Language is such an important part of people’s identity and culture that the European Union has defined linguistic diversity as one of its fundamental values. According to the EU Commission, all Europeans should be able to speak two foreign languages by 2025. The average European speaks just 2.32 languages today—including their native language.
But what makes learning another language so hard? And which of the world’s languages are the hardest to learn? Arabic? Chinese? Or maybe German? All three, according to a UNESCO ranking. There are plenty of lists of the world’s hardest languages. In a LinkedIn survey, our followers voted for Chinese.
This blog post looks at the top five hardest languages to learn for people who are native speakers of German.
First of all, What makes a language hard to learn?
There are nearly 6,900 languages in the world. Why do we find some of them easier to learn than others? All kinds of factors determine success in language learning:
How different is the foreign language from your native language?
If the root language is different from your first language, the foreign language may be harder to learn. For speakers of Romance languages, for example, learning Arabic is a much more complex task than learning French.
Does the foreign language use a different alphabet?
There are around 100 alphabets around the world. If you are accustomed to the Latin alphabet, you may find it challenging to learn hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.
How different are the sounds from your native language?
If the language you are trying to learn contains sounds that your native language doesn’t, it may take you longer to master the pronunciation. But the main question is: how important is pronunciation? If you don’t get the tones right in Chinese, for example, you run the risk of committing a major faux pas. But more on that later.
Does the language have complicated grammar?
More than 40 cases? Words all fused together? Five genders? Many language learners find grammar a curse. There are dramatic differences in the complexity of the grammar in different languages.
The five hardest languages in the world
According to these metrics, what languages are the hardest for native speakers of German to learn? Here are our top five—in no particular order. After all, the difficulty of learning a language ultimately depends on the learner, so it’s always subjective.
Chinese
It’s all Chinese to me! Anyone who tries to read Chinese characters for the first time is sure to think exactly that. In stark contrast to, say, the Latin alphabet, Mandarin has more than 80,000 characters. You have to have mastered at least 2,000 of them for basic expression. Each character stands for a word. And they combine to form new words depending on the order in which they are arranged.
The vital importance of getting the tone right in Chinese is a struggle for speakers of languages like German, where the tone doesn’t matter all that much. In Chinese, the meaning of any one syllable can be vastly different depending on the tone in which it is spoken. Pronunciation alone determines whether “ma” means “horse,” “scold,” “hemp” or “mother,” as you can see in this video of Chinese tongue-twisters.
They say that it takes native German speakers around 88 weeks to gain a basic command of Mandarin.
Japanese
Let’s start with the good news: Unlike Chinese, Japanese is not a tonal language, which reduces the chance of major mispronunciation-related gaffes. It’s the writing part that’s tricky, as Japanese uses three writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. The first is based on a syllable alphabet with 45 syllables, while kanji uses Chinese characters so it’s similarly complex. Since Japanese newspapers use kanji, people need to know around 2,000 characters in order to follow current events.
If you suffer from grammarphobia, Japanese may not be your cup of tea. As an agglutinative (meaning “gluing together”) language, Japanese forms words by joining morphemes to the root word. The question word “ka” is added at the end of a sentence, so you don’t know whether you’ve been listening to a statement or a query until the end.
Japan is known for politeness and pride. Depending on what group you are speaking to—“uchi,” i.e. family or colleagues, or “soto,” who are people you don’t know—you have to use different forms of address and politeness. For fans of linguistic challenges, Japanese is certainly a rich source of excitement.
Arabic
Arabic may have just 28 letters, but each one can be written any of four different ways depending on its position in a word. The fact that many vowels are not written, only spoken, also makes things really tough for learners.
Speaking of speaking: Arabic uses diacritical marks in the form of dots, hooks, lines, and circles that can change the pronunciation and meaning of a word completely. For example, the word عقد can mean contract, necklace, or necktie depending on the diacritics. The guttural sounds make learning to speak Arabic even harder.
Another huge hurdle for westerners is getting used to writing from right to left. Incidentally, there’s no such thing as “the Arabic language.” The are huge differences among the various Arabic dialects, including the vocabulary and grammar. If you can talk to an Egyptian, don’t assume you can also chat with someone from Yemen.
Hungarian
Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugric family. It stands linguistically alone with Finnish among many Indo-European neighbors. With an unbeatable 44 letters, up to 40 cases and really challenging grammar, Hungarian was a shoo-in for our top five.
Where languages like English and German use auxiliary verbs, Hungarian uses a special case. The fact that Hungarian, like Japanese, is also agglutinative only adds to the case complexities: place indications, prepositions and possessive pronouns are simply tacked on to each word. When you’re at home, for example, you’re not “in your house” but “houseinyour.”
This results in plenty of unpronounceable marvels like “Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért,” which translates roughly as “the impossibility of your canonization.” What’s more, a tiny change to the suffixes can alter the meaning of a word entirely.
Not only that—verbs are conjugated in either of two ways depending on whether you use a definite or indefinite object. German speakers get a little help from loanwords such as “sláger” (hit song) and “koffer” (suitcase), which sound similar in both languages.
Polish
Surprised to see Polish on this list? We think its tough pronunciation justifies its presence among the top five. Polish has eight vowel sounds and is dominated by consonants, with words like “chrząszcz” (beetle) that are real tongue-twisters. The Polish alphabet contains 32 letters plus seven digraphs (ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz and sz), meaning sets of two letters that combine to make a single sound.
Interestingly, there are two additional grammatical genders besides masculine, feminine and neuter: masculine animate (used for male animals, for example) and masculine inanimate (used for objects).
Another unique feature: not all Polish verbs can be used for all occasions. Verbs are either perfective or imperfective, depending on whether they describe common and ongoing occurrences or completed events.
Do you need translations into or out of the world’s hardest languages?
Learning a new language is fun, but with rules like the above, it can be a long process. Don’t worry: if you need a foreign language for work, you don’t necessarily have to speak it yourself. At ACT Translations, we speak more than 150 languages—from the most popular and most widely spoken languages in the world to the most complex. Our Chinese, Icelandic, and Arabic translators are always happy to help you with the texts you need to succeed on the job.
