What are the top 3 hardest languages for English speakers to learn?
24th October 2021
With the English language being the world’s ‘lingua franca’ it’s hard to get motivated to learn another language. Chances are, wherever you go, you will find someone speaking English.
We often forget that learning foreign languages can be very rewarding. It can open another level to your travelling experience, help with your career, improve your memory, and enhance your ability to multitask. Sounds great right?!
Some languages are harder to learn than others. If you are up for a big challenge, we’ve created a list of the top three most difficult languages for English people to learn.
1. Mandarin Chinese
It may be the hardest language to learn, but it is also the most widely spoken language in the world with over 1 billion native speakers. Cantonese is one of the dialects spoken, primarily in south-eastern China, Hong Kong and parts of Southeast Asia.
What makes Mandarin Chinese so hard to learn? They operate a completely different alphabet and include thousands of special characters in their language. To top it off, Mandarin Chinese has four tones, so one word can be pronounced four different ways, and each pronunciation has a different meaning.
2. Arabic
Second of the top five most spoken languages in the world, Arabic, comes with many varieties, depending on the region and country the language is spoken in.
Similarly to Chinese, this language also uses a non-Latin alphabet, but only has 28 script letters to learn. This makes learning Arabic slightly easier for English speakers to learn than Chinese.
Arabic is written from right to left instead of left to right, which takes time to get used to.
What makes reading and writing in Arabic particularly challenging for beginners is the exclusion of most vowels in words. Spoken Arabic uses sounds that don’t exist in other languages. And when it comes to grammar, verbs often come before the subject and you have to learn a dual form of words in addition to the singular and plural forms.
3. Polish
Firstly, Polish is hard to learn, but it’s a lot easier than Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. It uses the Latin alphabet, which English speakers are more familiar with and only has three verb tenses: present, past and future.
The most difficult part of the Polish language is its grammar and spelling. Polish has 9 additional letters – ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż which may be hard to get used to.
Some words use ż and others rz which are pronounced identically but change depending on the grammar.
Words are loaded with consonants, which makes them difficult to spell and pronounce. For example, małżeństwo means “marriage” and bezwzględny means “ruthless.”.
The language has five grammatical genders, free word order and 17 different ways to say numbers.
Did you know English is the hardest language to learn to read?
It may be hard for us to learn other languages, but did you know that English is the hardest language to learn to read? It all starts at school. British kids take two-and-a-half years to reach the basic elements of literacy, while children learning other languages reach that point within a year.
English belongs to the Germanic language family with many words containing clusters of consonants and a complex relationship between letters and their sounds.
In Finnish for example, the relationship between a letter and its sound is fixed whereas in English letters, sound often depends on its context within the word. To make it more complex, there are no set rules!
So, when you are having a bad day at language learning, just think – students learning English are in for some tough reading!
