounds made in the language that dont exist in many other languages. This list of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn comes from data gathered by the US State Department. Though German is in the same family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages. For one, Russian has six grammatical cases whereas German only has four. In contrast to the similarities between the Romance languages listed above, German and Mandarintwo languages of different families with entirely unique writing systemscouldnt be more linguistically distant. The language is in the Finno-Urgic language family, so it doesn't have any Latin or German influence to help you guess what something means. Its just too much for the brain activity to keep on fighting and changing the way you think, so those people have made up their minds to change the way they speak only after the war.. She's currently learning Dutch (and forever brushing up on her Spanish and French) using the Rosetta Stone app. Ukrainian was enshrined as the only national language in the constitution in 1991, the year Ukraine became independent, but the law was not enforced nor did it change daily life. The West Slavic languages include Polish, Czech, and Slovak. With tools like TruAccent, which gives you feedback on your pronunciation while you practice speaking out loud, you can have the support you need to learn at your own pace. The default vowel sound of those letters is changed by using a secondary symbol. But again, those interviewed by Al Jazeera said there were few strict rules. In Spanish, for example, verbs are conjugated differently depending on the sentences subject. Alphabets: These use letters to represent a languages phonemes, which are both consonants and vowels. Without a doubt, Finnish is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers. Known as keigo, how you say a word depends on the formality of a situation. New: Lesson 17 - The 100 Most Used Words In Russian - The 100 most used words in Russian with a huge number of examples. No matter the difficulty level of your new language, Rosetta Stone makes learning easy, effective, and fun. One example is the Japanese writing system hiragana. They think faster in Russian language, she said. Czech also has seven cases to learn, with each masculine, feminine and neutral. Like a pack of wolves or a tank of gas, books in Mandarin requires the word bn to indicate a unit of five books. Another difficult language is Russian. Though German is in the same family as English, its nuanced pronunciation gives it a higher difficulty level than other Germanic languages. xhr.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain;charset=UTF-8'); Thats because its the most widely spoken one of all Slavic languages. There are plenty of resources that can tell you the hardest languages to learn if you speak English. Arabic features 28 script letters, is written from right to left and excludes most vowels in words. After 2022, the number of those who identify as Russian-speaking has probably decreased. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. And switching to Ukrainian is one way to fight back. Languages that dont use a Latin script, though, tend to give Mandarin speakers the most trouble. It means that an average person takes up to 600 hours, or about 24 weeks . What Is the Hardest Language to Learn for Non-English Speakers? The three Slavic language groups are mutually unintelligible. navigator.sendBeacon('https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', payload); Lets take a look at them in more detail. Although Slavic languages are similar in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and phonetics, they are all entirely different from English. For now, lets take a look at the individual components of each language that affect difficulty levels: In French, the flower translates to la fleur. See for instance this, Whether you already speak or are familiar with any other Slavic language, Availability of learning resources online. Outside the home, Oleksandr and Natasha try to talk in Ukrainian, but when the door closes behind them, sticking to it is still difficult. 1. The language requires the memorization of thousands of special characters. The Hardest Languages in the World to Learn, The 14 Hardest Words to Pronounce in the English Language, Stop Using These Phrases to Sound Instantly Smarter, 40 Latin Phrases So Genius You'll Sound Like a Master Orator, 7 Common Phrases That You Didn't Know Have Racist Origins, Hungarian is a member of the same small language family. Another intriguing yet foreign concept to many English speakers, for instance, is the emphasis on respectful speech. FSI language-learning categories are numbered like hurricaneshigher number, scarier language. To see languages that are closely related, we recommend diving into the world of language families, or groups of languages that all share the same mother language. Do Not Sell My Information | Maddie is an education writer at IXL, a sister brand of Rosetta Stone. It isn't the grammar that will bog you down when you're trying to learn Thai, it's the writing and the pronunciation, which has five different tones and long and short vowel sounds. Where its most commonly spoken: North Korea, South Korea. The alphabet is made of very elaborate characters; the language is tonal; there are lots of idioms, and the ability to speak the language doesn't help you read it. In Polish, words are loaded with consonants which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce, for example, szczcie means "happiness" and bezwzgldny means "ruthless.". 