In the internet age, it’s becoming much easier to get into contact with people from different countries. Learning a new language might be a fun aspect of that, because there’s honestly no downside in learning a second (or third or fourth) language.
And if you’re going to learn a new language, you might as well challenge yourself. Thankfully, science has determined what the most difficult to learn languages are if you’re an English speaker. Let’s take a look.
Finnish
Pretty sure this one is difficult for everyone, even Finnish speaking people. The grammar is insanely crazy and whoever invented this must really hate language in general.
Sanskrit
A language so hard they used it for psychological research. They actually had people learn Sanskrit during surgery to see if the brain being fully occupied with trying to make sense of this (thankfully) dead language still had room to send activity to pain neurons. And yes, it did dull the pain some, but the physical pain was replaced with the mental agony of learning Sanskrit.
Khoisan
Also known as “that language with the clicks in it”. The clicks alone require a certain finesse that’ll be sure to keep you busy for weeks.
Arabic
This one is particularly hard because it’s made up of sounds and an alphabet that doesn’t exist in the Queen’s language. It’d essentially be like learning to speak all over again.
Japanese
It’s a language that has thousands of characters, each with their own different pronunciations and meanings. Apparently, it’s not just putting “-kun”, “-san” and “-chan” after everything. Who knew.
Icelandic
It’s a Scandinavian language and they have a volcano named “Eyjafjallajökul”. If you still think this will be a walk in the park, I doubt anything scares you in life.
Chinese
It’ll take you knowledge of about 4,000 different characters to be able to read a newspaper. You still wouldn’t be able to pronounce anything so speaking would require the same amount of work. And if that’s not enough for you, their dictionary has about 40,000 characters in it.
Hungarian
Hungarian has something called “language cases”, of which English has 0. Hungarian has 18 of them. They also have unusual sentence structures and a great reliance on idioms. Definitely a tough cookie, this one.
Russian
Apparently, there’s more to Russian than just “Da, Vodka!”. It has an alphabet unknown to most English speakers, and stressing your words is very important because it can change the meaning entirely.
Korean
The difficult part about Korean is that it was developed in a very isolated society, which means it has no common ancestry with any language on Earth. Not even Chinese or Japanese knowledge will help you when learning this language.
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