As we have different mother tongues and are just generally different people, we will all have different opinions on what would be the most difficult language to learn. Here are a few languages that are often cited as difficult to learn:
Mandarin – Besides the fact that you need to know thousands of characters to be able to read and write Chinese, another difficulty of Mandarin is that with just few sounds, Mandarin resorts to tones to distinguish between meaning of words. Learning to distinguish the tones, and producing them alone can take weeks to accomplish.
Japanese – The Japanese writing system may be more complicated than the Chinese, as it combines characters (Kanji) with two other writing systems: Katakana and Hiragana. Besides that, ways of addressing people vary based on the hierarchical relationship and situation.
German – Speaking just a bit of German may be doable, what makes the language hard to learn well is its multitude of rules and structures. Besides verbs, German also inflects nouns and sentence structure is rather rigid.
Arabic – Is said to be difficult for its multitude of sounds. Correct me if I’m wrong here. I haven’t studied Arabic.
English – If you grew up with it, you may not realize it, but English is not easy to learn at all. It’s not difficult for its rules, like German is, but rather for its lack of it. As well as its large vocabulary.
Klingon – A language specifically designed by linguist Marc Okrand for the fictional alien Klingon species in Star Trek. He made sure the language was as different as possible from languages commonly spoken on Earth, in particular different to English. As you could say that his assignment was to create a very difficult language, it’s quite likely Klingon is actually the most difficult language to learn.
What do you think is the most difficult language to learn? Does it challenge you or rather scare you away? Join the discussion on our Facebook page!
About Guus Goorts
Guus has traveled widely and has lived in The Netherlands, Ghana, Belgium and Singapore. In descending order of fluency, he speaks Dutch, English, Mandarin, German and some rudiments of Spanish, French and Italian. Guus lives in Singapore with his wife and two young children. He settled in Singapore in early 2006 from his native country The Netherlands. After working in a job for corporate training, he founded Yago Languages, Singapore's guide to language learning.
I have to say the most difficult would be Arabic first and then Mandarin. Arabic was phenomenally hard for me back when I was living in Beirut (but since the people I ran around with also spoke French, it didn’t matter too much). Arabic script for me was impossible. Nonetheless, I found I could pick up Arabic if I just concentrated on the speaking rather than the writing.
As for Chinese, I spent seven long years with one of the world’s top Chinese teachers learning how to write it. It went nowhere. I speak Cantonese as a native, but you would’ve thought that should’ve helped the writing – but it isn’t.
As for German and Japanese, I find they’re pretty easy to get used to and pick up. Of course, English has always been hard even for a native speaker like me! Hard, because once you get used to the way English is spoken and written in the UK and Europe, it’s really, really hard to get used to the brand of English used in this part of the world! But maybe that’s just me.