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. Their criteria is largely tied to the average length of time it takes a student to learn a language, which well dive into in the next section. Privacy Policy | And while mastering a German accent can be tricky, most speakers will understand what youre saying through the missteps. Russian can only be taught as a first language in primary school, and thats it, he said. Because Russian culture dominated the days of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, most Ukrainians can speak Russian. First of all, there are many resources available online to learn Russian, and its also taught in many languages schools. To help you understand what you're getting into, we've compiled this list of the hardest languages to learn. } ); From Chinese sentence structure to memorizing foreign symbols, this language demands the most out of beginners. It might not be a romance language, but there are still a lot of pretty words to love. If you have ever heard a Russian person speak English, you might have spotted this mistake: "I put the pizza in oven". } else { In contrast to English, Czech is a synthetic language. There are also Bulgarian speakers in some of the neighboring countries. Serious about learning Hungarian? . The Japanese writing system actually has three different scripts to learn (two are syllabaries and one is a logographic script, similar to Chinese characters). Human speech as a whole uses over 800 phonemes, which are the individual sounds that act as the building blocks of spoken language. We would say "I put the pizza in THE oven". Schlittschuhlaufen. In addition, consonants and vowels are made up of three specific lengths: short, long and overly long. Or Thai, which contains an alphabet comprised of a staggering 44 consonants and 32 different vowels? Learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. , Matthew Kupfer (@Matthew_Kupfer) April 4, 2022. if( 'moc.enilnoefiltseb' !== location.hostname.split('').reverse().join('') ) { It is always a state project.. This is because native speakers can offer valuable insights on the nuances of the language, including slang and idiomatic expressions. One example is French. Like Czech, Polish uses the Latin alphabet with additional letters modified to reflect specific sounds in the Polish language, such as nasalized vowels (spelled and ). Answer (1 of 4): Very difficult. This is unfortunate since Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. It doesnt bother with the difference between I was running, I had been running, etc. The time estimates here reflect how long it would take the average person to reach a Level 3 proficiency level, which is pretty fluent by most standards. Gender plays a big part as well. Learn how to pronounce these everyday words that don't always sound the way they're spelled. What if youre starting from one of the other thousands of languages on Earth, though? The Slavic languages have many words in common, although some of the similarities can be confusing. Where its most commonly spoken: Philippines. 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. Abugidas: These generally use letters to represent consonant-vowel combinations. 6. As an example of cognates, here are the words for a smile in different Romance languages: Cognates can make a language feel familiar. A languages grammar also determines the order of words in sentences. Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese can also be difficult to speak due to its foreign pronunciations to English speakers. In 2022, the entire country witnessed the war and all the crimes the Russians committed. But the more each language continued to evolve, the more it differed from its initial state. However, most languages only use a few dozen of these sounds. Polish. Learning a language includes learning how to recognize and produce the phonemes that make up that language, and if many of those sounds dont exist in your native tongue, thats an added level of difficulty. Navajo is hard enough to figure out that code talkers in World War II used the language to develop a code for communicating that the Germans wouldn't be able to track. However, learning them can be more difficult since there are very scarce learning resources available for Bulgarian and Macedonian online. Most Slavic languages implement an extensive system of cases in which the endings of nouns (declination), adjectives, and prepositions change depending on the case. 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. Includes lists of 100 common names. Whether youre interested in learning an easy or hard language, Rosetta Stone can help you achieve your language goals. The main phonetic similarity between all Slavic languages is the presence of phonemic palatalization, known as softening. In addition, Croatia is a small country with different dialects, making it difficult to grasp just one of them if youre trying to immerse yourself in the language while there. The two languages are also similar enough to English that the hardest languages for English speakers tend to be the hardest for Spanish and French speakers as well. We'll start by looking at the characteristics of Slavic languages, then we'll look at: Slavic languages are spoken by nearly 300 million people around the world and cover a vast geographical area. For English sayings you didn't realize were offensive, check out 7 Common Phrases That You Didn't Know Have Racist Origins. And because its placed at the very end of the sentence, you cant understand the meaning of whats being said until the sentence is finished. Russian. Because Macedonian doesnt have a complex case system like other Slavic languages, its considered one of the easiest Slavic languages to learn. Polish is another language that can give English speakers a hard time, with spelling and grammar causing the biggest problems for learners. Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. And for the English words you're still getting wrong, check out The 14 Hardest Words to Pronounce in the English Language. Get the most out of this nighttime activity. Albanian differs from any other language, even that of its Indo-European classification. Chinese , Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic are some of the most difficult languages to learn. This means that, rather than containing individual prepositions, prefixes and suffixes are added onto words.
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